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This series is an up-close-and-personal account of the heroes introduced by Eric Vaughan and Patrick Lovell’s “The Con” which took a simple but revolutionary approach to explain the epidemics of elite fraud driving the great financial crisis of 2007-2008.
Who caused the 2008 great financial crisis? What was the continuing aftermath for real people targeted by the predators?
Ilene Goldstein and her disabled husband were victims of calculated lies and fraud. After two years of losing equity in their home, paying on a loan fraught with everything the Goldstein’s did not sign up for but were duped into, Ilene reached a breaking point and attempted suicide.
Steve Grumbine, Patrick Lovell, and Eric Vaughan speak with Ilene Goldstein, a real estate agent, whose husband had been a Wall Street stockbroker before his disability, thought they were somewhat sophisticated in financial matters, but discovered the deceit and fraud was overwhelming. This is not a victimless crime in any way, shape, or form. Government officials are the wolves right now preying on unwitting victims. Today, more than 13 years after this horror began, Ilene has no idea to whom payments should be made, what amount is owed, and what is a payoff amount. The lies continue, yet Ilene’s words to everyone are “keep fighting” no matter what roadblocks are put before you. Look at people as human beings.
The New Untouchables: The Pecora Files
S2:E4 The Walls Cave In
July 25, 2021
[00:00:05.100] – Ilene Goldstein {intro/music]
We went to the cops. I said to the cop, “I want to file charges.” She said, “Against whom?” I said, “Angelo Mozilo and the loan officer from my deal.” He said, “You can’t do that.” I said, “Why not? He said, “It’s a company.” I said, “But I named the person. I want to file charges against him.” “I’m sorry, I can’t take that complaint.”
[00:00:28.400] – Ilene Goldstein {intro/music]
Did we ever see a dime of one settlement? Not the mortgage settlement, not the robo signing settlement, not the B of A settlements, not the Countrywide settlements. That the help for the homeowners? Nothing. Just more money out of our pocket to lose.
[00:00:52.950] – Eric Vaughan {intro/music]
In a world of elite criminals, only people of elite character can protect our system. This is the new untouchables.
[00:01:03.610] – Patrick Lovell
So in our ongoing investigation, Steve and Eric, within the context of what happened in the aftermath of the great financial crisis of 2008, there are unbelievable amounts of misinformation out there about what actually constituted the 2008 great financial crisis and ultimately who the victims were.
We typically think of the aftermath of people going through foreclosures as people that were pretty much characterized as deadbeats, people that couldn’t afford their mortgages, maybe they bit off more than they could chew. But as we introduced in our season one, that was not the case most of the time.
A vast majority of loans that went into our system were given to people who A – already had homes that they refinanced under fraudulent circumstances or B – they got put into loans that they didn’t understand they were getting into with adjustable arms, negative amortization, a lot of techniques used by sales executives to get a deal done under all circumstances, including even if the homeowner, the person that was going for a loan, didn’t qualify.
This was actually constituted from management, from the CEOs down, and everything was baked in based on what we call modern executive compensation that would create huge short-term numbers, basically getting as much bad product in the pipeline to then unload on investors around the world. Today, we’re going to talk to Eileen Goldstein from Las Vegas, Nevada.
Her story is tragic. It’s horrific, but it’s also, unfortunately, too common. Eric, when we went down this path initially, can you provide some context as to what you gleaned by way of Addie Polk’s story and then how we learned how it was just part of the play, the design that it was really used to identify and target the most vulnerable among us, particularly women and elderly women?
[00:03:04.840] – Eric Vaughan
As we sort of went through our investigation, when we found Addie Polk, the tragic circumstances of that is ultimately what drew us to that story. But as we would later interview further people down the road, it became very clear that there was a pattern that was emerging and that the more vulnerable the community, the more vulnerable the person, the more they were targeted.
And it just so happened that Addie checked off almost every single one of those boxes, and I think eventually became very clear that Addie became sort of the quintessential victim of this crime wave. Now, the interesting thing that I always thought, and this is something that was a realization a little bit down the road as we were piecing our documentary together, was that even the very notion if you were to take the bank’s story and give them all the benefit of the doubt, they’re saying that somehow people bit off more than they could chew.
They said somehow that that there were all these dead beats, right? If that’s the case, then they have nothing but their own underwriting to blame. So even if we’re going completely by their story, it’s still because of the banks. And that was just a very powerful realization that the story that in years in the favor of the banks the most still means that the banks are at fault for everything.
[00:04:38.420] – Ilene Goldstein
Yeah.
[00:04:38.810] – Lovell
Beautifully stated, Eric. And Ilene, again, I’m so excited to get to you, but I got to ask Steve this particular question just to set the tone for our conversation today. So we’ve learned through you, Steve, and your tremendous podcast at Macro N Cheese and your interaction with some of the most astute economists, really, that exist by way of what the opportunities and the possibilities are by way of what could happen versus what actually does happen to constitute our financial system.
And I’ve heard over and over from many of your guests that really the entirety of our financial system is predicated on asset value and that determines ultimately capital flows. And I don’t want to get into the weeds, but I’m just curious if you can give us a broad opening statement of what that means in terms of the Fed’s capacity to create flow through our financial system predicated on asset value.
[00:05:32.360] – Steve Grumbine
One of the most important things to understand is there are these auditors and evaluators and other people throughout the process that boost the value of assets up high. And the Fed, whenever those things fail, seems to backstop them immediately to provide a don’t worry about how high you evaluate those products. We’re going to take care of you. Your losses? We’ll cover them.
They don’t say that openly, but that’s what they do in practice. And I think it’s really important to understand that when you are the one driving the ship and you’re able to control the prices and the valuations, you’re able to control behind the scenes to ensure that you make huge windfalls of money at someone else’s expense, in particular this environment, it becomes very obvious that we have to really take a hard look at, number one, how assets are valued.
Number two, who is evaluating those assets and then how in the world when those assets go bad, loans that are taken out against those assets, how that is, in turn, handled as well. And right now, it seems to all point towards the owners of the Wall Street class investors, the bankers, these shadow banking groups, people like JP Morgan, Jamie Dimon, that whole gang.
They know how the system works throughout this process. They have invented a wealth or an asset that doesn’t really exist in these CDOs and other debt instruments that they sell on the open market to cover their tracks. And ultimately, we see all sorts of tragedy come from this because they make off with windfalls of cash. We end up without our homes.
[00:07:22.010] – Lovell
And I’m so happy that we were able to demonstrate this from the get-go. So, viewers, please spread the word. Steve Grumbine is the guy who actually knows what he’s talking about, particularly in the universe of podcast because everybody out there thinks they know what they’re talking about, but they don’t. Without further ado, I want to introduce our guest for this morning’s show.
Welcome. Ilene Goldstein is in Las Vegas, Nevada. And I know you have been through a story that we’ll never be able to cover in the short amount of time that we have, but we’re going to do our best to get to the prescient points. I think I’d like to just give you an opportunity to introduce yourself, Miss Goldstein, and give us an initial overview of what your story is.
[00:08:08.160] – Goldstein
My husband and I married a long time. He’s disabled and we decided to refinance because we had a first and second. So in 2005, we got this brochure for this terrific one percent mortgage. We would just have to pay one percent fixed rate. We made the mistake of calling them, and then our nightmare started. During the origination process, they inflated our income, doubled it.
We didn’t know that till later. We didn’t know anything till later. And we thought we were just signing up for a regular 30-year first mortgage. We found out a few weeks later when we got a welcome package from Countrywide that we didn’t get that. In fact, it was a pay option arm. And we only had one payment that did a principal reduction. Everything else was interest.
[00:09:00.210] – Lovell
Well, I think you identified something extremely important at the outset. Without your knowledge, they inflated your income.
[00:09:08.510] – Goldstein
Yes, more than double.
[00:09:10.160] – Lovell
More than doubled your income. And to do so, they wanted to be able to A – get you approved for a loan that could have potentially been depending on what the paperwork construed downstream, but just the shortcut for the audiences. Typically, they would do this for what we call high yield spread premium because they were working specifically on volume and commissions.
So they wanted to get you into a loan that would pay them the highest commission that could ultimately have devastating consequences on you downstream. So I understand you had a physical emergency that put you into arrears when the initial collapse took place. Can you walk us through that?
[00:09:50.660] – Goldstein
OK, so the loan was originated October 2005. And by October 2007, after almost 24 months of making payments, I could not watch one more month losing more equity because we were at 50 percent loan to value when this started. I wanted a loan for $143,000. We got one for $183,000 that we would never, ever be affordable ever.
Unless, of course, it was that one percent that they tricked us on. And so I couldn’t take it. And I had major depressive disorder and I attempted suicide on October 28, 2007. Fortunately, somebody was there in the house with me and I got to the hospital. I was in a coma for four days.
And as I told you the other day, Patrick, when I woke up, I saw the popcorn ceiling and said, this can’t be heaven. God would have a better ceiling than this. And so then at that moment, I went into therapy and I started learning. Unfortunately, I was a realtor before all of this, and my husband was a Wall Street stockbroker before all of this before I became disabled.
And so we thought we knew stuff. We thought we were somewhat sophisticated. And so then I just started learning about the awful world of credit default swaps and securitization and going through watching the system break down. I actually had a deal that earlier in February that died, my office died. Everything died on February 7, 2007, and then it just got worse.
So in May of 2008, we didn’t know what to do cause Countrywide at that point had been saying to us, “Just send money.” Well, like how much? (They) said like anything. So for four months, we sent whatever we wanted and we thought we were helping ourselves. And the next thing we know, we get a notice of default from Recon Trust, which happens to not have been the substitute trustee until the next day when they recorded that.
And years later, we found that the notary who signed that notice of default pled guilty to notary fraud in the state of Nevada. It was part of a 453-count indictment that eventually led to Lorraine Brown and Doc X.
[00:12:07.900] – Lovell
OK, let me push hard right now, because America I think and I’ve been in the midst of this for a long time, and I’m going to turn to this question kind of towards my co-panelists for the moment before we move on to the next phase. We all know the term Robo Signing. And at that time, the only major media operation to do a story on this was Steve Kroft at CBS’s 60 Minutes.
And they did a story on DocX and Lorraine Brown. It transpired from a woman that we know very well, Lynn Szymoniak out of Florida, who, because she’s an attorney and an investigator she realized that, wait a second, there were these documents, shops that were fabricating documents across the United States to get people through foreclosure as quickly as possible.
So here we just had an example of someone who was a victim of that, and this was outright fraud, Steve. This was clear, just literally the easiest to prove in the world, fraud, but the courts just ramrodded through the system anyway. And nobody to this day has put together a complete comprehensive understanding of what judge actually knew, what, when, and how about documentation fraud, particularly as it comes through the secretary of state and all of these different entities within the government. Steve, how do you think that’s possible?
[00:13:32.580] – Grumbine
Well, each step along the way, it’s obvious that government has captured, that the people that are supposed to be guarding the henhouse are the wolves right now. So they in turn pass that on to each other. There’s no other way around it. It still blows my mind that every step through this process, there is somebody covering someone’s back. Somebody is getting a little piece of the pie each step along the way.
But I got to come back to something. Ilene, your story kicked my tail. I know that dark feeling of trying to take your life. And when financial trouble hits and especially when it’s coming out of nowhere like yours did when you’re completely caught, I can’t get past that feeling. That’s why I’m so interested in doing the series, is because of that human aspect. This is not a victimless crime here.
[00:14:26.610] – Goldstein
Oh, no, we were going to lose everything.
[00:14:28.950] – Grumbine
With your life. Everything else can be replaced, although I don’t want to focus. I’m concerned about, in the end, these behaviors. They pushed you into such a situation that life became so bad, things became so rough. And to me, that’s what I’m getting from all this, all the technical details. But watching the real impacts. Are people ready to take their lives?
To me, I hope folks understand that this is not just some sort of white-collar crime where people are just pushing pieces of paper back and forth. People are literally dying as a result of the behavior of these criminals. And Ilene, that’s the big takeaway here for me. I feel so badly for you and victims like yourself.
[00:15:15.110] – Goldstein
I didn’t stay a victim. You could stay a victim or you could respond to them. And so we tried to play by the rules. We sent the debt validation letter asking who the hell Seewald was. I don’t know anybody at Countrywide. We didn’t do business with them.
They’re just a servicer. So they use this double-speak. At that time, well, the servicer is Countrywide, OK, but the investor is Countrywide. OK, but they’re not the investor it’s actually Bank of New York for this guy. OK, who do I write a check to?
[00:15:49.250] – Grumbine
Wow.
[00:15:49.250] – Goldstein
There should be someone I should pay off. Who do I owe the money to? And I could tell you honestly, 13 years later, I still don’t know.
[00:15:58.640] – Lovell
Eric, ask Ilene because that’s the whole point, isn’t it?
[00:16:03.290] – Vaughan
But a couple of things. One, I’m glad the first thing you saw was bad popcorn ceiling when you woke up.
[00:16:08.900] – Goldstein
Yes. Me, too. Thank you. Thank you.
[00:16:09.790] – Vaughan
I mean, I’m very happy that that was the case. But also, you were a realtor. Your husband worked on Wall Street
[00:16:17.840] – Goldstein
The 90s when he became disabled early before they got really, really, really piggy.
[00:16:24.110] – Vaughan
Right. Nevertheless, between those two bodies of knowledge.
[00:16:29.090] – Goldstein
Yeah.
[00:16:29.660] – Vaughan
You would think that you’d be able to sniff this out from a mile away. But it doesn’t matter. What struck me when I heard that was that it doesn’t matter how sophisticated you are if you’re being lied to and
[00:16:40.610] – Goldstein
Right.
[00:16:40.610] – Vaughan
. . . the fraud is happening behind your back. You could be the most sophisticated borrower that’s ever been. It doesn’t matter if after you hand off the paperwork, they put something else in, and then they do a completely different deal.
[00:16:54.350] – Goldstein
Right. And especially the one thing they predicated this fraud upon, I believe, is the trust that the public had in banking and bankers that they wouldn’t screw you. They depended upon that.
[00:17:07.940] – Vaughan
Right. Absolutely. I mean, it’s the violation of that trust that is one of the biggest stories that gets repeated time and time again. But the other question that I had for you is that the way that your mortgage was set up was that it was interest only. And then one principal payment. I was wondering, you could tell me what that final payment was going to be?
[00:17:26.930] – Goldstein
Well, it wasn’t. It was actually multi-payment. It was pay option arm. You can make four different payments per month. If you could figure out the math on this loan, I would give you a million dollars because we can’t ever predict what that end payment would have been. I mean, you would think the one thing you could get from a servicer since it’s their only job, is actually an accounting of the accounts. Right? But you don’t get that. You get mumbo-jumbo, and you owe this and it’s that.
You get a note that says one thing. You get a mortgage paper every month, a statement saying you owe this and then you owe that on another paper. You get different papers saying different things. I have never, ever, ever found out how much we owed to whom we owed it and how do we pay it off and resolve the situation other than foreclosure.
[00:18:20.570] – Vaughan
So if you are not being given any clarity as to what your payment needs to be and they’re not providing any clear accounting of your account
[00:18:32.830] – Goldstein
Right.
[00:18:33.100] – Vaughan
Then there’s absolutely zero way of understanding as to whether or not your loan would be in default.
[00:18:41.230] – Goldstein
Yeah, and how many times are they going to accelerate? One person says I’m accelerating for this amount. When we got the notice of default, it had three different dollar amounts, three different notices with three different dollars. So we sent that debt validation. At the same time, we had a mortgage audit guy working for us.
This was in August of 2008, and they wrote a letter to Countrywide and somehow managed to get the Office of Thrift Supervision involved. And they just, you know, backed Countrywide. Oh, sorry. They bought it on the secondary market. They don’t know what the first guy did. Well, I thought in law the first guy sells to the second guy. The second guy is responsible for the action of the first guy. No?
[00:19:23.200] – Lovell
That’s what it’s supposed to be.
[00:19:25.450] – Goldstein
I thought I thought it. But then they filed the notice of trustee sale on October 1, 2008, and they never removed it. Oh, and I rescinded in September. I went to Neil Gaffield seminar in September 2008, I took the bus into California and one day went to a seminar, took the bus back, and I wrote a letter rescinding the loan. It was within the three years.
It was within my rights to do. We said we don’t like this deal. We want to be made whole. And then my husband speaks to Linda Reise. I don’t mind naming anybody. I’ll give you everybody’s name and telephone number because I’m telling the absolute truth. And she said, “Forget about the rescission. How much can you pay?” And my husband said, “$200 a month,” because that covered the taxes and insurance.
And she said, OK. And the next phase in April 2009, B of A was involved because we know how happy they were to get Countrywide. And we went through the nightmare of a mortgage modification from July 2009 till April 2011. We paid them that whole time. Never got a modification. Sent in documents up the wazoo. Then we couldn’t take it anymore.
In June 2011, we joined a lawsuit which turned into multi-district litigation, which you mentioned in your show, MDL 10-2193 in Massachusetts for mortgage modification, breach of contract. And the judge described that as Kafkaesque and declined the class action. And we went back to limbo and we sat there for two years and then SPS was involved.
So we dealt with SPS. Reiterated our need to reaffirm our recission, and we played with them for two years. And then they brought in Quality Loan Service. And by January 2018, I was in the hospital with high blood pressure.
[00:21:18.620] – Vaughan
Bureaucratic hell will do that.
[00:21:21.280] – Goldstein
And then they finally took the house August 5, 2018. They had to put repairs in They didn’t sell it until April 2019, and now there’s strangers living in my house.
[00:21:41.220] – Intermission
You are listening to The New Untouchables, a podcast brought to you by a collaboration of the creators of the docuseries The Con and Real Progressives, a nonprofit organization dedicated to teaching the masses about MMT or Modern Monetary Theory. Please help our efforts and become a monthly donor at PayPal or Patreon, like and follow our pages on Facebook and YouTube, and follow us on Periscope, Twitter, and Instagram.
[00:22:35.440] – Lovell
I’m so struck by the detail of your analysis, because what you do is you imbue, like so many I met on this journey, you’re just the antithesis of the idea of a deadbeat. You’re somebody who’s actually trying to work within a system that makes sense. And none of it made sense. It didn’t make sense to me.
That’s why we went on this journey to pull these threads. And now it makes sense. The whole thing was designed to destroy everybody. So a system at the top could literally steal from both sides. The American people would collapse. The middle class it collapsed working class, it collapsed minorities. And then it got insanely rich, building on, quite frankly, the ashes of the American dream, which, of course, is this insane nightmare.
Can you tell us some of the God-awful emotional turmoil that you experienced? It’s one thing to say suicide early, but this is beyond marathon. This is beyond triathlon. This is beyond anybody’s expectation of being able to survive. Can you explain to our viewers what it’s like to have to try to survive this?
[00:23:33.220] – Goldstein
Well, the one thing I decided I was not going to feel right away was guilt for attempting suicide because I’m human and I could only take so much and under very bad conditions, I made a choice that maybe not everyone else believes. But I believe God chose me not to disappear off the face of the Earth. And I kind of figured if I had one more day doing this, I was going to fight them.
But that meant going to have psychological counseling for three and a half years and believing that the truth matters. And quite frankly, being so disappointed so many times, hearing about this consent order and that judgment and the mortgage settlement, being called a deadbeat, and calling notary fraud, robo signing, making the reality of it into an unreality where it became entertainment for people, and then not wanting to share this with people, not wanting to explain year after year why I’m still fighting the bank.
And they’re like, but you didn’t pay. Are you kidding me? They took my equity first. They got paid upfront. They got all these other things that they got paid on. The outrage that they got paid over and over and over. And every time I get the hope, like Obama said, “Oh, there’s hope.” No, there was not hope. There was not hope.
Elizabeth Warren, I love the woman, but if she says one more time she’s going to smack a banker, I might have to do it for her. OK. Bernie, I feel was real and true about feeling for people. I wish the people who were behind Bernie would get behind this movement because it could just the same be them and it might be them.
How many of them, how many of the disgruntled Americans walking around are people who lost their house? How many people walking out with their gun doing something? My kids won’t even buy houses now. They’ve lost faith in the American system of what they call corruption.
[00:25:30.500] – Lovell
You’ve really tapped into the whole purpose of what we’re attempting to do, and I urge our viewers to please, please pay attention. We are desperately trying to galvanize a civil rights like movement to purge corruption. It’s destroyed lives. It’s killing people, but it’s killing people through deception like Miss Goldstein just mentioned. You got to be aware.
When people got behind on their payments, there was a governmental action that created a $25 billion national mortgage settlement built on all of the worst behaviors of the servicers that were acting on behalf of so-called investors who didn’t even have proof that they were investors because of the insanity of what we’re going to demonstrate to you along the way of what we call right of assignments and who actually can pick up the paper and who actually has a right to foreclose on the debt.
That wasn’t the people that were in the courts. The courts just rubberstamp what these what we called foreclosure mills were in there to do, which was to push people like Miss Goldstein who lasted much longer than many. In fact, I think I’ve seen statistics that it’s like literally one percent of the victims of this crime really went the distance. Go ahead, Ilene.
[00:26:44.420] – Goldstein
I will go my one percent against their one percent.
[00:26:48.530] – Lovell
Boom!
[00:26:48.930] – Goldstein
Who are they? They’re people. They’re people. They broke the law. I had to suffer through the law by doing the right thing. But I can swear to you and any other judge, any place on a million Bibles, I’m telling the truth. They can’t swear that. They could say, “Oh, we were bad, but we had so much fun doing it.” I had kids. That don’t work with me.
[00:27:11.680] – Lovell
When the court of law, literally rubber stamps what we could show could prove to a sixth-grader, if they knew the ABCs of this, and it’s that simple of what constitutes documentation fraud, those cases should have been thrown out right away. That doesn’t even mention the national mortgage settlement because people billions and billions and trillions and trillions of dollars went to the financial apparatus and these guys that were destroying people in the courtroom on behalf of the courts.
Steve, are we not a country that’s supposed to have separation of powers between the legislative, the executive, and the judiciary? Isn’t that the whole concept for the integrity of law and separation of powers? Is that what you’re seeing in this show?
[00:27:49.880] – Grumbine
Absolutely not. What you’re seeing on the show is that they’re all in collusion together. Bottom line is there is no separation. Everything you said sounds like wash, rinse, repeat, every victim that we’ve spoken to has had a very similar story. The good news with most of the victims we’ve spoken to so far, many of them have been fighters just like you.
But to your point, Patrick, that’s one percent. The other 99 percent don’t end up fighting, don’t end up winning. Or if they fight, they end up losing, getting their tails handed to them. So I just want to make sure that you, the audience, understand this is happening right now to every single person out there. Any of us could be hit with this at any given time.
And there’s no confidence in the housing business and that these loans are actually going to be handled in a way that is in your best interest. I think the fraud is baked in so deeply into this that if we don’t take major action and get people together fighting back, that this is going to continue as the Wall Street way of doing business in perpetuity until we finally take action.
[00:29:01.730] – Lovell
And on that note, Ilene, are there other ramifications of this incredible wisdom that you’ve gleaned from this horrific process?
[00:29:10.490] – Goldstein
I don’t know. Keep fighting. The people who think they don’t have a reason to keep fighting, who think that turning the gun on them is better than fighting or even losing. I ultimately had to decide to give up the house where I just had to stop fighting them. My family begged me, please, it’s going to kill you.
So it was going to kill me in the beginning. It was going to kill me in the end. So all I say to people now is, “OK, listen to your family. If it’s going to kill you, walk away. But if not, if you could keep fighting and keep your home. Do it. Do it.” I don’t know if that was wisdom, but heck. Better than just letting them win by default.
[00:29:50.890] – Lovell
The only way we’re going to win is if we all come together on this and create a civil rights like movement that’s going to purge corruption from our country. And there’s about 17 million other people right now on the verge of default when that mortgage moratorium goes off, not to mention the rentals. And if for anybody paying attention, there’s a lot of homelessness out there and more to come.
[00:30:06.980] – Vaughan
Well, I think what I keep hearing is that you’re lied to on the front end, then all the information that you have is completely confusing and obfuscates any information that you might actually get. And then you have a judiciary that I think, one, there was a certain period of time where they were like seeing 300 foreclosures in the morning, and another 200 in the afternoon or vice versa or something like that, where they’re just like cranking them out as fast as they possibly can.
So they have too big of a workload. And then on top of that, there’s just this for lack of a better term, I suppose, or maybe it’s the exact right term, what seems to be a pattern of prejudice against the homeowner, where basically if the information is coming from the bank or the bank’s lawyer, then that must be true and
[00:30:59.660] – Goldstein
Gospel.
[00:30:59.660] – Vaughan
We’re not even going to look at yours. So I was wondering if maybe you could speak to us a little bit about your experience. How open were the courts to seeing any of the information that you might have brought to them?
[00:31:10.580] – Goldstein
Well, the thing is, Nevada is a non-judicial state. You don’t ever get to court. It’s just documents at the recorder. You get a copy of the paper. Ther’s no judge. You don’t go to a judge. You don’t get to present your case. You get papers in the mail. When they filed the notice of trustee sale, we sat for three years not knowing every day if they were going to file that day and sell the house underneath us, lock us out.
They did it in Florida a lot with their rocket docket. But here in Nevada, they had sheriff and the marshals come and taking people out of the house, locking them out. We didn’t know if that could happen. And then we were supposed to negotiate in good faith with them at the same time. Well, how do you do that if you have a gun to your head?
How do you negotiate if every time you make the negotiation, you’re not giving the information you’re negotiating with. You never learn what your payoff is or what this new modified mortgage would ever be. Like, what do we get to pay it off in 300 years? Like what is this abstract concept of IOU money? It means something to you, but it means nothing to me anymore other than I’m going to lose everything no matter what.
And we didn’t have a lot of money to fight them. Over the course of the years, we spent about $7,000 fighting them. But mostly it was just with letters and persistence and bringing up the fact of law that they were trying to avoid. We rescinded. They said ignore it. Sorry, as an operation of law when it was put into the mail and when you received it and your employer acknowledged it, it became effective.
Go to the Supreme Court. Check if that’s true. So we live so much of our time trying to obey the law, trying to enforce the law. We went to the cops. I said to the cop, “I want to file charges.” She said, “Against whom?” I said, “Angelo Mozilo and the loan officer for my deal.” He said, “You can’t do that.” I said, “Why not?”
He said, “It’s a company.” I said, “But I named the person. I want to file charges against them.” “I’m sorry. I can’t take that complaint.” We went to the D.A. Who do we fight? What do we do? I’m sorry. I can’t take that complaint. Go to the attorney general. Go to the attorney general. Oh, yeah. They’re bad boys. We’re going to get money from them. Don’t worry.
Did we ever see a dime of one settlement? Not the mortgage settlement, not the robo-signing settlements, not the B of A settlements, not the Countrywide settlements. That’s the help for the homeowners? Nothing. Just more money out of our pocket to lose, knowing we could probably most definitely lose, except we’re really stubborn and I wouldn’t give up.
[00:33:59.870] – Grumbine
Wow!
[00:33:59.870] – Lovell
That is so profound to me to hear you lay it up that way, because Steve and Eric, she hit so many incredibly important points. Yes, there were settlements. There were supposedly situations. I mean, we were all waiting because of what Obama said based on HAMP to basically modify our house. In my particular case, I was supposed to modify for 90 days. I got past that.
I went 18 months where they would not modify me and they kept bouncing me around. That’s what led me on this journey. Eric at the very beginning, I said to him, none of this made sense, Eric. And we went to the servicer, my servicer in Portland, Oregon, and I’ll never forget on camera before we knew any of this stuff, before we knew Bill Black.
Eric says, “Well, it’s apparent that the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand’s doing.” And I remember you saying that Eric, at the very beginning. And think about how much we’ve learned since and how profoundly accurate that statement is, brother.
[00:34:53.780] – Vaughan
Right. Right.
[00:34:55.280] – Goldstein
And then they don’t give you a chance to emotionally recover, because if you feel like you’re being hunted and you are in your home. The last two years, they had a girl coming every week knocking on the door every week. And I told her, if you keep coming on my property, I’m going to get you arrested for trespassing. She laughed at me like you’re a deadbeat. Go away. Shut up. Pay your mortgage.
[00:35:21.340] – Grumbine
I remember I literally crawled across the floor as I would hear the knocks. We had slats in our windows and I would crawl up and I’d part the slats to look out to see who it was. And sure enough, I’d see a car just down beyond where they thought I’d see them huddled down there. And they like, “We hear you in there. Just open the door so we can give you these papers.” And it was terrifying. My kids would be like, “Can we talk, daddy? Can we talk?” And I’m like, “sshh, sshh.”
[00:35:51.040] – Goldstein
I had to change my telephone number because the first couple of years, every time the phone rang, I cried. And you get a lot of warranty calls and kids calling for my children and life happening. But every time I cried. How could they ever repay me in that way? How could they ever give me back my peace of mind?
And they can even if they would decide somehow by some miracle, I had a judgment against them and I was going to get paid money. It wouldn’t be enough, really. Quite honestly, the only thing that would be enough for me right now is that they would file criminal charges against them because what they’re doing is just plain straight-up criminal.
[00:36:31.580] – Grumbine
Can’t give you those years of your life back. All the fear and the pain and suffering, none of it.
[00:36:37.430] – Lovell
Let me chime in on that real quick too again, to galvanize this movement for the audiences out there, because, listen, nothing has changed. It’s just basically morphed like a virus. So what we’ve seen, let’s call it 2012 through the 2018 era, it was mostly covering up this madness through people like Miss. Goldstein. And I call that financial terrorism.
What you guys just described was financial terrorism. But in addition to that, because of the way the emergency stimulus worked and stock buybacks and perverse corporate incentive based on short term, we got CEOs of Wall Street buying back their stocks and then doing the same thing in what we call collateralized loan obligations to zombie companies, zombie companies that show no profit.
Their only demand is government money through buying bonds that are made up of nothing. OK, this is what backstops the entirety of our financial system. And meanwhile, The Con, who just basically our program, who builds this incredible engineered criminal conspiracy from the bottom up. And again, to all of those viewers out there who listen to the most crazy people in the podcast arena.
Yes, conspiracy theory is madness. Conspiracy is another level of madness with the magic of owning the system, which is called corruption. And the only way you can prove it is if you actually do the work and you unwind and you unpacked all of the elements that constitute what the crime actually is. Eric, what would you ask Ilene given what we’re going to talk about next with, of course, Mr. O’Brien and Mr. Thigpen?
[00:38:14.240] – Vaughan
Well, I’m kind of curious to go through and check off like all the different boxes you said that you were refinancing, correct?
[00:38:21.290] – Goldstein
Correct.
[00:38:21.950] – Vaughan
And so is there anything remarkable at all about the appraisal?
[00:38:25.800] – Goldstein
Oh, yeah. If you believe market value at the time was $285,000, but the appraisal actually came in lower, not higher. So I don’t know, we might be different on that point. The market value supposedly was to $285,000 and they came in at $242,000, so it immediately dropped.
[00:38:42.770] – Lovell
What era was that? Was that 2007?
[00:38:43.670] – Goldstein
2005.
[00:38:46.460] – Lovell
Oh, that’s 2005, but that’s before the vintage shorts happened. So that’s part and parcel to that.
[00:38:51.410] – Goldstein
Yeah. So it was part of a series from 2005. If you also think about the other thing about this, Countrywide had 530 trusts. Right? And you figure they named or they allegedly had 4,000 customers loans in each trust. I don’t know the math of that, but think about how many people that affected by just their handiwork in the trusts and multiply that number out.
How many people actually kept their houses? I recently spoke to you of someone who got the same kind of loan as me, but he’s doing real well in his life and he happens to be one of them, an inside boy. So he feels like it was the best product he ever received in his life. And I said, but what if they screw up your paperwork?
What if they decide that you didn’t pay your mortgage. He’s like, “Well, I’m not worried about it because I have enough money.” I said, “What if?” He’s like, “Oh, no, no, no, no.” I’m like, “OK, you’re Teflon then. You’re the only person in the world who would not get screwed over by bad paperwork.”
[00:39:52.990] – Vaughan
Now, the bad paperwork part is what we’re going to be jumping into here in a little bit. And once again, I think one of the things that’s really striking to me is, in your estimation, I’m guessing that you’re not like a forensic document, whatever person of anyway, shape or form. Were you able to understand when you saw a fraudulent document?
[00:40:12.760] – Goldstein
Well, it wasn’t so much being able to identify the fraudulent document. It was more in what way were they trying to use this fraudulent document.
[00:40:20.710] – Vaughan
Right.
[00:40:21.100] – Goldstein
So it was like for the notice of default, looking at it, no, didn’t look fraudulent. I didn’t know anything about that in June of 2008, but I suspected everybody, you know, at that point. But when it became later when they did the more fraudulent documents would be if there could be something more or less fraudulent.
The later documents in 2011, when they rescinded the notice of trustee sale, they were preparing to do something. They just the right hand, like you say, didn’t know the left. So I guess they didn’t tell the foreclosure department that the client happened to be in litigation with them at the same time. So once they synced that up, they kind of left us alone.
But then we got the really bogus paperwork. It was 2018 when SPS Sillett Portfolio Servicing out of Salt Lake and Quality Loan Services give them their hometown in Irvine, I believe. And it’s when they came in with documents, when there was something notarized by a notary and filed in Salt Lake but filed in Nevada. So I know this like really bogus stuff there, but what’s the point of looking at it?
[00:41:32.680] – Vaughan
Right. But the point is, is that it got to a point where it’s like it was clear even to a layperson that something fraudulent was going on and you never even had an opportunity to show it to anybody.
[00:41:43.540] – Goldstein
No, and I wanted to bring it to the county recorder because she was responsible for the documents that were recorded in his county. And they were like, well, you have to fill out this form and explain this and that and the next thing. It’s like, oh, screw it, screw it.
I could have probably taken my development alone because it was low-income elderly people, people of color. And I could have probably just did an audit of that development and showed you 200 instances of fraud. What good is identifying fraud if there’s no one to enforce that?
[00:42:17.680] – Vaughan
Right.
[00:42:18.820] – Goldstein
So there was no one to turn to. I would have been another soapbox. And you have to start over, like when you go to a new doctor, every time you explain what’s going on, you have to start with well tell me your medical history, explain your situation. It gets really weary and wearisome and exhausting to continually have to provide documents to prove your financial situation, which did not change since day one.
It’s not like my husband income exploded. Nothing changed for us. It just depended on what wave they were surfing that day over on the robo signing thing so we’re going to throw that paper out and going to give you new paper. And we don’t like that deal. Let’s change it to this deal today. And there was never a consistency except for the inconsistency.
[00:43:08.560] – Lovell
Your analysis is poetry, and it’s incredibly important because, Steve, what we’re about to uncover next is exactly what Ilene just teed up, but from the perspective of the guys on the inside. So Ilene just so you know, we’re going to talk to John O’Brien out of Massachusetts, to Jeff Thigpen, who are the only honest recorders with the courage to come forward with the levels of criminal fraud that took place that they notified the AG of the United States, every single entity you could possibly imagine. So you’re going to be vetted out now and we’re listening. What are your closing words, Ilene?
[00:43:44.040] – Goldstein
Thank you for having me, and I hope that you guys have great success in sharing this message and I’m all in to get those corrupt bastards out.
[00:43:54.000] – Lovell
That’s incredibly powerful for me. But since this opportunity is to connect with other people, what would you tell them we have to do in terms of coming together?
[00:44:02.730] – Goldstein
You have to listen to people and actually believe what they’re saying is true. I think people have become so skeptical of believing what’s true. Who do you believe? Who is it being said by? What’s their political leanings? I think that has to end. It has to be more of let’s look at it as income inequality, which is really the true situation, because it’s the super rich that are getting richer and everybody else, it doesn’t matter what your color or religion or where you live, rural, city.
If you’re poor, they’re going to come and try to get more from you. They’re going to try to get you to sign up for more and want more and provide less and take. So, don’t let that happen. Don’t look at another human being who’s as poor as you, as someone who’s less than you. Just they’re not. They’re human. And these guys are inhuman. They’re inhuman.
[00:44:53.280] – Lovell
Thank you. We’re so deeply touched by you coming on our program and sharing.
[00:44:56.730] – Goldstein
Thank you. Thank you. Nice to meet you.
[00:44:59.790] – Grumbine
You as well.
[00:45:00.600] – Vaughan
Thank you.
[00:45:04.840] – End Credits
The New Untouchables is produced by Andy Kennedy, descriptive writing by Rose Ann Raiola Miele and promotional artwork by Cristina of Paradigms and Revolutions Design Group The New Untouchables is publicly funded by our Real Progressives Patreon account. If you would like to donate to The New Untouchables, please visit patreon.c
Mentioned in the podcast:
Whistleblower Lynn Szymoniak
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This series is an up-close-and-personal account of the heroes introduced by Eric Vaughan and Patrick Lovell’s “The Con” which took a simple but revolutionary approach to explain the epidemics of elite fraud driving the great financial crisis of 2007-2008.
Who caused the 2008 great financial crisis? What was the continuing aftermath for real people targeted by the predators?
Ilene Goldstein and her disabled husband were victims of calculated lies and fraud. After two years of losing equity in their home, paying on a loan fraught with everything the Goldstein’s did not sign up for but were duped into, Ilene reached a breaking point and attempted suicide.
Steve Grumbine, Patrick Lovell, and Eric Vaughan speak with Ilene Goldstein, a real estate agent, whose husband had been a Wall Street stockbroker before his disability, thought they were somewhat sophisticated in financial matters, but discovered the deceit and fraud was overwhelming. This is not a victimless crime in any way, shape, or form. Government officials are the wolves right now preying on unwitting victims. Today, more than 13 years after this horror began, Ilene has no idea to whom payments should be made, what amount is owed, and what is a payoff amount. The lies continue, yet Ilene’s words to everyone are “keep fighting” no matter what roadblocks are put before you. Look at people as human beings.
The New Untouchables: The Pecora Files
S2:E4 The Walls Cave In
July 25, 2021
[00:00:05.100] – Ilene Goldstein {intro/music]
We went to the cops. I said to the cop, “I want to file charges.” She said, “Against whom?” I said, “Angelo Mozilo and the loan officer from my deal.” He said, “You can’t do that.” I said, “Why not? He said, “It’s a company.” I said, “But I named the person. I want to file charges against him.” “I’m sorry, I can’t take that complaint.”
[00:00:28.400] – Ilene Goldstein {intro/music]
Did we ever see a dime of one settlement? Not the mortgage settlement, not the robo signing settlement, not the B of A settlements, not the Countrywide settlements. That the help for the homeowners? Nothing. Just more money out of our pocket to lose.
[00:00:52.950] – Eric Vaughan {intro/music]
In a world of elite criminals, only people of elite character can protect our system. This is the new untouchables.
[00:01:03.610] – Patrick Lovell
So in our ongoing investigation, Steve and Eric, within the context of what happened in the aftermath of the great financial crisis of 2008, there are unbelievable amounts of misinformation out there about what actually constituted the 2008 great financial crisis and ultimately who the victims were.
We typically think of the aftermath of people going through foreclosures as people that were pretty much characterized as deadbeats, people that couldn’t afford their mortgages, maybe they bit off more than they could chew. But as we introduced in our season one, that was not the case most of the time.
A vast majority of loans that went into our system were given to people who A – already had homes that they refinanced under fraudulent circumstances or B – they got put into loans that they didn’t understand they were getting into with adjustable arms, negative amortization, a lot of techniques used by sales executives to get a deal done under all circumstances, including even if the homeowner, the person that was going for a loan, didn’t qualify.
This was actually constituted from management, from the CEOs down, and everything was baked in based on what we call modern executive compensation that would create huge short-term numbers, basically getting as much bad product in the pipeline to then unload on investors around the world. Today, we’re going to talk to Eileen Goldstein from Las Vegas, Nevada.
Her story is tragic. It’s horrific, but it’s also, unfortunately, too common. Eric, when we went down this path initially, can you provide some context as to what you gleaned by way of Addie Polk’s story and then how we learned how it was just part of the play, the design that it was really used to identify and target the most vulnerable among us, particularly women and elderly women?
[00:03:04.840] – Eric Vaughan
As we sort of went through our investigation, when we found Addie Polk, the tragic circumstances of that is ultimately what drew us to that story. But as we would later interview further people down the road, it became very clear that there was a pattern that was emerging and that the more vulnerable the community, the more vulnerable the person, the more they were targeted.
And it just so happened that Addie checked off almost every single one of those boxes, and I think eventually became very clear that Addie became sort of the quintessential victim of this crime wave. Now, the interesting thing that I always thought, and this is something that was a realization a little bit down the road as we were piecing our documentary together, was that even the very notion if you were to take the bank’s story and give them all the benefit of the doubt, they’re saying that somehow people bit off more than they could chew.
They said somehow that that there were all these dead beats, right? If that’s the case, then they have nothing but their own underwriting to blame. So even if we’re going completely by their story, it’s still because of the banks. And that was just a very powerful realization that the story that in years in the favor of the banks the most still means that the banks are at fault for everything.
[00:04:38.420] – Ilene Goldstein
Yeah.
[00:04:38.810] – Lovell
Beautifully stated, Eric. And Ilene, again, I’m so excited to get to you, but I got to ask Steve this particular question just to set the tone for our conversation today. So we’ve learned through you, Steve, and your tremendous podcast at Macro N Cheese and your interaction with some of the most astute economists, really, that exist by way of what the opportunities and the possibilities are by way of what could happen versus what actually does happen to constitute our financial system.
And I’ve heard over and over from many of your guests that really the entirety of our financial system is predicated on asset value and that determines ultimately capital flows. And I don’t want to get into the weeds, but I’m just curious if you can give us a broad opening statement of what that means in terms of the Fed’s capacity to create flow through our financial system predicated on asset value.
[00:05:32.360] – Steve Grumbine
One of the most important things to understand is there are these auditors and evaluators and other people throughout the process that boost the value of assets up high. And the Fed, whenever those things fail, seems to backstop them immediately to provide a don’t worry about how high you evaluate those products. We’re going to take care of you. Your losses? We’ll cover them.
They don’t say that openly, but that’s what they do in practice. And I think it’s really important to understand that when you are the one driving the ship and you’re able to control the prices and the valuations, you’re able to control behind the scenes to ensure that you make huge windfalls of money at someone else’s expense, in particular this environment, it becomes very obvious that we have to really take a hard look at, number one, how assets are valued.
Number two, who is evaluating those assets and then how in the world when those assets go bad, loans that are taken out against those assets, how that is, in turn, handled as well. And right now, it seems to all point towards the owners of the Wall Street class investors, the bankers, these shadow banking groups, people like JP Morgan, Jamie Dimon, that whole gang.
They know how the system works throughout this process. They have invented a wealth or an asset that doesn’t really exist in these CDOs and other debt instruments that they sell on the open market to cover their tracks. And ultimately, we see all sorts of tragedy come from this because they make off with windfalls of cash. We end up without our homes.
[00:07:22.010] – Lovell
And I’m so happy that we were able to demonstrate this from the get-go. So, viewers, please spread the word. Steve Grumbine is the guy who actually knows what he’s talking about, particularly in the universe of podcast because everybody out there thinks they know what they’re talking about, but they don’t. Without further ado, I want to introduce our guest for this morning’s show.
Welcome. Ilene Goldstein is in Las Vegas, Nevada. And I know you have been through a story that we’ll never be able to cover in the short amount of time that we have, but we’re going to do our best to get to the prescient points. I think I’d like to just give you an opportunity to introduce yourself, Miss Goldstein, and give us an initial overview of what your story is.
[00:08:08.160] – Goldstein
My husband and I married a long time. He’s disabled and we decided to refinance because we had a first and second. So in 2005, we got this brochure for this terrific one percent mortgage. We would just have to pay one percent fixed rate. We made the mistake of calling them, and then our nightmare started. During the origination process, they inflated our income, doubled it.
We didn’t know that till later. We didn’t know anything till later. And we thought we were just signing up for a regular 30-year first mortgage. We found out a few weeks later when we got a welcome package from Countrywide that we didn’t get that. In fact, it was a pay option arm. And we only had one payment that did a principal reduction. Everything else was interest.
[00:09:00.210] – Lovell
Well, I think you identified something extremely important at the outset. Without your knowledge, they inflated your income.
[00:09:08.510] – Goldstein
Yes, more than double.
[00:09:10.160] – Lovell
More than doubled your income. And to do so, they wanted to be able to A – get you approved for a loan that could have potentially been depending on what the paperwork construed downstream, but just the shortcut for the audiences. Typically, they would do this for what we call high yield spread premium because they were working specifically on volume and commissions.
So they wanted to get you into a loan that would pay them the highest commission that could ultimately have devastating consequences on you downstream. So I understand you had a physical emergency that put you into arrears when the initial collapse took place. Can you walk us through that?
[00:09:50.660] – Goldstein
OK, so the loan was originated October 2005. And by October 2007, after almost 24 months of making payments, I could not watch one more month losing more equity because we were at 50 percent loan to value when this started. I wanted a loan for $143,000. We got one for $183,000 that we would never, ever be affordable ever.
Unless, of course, it was that one percent that they tricked us on. And so I couldn’t take it. And I had major depressive disorder and I attempted suicide on October 28, 2007. Fortunately, somebody was there in the house with me and I got to the hospital. I was in a coma for four days.
And as I told you the other day, Patrick, when I woke up, I saw the popcorn ceiling and said, this can’t be heaven. God would have a better ceiling than this. And so then at that moment, I went into therapy and I started learning. Unfortunately, I was a realtor before all of this, and my husband was a Wall Street stockbroker before all of this before I became disabled.
And so we thought we knew stuff. We thought we were somewhat sophisticated. And so then I just started learning about the awful world of credit default swaps and securitization and going through watching the system break down. I actually had a deal that earlier in February that died, my office died. Everything died on February 7, 2007, and then it just got worse.
So in May of 2008, we didn’t know what to do cause Countrywide at that point had been saying to us, “Just send money.” Well, like how much? (They) said like anything. So for four months, we sent whatever we wanted and we thought we were helping ourselves. And the next thing we know, we get a notice of default from Recon Trust, which happens to not have been the substitute trustee until the next day when they recorded that.
And years later, we found that the notary who signed that notice of default pled guilty to notary fraud in the state of Nevada. It was part of a 453-count indictment that eventually led to Lorraine Brown and Doc X.
[00:12:07.900] – Lovell
OK, let me push hard right now, because America I think and I’ve been in the midst of this for a long time, and I’m going to turn to this question kind of towards my co-panelists for the moment before we move on to the next phase. We all know the term Robo Signing. And at that time, the only major media operation to do a story on this was Steve Kroft at CBS’s 60 Minutes.
And they did a story on DocX and Lorraine Brown. It transpired from a woman that we know very well, Lynn Szymoniak out of Florida, who, because she’s an attorney and an investigator she realized that, wait a second, there were these documents, shops that were fabricating documents across the United States to get people through foreclosure as quickly as possible.
So here we just had an example of someone who was a victim of that, and this was outright fraud, Steve. This was clear, just literally the easiest to prove in the world, fraud, but the courts just ramrodded through the system anyway. And nobody to this day has put together a complete comprehensive understanding of what judge actually knew, what, when, and how about documentation fraud, particularly as it comes through the secretary of state and all of these different entities within the government. Steve, how do you think that’s possible?
[00:13:32.580] – Grumbine
Well, each step along the way, it’s obvious that government has captured, that the people that are supposed to be guarding the henhouse are the wolves right now. So they in turn pass that on to each other. There’s no other way around it. It still blows my mind that every step through this process, there is somebody covering someone’s back. Somebody is getting a little piece of the pie each step along the way.
But I got to come back to something. Ilene, your story kicked my tail. I know that dark feeling of trying to take your life. And when financial trouble hits and especially when it’s coming out of nowhere like yours did when you’re completely caught, I can’t get past that feeling. That’s why I’m so interested in doing the series, is because of that human aspect. This is not a victimless crime here.
[00:14:26.610] – Goldstein
Oh, no, we were going to lose everything.
[00:14:28.950] – Grumbine
With your life. Everything else can be replaced, although I don’t want to focus. I’m concerned about, in the end, these behaviors. They pushed you into such a situation that life became so bad, things became so rough. And to me, that’s what I’m getting from all this, all the technical details. But watching the real impacts. Are people ready to take their lives?
To me, I hope folks understand that this is not just some sort of white-collar crime where people are just pushing pieces of paper back and forth. People are literally dying as a result of the behavior of these criminals. And Ilene, that’s the big takeaway here for me. I feel so badly for you and victims like yourself.
[00:15:15.110] – Goldstein
I didn’t stay a victim. You could stay a victim or you could respond to them. And so we tried to play by the rules. We sent the debt validation letter asking who the hell Seewald was. I don’t know anybody at Countrywide. We didn’t do business with them.
They’re just a servicer. So they use this double-speak. At that time, well, the servicer is Countrywide, OK, but the investor is Countrywide. OK, but they’re not the investor it’s actually Bank of New York for this guy. OK, who do I write a check to?
[00:15:49.250] – Grumbine
Wow.
[00:15:49.250] – Goldstein
There should be someone I should pay off. Who do I owe the money to? And I could tell you honestly, 13 years later, I still don’t know.
[00:15:58.640] – Lovell
Eric, ask Ilene because that’s the whole point, isn’t it?
[00:16:03.290] – Vaughan
But a couple of things. One, I’m glad the first thing you saw was bad popcorn ceiling when you woke up.
[00:16:08.900] – Goldstein
Yes. Me, too. Thank you. Thank you.
[00:16:09.790] – Vaughan
I mean, I’m very happy that that was the case. But also, you were a realtor. Your husband worked on Wall Street
[00:16:17.840] – Goldstein
The 90s when he became disabled early before they got really, really, really piggy.
[00:16:24.110] – Vaughan
Right. Nevertheless, between those two bodies of knowledge.
[00:16:29.090] – Goldstein
Yeah.
[00:16:29.660] – Vaughan
You would think that you’d be able to sniff this out from a mile away. But it doesn’t matter. What struck me when I heard that was that it doesn’t matter how sophisticated you are if you’re being lied to and
[00:16:40.610] – Goldstein
Right.
[00:16:40.610] – Vaughan
. . . the fraud is happening behind your back. You could be the most sophisticated borrower that’s ever been. It doesn’t matter if after you hand off the paperwork, they put something else in, and then they do a completely different deal.
[00:16:54.350] – Goldstein
Right. And especially the one thing they predicated this fraud upon, I believe, is the trust that the public had in banking and bankers that they wouldn’t screw you. They depended upon that.
[00:17:07.940] – Vaughan
Right. Absolutely. I mean, it’s the violation of that trust that is one of the biggest stories that gets repeated time and time again. But the other question that I had for you is that the way that your mortgage was set up was that it was interest only. And then one principal payment. I was wondering, you could tell me what that final payment was going to be?
[00:17:26.930] – Goldstein
Well, it wasn’t. It was actually multi-payment. It was pay option arm. You can make four different payments per month. If you could figure out the math on this loan, I would give you a million dollars because we can’t ever predict what that end payment would have been. I mean, you would think the one thing you could get from a servicer since it’s their only job, is actually an accounting of the accounts. Right? But you don’t get that. You get mumbo-jumbo, and you owe this and it’s that.
You get a note that says one thing. You get a mortgage paper every month, a statement saying you owe this and then you owe that on another paper. You get different papers saying different things. I have never, ever, ever found out how much we owed to whom we owed it and how do we pay it off and resolve the situation other than foreclosure.
[00:18:20.570] – Vaughan
So if you are not being given any clarity as to what your payment needs to be and they’re not providing any clear accounting of your account
[00:18:32.830] – Goldstein
Right.
[00:18:33.100] – Vaughan
Then there’s absolutely zero way of understanding as to whether or not your loan would be in default.
[00:18:41.230] – Goldstein
Yeah, and how many times are they going to accelerate? One person says I’m accelerating for this amount. When we got the notice of default, it had three different dollar amounts, three different notices with three different dollars. So we sent that debt validation. At the same time, we had a mortgage audit guy working for us.
This was in August of 2008, and they wrote a letter to Countrywide and somehow managed to get the Office of Thrift Supervision involved. And they just, you know, backed Countrywide. Oh, sorry. They bought it on the secondary market. They don’t know what the first guy did. Well, I thought in law the first guy sells to the second guy. The second guy is responsible for the action of the first guy. No?
[00:19:23.200] – Lovell
That’s what it’s supposed to be.
[00:19:25.450] – Goldstein
I thought I thought it. But then they filed the notice of trustee sale on October 1, 2008, and they never removed it. Oh, and I rescinded in September. I went to Neil Gaffield seminar in September 2008, I took the bus into California and one day went to a seminar, took the bus back, and I wrote a letter rescinding the loan. It was within the three years.
It was within my rights to do. We said we don’t like this deal. We want to be made whole. And then my husband speaks to Linda Reise. I don’t mind naming anybody. I’ll give you everybody’s name and telephone number because I’m telling the absolute truth. And she said, “Forget about the rescission. How much can you pay?” And my husband said, “$200 a month,” because that covered the taxes and insurance.
And she said, OK. And the next phase in April 2009, B of A was involved because we know how happy they were to get Countrywide. And we went through the nightmare of a mortgage modification from July 2009 till April 2011. We paid them that whole time. Never got a modification. Sent in documents up the wazoo. Then we couldn’t take it anymore.
In June 2011, we joined a lawsuit which turned into multi-district litigation, which you mentioned in your show, MDL 10-2193 in Massachusetts for mortgage modification, breach of contract. And the judge described that as Kafkaesque and declined the class action. And we went back to limbo and we sat there for two years and then SPS was involved.
So we dealt with SPS. Reiterated our need to reaffirm our recission, and we played with them for two years. And then they brought in Quality Loan Service. And by January 2018, I was in the hospital with high blood pressure.
[00:21:18.620] – Vaughan
Bureaucratic hell will do that.
[00:21:21.280] – Goldstein
And then they finally took the house August 5, 2018. They had to put repairs in They didn’t sell it until April 2019, and now there’s strangers living in my house.
[00:21:41.220] – Intermission
You are listening to The New Untouchables, a podcast brought to you by a collaboration of the creators of the docuseries The Con and Real Progressives, a nonprofit organization dedicated to teaching the masses about MMT or Modern Monetary Theory. Please help our efforts and become a monthly donor at PayPal or Patreon, like and follow our pages on Facebook and YouTube, and follow us on Periscope, Twitter, and Instagram.
[00:22:35.440] – Lovell
I’m so struck by the detail of your analysis, because what you do is you imbue, like so many I met on this journey, you’re just the antithesis of the idea of a deadbeat. You’re somebody who’s actually trying to work within a system that makes sense. And none of it made sense. It didn’t make sense to me.
That’s why we went on this journey to pull these threads. And now it makes sense. The whole thing was designed to destroy everybody. So a system at the top could literally steal from both sides. The American people would collapse. The middle class it collapsed working class, it collapsed minorities. And then it got insanely rich, building on, quite frankly, the ashes of the American dream, which, of course, is this insane nightmare.
Can you tell us some of the God-awful emotional turmoil that you experienced? It’s one thing to say suicide early, but this is beyond marathon. This is beyond triathlon. This is beyond anybody’s expectation of being able to survive. Can you explain to our viewers what it’s like to have to try to survive this?
[00:23:33.220] – Goldstein
Well, the one thing I decided I was not going to feel right away was guilt for attempting suicide because I’m human and I could only take so much and under very bad conditions, I made a choice that maybe not everyone else believes. But I believe God chose me not to disappear off the face of the Earth. And I kind of figured if I had one more day doing this, I was going to fight them.
But that meant going to have psychological counseling for three and a half years and believing that the truth matters. And quite frankly, being so disappointed so many times, hearing about this consent order and that judgment and the mortgage settlement, being called a deadbeat, and calling notary fraud, robo signing, making the reality of it into an unreality where it became entertainment for people, and then not wanting to share this with people, not wanting to explain year after year why I’m still fighting the bank.
And they’re like, but you didn’t pay. Are you kidding me? They took my equity first. They got paid upfront. They got all these other things that they got paid on. The outrage that they got paid over and over and over. And every time I get the hope, like Obama said, “Oh, there’s hope.” No, there was not hope. There was not hope.
Elizabeth Warren, I love the woman, but if she says one more time she’s going to smack a banker, I might have to do it for her. OK. Bernie, I feel was real and true about feeling for people. I wish the people who were behind Bernie would get behind this movement because it could just the same be them and it might be them.
How many of them, how many of the disgruntled Americans walking around are people who lost their house? How many people walking out with their gun doing something? My kids won’t even buy houses now. They’ve lost faith in the American system of what they call corruption.
[00:25:30.500] – Lovell
You’ve really tapped into the whole purpose of what we’re attempting to do, and I urge our viewers to please, please pay attention. We are desperately trying to galvanize a civil rights like movement to purge corruption. It’s destroyed lives. It’s killing people, but it’s killing people through deception like Miss Goldstein just mentioned. You got to be aware.
When people got behind on their payments, there was a governmental action that created a $25 billion national mortgage settlement built on all of the worst behaviors of the servicers that were acting on behalf of so-called investors who didn’t even have proof that they were investors because of the insanity of what we’re going to demonstrate to you along the way of what we call right of assignments and who actually can pick up the paper and who actually has a right to foreclose on the debt.
That wasn’t the people that were in the courts. The courts just rubberstamp what these what we called foreclosure mills were in there to do, which was to push people like Miss Goldstein who lasted much longer than many. In fact, I think I’ve seen statistics that it’s like literally one percent of the victims of this crime really went the distance. Go ahead, Ilene.
[00:26:44.420] – Goldstein
I will go my one percent against their one percent.
[00:26:48.530] – Lovell
Boom!
[00:26:48.930] – Goldstein
Who are they? They’re people. They’re people. They broke the law. I had to suffer through the law by doing the right thing. But I can swear to you and any other judge, any place on a million Bibles, I’m telling the truth. They can’t swear that. They could say, “Oh, we were bad, but we had so much fun doing it.” I had kids. That don’t work with me.
[00:27:11.680] – Lovell
When the court of law, literally rubber stamps what we could show could prove to a sixth-grader, if they knew the ABCs of this, and it’s that simple of what constitutes documentation fraud, those cases should have been thrown out right away. That doesn’t even mention the national mortgage settlement because people billions and billions and trillions and trillions of dollars went to the financial apparatus and these guys that were destroying people in the courtroom on behalf of the courts.
Steve, are we not a country that’s supposed to have separation of powers between the legislative, the executive, and the judiciary? Isn’t that the whole concept for the integrity of law and separation of powers? Is that what you’re seeing in this show?
[00:27:49.880] – Grumbine
Absolutely not. What you’re seeing on the show is that they’re all in collusion together. Bottom line is there is no separation. Everything you said sounds like wash, rinse, repeat, every victim that we’ve spoken to has had a very similar story. The good news with most of the victims we’ve spoken to so far, many of them have been fighters just like you.
But to your point, Patrick, that’s one percent. The other 99 percent don’t end up fighting, don’t end up winning. Or if they fight, they end up losing, getting their tails handed to them. So I just want to make sure that you, the audience, understand this is happening right now to every single person out there. Any of us could be hit with this at any given time.
And there’s no confidence in the housing business and that these loans are actually going to be handled in a way that is in your best interest. I think the fraud is baked in so deeply into this that if we don’t take major action and get people together fighting back, that this is going to continue as the Wall Street way of doing business in perpetuity until we finally take action.
[00:29:01.730] – Lovell
And on that note, Ilene, are there other ramifications of this incredible wisdom that you’ve gleaned from this horrific process?
[00:29:10.490] – Goldstein
I don’t know. Keep fighting. The people who think they don’t have a reason to keep fighting, who think that turning the gun on them is better than fighting or even losing. I ultimately had to decide to give up the house where I just had to stop fighting them. My family begged me, please, it’s going to kill you.
So it was going to kill me in the beginning. It was going to kill me in the end. So all I say to people now is, “OK, listen to your family. If it’s going to kill you, walk away. But if not, if you could keep fighting and keep your home. Do it. Do it.” I don’t know if that was wisdom, but heck. Better than just letting them win by default.
[00:29:50.890] – Lovell
The only way we’re going to win is if we all come together on this and create a civil rights like movement that’s going to purge corruption from our country. And there’s about 17 million other people right now on the verge of default when that mortgage moratorium goes off, not to mention the rentals. And if for anybody paying attention, there’s a lot of homelessness out there and more to come.
[00:30:06.980] – Vaughan
Well, I think what I keep hearing is that you’re lied to on the front end, then all the information that you have is completely confusing and obfuscates any information that you might actually get. And then you have a judiciary that I think, one, there was a certain period of time where they were like seeing 300 foreclosures in the morning, and another 200 in the afternoon or vice versa or something like that, where they’re just like cranking them out as fast as they possibly can.
So they have too big of a workload. And then on top of that, there’s just this for lack of a better term, I suppose, or maybe it’s the exact right term, what seems to be a pattern of prejudice against the homeowner, where basically if the information is coming from the bank or the bank’s lawyer, then that must be true and
[00:30:59.660] – Goldstein
Gospel.
[00:30:59.660] – Vaughan
We’re not even going to look at yours. So I was wondering if maybe you could speak to us a little bit about your experience. How open were the courts to seeing any of the information that you might have brought to them?
[00:31:10.580] – Goldstein
Well, the thing is, Nevada is a non-judicial state. You don’t ever get to court. It’s just documents at the recorder. You get a copy of the paper. Ther’s no judge. You don’t go to a judge. You don’t get to present your case. You get papers in the mail. When they filed the notice of trustee sale, we sat for three years not knowing every day if they were going to file that day and sell the house underneath us, lock us out.
They did it in Florida a lot with their rocket docket. But here in Nevada, they had sheriff and the marshals come and taking people out of the house, locking them out. We didn’t know if that could happen. And then we were supposed to negotiate in good faith with them at the same time. Well, how do you do that if you have a gun to your head?
How do you negotiate if every time you make the negotiation, you’re not giving the information you’re negotiating with. You never learn what your payoff is or what this new modified mortgage would ever be. Like, what do we get to pay it off in 300 years? Like what is this abstract concept of IOU money? It means something to you, but it means nothing to me anymore other than I’m going to lose everything no matter what.
And we didn’t have a lot of money to fight them. Over the course of the years, we spent about $7,000 fighting them. But mostly it was just with letters and persistence and bringing up the fact of law that they were trying to avoid. We rescinded. They said ignore it. Sorry, as an operation of law when it was put into the mail and when you received it and your employer acknowledged it, it became effective.
Go to the Supreme Court. Check if that’s true. So we live so much of our time trying to obey the law, trying to enforce the law. We went to the cops. I said to the cop, “I want to file charges.” She said, “Against whom?” I said, “Angelo Mozilo and the loan officer for my deal.” He said, “You can’t do that.” I said, “Why not?”
He said, “It’s a company.” I said, “But I named the person. I want to file charges against them.” “I’m sorry. I can’t take that complaint.” We went to the D.A. Who do we fight? What do we do? I’m sorry. I can’t take that complaint. Go to the attorney general. Go to the attorney general. Oh, yeah. They’re bad boys. We’re going to get money from them. Don’t worry.
Did we ever see a dime of one settlement? Not the mortgage settlement, not the robo-signing settlements, not the B of A settlements, not the Countrywide settlements. That’s the help for the homeowners? Nothing. Just more money out of our pocket to lose, knowing we could probably most definitely lose, except we’re really stubborn and I wouldn’t give up.
[00:33:59.870] – Grumbine
Wow!
[00:33:59.870] – Lovell
That is so profound to me to hear you lay it up that way, because Steve and Eric, she hit so many incredibly important points. Yes, there were settlements. There were supposedly situations. I mean, we were all waiting because of what Obama said based on HAMP to basically modify our house. In my particular case, I was supposed to modify for 90 days. I got past that.
I went 18 months where they would not modify me and they kept bouncing me around. That’s what led me on this journey. Eric at the very beginning, I said to him, none of this made sense, Eric. And we went to the servicer, my servicer in Portland, Oregon, and I’ll never forget on camera before we knew any of this stuff, before we knew Bill Black.
Eric says, “Well, it’s apparent that the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand’s doing.” And I remember you saying that Eric, at the very beginning. And think about how much we’ve learned since and how profoundly accurate that statement is, brother.
[00:34:53.780] – Vaughan
Right. Right.
[00:34:55.280] – Goldstein
And then they don’t give you a chance to emotionally recover, because if you feel like you’re being hunted and you are in your home. The last two years, they had a girl coming every week knocking on the door every week. And I told her, if you keep coming on my property, I’m going to get you arrested for trespassing. She laughed at me like you’re a deadbeat. Go away. Shut up. Pay your mortgage.
[00:35:21.340] – Grumbine
I remember I literally crawled across the floor as I would hear the knocks. We had slats in our windows and I would crawl up and I’d part the slats to look out to see who it was. And sure enough, I’d see a car just down beyond where they thought I’d see them huddled down there. And they like, “We hear you in there. Just open the door so we can give you these papers.” And it was terrifying. My kids would be like, “Can we talk, daddy? Can we talk?” And I’m like, “sshh, sshh.”
[00:35:51.040] – Goldstein
I had to change my telephone number because the first couple of years, every time the phone rang, I cried. And you get a lot of warranty calls and kids calling for my children and life happening. But every time I cried. How could they ever repay me in that way? How could they ever give me back my peace of mind?
And they can even if they would decide somehow by some miracle, I had a judgment against them and I was going to get paid money. It wouldn’t be enough, really. Quite honestly, the only thing that would be enough for me right now is that they would file criminal charges against them because what they’re doing is just plain straight-up criminal.
[00:36:31.580] – Grumbine
Can’t give you those years of your life back. All the fear and the pain and suffering, none of it.
[00:36:37.430] – Lovell
Let me chime in on that real quick too again, to galvanize this movement for the audiences out there, because, listen, nothing has changed. It’s just basically morphed like a virus. So what we’ve seen, let’s call it 2012 through the 2018 era, it was mostly covering up this madness through people like Miss. Goldstein. And I call that financial terrorism.
What you guys just described was financial terrorism. But in addition to that, because of the way the emergency stimulus worked and stock buybacks and perverse corporate incentive based on short term, we got CEOs of Wall Street buying back their stocks and then doing the same thing in what we call collateralized loan obligations to zombie companies, zombie companies that show no profit.
Their only demand is government money through buying bonds that are made up of nothing. OK, this is what backstops the entirety of our financial system. And meanwhile, The Con, who just basically our program, who builds this incredible engineered criminal conspiracy from the bottom up. And again, to all of those viewers out there who listen to the most crazy people in the podcast arena.
Yes, conspiracy theory is madness. Conspiracy is another level of madness with the magic of owning the system, which is called corruption. And the only way you can prove it is if you actually do the work and you unwind and you unpacked all of the elements that constitute what the crime actually is. Eric, what would you ask Ilene given what we’re going to talk about next with, of course, Mr. O’Brien and Mr. Thigpen?
[00:38:14.240] – Vaughan
Well, I’m kind of curious to go through and check off like all the different boxes you said that you were refinancing, correct?
[00:38:21.290] – Goldstein
Correct.
[00:38:21.950] – Vaughan
And so is there anything remarkable at all about the appraisal?
[00:38:25.800] – Goldstein
Oh, yeah. If you believe market value at the time was $285,000, but the appraisal actually came in lower, not higher. So I don’t know, we might be different on that point. The market value supposedly was to $285,000 and they came in at $242,000, so it immediately dropped.
[00:38:42.770] – Lovell
What era was that? Was that 2007?
[00:38:43.670] – Goldstein
2005.
[00:38:46.460] – Lovell
Oh, that’s 2005, but that’s before the vintage shorts happened. So that’s part and parcel to that.
[00:38:51.410] – Goldstein
Yeah. So it was part of a series from 2005. If you also think about the other thing about this, Countrywide had 530 trusts. Right? And you figure they named or they allegedly had 4,000 customers loans in each trust. I don’t know the math of that, but think about how many people that affected by just their handiwork in the trusts and multiply that number out.
How many people actually kept their houses? I recently spoke to you of someone who got the same kind of loan as me, but he’s doing real well in his life and he happens to be one of them, an inside boy. So he feels like it was the best product he ever received in his life. And I said, but what if they screw up your paperwork?
What if they decide that you didn’t pay your mortgage. He’s like, “Well, I’m not worried about it because I have enough money.” I said, “What if?” He’s like, “Oh, no, no, no, no.” I’m like, “OK, you’re Teflon then. You’re the only person in the world who would not get screwed over by bad paperwork.”
[00:39:52.990] – Vaughan
Now, the bad paperwork part is what we’re going to be jumping into here in a little bit. And once again, I think one of the things that’s really striking to me is, in your estimation, I’m guessing that you’re not like a forensic document, whatever person of anyway, shape or form. Were you able to understand when you saw a fraudulent document?
[00:40:12.760] – Goldstein
Well, it wasn’t so much being able to identify the fraudulent document. It was more in what way were they trying to use this fraudulent document.
[00:40:20.710] – Vaughan
Right.
[00:40:21.100] – Goldstein
So it was like for the notice of default, looking at it, no, didn’t look fraudulent. I didn’t know anything about that in June of 2008, but I suspected everybody, you know, at that point. But when it became later when they did the more fraudulent documents would be if there could be something more or less fraudulent.
The later documents in 2011, when they rescinded the notice of trustee sale, they were preparing to do something. They just the right hand, like you say, didn’t know the left. So I guess they didn’t tell the foreclosure department that the client happened to be in litigation with them at the same time. So once they synced that up, they kind of left us alone.
But then we got the really bogus paperwork. It was 2018 when SPS Sillett Portfolio Servicing out of Salt Lake and Quality Loan Services give them their hometown in Irvine, I believe. And it’s when they came in with documents, when there was something notarized by a notary and filed in Salt Lake but filed in Nevada. So I know this like really bogus stuff there, but what’s the point of looking at it?
[00:41:32.680] – Vaughan
Right. But the point is, is that it got to a point where it’s like it was clear even to a layperson that something fraudulent was going on and you never even had an opportunity to show it to anybody.
[00:41:43.540] – Goldstein
No, and I wanted to bring it to the county recorder because she was responsible for the documents that were recorded in his county. And they were like, well, you have to fill out this form and explain this and that and the next thing. It’s like, oh, screw it, screw it.
I could have probably taken my development alone because it was low-income elderly people, people of color. And I could have probably just did an audit of that development and showed you 200 instances of fraud. What good is identifying fraud if there’s no one to enforce that?
[00:42:17.680] – Vaughan
Right.
[00:42:18.820] – Goldstein
So there was no one to turn to. I would have been another soapbox. And you have to start over, like when you go to a new doctor, every time you explain what’s going on, you have to start with well tell me your medical history, explain your situation. It gets really weary and wearisome and exhausting to continually have to provide documents to prove your financial situation, which did not change since day one.
It’s not like my husband income exploded. Nothing changed for us. It just depended on what wave they were surfing that day over on the robo signing thing so we’re going to throw that paper out and going to give you new paper. And we don’t like that deal. Let’s change it to this deal today. And there was never a consistency except for the inconsistency.
[00:43:08.560] – Lovell
Your analysis is poetry, and it’s incredibly important because, Steve, what we’re about to uncover next is exactly what Ilene just teed up, but from the perspective of the guys on the inside. So Ilene just so you know, we’re going to talk to John O’Brien out of Massachusetts, to Jeff Thigpen, who are the only honest recorders with the courage to come forward with the levels of criminal fraud that took place that they notified the AG of the United States, every single entity you could possibly imagine. So you’re going to be vetted out now and we’re listening. What are your closing words, Ilene?
[00:43:44.040] – Goldstein
Thank you for having me, and I hope that you guys have great success in sharing this message and I’m all in to get those corrupt bastards out.
[00:43:54.000] – Lovell
That’s incredibly powerful for me. But since this opportunity is to connect with other people, what would you tell them we have to do in terms of coming together?
[00:44:02.730] – Goldstein
You have to listen to people and actually believe what they’re saying is true. I think people have become so skeptical of believing what’s true. Who do you believe? Who is it being said by? What’s their political leanings? I think that has to end. It has to be more of let’s look at it as income inequality, which is really the true situation, because it’s the super rich that are getting richer and everybody else, it doesn’t matter what your color or religion or where you live, rural, city.
If you’re poor, they’re going to come and try to get more from you. They’re going to try to get you to sign up for more and want more and provide less and take. So, don’t let that happen. Don’t look at another human being who’s as poor as you, as someone who’s less than you. Just they’re not. They’re human. And these guys are inhuman. They’re inhuman.
[00:44:53.280] – Lovell
Thank you. We’re so deeply touched by you coming on our program and sharing.
[00:44:56.730] – Goldstein
Thank you. Thank you. Nice to meet you.
[00:44:59.790] – Grumbine
You as well.
[00:45:00.600] – Vaughan
Thank you.
[00:45:04.840] – End Credits
The New Untouchables is produced by Andy Kennedy, descriptive writing by Rose Ann Raiola Miele and promotional artwork by Cristina of Paradigms and Revolutions Design Group The New Untouchables is publicly funded by our Real Progressives Patreon account. If you would like to donate to The New Untouchables, please visit patreon.c
Mentioned in the podcast:
Whistleblower Lynn Szymoniak
