Last year a disabled military veteran dropped dead of a heart attack in court while fighting a mistaken foreclosure by Wells Fargo bank.

Here's the article from Crooks & Liars:

A bank foreclosure can be a horrifically stressful event on a young and healthy person. But imagine coping with a bank trying to take away your home because of a typo on their part, and not any fault of your own, when you are a frail, disabled veteran. That's the battle 62-year-old Larry Delassus had to fight even though court records show he paid his mortgage two months ahead of schedule and also paid his property taxes in advance.

   On the morning of Dec. 19, 2012, in a Torrance courtroom, Larry Delassus' heart stopped as he watched his attorney argue his negligence and discrimination case against banking behemoth Wells Fargo.

   His death came more than two years after Wells Fargo mistakenly mixed up his Hermosa Beach address with that of a neighbor in the same condo complex. The bank's typo led Wells Fargo to demand that Delassus pay $13,361.90 ­— two years of late property taxes the bank said it had paid on his behalf in order to keep his Wells Fargo mortgage afloat.

   But Delassus, a quiet man who suffered from the rare blood-clot disorder Budd-Chiari syndrome and was often hospitalized, didn't owe a penny in taxes.

   One of his neighbors, whose condo "parcel number" was two digits different from Delassus', owed the back taxes.

   In a series of painfully tragic events, Wells Fargo relied on its typographical error to double Delassus' mortgage — from $1,237.69 to $2,429.13 — as its way of recouping the $13,361.90 in taxes Delassus didn't owe. Delassus, a retiree living on a $1,655 check, couldn't meet the mysteriously increased mortgage. He stopped paying, and soon was far behind on his mortgage.

One especially difficult moment during his battle with Wells Fargo came in May 2011, shortly after another bad bout of illness, Delassus' condo was sold by the bank. In a videotaped court deposition later, Delassus breaks down crying. "I came back from the hospital, and that very day, they sold the son of a b*tch," he says. "I'm homeless. I did not have a home. My condo — 16 years, gone. Gone."

There's much more on Larry Delassus' battle with Wells Fargo here:

Once Wells Fargo had acknowledged their typographical error, there doesn't seem to be any logical reason that they didn't bend over backwards to return Mr. Delassus to square one with his mortgage...the 16-year mortgage holder who never missed a payment, and return him to that point with all the erroneously tacked on fees wiped away.

Delassus' attorney Anthony Trujillo, a friend and next-door neighbor, recalls deposing Wells Fargo Litigation Support Manager Michael Dolan in 2012, and asked what his definition of “fair” was.

“Fair is a place where they have ponies and merry-go-rounds,” Dolan said.

Nice!

When the mortgage crisis was in full swing I was of the belief as I know many others here were that the owners had all gotten liar loans etc. and bought more than they could ever pay for and didn't want to reward them by letting them stay in those homes.
Now I see a bit more and think it was all engineered to transfer even more wealth to the major banks. They made money making those loans, when the purchaser could no longer pay they took them back & sold them again all the while taking money from the Govt. the same people being foreclosed upon to cover any losses.
If the Govt. had guaranteed the mortgages or come up with a finance program and kept those people in their homes would we have spent more than we did ?
And yes that story sucked because no one will be punished for that mans death, to refuse to acknowledge the mistake and to keep on with it should be like using a gun in a crime and have all penalties doubled.

FASTMIKE wrote on 03/11/13 at 7:40pm:


You are smart guy Mike, so I'm sure you really know the answer. It's the same people who oppose bank regulations and favor giving banks more leeway. The same ones who pushed the bank bailouts. Wonder who that could be?

FASTMIKE wrote on 03/11/13 at 7:40pm:


I agree. But if we weren't willing to do that we should have at least broken them up in to smaller institutions that weren't "too big to fail".

CD

AIG got too big to fail because they were not regulated as an insurance company even though they were selling insurance. A credit default swap is basically insurance against the risk of selling a mortgage, but they were not required to have to have the capital reserves required to sell insurance.

And the AIG and bank bailouts were conceived under a GOP administration by a Republican Treasury Secretary that just happened to be a former head of a major investment bank on Wall Street.

But to be fair, it was Bill Clinton who signed a GOP backed law that eliminated the barrier between commercial banking and investment banking. That played a major part in allowing Wall Street the financial "creativity" that caused that mess.

dscEvents wrote on 03/23/13 at 10:07am:




i didnt ask who.....i asked why.....


they got bailed out in warp speed because the insure the senate and congress pension plans.....lol.....TOO BIG TO BURN THEIR OWN FINGERS.