Justice Closing in On Notorious 'Foreclosure Assistance' Firm
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Thanks in part to a recent SF Weekly
column detailing the latest exploits of longtime con man Paul Noe II, a federal
judge recently announced he would advise federal, state, and municipal
prosecutors to investigate a suspicious statewide "foreclosure assistance"
operation that targeted defaulted homeowners in the San Francisco Bay
Area.
"I am referring these matters to the State
Bar of the State of California, to the State Bar of the State of Nevada, to the
United States Attorney in the Central District of California, and to the
district attorney of Los Angeles and San Bernadino and Orange Counties, so that
they can make an investigation of this matter, and do what is required under
the law of the State of California," U.S. District Judge Manuel Real
said during a Jan. 13 hearing.
Real had just heard allegations that Mitchell
Roth, a longtime attorney of Noe's, had filed multiple lawsuits on behalf of
clients, then failed to show up in court to prosecute the cases. The filings
were submitted on behalf of customers of a Noe front company called United
First, Inc. whose business model involved convincing desperate homeowners that
they might have grounds for a so-called "missing title" lawsuit.
These suits would supposedly be based on the legal theory that banks had lost
track of buildings' titles when mortgages were bundled into securities, and
thus had no right to foreclose. Whatever the merits of the theory -- and
there's no evidence that either Roth or Noe had established whether their
clients had any legal standing before collecting their fees -- attorneys have
charged that Mitchell has been simply filing lawsuits en masse, abandoning them, and allowing judges to throw cases out of court.
Attorneys for banks had been confused by Roth's
mass filings, and apparent mass abandonments, until they Googled Roth's name.
They found the SF Weekly story detailing United First's unusual
business strategy, and the lawsuits made a perverse sort of sense: Roth and Noe
were apparently capitalizing on the homeowners' hopes that they might
somehow keep their homes, and then abandoning them in court.
Mitchell, for his part, has claimed that each of
the apparent dozens of abandoned cases was the result of mix-ups
and extenuating circumstances. Judge Real, however, was not
convinced. After the judge announced he was asking law enforcement to investigate,
Roth obtained an attorney to represent him, and during subsequent court
proceedings refused to answer questions based on the Fifth Amendment to the
Constitution's protection against self-incrimination.
Behind Roth's increasingly precarious situation is
his longtime client, Noe, who in 2003 was the subject of an SF Weekly
feature titled Son of
Super Swindler. That story described how Noe, who has been convicted
of felony fraud, had also been admonished by the California Department of
Insurance for his involvement in a so-called "trust mill" annuity
sales operation. Fronted by a series of ephemeral shell companies, Noe's
associates had tricked senior citizens into putting their savings into
ill-advised, high-fee annuity investments.
Last September, an SF Weekly column detailed Noe's latest gambit, which involved convincing people with homes in foreclosure to make thousands of dollars in monthly payments to United First, which in turn was supposed to pay Roth to file a lawsuit on the homeowners' behalf.
Rick Jurgens, an advocate with the National
Consumer Law Center in Washington, D.C., reviewed a copy of a Roth/Noe contract
SF Weekly sent him, and noted: "Bogus doesn't begin do define it
... To have these for-profit enterprises come in and throw a deal that's
just there to squeeze the last penny out of a victim's pocket is really
horrifying to see."
So far, Noe appears to remain unscathed by his latest effort to squeeze
money from unsophisticated consumers.
If prosecutors take Judge Real up on his call for an investigation into
Noe's latest scheme, could United First be his
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