Ft. Lauderdale is a gorgeous part of the country, beautiful blue ocean, magnificent greenery, vacation paradise of the rich and powerful. My only real experience there was back in the 1980s when a number of organized crime boiler rooms were doing their telephone scams from office buildings located on NE 125th Street. The federal investigator who accompanied me said the boulevard was well-known among the feds as “Maggot Mile.”
Well, the swampland salesmen eventually moved out of Ft. Lauderdale and spread across the country, mostly in the sunbelt states where they continued running their scams. Those memories sort of popped up in my head as I watched the television story linked below.
Seems an investigative reporter in Ft. Lauderdale has discovered a longtime HOA president has been paying himself tens of thousands of dollars a year salary, and even bought himself a $20,000 car in another state with the community’s budget but without the community’s knowledge.
Complaints were filed with local authorities but they won’t investigate because it’s….(hold your breath)…. a civil matter. Some things never change.
I’m with Iva who asks “What in the world is this man hiding?”
Iva…I asked that same question of our former board president! He dropped dead as soon as I turned up the heat and what we learned was he was hiding no audits on TEN MILLION dollars that was unaccounted for (audits were required annually per the by-laws) and $500,000 in unpaid debt. He was also hiding that he had just purchased two places in an HOA in Carlsbad, CA where he was running for the board at the time of his death.
Trust me, Iva you don’t want to stop digging for the truth!
Where do HOA crimes including, but not limited to: knowingly filing fraudulent foreclosures and equity theft, fabricated liens, extortion, knowingly filing false, or fabricated lawsuits, slapp lawsuits, embezzlement, forging paper work and filings in a court, harassment, terrorizing, death threats, “the new domestic violence,” willful and intentional property destruction, breaking and entering, knowingly giving false, or fabricated information to law enforcement, lying under oath, wire fraud, mail fraud, slander, libel, collusion and a range of possible IRS crimes and/or violations, get the designation as being “civil matters.” I can think of no other industry, or business in America where any of these crimes would be considered “civil matters.”