Get caught drunk driving and you might get a year behind bars. Embezzle a million bucks, cost fifty people their homes and you get 30 days!
Massoud Aaron Yashouafar is known in three states for his enormously fishy real estate deals. And he’s the big cheese behind the Paradise Spa scandal in Las Vegas. Much of the Homeowners Association burned to the ground in 2010, but somehow a million dollars in insurance money found its way to Yashouafar’s pockets instead of the homeowners.
Originally, the burned condos could have been rebuilt. But it took so much time to deal with the ruins that the county finally demolished them. To rub salt in the wounds of the homeless HOA members the county filed liens on the ruined units and sent the owners bills to pay for the demolition job. Ah yes, all those displaced homeowners are still on the hook for monthly dues!
BTW, for you skeptics who think your HOA isn’t capable of spying on your intimate behavior, be assured they can…and will. Homeowners Associations are all about monitoring intimate behavior and micro-managing your life. With that in mind, the story linked below might blow your mind.
It’s about a Texas family who discovered that someone was able to hack into an off-the-shelf baby monitor, eavesdrop on every sound in the house, and even manipulate the camera to take a look at things around the room, AND CALL THE BABY BY NAME!
My friends, baby monitors operate on just a few public radio and TV frequencies. They can be hacked by a school kid. Just YouTube “how to hack a baby monitor” and look at your results!
An expose’ by the Denver Post shows that many Colorado homeowners have been forced to pay legal bills to law firms which had never filed foreclosure lawsuits against their properties.
“Phantom court cases” the Post calls them. Homeowners afraid of losing their homes have been sent legal bills by county public trustees saying that foreclosures could not be stopped unless homeowners forked over the legal fees for these nonexistent lawsuits.
The homeowners always did.
Grift? Graft? Regardless of what it’s called lawyers and law firms are rarely, if ever, sanctioned. They participate in confiscation of private homes yet if they’re caught they face no penalties. Our society has been turned upside down. Shoplift more than $200 in Colorado and you face prison time for a felony. Steal thousands of dollars from distressed homeowners and you can buy your kid a Ferrari. A strange legal system in this country.
Some homeowners describe it as such. But when HOAs lawyers advise it to do the kind of thing linked in the video below, it’s worse than a scourge. It’s actionable illegal conduct. What if this homeowner had to leave home to attend to an emergency at a local hospital? This would be a lawsuit with no bottom line on damages. This lawsuit could cost the HOA millions and millions of dollars.
The president of the Seascape Homeowners Association in Galveston, Texas, is suing a homeowner for ten million bucks after the homeowner circulated an email to fellow homeowners called the president “arrogant, incompetent, dishonest, and harassing.”
President Ron Benotti is suing homeowner Richard Alan Collier. Collier alleged that Benotti mishandled a project to restore beaches in the area.
The really surprising thing here is that the court didn’t throw this case out long ago based on the ‘public figure’ rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court. Once a person goes public by running for office or otherwise inserting himself into public discussions it’s nearly impossible to successfully sue for libel and/or slander. It’s the one thing that protects news agencies from lawsuits when they inspect the private behavior of public officials.
Benotti’s lawyers had to have told him that his lawsuit will never survive against the public figure argument. His defamation suit is nothing more than a SLAPP lawsuit designed to cost the defendant his life savings and shut him up.
For shame, Benotti and your phalanx of HOA paid-for lawyers! For shame!
