Well, heck, I’ll take a shot at linking it to the national HOA disgrace. One of the most unreported felonies in the country, of course, is embezzlement from Homeowners Associations.
But (and here’s my lame attempt at making the subject faintly relevant), did you know that birds can be as crooked as the bird-brains who manage Homeowners Associations?
Yup, the owner of a car wash in New Brunswick, Canada thought his employees were stealing money from one of his car wash machines, so he set up a hidden camera to catch the thief. And here you see the results:
Ah, it’s so good when you see member of the real estate industry who finally discovers that all is not good in HOA Amerika! I hope he continues his research. He’s going to be stunned!
And here I thought Canadians were all so polite. Well, in my experience, they’re a heck of a lot more polite than your typical American.
Still, when people get involved in a Homeowners Association, on either side of the border, tempers can flare, guns get pulled, people get injured and are sometimes even shot to death. So far, all the HOA murders have happened on the American side.
Do HOAs ever find true justice when they’re ripped off by property managers? Well, not often. But once in a blue moon a crooked HOA manager is held to account. Well, kind of.
A couple of property managers in Massachusetts and New Hampshire were caught with their hands in several HOA cookie jars under their control. Over a two year period they stole more than a hundred thousand bucks.
“No contest! No contest at all!” Judges love to hear those words. It means they can dispose of a case quickly, make the bad guys promise to pay back a few bucks, and not have to bother about putting the bad guys behind bars.
Gosh, how many times do we have to hear that line from these embezzlers? “Filled with remorse.” It’s such a load of horse puckey. If you’re going to make a bald-faced theft of 350,000 bucks from your neighbors, the only remorse you’re going to feel is that you didn’t steal enough.
Jill Rouse Boothby of Boothby Realty was a property manager for nearly a dozen Birmingham, Alabama condo associations. Plea agreements like hers are only made if she can plead guilty to a small fraction of the crimes she’s accused of. Halloween is over so we can’t really call her a witch. She’s worse. And with all the people she’s hurt, with all the elderly people who’ve been swindled out of their life savings, she deserves worse punishment than she’ll ever be given.
