Category Archives: lawsuit

LOL! The Drones Are Here!

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It’s so much fun to a see a prediction come true. For several years, now, I’ve been talking about the coming wave of inexpensive drones; flying machines equipped with incredibly clear spy cams. They’re light as a feather and designed to be astoundingly invasive. If you and your gal pal or boy toy use the backyard Jacuzzi at midnight, understand that your underwater antics are going to be displayed at the monthly HOA board meeting. From five hundred feet in the air you’ll be able to count the freckles on your lover’s shoulders. At night!

If you leave your second story bedroom shades open, these spy cams can hover and record all the action.

“Not fair!” you rant. “Not fair!”

Well, get used to it, folks, because the FAA doesn’t regulate these spy toys. Unless you’re invading federal air space there are no rules at all. And if your backside shows up on the community center’s big screen how are you going to stop it? Invasion of privacy? Heck, there’s a long list of Homeowners Associations that routinely violate privacy. Some California HOAs are doing unannounced inspections of the interior of members’ homes. It’s all in the name of stopping hoarders, of course.

Slander? HOAs routinely slander targeted homeowners. Your extra pounds aren’t slander because you did it to yourself.

Harassment? Forget about it. The ‘H’ in HOA means harassment.

Remember all those covenants and standards that you signed on your real estate documents? Well, hidden inside those documents is a clause that lets your HOA board change the covenants at will and as needed. If your HOA needs to force a targeted homeowner out (think race, religion, gender bias, marital status) then it will do so. Your lawsuit against the HOA will cost you a bloody fortune, and in the end it’ll be tossed out of court because you gave your permission to your HOA to sue you. Not only that, you agreed to pay all your HOAs legal expenses.

So, hot tub lovers, start dieting now. Your privates are no longer private.

http://tinyurl.com/mwocfal

 

Little Pleasure On Pleasure Island

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People move into lush-looking Homeowners Associations thinking they’ve bought a little slice of Utopia. But few people know that there really is no workable Utopia in this life. In fact, the original Utopia, written five centuries ago by Sir Thomas More, was actually a farce; a comedy about the inability of the human race to get along with one another. Homeowners Associations founded along the same lines of More’s Utopia have built into their own structure the probability of failure and decline into despotism and tyranny.

There’s an old bit of survivalist wisdom that teaches if three men go into the wilderness, two will always turn against the one. So any government which is allowed to use tyrannical rules against a minority is doomed to failure, disaster and a complete loss of justice. In fact, the genius of our country’s Constitution is that it doesn’t create a ‘majority rules’ ethic. It’s not a Democracy. It removes the people several steps from the rulers, and it divides the rulers into several separate but equal bodies of government. Our Congress is divided into a House and Senate. But the two must work together to pass legislation. The Executive has veto powers over Congress, yet Congress has the ability to overpower the Executive by gathering together a super-majority. And when everything goes to Hell in a hand basket, there’s a Supreme Court which can overturn or delay the implementation of bad legislation. All states except Nebraska have a similar structure (Nebraska has a unicameral instead of a bicameral legislature).

With all this in mind, we sadly turn our eyes to the Pleasure Island Mariner’s Cove Homeowners Association near Port Arthur,Texas. We’ve discussed Pleasure Island before. Like every other HOA in the country, Pleasure Island is just one vote away from disaster. If an HOA attorney needs a little extra cash, he advises the board to use minor violations of covenants to fine, seize and foreclose on straying homeowners.

Deborah Dommert got behind on her HOA dues. Then the late fees and legal bills started rising too quickly for her to catch up. Remember that HOA covenants invariably order a homeowner to pay all the legal bills of the Homeowners Association. And like thousands of other homeowners across the country, she now faces the seizure and foreclosure of her home. She has no court of last resort. She has no Congress which can pass laws shutting down these neighborhood tyrannies. She is without access to real justice.

HOA attorneys are taught by huge HOA management conglomerates to never allow a homeowner to negotiate a way to catch up on dues. In national legal seminars, attorneys learn how to boost their income by abusing those who can’t afford legal representation.

Deborah Dommert will most likely lose her home. But some investor in future weeks or months will make a tidy fortune out of her personal disaster. The investor might even turn out to be a close ‘friend’ of the HOA board or law firm.

The biggest disaster of all is the loss of personal freedom for all of us.

http://tinyurl.com/ln2pxdk

Fiddler On The Wrong Roof!

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guest blog by Nila Ridings

From my previous Wichita, Kansas story you might recall folks there have some weird and wicked things happen to them. 

Rozalin Taylor was away from home for a few hours, and stunned by what she saw when she returned. Half of her roof was gone, not because of wind, but because of a lost roofing crew. At first, Rozalin thought she was being surprised with a new roof compliments of members of her church.
 
Reality set in and she went searching for whoever had done the damage and left truck tracks in her lawn. The roofing company working right down the street claimed no knowledge of ever being on her roof.  Finally, some helpful friends papered the bare roof to help protect her from an approaching storm.
 
Rozalin learned she wasn’t the first homeowner in the area missing part of their roof simply because a roofing company couldn’t read addresses!
 
Could somebody please buy these guys a GPS?
 
 

Las Vegas HOA Mob

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As I’ve said repeatedly on this blog, never in my forty year career as an investigative reporter have I seen forty percent of the suspects on a federal indictment list suddenly ‘commit suicide’. But in the Las Vegas HOA scandal, of the first ten indictments, four suspects died in somewhat weird ways. Yes, I’ve read the coroner’s reports and the police reports. But still….

Attorney and HOA TV star Nancy Quon had supposedly tried to commit suicide before…WITH the help of her police officer boyfriend who supposedly had the Las Vegas police lab mix up some illegal drugs which she would use in her ‘suicide’. That cop is one of those under indictment in the HOA scandal. The coroner ruled it was a legitimate suicide. OK, I understand, it’s Las Vegas.

But even the family of attorney David Amesbury doesn’t believe he committed suicide. He was found hanging from a rafter in his brother’s barn. Just shortly before his ‘suicide’ he was found inside the locked gates of his gated HOA community, badly beaten, ribs broken, both knees bashed inwards. And somehow he’s able to climb a ladder in a barn and hang himself? Give me a break.

Folks, you haven’t even seen one percent of this scandal as it’ll unfold in next year’s federal court case in Nevada. This is Organized Crime in capital letters. And it’s the same kind of Organized Crime that permeates the entire structure of Homeowners Associations across America. Have I seen it personally? Yes, as documented in my new book, Neighbors At War, I was once hit with a $75,000 extortion demand by a local HOA official. He was stupid enough to issue that demand through my personal attorney, who took extensive notes. Then, this HOA official was stupid enough to ‘confess’ to the HOA board in writing that he actually had such a communication with my attorney and he was sure it was tape recorded. Strangely enough, his memo was not produced during discovery as required by law. It was ‘accidentally’ included in a box of material that I was never supposed to see. Those records suddenly vanished right before my court trial, but he couldn’t get rid of that memo.  These people may be organized criminals, but they’re really not very smart.

Homeowners Associations are a dangerous institution. Any phony or quasi governmental institution that’s not required to abide by the restrictions of the U.S. Constitution is dangerous to your personal and financial health. They do not protect your property values. They do not protect your family’s privacy or safety. Thousands of Americans have discovered over the past few years that by agreeing to live in an HOA, they’ve signed a Devil’s Contract. If I appear to rant and rave, it’s just my way of trying to issue the warning that I wish someone had once issued me. Reading your real estate paperwork is the customary advice. But there’s nothing in your real estate documents that talks about what’s actually happening in HOA Amerika.

You know, I’d just love to cover those Las Vegas trials in person.

Just my rant of the day.

http://tinyurl.com/bwdjoat

 

HOA Figures Involved In International Drug Trafficking?

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That headline might seem like a bit of sensational hyperbole, except that the story comes from one of the nation’s most respected journalists, John L. Smith, columnist for the Las Vegas Review Journal. I’ve talked about him before, but I don’t remember sending you to his column earlier this year on some bizarre links in the Las Vegas HOA scandal.

As you may recall, the feds have indicted or gotten guilty pleas from nearly forty HOA figures in Nevada, including famed attorneys, a famous attorney/TV talk show host, Nancy Quon, well know politicians and police officials. These are well known public figures, folks! Public figures in the Homeowners Association business. And already federal investigators have talked about organized crime, rigged HOA board elections, racketeering, attempted murder, suspicious suicides, armed robbery, hostage-taking, extortion, bribery, embezzlement from homeowners, insurance fraud. The list goes on and on.

But Smith’s column from May 19th would be freakin’ unbelievable, even as a plot for a Hollywood action flick. Except that it’s real.

This federal investigation of Homeowners Associations is the first of its kind in the country. Yet the feds know of hundreds, possible thousands of cases of HOA embezzlement across the land. It’s long been my contention that if this FBI/US Attorney’s team was planted in any major city in America, they’d find the same kind of corruption. That’s because the very model of HOA management is designed to perpetuate, excuse and even encourage corruption. This is the type of neighborhood management that’s supposed to protect your property values! But millions of homeowners have suddenly discovered that they weren’t protected. They never were.

The players mentioned in Smith’s column are almost impossible to graph out on a chart. But you’d better believe the U.S. Attorney plans to do exactly that in front of a federal jury next year.

As you read Smith’s column linked below, just ask yourself, “What if this is going on in my town?” What if?

http://tinyurl.com/mwwn3l3