No, actually it was about 283 HOA dollars a day. But the treasurer of the Stratford Homeowners Association in a well-to-do suburb of Augusta, Georgia, is facing theft charges.
Laurie Wainwright-Vanover now stands accused of stealing more than a quarter million bucks from her Homeowners Association over a four year period. She was treasurer of her association and had access to the dues paid by all her neighbors.
Of course, she’s not guilty until proven so in a court of law. Unless she pleads guilty, innocent by reason of insanity or….better yet? How about this for a defense: Since we’re living in an era of redistribution of wealth, all she was doing was trying to help carry out national policy. Who knows? People who embezzle from their neighbors sometimes come up with some goofy excuses for doing so.
Nevada has some slimy creatures. But this one has finally been nailed by the U.S. Attorney. Las Vegas huckster Leon Benzer has at long last been indicted for leading the organized crime ring that bled untold tens of millions of dollars out of that state’s Homeowners Associations.
Benzer has claimed innocence all along. In fact, he’s now saying that he got personal approval for running his racket by the Nevada Attorney General. While that’s totally believable, the HOA scam was totally unbelievable. More than two dozen participants have already pleaded guilty to rigging HOA board elections so they could put phony straw men on the boards and divert millions of dollars to Benzer, a bunch of lawyers, a few police officials and a politician here and there.
Oh, and this is the case where forty percent of the first ten suspects accused ‘committed suicide,’ at least one of them in impossible circumstances. But that’s the Vegas way.
The real tragedy here is that the FBI may be winding down its investigation. But with all they’ve learned during this four year investigation, they could transplant this team of federal agents to any city in the country and they’d find just as much corruption. HOA scams are going on all over.
Where is Uncle Billy Bob? Sounds like he was hired to restore the Heritage Landing Condos in Saint Charles, Missouri but has headed off to….fishing trip? Guadalajara? Elsewhere? Residents are living in hotel rooms but the contractor is MIA. Who hires these losers, anyway?
Ten months ago, the Jahnke family and Scott Collins were told they would be back in their condos by the end of 2012 after a fire in July. Collins is reduced to tears because the restoration left his place in worse condition than pre-fire. And poor Debra Jahnke is so stressed out she’s on blood pressure medication and anxiety drugs. She says a new home could be built from the dirt up faster. And ten months in a hotel is, well, miserable.
Ahhh, but the big question is: Why the shoddy work? Who IS the contractor that is showing up on a sometime”ish” basis? And the biggest question of all is…”Where’s the insurance money?” “And the property manager?” Oh my! Imagine this, NOT AVAILABLE for comment on camera!
In emergencies, condo dwellers are left at the mercy of property managers who hire the cheapest labor and produce the shoddiest work. That means owners are zapped with future expensive repairs. And, of course there’s no “go to” source for answers.
One of the early founders of our movement who’s perhaps one of the top three homeowners rights advocates in the country is Arizona’s George Staropoli. He has testified before legislatures, he’s a devout Constitutionalist, he’s perhaps one of the most articulate people standing up for downtrodden victims of the national HOA scam. To say he was a huge inspiration to me is putting it mildly.
His website, pvtgov.org, has tens of thousands of fans. In fact, his was the first site I discovered when I was trying to learn what was wrong with the basic nature and structure of American Homeowners Associations.
But his post linked below is exceptionally powerful, and should be spread to every legislator in the country. It should be a guest editorial in every newspaper. It’s not negative, but is actually a positive critique of HOAs because it points us to an escape route from the current HOA system.
Larry Delassus lived in a condominium at Hermosa Beach. He was a veteran of the U.S. Navy and is badly disabled. Wells Fargo apparently didn’t take any of that into consideration when it seized his home and quickly auctioned it off.
Delassus filed a lawsuit, and his attorney tried to present evidence that Wells Fargo had combed its records for homeowners who had more equity available for the taking. Those records included requests for loan modifications, a horrible violation of trust by those homeowners who filled the re-fi paperwork out.
In any event, Delassus finally did get his case into court. Wells Fargo admitted that it had made a mistake in Delassus’ foreclosure because it used the wrong parcel number from the assessor’s office when it targeted his home.
But Delassus didn’t get to see how the case turned out.
