Here’s a homeowner who drives a pick-up truck and parks it at his home on his driveway. Well actually it’s not his driveway according to his HOA.
This HOA board is dumber than a box of rocks, in my opinion. A pick-up truck does not indicate a person operates the vehicle for commercial use!
How well I know. One of my vehicles is a pick-up truck. Thank goodness it has four-wheel drive. My HOA owns my driveway, too. They are supposed to maintain it, but in ten years they have only sealed it once. One time! After it had cracked and fallen apart. The worst issue I’ve had is when it dropped below the concrete floor in the garage. I literally could not get my truck into my garage without using four-wheel drive every time!!! In addition, every time it rained the water ran in under the garage floor and eventually into my finished basement. The HOA made a very poor attempt to repair the driveway after I had professional contractors tell me it was not repairable. Now it has separated leaving a crack across the driveway that is 3″ deep allowing water to run under the driveway. It has also started to drop again…back to four-wheeling into my garage I’ll go.
The HOA now claims it’s my responsibility to pay for the replacement of the driveway. Yes, we are in another court battle because my HOA would rather spend $100,000 on a legal battle than to replace a $5,000 driveway. As our readers know, you just can’t fix the incredible levels of stupid in an HOA!
A former board president told me that all driveways are common ground. I asked if I had a party and needed extra parking spaces could my guests park on my neighbors’ driveways? He said, “They sure can!”
As if we don’t already have at least a million reasons why not to buy in an HOA, this driveway issue is just more proof of it!
Well, the guilty plea was made. Federal Judge Mahan accepted it. No sentence yet. Leon Benzer might be surprised to hear himself described as a mobster, but that’s exactly what he is. He conspired with lawyers, police officials, judicial officials, and state politicians to steal millions of dollars from Nevada Homeowners Associations. That’s called racketeering. You don’t need to be Italian to be a mobster. You just have to have a massive deficit of character.
Traditionally, white collar criminals get about 18 months in prison no matter how many millions they’ve stolen. Benzer has bankrupted an unknown number of Las Vegas homeowners. The damage he inflicted will impact generations of American families. In the end, he made himself a multi-millionaire at the expense of ordinary citizens. He conspired with mobsters and drug cartels in Mexico to hide his fortune. When he walks out of prison he’ll retire to waterfront property in some exotic locale and laugh at the stupidity of all the people he swindled.
Benzer will laugh at the impotent American legal system which couldn’t come close to touching the real scope of his swindle. He’ll snigger at FBI agents who spent years trying to uncover his scam. He’ll laugh at prosecutors and a judge who couldn’t give him life in prison. And he’ll look back fondly at his time in prison bragging to cellmates about how much fun he had doing this swindle. I know all of this because I’ve spent four decades investigating and exposing white collar criminals. Despite federal prison sentences they love what they do.
White collar criminals are addicted to their lifestyles. To the victims it’s devastating. To the mobsters it’s all a game.
Yes, most of us would like to see the Homeowners Association Movement go extinct. But the kind of violence in the story linked below is unacceptable. Anyone who tries to take another’s life and property deserves a life sentence in prison.
This incident happened at the Pointer Ridge HOA in College Park, Georgia. If you can help identify this suspect, please call police.
I don’t have to exaggerate this one since it’s coming out in next month’s federal HOA racketeering trial in Las Vegas. No, there are positive links between money laundering in American Homeowners Associations through Mexican drug cartels. As absolutely incredible and impossible it sounds, everything’s fair game when it makes its way into sworn federal court testimony.
Sound weird? Impossible? Just remember that when crime gets organized, organized crime becomes endemic.
And remember that the national news networks are totally avoiding any in-depth reporting on this story. Shame on the national media.
Whether you agree or disagree with the Wall Street Journal columnist linked below, the term ‘hate speech’ is a constantly sliding scale. And it usually slides in ways that benefit the current political power. The first act of dictators is to ban some kinds of speech. Certainly, some speech is in bad taste but if you allow any ruling power to regulate what can and cannot be said in public, then you’re on a decidedly slippery slope.
On the Neighbors At War blog we frequently take note of certain Homeowners Associations where a battered neighbor who tries to run for the board is banned from speaking out, banned from handing out campaign literature, forbidden from expressing opinions to neighbors. That kind of fascism threatens the very homes and neighborhoods in which we live.
At the same time, censorship of any kind is a double-edged sword. On a website like this, the moderator has the power to permit or to edit out language or thoughts that he deems are simply in bad taste. But this website is not a government institution. It’s a place where we share concerns, thoughts, feelings.
Our Republic is unique in that the very first right granted to Americans was the right to express thoughts without government censorship. Are there limits? Of course. And we granted the Supreme Court the power to analyze certain kinds of speech to see if they constituted an endangerment to others. In some cases (yelling fire, libel, slander) the Court ruled that freedom of speech is not absolute.
Although Wall Street Journalist Bret Stephens is being pilloried for writing this column, in my opinion he should be congratulated for his analysis.
