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.
It’s hard to believe that it was once legal for Homeowners Associations to outlaw the sale of homes to anyone of the ‘wrong’ race. But that’s the shameful racist background of the HOA movement. Homeowners Associations across America once banned the sale of homes to most minorities. It took some brave pioneers to break the HOA racial barriers.
Now, one of those pioneers has died at the age of 85.
Dorothy Mae Adams and her husband are black. Their HOA in San Francisco, Westwood Park, had a deed restriction against the sale or lease of any home to people of African descent. But in 1959 the Adams couple fought for their home and won. The only sad part of the story is that HOAs didn’t die along with the racial restrictions that got them started in the first place.
I’m not smart enough to know if anti-HOA activist Jonathan Friedrich will win his HOA lawsuit in Nevada. He claims he bought the house before the developer included it in an adjacent HOA. Friedrich says his home and several others were missed, and the paperwork was only recently filed. But more than anyone else I know in the country, Jonathan has chutzpah.
If your picture is a little grainy, it’s a 50 foot long banner that says, “Rancho Bel Air is Stealing from us and Breaking The Law!
Reminds me of the old advertising saying that goes:
“He who has a thing to sell and goes and whispers in a well is not so apt to get the dollars as he who climbs a tree and hollers.” Keep hollering, Jonathan. We hear you!
Our guest blogger, Deborah Goonan first wrote about this HOA several months ago. But it’s so nightmarish and such a good example of how damaging HOAs can be to your mental and financial health, it’s worth dragging out again. These homeowners in a collapsing HOA in Virginia’s Historic Triangle will never be able to solve their problems.
Homeowners who bought into Riverwalk Townes are beginning to learn how stupid they were. Just a few years old, the Homeowners Association is suddenly deciding that fundamentally bad construction cannot be corrected by suing the builder. Now they’re having to turn to York County to see if their unfinished subdivision can be finished at taxpayer expense.
Street lights don’t work, roads are unsafe, drainage systems are falling apart. The roads aren’t properly crowned so rainwater flows down the middle of the streets, two foot wide trenches crisscross yards which actually isn’t a bad idea if you’re a fisherman looking for worms.
But the real worm is the developer, Gary Sheppard of Sheppard, Hale & Associates, now one of Virginia’s most well-respected builders.
Didn’t anyone warn these homeowners that they were stupid to buy into the HOA concept?
Please send me your submissions! ABC 20/20 did a story on these two couples on January 2nd. Amazingly bad neighbors.
I’m going to start soliciting similar nominations from you for the year’s worst neighbor…not sure what prize I’ll award for the most nightmarish neighbor…maybe a free copy of Neighbors At War, but these two couples are a prize.
God bless them. What would the rest of us do for entertainment without idiots like these?
