Yes, indeedy, a crook who’s been stealing money from Northern California Homeowners Associations has been caught with his fingers in the graham cracker jar. Chris Barna, of Manteca, California, figured no one would be the wiser if he swiped a million or so bucks from his employer, a company that manages many HOAs in that state.
Barna saved everyone the time and money it would have taken to prosecute him. He pleaded guilty in Federal Court and agreed to pay full restitution. But that’s a laugh. If he gets the 30 year federal prison sentence, which is the maximum statutory penalty for stealing a million bucks, it’ll be a cold day in Hell before he squares up with the folks he ripped off.
Thirty years in federal prison is way too good for creeps like this one.
Texas has legislation that prevents HOAs from harassing homeowners over their display of the American flag. But that hasn’t stopped the Forrest Lake Townhouse Association from suing homeowner Billy B. Martin over his flag. Martin says the HOA’s flag at the clubhouse was tattered. The board members wouldn’t do anything about it. So he put up his own. That’s when the HOA started fining him $200 a day.
The president of this Houston HOA, Jim Elswick, refuses to comment to reporters. Get used to it, folks. These guys are trained by their HOA lawyers to never respond. Still, as a lifetime investigative reporter I can tell that the phrase, “No comment,” most often means “liar, liar, pants on fire.” I used to love it when the bad guys turned to my TV camera and said, “No comment.” Just loved it.
In any event, this neighborhood is so torn up by nastiness right now, that Houston Police had to be called to preserve the peace at an HOA board meeting.
The board argues that Martin’s flag will lower property values in the Forrest Lake Townhouse Association.
Tell me this: Would you buy a home in the Forrest Lake Townhouse Association?
No army can operate without generals, officers and foot soldiers. It’s the foot soldiers who are thrown into battle and suffer the most injuries and fatalities.
My father, a Lt. Colonel who commanded a tank battalion in Europe in 1945, was massively wounded when a bazooka hit his tank in the German town of Kaiserslautern.
All his life we kids asked him questions about being an officer in the military and what the experience was like. He refused to answer those questions, always referring to the heroism of foot soldiers who paid the highest price in the war to defeat facism. His biggest love in life was the common soldier who fought on the front lines.
My reason for writing this: There are foot soldiers in the war for a return to Constitutional rights in HOA Amerika. They don’t have websites, they don’t get interviewed, they don’t write talked-about books. But their research into the ugly, systematic abuse of homeowners, along with their ongoing emails which inform us of abuses we’d never know about otherwise, are invaluable in our battle.
Cynthia.
Jim.
Brad.
Nila.
Jonathan.
And many others.
Our community is too small, because we’re able to identify most of our ranks by first names only. But it’s growing, I promise you it’s growing.
Kay Sturtz gets 30 days community service after two embezzling cases where she stole more than $35,000. In the first case a couple of years ago, she swiped $10,600 from her Homeowners Association in Washington State. The judged dropped the case after she paid back the missing money. But she apparently got that money by embezzling $26,000 from her employer, the Blue Sky Landscape Service.
Thirty five thousand bucks! Wow! That’s more than a thousand bucks a day. And she gets to luxuriate at home.
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.
