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What the Costumes Reveal

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/29/opini ... .html?_r=3




On Friday, the law firm of Steven J. Baum threw a Halloween party. The firm, which is located near Buffalo, is what is commonly referred to as a “foreclosure mill” firm, meaning it represents banks and mortgage servicers as they attempt to foreclose on homeowners and evict them from their homes. Steven J. Baum is, in fact, the largest such firm in New York; it represents virtually all the giant mortgage lenders, including Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo.

The party is the firm’s big annual bash. Employees wear Halloween costumes to the office, where they party until around noon, and then return to work, still in costume. I can’t tell you how people dressed for this year’s party, but I can tell you about last year’s.

That’s because a former employee of Steven J. Baum recently sent me snapshots of last year’s party. In an e-mail, she said that she wanted me to see them because they showed an appalling lack of compassion toward the homeowners — invariably poor and down on their luck — that the Baum firm had brought foreclosure proceedings against.

When we spoke later, she added that the snapshots are an accurate representation of the firm’s mind-set. “There is this really cavalier attitude,” she said. “It doesn’t matter that people are going to lose their homes.” Nor does the firm try to help people get mortgage modifications; the pressure, always, is to foreclose. I told her I wanted to post the photos on The Times’s Web site so that readers could see them. She agreed, but asked to remain anonymous because she said she fears retaliation.

Let me describe a few of the photos. In one, two Baum employees are dressed like homeless people. One is holding a bottle of liquor. The other has a sign around her neck that reads: “3rd party squatter. I lost my home and I was never served.” My source said that “I was never served” is meant to mock “the typical excuse” of the homeowner trying to evade a foreclosure proceeding.

A second picture shows a coffin with a picture of a woman whose eyes have been cut out. A sign on the coffin reads: “Rest in Peace. Crazy Susie.” The reference is to Susan Chana Lask, a lawyer who had filed a class-action suit against Steven J. Baum — and had posted a YouTube video denouncing the firm’s foreclosure practices. “She was a thorn in their side,” said my source.

A third photograph shows a corner of Baum’s office decorated to look like a row of foreclosed homes. Another shows a sign that reads, “Baum Estates” — needless to say, it’s also full of foreclosed houses. Most of the other pictures show either mock homeless camps or mock foreclosure signs — or both. My source told me that not every Baum department used the party to make fun of the troubled homeowners they made their living suing. But some clearly did. The adjective she’d used when she sent them to me — “appalling” — struck me as exactly right.

These pictures are hardly the first piece of evidence that the Baum firm treats homeowners shabbily — or that it uses dubious legal practices to do so. It is under investigation by the New York attorney general, Eric Schneiderman. It recently agreed to pay $2 million to resolve an investigation by the Department of Justice into whether the firm had “filed misleading pleadings, affidavits, and mortgage assignments in the state and federal courts in New York.” (In the press release announcing the settlement, Baum acknowledged only that “it occasionally made inadvertent errors.”)

MFY Legal Services, which defends homeowners, and Harwood Feffer, a large class-action firm, have filed a class-action suit claiming that Steven J. Baum has consistently failed to file certain papers that are necessary to allow for a state-mandated settlement conference that can lead to a modification. Judge Arthur Schack of the State Supreme Court in Brooklyn once described Baum’s foreclosure filings as “operating in a parallel mortgage universe, unrelated to the real universe.” (My source told me that one Baum employee dressed up as Judge Schack at a previous Halloween party.)

I saw the firm operate up close when I wrote several columns about Lilla Roberts, a 73-year-old homeowner who had spent three years in foreclosure hell. Although she had a steady income and was a good candidate for a modification, the Baum firm treated her mercilessly.

When I called a press spokesman for Steven J. Baum to ask about the photographs, he sent me a statement a few hours later. “It has been suggested that some employees dress in ... attire that mocks or attempts to belittle the plight of those who have lost their homes,” the statement read. “Nothing could be further from the truth.” It described this column as “another attempt by The New York Times to attack our firm and our work.”

I encourage you to look at the photographs with this column on the Web. Then judge for yourself the veracity of Steven J. Baum’s denial.

Gail Collins is off today.

Were I not busy at work, I'd post pictures of leeches, ticks, fleas, and various parasitic worms along with some pansies, cowards, and insecure blowhards to illustrate how I view them. The last picture should be shotgunned deer as a "repent"-type of warning, but people in this country are too apathetic to get to that point. Me, a civil war (or, better, a simultaneous war of New England secession) would give me something better to do, with a better sense of fulfillment.

Stuff like this makes me wonder why people out there still don't understand why we are where we are today. Just sick.

These kinds of people are precisely why we have massive protests going on for months now across the nation and spreading across the globe.

I don't understand the point of non-violent protest, but at least people are displaying their justifiable anger against worthless scum like these. I see no difference in mentality between the majority of the 1% who'd throw babies onto pikes if it increased their wealth a few dollars and the politicians who support them and the heads of criminal organizations, except that the criminals have more balls. What bothers me most about these unjustifiable rich is that they really serve no purpose to mankind. For most, their greed is unlimited and yet they do nothing of value with their money. They buy bigger yachts to one-up the guy with the last biggest yacht and still they could never spend how much they have. They live out of touch with the reality of the world they live in, they aren't saving lives, they're not even trying to make them better. How small a penis can people have? Can not all that money buy an actual large penis?

These scum are amused by the plights of the people they step on. This is the kind of thing that got the French to run their streets red with blood. The French for crying out loud! Conditions here are not as bad as pre-revolutionary France (and certainly not for me personally at the moment), but the disconnect isn't far from it.

I'm betting that this country will see civil uprising of a much larger scale, probably a revolution within the next 30 years. We are very quickly using up the planets resources without letting them recover. The rich are stomping on the middle and lower class. Our farmlands are destroying the topsoil with which they depend on. We depend too greatly on oil which won't be around for much longer. The population is estimated to reach 10 billion by 2050 I believe and it's been calculated that the earth can only really support about 2 billion people and still regenerate itself. We're headed toward a catastrophe.

I must be part of the elite because I do not feel sorry for people who lost their homes because they bought something they couldn't afford.

People are rich because they did something to get there. I hate people that think they're entitled to anything, the reason this country is so rich compared to every other country is because of the opportunities available here. There are some people out there with genuinely bad luck that don't deserve what has happened to them, but for the most part the homeless are that way because of stupid decisions and no motivation.

That may be the case with a lot of people but this is just disgusting. These people are getting rich by knowingly shittiny on people less fortunate than themselves or in the best case people who made dumb choices financially. Either way its wrong.

True, it is messed up what they do. Nothing really can be done about it though. Any laws that would stop it would have to be subjective, and subjective laws are not a good path to go down. I'm just getting sick of all the people complaining about how it's not fair that rich people have money and they don't, because they could have done exactly the same thing, the difference is they didn't.

I don't think they're complaining because the rich are rich and they're poor. I think they're angry because a lot of those uber rich people are extremely greedy and made their riches illegally and immorally.

There's always two sides of the coin. There are definitely rich people who got their money via a questionable means, but there are also people who don't do anything and expect to be given everything and to be taken care of, despite doing nothing.

I work hard and have worked hard to get to where I am today. I'm not opposed to helping someone "down on their luck", but unfortunately that has become the easy way out for too many people. There are jobs out there if you are willing to do them. They may not be pleasent, they may not pay as much as you want, and they may require you to travel or relocate. However they are out there.

The mortgage thing is ridiculous. I certainly don't condone the behaivors mentioned in the article, however too many of those people should have never been allowed to get loans for the amounts they did. Too many people were living way beyond their means....

True but what about the ones who were living just fine with a good paying job and now that job either no longer exists or they've been laid off and nobody is hiring and a minimum wage job isn't going to pay their mortgage anymore?

That is a tough situation to be in. I can't speak for what others would do, but I would try to downsize to something I could afford on a lower paying job, and/or expand my job search to a region that has better jobs. There are areas of the country that have lower rates of unemployment than others as well as economic and job growth. I know up rooting yourself and/or the family to somewhere else may not be the most desirable thing, but if it allows you to find a job to pay your bills and live your life, then that's a sacrafice you have to make.