The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (42 page)

Over time, these events made him physically sick. He would leave the room thinking,
“I want to get into an honest profession, like the fucking practice of law.”

In 2001, he began working at his uncle Don’s law office in Jacksonville. On December
12, Weidner was supposed to fly to Fort Lauderdale and back with his uncle, another
lawyer, and two clients on Don’s single-engine Piper Cherokee. A last-minute phone
call from a judge kept Matt at the office. That evening, in a heavy fog, the plane
crashed into a pine swamp near the Jacksonville airport, killing everyone.

With his chilling reprieve, Weidner fled to St. Petersburg, where he set up a one-man
practice. For the first few years he didn’t even have a place to sit, would just grab
a desk when one of the other lawyers in the storefront office suite was in court.
He hustled and scraped by, mostly on divorce cases, until, around 2007, foreclosures
started coming in—lots of them. The first cases were from poorer areas like south
St. Pete. Then middle-class professionals showed up. It was carnage, but all in the
shadows, because no one wanted to talk about it—shamefaced men who could hardly bring
themselves to tell Weidner about the mortgage modification scam they’d fallen for.
Couples sat down and lit into each other, the wife blaming the husband for losing
his job, the husband blaming the wife for wanting a big house, until Weidner stopped
them: “Hey, guys, it’s us against them now, and it doesn’t matter what happened, we’ve
got to stick together.” He would walk around to their side of the curved desk and
roll up an empty chair between them: “I want you guys to focus on the impact this
has on the kids.”

Some clients came in the first time saying, “I’m not losing my home no matter what
it takes,” and Weidner told them, “I’m your guy. I’m going to fight for you.” Through
most of 2008 and 2009 he assumed that the government and the banks would work something
out—split the defaulted loans, the Treasury paying the banks half the value, the banks
writing off the other half as bad debt, the mortgages now belonging to the feds, who
would start over with the homeowners and keep them in their houses. Something like
the bank bailout—just evaporate all that phantom debt, which would never be paid off
in the whole history of the world. But there was no bailout for homeowners. His clients
would spend pointless months trying to get someone at the bank on the phone to agree
to a short sale or loan modification, finally growing tired and coming back to Weidner:
“I’m ready to go. Mom’s got a place I can live at,” or “We’re going to rent somewhere
downtown.”

Weidner would tell them, “I’ve never lost a foreclosure case.” It was true. Zero.
Not because he was that good, though clients found him to be a fearless advocate.
It was because the system was that bad.

Weidner found that as soon as he offered any resistance, the bank’s case started to
crumble. The original note was lost. A title search couldn’t establish continuous
chain of custody. The Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems had replaced the good
old physical document at the recorder’s office in the county courthouse with a digital
facsimile, which, under Florida law, shouldn’t qualify. The paperwork bore a fraudulent
signature, a phony date, a bogus seal. No one noticed any of this while the economy
chugged along, but as soon as things went into the toilet and people stopped being
able to pay, America’s mortgages turned out to be a hoax. A client named Arlene Fuino,
a real estate agent and “short sale and foreclosure resource,” was being sued for
default by “U.S. Bank National Association, as Trustee for Structured Asset Securities
Corporation Trust 2006-WF2.” What the hell was that? Weidner took the case to a Sixth
Circuit judge and demanded that the plaintiff’s attorney show capacity: “All we’re
asking is for them to identify who is the entity that is asking my client to give
them a couple hundred thousand dollars.” Basically, Wall Street (“Gotham,” he called
it, “the anus, the black hole of the country, sucking all the money up there, the
core of the apocalypse”) had sliced and packaged the mortgages so many times through
securitization, and then the banks had cut so many corners trying to recover the bad
loans, that no institution could establish a clear right to someone’s house. Which
didn’t stop the sheriff’s deputies from banging on the door.

Weidner had never doubted the soundness of the courts, and he was staggered by the
implications: “Our entire system of property ownership is in chaos and turmoil.”

One day, he was sitting in Room 300 of the St. Petersburg Judicial Building, waiting
for his case to come up, when a plaintiff’s attorney in another foreclosure case informed
the judge that she wasn’t the plaintiff’s attorney after all. She had been hired by
a computer at a gigantic foreclosure mill called Lender Processing Services to represent
Wells Fargo, but it turned out that Wells Fargo was not the holder of the note—U.S.
Bank was—at least, that was what she thought. Judge Pamela Campbell told her to get
it straightened out. When Weidner’s case was called, he stood up on the courtroom’s
pale green carpet and said, “Your Honor, my head is about to explode because of what
we just heard in the last case.”

Judge Campbell smiled wanly. “Hopefully they’ll figure out who the proper plaintiff
is.”

The judges heard Weidner’s arguments, and the judges issued stays on foreclosure sales.
But the judges refused to grant his motions to dismiss—because, after all, his clients
owed money
. So the cases languished in purgatory year after year, as the mortgages went unpaid,
the courts remained clogged, the banks rejected applications to modify loans, and
the clients got no resolution. But at least they stayed in their homes.

There was, for example, Jack Hamersma. When Jack first walked through Weidner’s door,
he was a burly boat salesman, a man’s man, who had once owned a collision shop and
had also done some house flipping. He was just past fifty and owed six hundred thousand
dollars on two loans on his house in St. Pete—a ridiculous amount, because by the
time Jack retained Weidner, it was worth maybe half that. Jack wanted his lawyer and
anyone who would listen to know that he had worked all his life, had been able to
afford the house when he bought it. Once Weidner got involved, the banks couldn’t
put the first piece of paper together, and the suit dragged on for years, during which
Jack lost his job with the boat company, his savings dwindled, and he came down with
three types of cancer—colorectal, liver, and lymph. That happened to a lot of Weidner’s
clients—the job, the house, their health, usually in that order. Weidner watched Jack
shrink before his eyes, dropping a hundred pounds, until, three years after that first
consultation, he limped into the office one afternoon to discuss his case, wasted
legs sticking out of his shorts, a canvas bag hanging over his shoulder, from which
a drip tube extended under a bandage on his chest. He had just come from five hours
of chemo and was at the start of forty-eight hours of pumping.

“I find that a lot of my clients are sick,” Weidner told Jack after inviting him to
sit down. “I don’t know what the connection is. Do you know?”

“The stress level is obviously high,” Jack said, in a voice that sounded clotted.
From the neck up there were still traces of rugged good looks. “When you can’t work,
you have no income over a period of years, then it does bad things to you. You run
out of money—it’s nothing intentional, you just can’t pay them.”

“You’re one of the guys that’s been hanging around the longest,” Weidner said.

“It’s going to outlive me.”

“Don’t give up yet.” It didn’t take much to set Weidner off, and Jack’s presence was
enough. “We want to do our task, our vocation, we want to provide, and I’m just so
fucking furious that our government has ripped away our ability to provide anything.”

“I don’t know if it’s up to the government to create jobs,” Jack said, “but it’s up
to them to help the situation. When I applied for some kind of aid they looked at
me like I had three heads.” Jack was pretty much broke, which disqualified him from
the government’s emergency homeowners’ program. His treatment was costing thirty-five
thousand a month, and if Medicaid rejected his application, the treatment would end.
“I’m in this little tiny corner and I can’t find my way out. Something is going to
collapse sooner or later.”

“They didn’t give my mom any longer than they gave you, and she’s still kicking.”

“I’d like to think I can beat it. From an attitude perspective, I think I can—on the
spiritual side. But on the clinical side, no, it’s inoperable. The statistics say
you live two years with what I’ve got.”

The conversation turned to Jack’s case. It seemed to have gone moribund. “I have not
heard anything from Bank of America in probably a year,” Jack said. “I get an occasional
little FedExgram from Wells Fargo telling me that if I pay them a hundred and eighty-three
thousand dollars today they will wipe it off.”

“So if you receive it today and they receive it tomorrow—”

“Technically it’s too late.” Jack managed a little laugh. “I’m not going to stir the
pot.”

“Let sleeping dogs lie.” Weidner was getting riled up again. How the fuck could fifty
trillion dollars of debt in the United States ever be paid off? “It gets to that level
of abstraction where the only people that are fucking paying anymore—why should you
pay? This whole debt thing, we’re just feeding this monster that, if everyone just
stopped, then they’d really be in a fix.”

“I don’t pay anyone anymore,” Jack said. “I can’t, I have no way to.” When somebody
tried to serve him with a summons on his Home Depot card, he didn’t answer the door.

“The only thing that is even remotely possible is massive worldwide debt repudiation,”
Weidner said. “It all gets fucking burned up, because, if not, your son works for
his entire life and never accumulates anything, because he is busy paying off personal
debt and government debt and institutional debt.”

“From my side, I can’t do anything about anything, so what do you do?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing,” Jack said. “Which isn’t my frame of mind, it’s not my character, it’s not
my makeup, but I’m pushed into that corner to the point that I have no options left.”

It was a mystery to Weidner why the banks didn’t aggressively pursue Jack’s house,
which was still worth some money, but went after others tooth and nail. It seemed
totally random, which was even scarier than the other scenarios—that the banks wanted
to keep the debt on their books as assets to show their stockholders, or that they
were getting perverse financial incentives, or that they actually thought the market
was going to bounce back sometime soon. The other thing Weidner couldn’t understand
was why all the unemployed homeowners in foreclosure across the country didn’t come
together in a mass movement. He asked Jack about that, and Jack had an answer.

“It cuts you off from everything. Imagine getting up every day and not having a purpose.
You’re not working, your self-worth goes down the toilet. You don’t interact with
people. You stay in your house. You don’t want to answer the phone. It isolates you.
I can’t even go out to get a bite to eat. I don’t want to spend fifteen dollars.”

Weidner leaned back in his chair and clasped his hands behind his head. “The good
news is we’ve kept you in the house.”

“That’s a wonderful thing,” Jack said. “Tomorrow is going to come.”

“It is. And you’ll be there greeting that day. You’re not going anywhere.”

“I’d rather be broke and still kicking than not kicking. They can kill you but they
can’t eat you, ain’t that the law?” Jack and Weidner shared a laugh.

So the case of BAC Home Loans Servicing, L.P., f/k/a Countrywide Home Loans Servicing,
L.P. v. Jack E. Hamersma dragged on, and Jack continued to live in his house, until,
two months later, he died there.

*   *   *

Weidner’s head was always about to explode. His mind filled with visions of a decadent
kleptocracy in rapid decline, abetted by both political parties—America’s masses fed
on processed poison bought with a food stamp swipe card, low-skill workers structurally
unable to ever contribute again and too dumb to know their old jobs weren’t coming
back, the banks in Gotham leeching the last drops of wealth out of the country, corporations
unrestrained by any notion of national interest, the system of property law in shambles,
the world drowning in debt. He was an NRA member with a concealed weapons permit,
and he kept a Smith & Wesson AR-15 semiautomatic rifle with three forty-round clips
at his bedside, but it didn’t make him feel safer, in fact it scared the shit out
of him, because he saw the orgies of collectors at gun shows and knew how many of
his fellow Floridians were armed: constitutional patriots like himself, military vets
and sportsmen in camo, and tattooed kids from the cities, who looked like the start
of militias. The whole thing went crazy when Obama took over—there was a run on ammunition,
and gun dealers started selling T-shirts that said “
WARNING: I AM A VETERAN.
Department of Homeland Security has determined that I may be radicalized and a threat
to national security. Approach at your own risk.
YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!
” So what would happen if the Tampa power grid went down? Chaos. That was the future—civil
unrest, social disintegration.

Weidner planted a little victory garden in the courtyard of his condo in St. Pete,
carrots and lettuce, tomatoes and peppers. It was amazing to taste real vegetables—even
to touch them. He was thinking about buying a piece of land out in eastern Hillsborough
County, in a remote area where he went for weekend drives with his girlfriend and
stopped to buy raw honey and milk at the subsistence farms of people who lived off
their crops and hunted deer and wild boar. That might be the only answer: Americans
would have to farm again. All these brokers and investors would get dirt under their
nails and go to bed sunburned and exhausted, and that would take care of their anxiety
and depression. The simpler communities would inherit the earth. He would use the
place as a refuge when the shit went down, maybe hire a couple of foreclosed vets
with a military skill set to take care of it. You didn’t want all of them wandering
around, mentally fucked up, with nothing to do.