Mickey Haller 4 - The Fifth Witness

it was the loan makers who lied. We’re talking about millions of loans, Hay, and when you have that much going on, there are not enough people or rules to control it all.”
    “Was it like nobody made anybody pay?”
    “There was some of that but it was mostly that people were taking on more than they could handle. And these loans had interest rates that changed. These rates dictated how much the home owner had to pay each month and they could go up by a lot. Sometimes they had what’s called a balloon payment where you have to pay it all back at the end of five years. To make a long and complicated story short, the country’s economy went down and the values of the homes went down with it. It became a crisis because millions of people in the country couldn’t pay for the houses they bought and they couldn’t sell them because they were worth less than what was owed on them. But the banks and other lenders and these investment syndicates that held all the mortgages didn’t really care about that. They just wanted their money back. So when people couldn’t pay they started taking their houses.”
    “So those people hire you.”
    “Some of them do. But there are millions of foreclosures going on. These lenders all want their money back and so some of them do bad things and some of them hire people to do bad things. They lie and cheat and they take away people’s houses without doing it fairly or under the law. And that’s where I come in.”
    I looked at her. I had probably lost her already. I pulled over the second stack of files I had on the table and opened the top one. I spoke as I read.
    “Okay, now here’s one. This family bought a house six years ago and the monthly payment was nine hundred dollars. Two years later when the shit started to hit the—”
    “Dad!”
    “Sorry. Two years later when things started going wrong in this country their interest rate went up and so did their payment. At the same time, the husband lost his job as a school bus driver because he had an accident. So the husband and wife went to the bank and said, ‘Hey, we have a problem. Can we change or restructure our loan so we can still pay for our house?’ This is called loan modification and it’s pretty much a joke. These people did the right thing, going in like that, but the bank led them on and said, ‘Yes, we’ll work with you. You keep paying what you can while we go to work on this.’ So they paid what they could but it wasn’t enough. They waited and waited but they never heard anything from the bank. That is, until they got the notice in the mail that they were being foreclosed on. So it’s this kind of stuff that is wrong and I try to do something about it. It’s David and Goliath stuff, Hay. The giant financial institutions are running roughshod over people and they don’t have too many guys like me standing up for them.”
    It was during my explanation to my young daughter that I finally realized why I had been drawn to this particular practice of law. Yes, some of my clients were just gaming the system. They were charlatans no better than the banks they were taking on. But some of my clients were the downtrodden and disadvantaged. They were the true underdogs in society and I wanted to stand for them and keep them in their homes for as long as I possibly could.
    Hayley had raised her pencil and was itching to go back to work as soon as I dismissed her. She was polite that way and must have gotten it from her mother.
    “Anyway, that’s what it’s all about. You can go back to work now. You want something else to drink or a dessert?”
    “Dad, pancakes are like dessert.”
    She had braces and had chosen lime green bands. When she spoke my attention was constantly drawn to her teeth.
    “Oh, right, yeah. Then what about something else to drink? More milk?”
    “No, I’m fine.”
    “Okay.”
    I went back to work too and separated the three foreclosure files in front of me. I had been getting so much business off the radio ads that we had been bundling court appearances. That is, trying to schedule together hearings and appearances on all cases that I had before a particular judge. In the morning I had three hearings before Judge Alfred Byrne in the downtown county courthouse. All three were defenses based on claims of wrongful foreclosure and fraud perpetrated by the lender or the loan-servicing agent employed by the lender.
    In each of the cases I had stayed foreclosure with my court filings.