Eideard

Eileen Foster

In the summer of 2007, a team of corporate investigators sifted through mounds of paper pulled from shred bins at Countrywide Financial Corp. mortgage shops in and around Boston.

By intercepting the documents before they were sliced by the shredder, the investigators were able to uncover what they believed was evidence that branch employees had used scissors, tape and Wite-Out to create fake bank statements, inflated property appraisals and other phony paperwork. Inside the heaps of paper, for example, they found mock-ups that indicated to investigators that workers had, as a matter of routine, literally cut and pasted the address for one home onto an appraisal for a completely different piece of property.

Eileen Foster, the company’s new fraud investigations chief, had seen a lot of slippery behavior in her two-plus decades in the banking business. But she’d never seen anything like this. “You’re looking at it and you’re going, Oh my God, how did it get to this point?” Foster recalls. “How do you get people to go to work every day and do these things and think it’s okay..?”

One executive, Foster says, sent an email to dozens of workers in the Boston region, warning them the fraud unit was on the case and not to put anything in their emails or instant messages that might be used against them…Her team was not allowed to interview a senior manager who oversaw the branches. Instead, she says, Countrywide’s Employee Relations Department did the interview and then let the manager’s boss vet the transcript before it was provided to Foster and the fraud unit.

In the end, dozens of employees were let go and six branches were shut down. But Foster worried some of the worst actors had escaped unscathed. She suspected, she says, that something wasn’t right with Countrywide’s culture — and that it was going to be rough going for her as she and her team dug into the methods used by Countrywide’s sales machine.

By early 2008, she claims, she’d concluded that many in Countrywide’s chain of command were working to cover up massive fraud within the company — outing and then firing whistleblowers who tried to report forgery and other misconduct. People who spoke up, she says, were “taken out.”

By the fall of 2008, she was out of a job too. Countrywide’s new owner, Bank of America Corp., told her it was firing her for “unprofessional conduct.”

Foster began a three-year battle to clear her name and establish that she and other employees had been punished for doing the right thing. Last week, the U.S. Department of Labor ruled that Bank of America had illegally fired her as payback for exposing fraud and retaliation against whistleblowers. It ordered the bank to reinstate her and pay her some $930,000.

Bank of America denies Foster’s allegations and stands behind its decision to fire her. Foster sees the ruling as a vindication of her decision to keep fighting.

“I don’t let people bully me, intimidate me and coerce me,” Foster told iWatch News during a series of interviews. “And it’s just not right that people don’t know what happened here and how it happened.”

This is the intro to Part 1 of Eileen Foster’s tribulations as whistleblower on Countrywide Financial. The single company that can assume credit for the Great Recession over any other. Add to it the continued attempts by present owners Bank of America to paper over the crimes committed, fraud perpetrated.

Part 2 appears today. Just click the link above and follow the slime trail.

“The branch manager was visibly shaken.”

Months after Bank of America wrongly foreclosed on a house Warren and Maureen Nyerges had already paid for, they were still fighting to get reimbursed for the court battle.

So on Friday, their attorney showed up at a branch office in Naples with a moving truck and sheriff’s deputies who had a judge’s permission to seize the furniture if necessary. An hour later, the bank had written a check for $5,772.88.

“The branch manager was visibly shaken,” attorney Todd Allen said Monday, recalling the visit to the bank last week. “At that point I was willing to take the desk and the chair he was sitting in.”

After the moving company and sheriff’s deputies get their share, the Nyerges should receive the rest of the money this week, ending a bizarre saga that started when they paid Bank of America $165,000 cash for a 2,700-square-foot foreclosed home in Naples in 2009.

About four months later, a process server knocked on their door and handed Warren Nyerges a notice of foreclosure…

“It was mind boggling,” said Nyerges, a 46-year-old retired police officer. “To try to unscrew the screw up, it’s not as easy as it sounds.”…

In September 2010, a Collier county judge ordered Bank of America to pay the couple’s $2,534 attorney fees. But by last week, the bank hadn’t paid up, so Allen got a judge’s permission to seize assets…

This isn’t the first time that Bank of America has tried to foreclose on a property that was owned by a person without a mortgage…

And Nyerges said he’s still upset with Bank of America.

“They couldn’t even spell our name right in the apology,” he said.

Does the attitude of the monster mega-bank sound all too familiar?

What does it take to hold your powerful bosses accountable if they try to bully you out the door?

Documents, e-mails, a former deputy district attorney as your lawyer — and a never-say-die approach.

Such was the lesson learned by Michael G. Winston, a former executive at the Countrywide Financial Corporation. Mr. Winston spent three years in a legal battle against Countrywide, the once-mighty mortgage giant, and its current owner, Bank of America, contending that he was punished and pushed out for not toeing the company line. On Feb. 4, he won: a jury in California awarded him $3.8 million in damages…

Mr. Winston’s story provides a glimpse into how business was done at Countrywide at the height of the subprime craziness — and how assiduously Angelo R. Mozilo, the company’s fallen leader, worked to quash dissent in the ranks. Mr. Winston had the audacity to question Countrywide practices. Mr. Mozilo was not pleased and, before long, Mr. Winston was marginalized and later dismissed.

Mr. Winston, a prominent executive in the field of organization management, is a rarity among corporate whistle-blowers. Most of them get run over by their former companies. A fascinating detail in his case: after providing to the opposition his list of witnesses, which included former colleagues who had also been let go by Bank of America, the bank hired several of them back. Then they testified against him.

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Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

Federal prosecutors in Los Angeles have dropped their criminal investigation into Angelo R. Mozilo, the former chief executive of Countrywide Financial, once the nation’s largest mortgage lender…

The closure of the case after two years of inquiry follows last October’s settlement by Mr. Mozilo of insider trading allegations made by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Regulators had contended that Mr. Mozilo sold $140 million in Countrywide stock between 2006 and 2007 even as he recognized that his company was faltering. Countrywide and Bank of America paid $45 million of Mr. Mozilo’s $67.5 million settlement, and he was responsible for the rest.

Without admitting or denying wrongdoing, Mr. Mozilo agreed to be banned from serving as an officer or a director of a public company.

The conclusion by prosecutors that Mr. Mozilo, 72, did not engage in criminal conduct while directing Countrywide will likely fuel broad concerns that few high-level executives of financial companies are being held accountable for the actions that led to the financial crisis of 2008.

Hundreds of billions of dollars have been lost by investors while millions of borrowers have lost their homes. Few of the people who ran the institutions that contributed to the disaster have been found liable…

Even as criminal and civil prosecutors are closing investigations into financial executives, private litigation is swelling. Investors who purchased dubious mortgage securities are bringing a wide array of cases against mortgage lenders and the Wall Street firms that enabled them. These investors maintain, citing internal documents and e-mails, that those putting together mortgage securities knew that they contained problematic loans that would likely fail…

In his years at Countrywide, Mr. Mozilo became one of the highest-paid executives in America. From 2000 until 2008, when he left, Mr. Mozilo received total compensation of $521.5 million…

Mozilo received a pat on the butt and wall-to-wall money from Bank of America on his departure. A historically criminal act even if the Department of Justice and the SEC feel successful prosecution at this time is unlikely. The operative phrase being “at this time”.

As civil cases proceed, the Feds retain the right to acquire information from those lawsuits to predicate future criminal prosecution against this creep. Still, it’s a sad day when the attitudes, premises and culture of American jurisprudence continues to bend over backwards to avoid criminal proceedings against the greedy bastards who brought down this economic house of cards.

The Los Angeles area bank robber had an outrageous disguise for an audacious plan, authorities said. He wore pink hospital scrubs, a Darth Vader mask, black wig, and gloves.

His unusual weapon: a hatchet.

His target: a Bank of America teller inside a Los Angeles area grocery.

The menacing get-up worked, and the robber allegedly got away with an undisclosed amount of cash on Thursday, authorities said.
But the heist was successful for only three hours…

Investigators found the alleged robber back at the scene of the crime — this time working his job as a courtesy clerk inside the same Albertson’s grocery in Rowland Heights, California…

Authorities declined to disclose how they tracked down the alleged robber.

Gregory Sanchez, 46, of West Covina, California, was charged with the bank robbery and was being held on $100,000 bail…

Maybe I shouldn’t let prospective bank robbers know this; but, exploding dye packs in the cash are so 5 minutes ago. Nowadays, banks salt the money with tiny RFID tags – radio traceable from nearby.

Bet numbnuts had some of the money in his pocket when he returned to the scene of the crime – to go to work.

Women’s earnings will recover faster than men’s as the U.S. economy rebounds, which means companies that market to females may perform well, according to a Bank of America Corp. research note to clients…

Women will rebound from the U.S. recession before men because females didn’t lose as many jobs as males did during the recession, the report said. Some of the industries most affected by the economy, such as manufacturing and construction, had more male than female workers. The unemployment rate for women, 8.9 percent, compared with 10.6 percent for men, is the widest it’s ever been, the report said…

Females make up the majority of the workforce in 9 of the 10 occupations that the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts will add the most jobs over the next 8 years, the note said…

More women are also graduating from college, with more than 50 percent of the bachelor’s degrees in the last decade awarded to women, according to the report. Additional education generally means higher earnings, Harris said.

There’s still a gender wage gap because of discrimination and interrupted work lives for children, according to Harris. Women working at least 35 hours a week in the first quarter of 2010 received 79 percent of the wages earned by men, according to the Labor Department.

The gap is narrowing, with the real median income for women rising at about a 1 percent annualized rate compared with contraction of 1.5 percent for men over the past five years, the note said.

Overdue.

Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

Bank of America Corp is beefing up its internal accounting controls after it incorrectly classified as much as $10.7 billion in short-term lending and repurchase deals for mortgage securities as sales, according to a letter filed with U.S. securities regulators.

The Charlotte, N.C.-based lender said the transactions — spread over a three-year period — were immaterial to Bank of America’s earnings in a May 13 letter to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, which was publicly filed on Friday.

The error was first disclosed in the bank’s first quarter 2010 report, which noted the bank incorrectly accounted for some mortgage-backed securities as sales, rather than repurchase or short-term lending deals…

If the deals were properly accounted for, Bank of America’s Tier 1 capital ratio — a key metric monitored by bank regulators — would have declined 0.01 percent on Sept 30, 2008, when the largest such error existed.

Bank of America has since beefed up its internal accounting procedures to prevent the error from recurring and the bank has not found similar errors after an internal review, according to the bank’s letter to the SEC.

Phew! I was getting worried there for a moment.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said Sunday that the car bomb found in New York City’s Times Square was being handled as a “potential terrorist attack.”

In an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Napolitano said it was too early to know who was responsible for leaving a vehicle laden with explosives in the symbolic heart of the nation’s most populous city.

“We’re taking this very seriously,” Napolitano said, noting that the New York police, FBI and federal Joint Terrorism Task Force were involved in the investigation. “We’re treating it as if it could be a potential terrorist attack.”

A T-shirt vendor who noticed smoke coming out of a tinted, dark green sport utility vehicle alerted police to the situation Saturday evening…

Officials said authorities are going through video from dozens of surveillance cameras in Times Square to determine who left the Nissan Pathfinder with its engine running and hazard lights flashing on a street shortly after 6 p.m. Saturday…

Inside the vehicle, police found three propane tanks, two filled five-gallon gas containers, two clocks with batteries, consumer-grade fireworks and a locked metal box that resembled a gun locker.

I wonder if journalists ever read other news sources?

Could be nutball undergrad dipshits who play the same games in their mommy’s basements.

In strikingly unenthusiastic fashion, federal Judge Jed Rakoff signed off on the Securities and Exchange Commission’s plan to fine Bank of America $150 million after failing to tell shareholders of about $16 billion in impending losses at Merrill Lynch.

“While better than nothing, this is half-baked justice at best,” wrote Mr. Rakoff in his ruling released Monday, a week before the case was scheduled to go to trial. “The amount of the fine appears paltry.”

The judge wrote in his report that his court was “shaking its head” and that, based solely on the merits, the settlement between the SEC and BofA should be rejected as “inadequate and misguided.” Yet he elected to go along with the SEC’s proposal, citing deference to the authority of regulators and adding that federal judges should be wary of the “power to impose their own preferences…”

The judge’s ruling also seems like a final slap at the reputation of the SEC. The federal agency was prepared to accept a $33 million fine from BofA last year until Mr. Rakoff rejected that settlement.

In the end, the judge signed off on the $150 million penalty—equal to about 3% of BofA’s pretax income last year—by citing a distinguished soothsayer and baseball player. In considering the tortured nature of the BofA case, the judge quoted Yogi Berra, who is said to have said: “I wish I had an answer to that because I’m getting tired of answering that question.”

In other words, everyone’s favorite cronies at the SEC are still taking care of their country club buddies. They’re just getting better at covering their tracks.

In what it is calling Operation Phish Phry, the F.B.I. began arresting 53 people on Wednesday on charges of conducting a vast financial fraud based on phishing — the act of tricking Internet users into revealing their passwords and other information.

The arrests were in Southern California, Nevada and North Carolina, while the authorities in Egypt sought to arrest 47 people whom the F.B.I. said were co-conspirators.

An 86-page indictment, filed in the United States District Court for the Central District of California in Los Angeles, accuses the defendants of tricking people into giving up their bank account information. The F.B.I. said that this was the largest number of defendants ever charged in a cybercrime case, and that they had stolen at least $2 million from 2007 to last month.

The scams victimized people with accounts at Bank of America and Wells Fargo, two of the nation’s largest banks…

The F.B.I. said the mastermind of the operation in the United States was Kenneth Joseph Lucas, 25, who had help from John Clarke, a friend, and Nichole Merzi, Mr. Lucas’s former girlfriend.

The phishing was done from Egypt. The bank account mules did all the money laundering in the United States.