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Top Foreclosure Firm’s Homeless-Themed Halloween Part... - 10/31/2011 2:20:59 PM

kalikshama

Posts: 14805
Joined: 8/8/2010
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The party was last year - pictures just now coming out.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/james-baum-foreclosure-homeless-halloween-255102

The story goes like this: New York’s largest foreclosure law firm, Steven J. Baum, held it’s big annual Halloween party last year, as they do every year the Friday before October 31. Nearly a year later, a former employee sent photos from the party to NY Times columnist Joe Nocera. But unlike most Halloween costume parties, this one sparked anger: the pictures depict what appears to be a “homeless” theme, with employees at the Buffalo-based firm apparently mocking the very homeowners their law firm targets with foreclosure.

...Bill Haydon, who says his income puts him in the top 1%, commented on the pictures, “I get it that sometimes attorneys need to do unpleasant things. To, however, take such mindless pleasure in it, to revel in other people's misery...to essentially wallow in it like pigs...is beyond the pale of basic human decency.”

“I fault the banks for lending money to people that were clearly unqualified, and for the deceptive practices that were often used,” A.S. in North Carolina wrote in response to the New York Times column. “I also fault the borrowers that were blind to the risks and overextended themselves. But I also understand that many people now facing foreclosure are the collateral damage of a corrupt, dysfunctional and unregulated system, people that lost their jobs or retirement savings due to the recession.”

At the end of the day, to show such callousness and lack of empathy to people who are losing their homes is disgusting, especially when you are most likely in contact and dealing with them every day,” A.S. continues. “No matter what the reason for foreclosure, it can only be a very painful and scary process for those going through it. For the Baum firm to treat it as a joke leaves me speechless.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/29/opinion/what-the-costumes-reveal.html?_r=4&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1319997941-Alnu3AXFwUMp5nQz2IAxFw

...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.

...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.