This shit is wicked on these mean streets
None of my friends speak
We’re all trying to win
It didn’t take over the world, but it was big. Jay-Z swept the clubs and sold tapes to corner stores until he landed a distribution deal. He gave Marcy a voice, and the nightmare that America had locked in the basement was suddenly playing in kids’ bedrooms. They wanted to live the American dream with a vengeance, like Scarface, like Jay-Z, they wanted to break the laws and win because only fools still thought you could do it in an orange uniform or a cheap suit when that game was fixed, and there could be a shortcut with a big payoff. It was paying off for the former Shawn Carter. Everyone who knew rap understood that Jay was going to be huge.
Music was just another hustle. He was a reluctant artist, still about the money and not apologizing for it, but to make this hustle work over the long run you needed art. He was as cold and focused as he’d been on the streets—seven more records in seven more years, all platinum. He softened the tracks and dumbed down his lyrics—more large living, less regret—to hit a bigger audience and double the dollars. It turned out lots of young whites could relate to money cash hoes Gs cream Cristal Lexus mackin poppin pimpin bitches grams rocks nines niggaz. Jay-Z told rap’s eternal story—“why I’m dope, doper than you”—a hundred different ways, no two couplets alike, and the kids believed him, so they wore what he wore, drank what he drank, and made him rich.
He launched a clothing line and it brought in more revenue than his music company, hundreds of millions. Started his own movie studio, got his own Reebok sneaker, distributed his own vodka, put out his own cologne, trademarked his own shade of Jay-Z Blue, cross-promoted everything. Stabbed a record producer in the VIP section of a Times Square club in 1999 for bootlegging his fourth album and quoted Pacino in Godfather II as he drove in the knife: “Lance, you broke my heart.” Holed up in the Trump Hotel with his lawyer and crew playing guts, a three-card game that rewarded self-possession. Vowed never to lose his shit again and later copped a plea, getting away with probation.
He became a corporate rapper, an outlaw entrepreneur, wearing sneakers to the boardroom like in a Silicon Valley start-up, working in the legit world while living the hustler’s dream. He retired from rapping in 2003 at Madison Square Garden (but that didn’t last long) and became a music executive, president of Def Jam, the biggest label in hip-hop. He cut his old partner at Roc-A-Fella loose, taking the name with him—“It’s just business,” Jay-Z told Damon Dash, sounding like another screen mobster. And he rhymed the point in his own words:
I sold kilos of coke, I’m guessin I can sell CDs
I’m not a businessman, I’m a business, man
Let me handle my business, damn!
It was the same hustle all the way up—he was doing the same thing on the twenty-ninth floor in midtown that he’d been doing on the corner in Trenton. The mainstream embraced rap while rap copied the mainstream, and Jay-Z played the game better than the suits because he’d learned it on the streets. When critics called him a sellout or materialist, he had the answer: selfishness was a rational response to the reality he faced.
Everything has to be put in context.
He did the things that top celebrities did: became a lifestyle brand, opened a sports bar chain, got sued by his workers for back wages, met Bono in a London cigar room with Quincy Jones, put his name to philanthropic causes, made the Forbes 400 (net worth 450 mil), hung out with presidents, carried on beefs with other stars, hooked up with a singer every bit as big as he was, bought her an island for her birthday, rented a wing of a maternity ward before she was due and made it their private suite, tried to trademark their baby girl’s name for future use (the U.S. Patent Office refused), and released a single when Blue Ivy Carter was four days old, rapping: “My greatest creation was you … You don’t yet know what swag is.”
The more he won, the more they loved him everywhere, lived through him, celebrated his money and power as their own. At concerts fans raised their hands together and flashed his Roc-A-Fella diamond logo as if they owned a piece of the deal. He was a mogul and a revolutionary, an icon and a thug (that was the perfect hustle), worshipped for getting to the top with a big fuck-you and no standing in line, still telling the world why he was dope, doper than you. And if he ever failed—when his sports bar in Vegas went bust, or his summer tournament basketball team stacked with NBA ringers lost, or his deal with Chrysler to put out a Jay-Z edition Jeep Commander painted Jay-Z Blue fell through—every trace of failure was hidden, as if the revelation might be fatal to his spell. He had to keep winning. Success wasn’t about anything except itself.
When Jay-Z bought a slice of the Nets and fronted the team’s move to Brooklyn, he became the boss and the star, the black Branch Rickey, Jackie Robinson with sins. When the new arena opened, he sold it out eight straight nights. In the smoky dark he told sixteen thousand fans, “I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this is where Jackie Robinson was the first African American to play professional sports and break the color barrier. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I was part of the group that brought the Nets here from New Jersey. You’ll hear people say I only own a small percentage of the team. It doesn’t matter what percentage—the story is that a black kid from a single-parent house made it from the Marcy projects about six minutes away from here. So the fact that I have any ownership in this franchise is fuckin amazing. The fact that I have any ownership in this venue is fuckin amazing. Don’t let them diminish your accomplishment or dim your shine.” Jay-Z held up his middle finger. Sixteen thousand middle fingers answered him.
There were times when he looked around at his life and thought he was getting away with murder.
TAMPA
By the thousands and thousands the foreclosures came. They came to Country Walk and Carriage Pointe, to inner-city Tampa and outermost Pasco, to Gulfport and northeast St. Pete. They arrived at houses where three months of mail lay in a pile at the front door, and houses where children were watching Dora the Explorer and adults had stopped answering the phone, and motels with 20 percent occupancy, and obscurely named investment entities with no known street address. They came like visitations from that laconic process server, the angel of death.
The foreclosures started out as complaints, all of them the same complaint: You owe me money! The complaints were filed by such transparently named financial institutions as HSBC Bank USA, and EMC Mortgage Corporation, and BAC Home Loans Servicing, L.P., formerly known as Countrywide Home Loans Servicing, L.P., and LSF6 Mercury REO Investments Trust Series 2008-1, and Citibank, N.A., as Trustee for the Holders of Bear Stearns Alt-A Trust 2006-6 Mortgage Passthrough Certificates Series 2006-6, and Deutsche Bank Trust Company Americas f/k/a Banker’s Trust Company, as Trustee and Custodian for IXIS 2006-HE3 by: Saxon Mortgage Services, Inc. f/k/a Meritech Mortgage Services, Inc. as its Attorney-in-Fact. The complaints of these institutions were drafted by foreclosure mills such as Law Offices of David J. Stern, P.A., and Marshall C. Watson, P.A., and Florida Default Law Group, and they were delivered as summonses by process servers such as ProVest, LLC–Tampa, and Gissen & Zawyer Process Service, and the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office. The summonses were personally served on, or nailed to the front door of, or left with a neighbor of, or tossed in the trash near the empty house of, Olivia M. Brown et al., and Jack E. Hamersma, and Mirtha De La Cruz a/k/a Mirtha Delacruz, and Aum Shree of Tampa, LLC, and LSC Investor, LLC, and John Doe, and Josephine Givargidze and Unknown Spouse of Josephine Givargidze. The summons stated:
A lawsuit has been filed against you. You have 20 calendar days after this summons is served on you to file a written response to the attached complaint with the clerk of this court. A phone call will not protect you; your written response, including the case number given above and the names of the parties, must be filed if you want the court to hear your side of the case. If you do not file your response on time, you may lose the case, and your wag
es, money and property may thereafter be taken without further warning from this court.
Thus set in motion, the lawsuits converged on downtown Tampa, where they assembled on the fourth floor of the George E. Edgecomb Courthouse of the Thirteenth Judicial Circuit. Across the bay they gathered in hordes on the third floor of the St. Petersburg Judicial Building of the Sixth Judicial Circuit. They were transformed into millions of pages of legal documents, and the documents were crammed into thick dull-brown legal folders, and the folders were stacked in boxes, and the boxes were loaded onto carts, and the carts were wheeled into courtrooms by bailiffs who looked weary from the effort. There, the black-robed judges—some of them brought out of retirement for this purpose, their six-hundred-dollar per diem largely paid by foreclosure filing fees—went about the work of clearing Florida’s backlog of half a million foreclosure cases, as earlier generations had cleared the mangrove swamps that made way for Tampa.
There were so many foreclosures, and the pressure from the state Supreme Court to dispose of them quickly was so great, that one senior judge, aged seventy-five or so, might carry three thousand cases at a time. A December morning’s daily docket in Hillsborough County consisted of sixty cases, beginning at 9:00 a.m. with National City Mortgage vs. Christopher Meier and ending at noon with Chase Home Finance vs. William Martens, allowing each case three minutes, and usually less, for justice to be served. After lunch, starting at 1:30 with Wells Fargo Bank vs. Stephanie Besser, and ending at 5:00 p.m. with Deutsche Bank vs. Raymond Lucas, the judge ruled on sixty more.
If Ms. Besser or Mr. Lucas happened to be represented by counsel, the rocket docket—for so it was called—might temporarily slow down and fall behind schedule. Worst of all if Ms. Besser or Mr. Lucas appeared in person, for then the court would have to confront the human face of a foreclosure, the particular lineaments of anxiety etched there by the prospect of losing one’s home, and embarrassment would settle over the proceedings, as if a terminal patient had wandered into a room where doctors were coldly discussing her hopeless prognosis, and the judge might be more likely to ask a few hard questions of the plaintiff’s attorney. Fortunately, this almost never happened. Most of the cases were unopposed, the only lawyer present the bank’s—almost always an attorney from one of several law firms around Florida, known as foreclosure mills, assigned the case by an automated computer system—who was sometimes not even physically there, just a voice with a law degree on the court’s speakerphone, knocking off fourteen cases in a half-hour call, and each case ended with the judge asking, “Anything unusual about this file? Anything missing?” and then setting a date for the foreclosure auction, two floors down in Room 202. At times the courtroom was empty except for the judge, a court assistant or two, and a bailiff wheeling the cartloads of cases back and forth. And, to save time, and perhaps to keep this judicial stockyard out of public view, many hearings weren’t even held in a courtroom, but confined to the obscurity of the judge’s private chambers.
In the summer of 2010, in Courtroom 409 of the George E. Edgecomb Courthouse, officers began to notice a woman at the daily foreclosure docket who had no apparent business there. She sat in the back row, never saying a word, but taking copious notes. If she had a case it never came up, and she looked more like a legal secretary than a lawyer, in her snakeskin-patterned V-neck top, black slacks, embroidered jacket, and tortoiseshell glasses. She was a short dumpling of a woman in her sixties, with dry straw-colored hair cut to her neck and a tired expression—the kind of person no one noticed, unless she happened to do something unusual.
Sylvia Landis—that was the woman’s name—was just a civilian, a private citizen, but she had a personal interest in how the courts were handling the torrent of foreclosures and the people swept up in them. Like nearly everyone in Tampa, she came from somewhere else—Doylestown, Pennsylvania. Her father had been a salesman, chronically unemployed, and she had grown up in financial chaos. She was in her thirties before she stopped having nightmares about starving to death, but she earned a master’s degree in personnel administration and pulled herself up into the middle class from which her parents had fallen. She worked as a career trainer with the Los Angeles Police Department for two decades. In 1999, Sylvia began to prepare for her retirement by joining the growing subculture of middle-class people who got involved in real estate. She took a class with a Southern California investment guru named Marshall Reddick, who laced his seminars with godly inspiration and whose motto was “helping to wipe out middle-class poverty.” The course was like a revival meeting, with people running out of the room to buy houses. Sylvia caught the spirit, and at one time or another she owned five houses: two in California, which she sold for a profit; a condo in Asheville, North Carolina; and two in Florida—one in Tampa, which she used for rental income, and a brand-new one in Cape Coral, where she planned to live after she retired.
It didn’t work out that way.
In 2004, ovarian cancer forced her into early retirement from the LAPD with a pension. She moved to the Asheville condo in 2007, thinking she would start a new career. In early 2008, when the market was tanking, she found herself unable to breathe and had to be hospitalized in the cardiac ward. She owed $157,500 on the three-bedroom house in Cape Coral—the epicenter of the crisis, with the single highest foreclosure rate in the country—and the rent she was collecting had dropped in half. She knew that she was going to lose the house, and before Bank of America could foreclose, she tried to get rid of it in a short sale, selling the property for less than she owed on it. That was when Sylvia became acquainted with the ways of the banks.
She found a buyer in early 2009 (she was going to lose half her investment), but she seemed to be on the phone with B of A every day, always passed from one person to another, and the sale didn’t happen, and meanwhile she believed that the bank was padding her costs. The term “robo-signing” wasn’t yet in use, but she received documents that didn’t seem authentic—computer-generated copies, with erroneous dates and suspicious signatures, of the assignment and transfer of her mortgage note to Bank of America after it bought Countrywide, the original lender. She wrote to bank vice presidents, to state attorneys general, to Gretchen Morgenson of The New York Times, to anyone who might care. She ran out of money for attorney’s fees and had to represent herself. All this while she was still recovering from cancer, and needless to say the stress wasn’t good for her health.
At the end of 2009 she completed a short sale on the house in Cape Coral. As if this had never happened, two weeks later, the bank’s law firm, David J. Stern, sued Sylvia for default. (Stern was the biggest and most notorious foreclosure mill in Florida, run like a legal sweatshop with a hundred thousand cases a year, most of them from Fannie and Freddie, earning profits that its boss spent on four mansions, ten luxury cars, two private jets, and a 130-foot yacht, before being shut down by a state fraud investigation.) It took Sylvia four more months to find someone at the bank who would straighten out the wrongful foreclosure mess, but her credit was shot.
By then she had moved to Tampa. She had fifty thousand dollars’ equity in her house there, with a ninety-one-thousand-dollar fixed-rate mortgage. It made financial sense to get rid of the Asheville condo, even at a steep loss, and claim the Tampa house that she’d used for rental income as her residence. And her one companion, a hyperactive little shih tzu—Sylvia had no children—needed a yard. It was a very modest place, in a working-class subdivision called Sugarwood Grove where her neighbors drove trucks and fixed their own houses. All the same, she needed a roommate. In 2007 she’d had a million dollars in assets. Now she had zero. Her savings were gone—she would have been on the street if not for her government pension. Along the way, she had given a big chunk of money to Wajed “Roger” Salam, a Tampa “joint-venture expert,” “founder of the Mastermind Forum,” and onetime associate of the motivational speaker Anthony Robbins. Needless to say, she never saw that money again. Back in L.A., some members of the real estate guru Marshall
Reddick’s club had filed a class action lawsuit against their mentor for fraudulent home sales in Florida (according to Sylvia, Reddick created more middle-class poverty than he’d ever ended). Still, though she regretted not having trusted her instinct and gotten out of the market with a lot of money when she saw the crash coming, Sylvia wasn’t ashamed of getting into real estate in the first place, even though investors were now vilified for causing the crash, consigned to the same status as subprime mortgage lenders. Wasn’t it the American way to take the initiative and help yourself?
A phrase that she once read in a New York Times column described her perfectly: “the formerly middle class.” She knew that countless others were making the same downward journey. Sylvia had grown up apolitical, with unquestioning respect for authority—she didn’t even know the name of her union at the LAPD—but the experience with the bank changed her. She called it “outright fraud,” something she had never imagined possible. A very conservative impulse that came from Doylestown, a fear of chaos and longing for law and order, led her downtown to the George E. Edgecomb Courthouse of the Thirteenth Judicial Circuit. She wanted to see what happened to foreclosures when they reached the bar of justice. She thought that her observations might be helpful to others.
Sylvia felt a certain awe on the Monday morning when she first went to court. Her instinct was to be polite and not make any fuss, but she had trouble finding the foreclosure court—there was no public schedule of hearings. She was told by a receptionist on the sixth floor that cases would be heard in Room 513, but she found that Room 513 was in a locked section of the fifth floor, with no court officer in sight. She went down another floor to Courtroom 409, where the receptionist had suggested there might also be hearings (though nothing seemed certain, because nothing was written, and the law was nothing if not written). The door to Courtroom 409 was open. Inside, there was a bailiff. She told Sylvia that there was nothing to watch, just administrative procedures.
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