Fear & Foreclosure in Las Vegas

The gambling capital of the world was also the fastest-growing housing market in the U.S. -- until it all came crashing down in a frenzy of ``liar loans'' and fraud.

By Anthony Effinger
Bloomberg Markets, December 2008

Eve Mazzarella was a Las Vegas success story. The high-school dropout and former housemaid moved to the Nevada city in 2000 from Seattle, got a certificate from the ABC Real Estate School and started selling houses in what would become the hottest market in the country.

In 2006, Mazzarella recorded sales of $13.8 million and made the National Association of Realtors' ``30 Under 30'' list, which names the best young agents in the nation. Mazzarella started her own company, Distinctive Real Estate & Investments Inc., in December 2003. She whipped around town in a Mercedes-Benz sport utility vehicle. She planned to build a three-story office building in Vegas's shabby downtown north of the Strip and preserve a historic house on the site by lifting it onto the roof.

Her competitors were impressed. ``She was an up and comer with a brilliant future,'' says Forrest Barbee, a broker at Prudential Americana Group, a Las Vegas agency where Mazzarella once worked.

The dream ended at about 5 a.m. on March 13, when federal agents smashed through the door of a stucco home on a quiet, grassy cul-de-sac looking for Mazzarella, 31, and her husband, Steven Grimm, 45, an erstwhile mortgage broker.

The day before, the U.S. Attorney for Nevada had indicted the couple on 6 counts of bank fraud, later revised to 13. Prosecutors say the pair recruited fake -- or ``straw'' -- buyers to apply for loans to purchase 227 properties worth $107 million. They told the straw buyers they would pay the mortgages. Then they skimmed thousands of dollars from each of more than 432 transactions, the indictment says, stashing the cash in 80 bank accounts.

Bonnie and Clyde

They allegedly arranged fake sales on some houses five times. Then, according to the indictment, they walked away from the mortgages, leaving lenders in the lurch.

If prosecutors are right, Mazzarella and Grimm were the Bonnie and Clyde of mortgage fraud -- among the greediest of a band of swindlers who took advantage of lax lending standards at profit- hungry banks, which stopped verifying income and assets for even questionable borrowers. Buyers who gave false information to mortgage lenders are technically guilty of fraud themselves. Yet authorities are mostly targeting schemes such as the one allegedly perpetrated by Mazzarella and Grimm.

What happened in Vegas didn't stay in Vegas. Similar schemes across the country helped pump up a housing bubble whose rupture has triggered a global banking crisis, prompted government intervention not seen since the Depression and helped precipitate what economists predict will be a long and painful recession.

Plea: Not Guilty

Mazzarella and Grimm have pleaded not guilty to conspiracy and bank fraud in Nevada federal court in Las Vegas. They couldn't be reached for comment on this story. Mazzarella's attorney declined to comment; Grimm's didn't return phone calls.

Mazzarella's father, a real estate lawyer in San Diego, says his daughter is innocent. ``She was putting money in Las Vegas real estate like everyone else,'' Mark Mazzarella says. ``The targets are going to be higher up the food chain.''

Mazzarella and Grimm's alleged scheme was just one of many in Las Vegas, where, throughout much of this decade, people wagered on houses like they were numbers on a roulette wheel. The advent of no-document ``liar loans'' fueled the frenzy, as maids, parking attendants and casino workers borrowed big to roll the dice on subdivisions rising amid the mesquite.

Like the city's replicas of Venice's canals and New York's skyline, Las Vegas real estate became a caricature, rising faster and booming bigger than in the rest of the nation.

Vegas Style Growth

Nevada added an estimated 275,000 new homes from 2000 to 2007, a 33 percent increase that was the highest in the country, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. In the second quarter of 2004, prices for previously owned homes in Las Vegas shot up 52.4 percent from a year earlier, the biggest increase ever recorded for a metropolitan area by the realtors' association. The next quarter, Vegas broke its own record, rising 53.7 percent.

Today, Nevada is No. 1 in a grimmer category: It's the most- foreclosed state in the nation. One in every 82 Nevada housing units got a foreclosure notice in September, according to RealtyTrac Inc., putting the state at the top of the list for the 21st straight month. Florida was second with one in every 178 housing units in some stage of foreclosure.

The $6.8 billion state budget, once fattened by the real estate boom, is a shambles. Governor Jim Gibbons drained a $267 million rainy-day fund, cut some medical services to the elderly and delayed increased payments to foster parents to close a deficit projected at $1.2 billion for the two-year period ending on June 30, 2009.

Click HERE to read the full version of this story

		Email this article Printer friendly format