Copyright Times Publishing Co. Mar 1, 2004
Angela Rivers knew the Tampa Heights house with the
weathered siding and rusty tin roof needed work, but she thought it
might finally be the place where, after 20 years, she and her husband
could realize the dream of owning their own home.
In October, the couple signed a six-month lease with
an option to buy, forked over an $800 cash deposit and moved into the
three- bedroom house at 1013 E Columbus Drive. The lease instructed them
to make future $650 monthly rent payments payable to James Redd, an
investor who had purchased the home three months earlier for $145,000.
The couple never had a hint of the problems that
would follow.
For a month, she said, the home had no water. For the
first two weeks, there was no electricity. When Rivers and her husband,
Joseph Henderson, a pipelayer, and his 16-year-old granddaughter moved
in, the house actually had been under a city of Tampa condemnation order
for more than two years.
"We had to bathe at neighbors' houses,"
Rivers, 35, said. "We ate out a lot.
"It was a struggle."
Only later, after police and city code inspectors
knocked on the door, did Rivers begin to understand the problems with
her leased home.
Rivers' landlord, James Redd, does not exist.
That name is one of several allegedly invented by
former Tampa mortgage broker Matthew B. Cox to buy 21 properties in
Tampa Heights and use them to obtain $2.7-million in fraudulent loans.
The $130,500 loan that enabled Redd's purchase at
1013 E Columbus Drive was accomplished with a fake ID with a drug
dealer's jailhouse booking photo pasted on it and a credit history
claiming Redd was a $94,000-a-year CPA for a tax services company,
records show.
Now, the FBI, Tampa Police Department and the Florida
Office of Financial Regulation are poring over records of the phony
buyers in an investigation of Cox and business partners David Walker and
Rudy Arnauts.
Walker and Cox worked together in the United Capital
Trust mortgage brokerage company, the firm that took a $9,300 brokerage
fee for handling Redd's loan on 1013 E Columbus Dr. Arnauts sold the
property and got a $112,000 check at closing, settlement records show.
Despite this six-figure mortgage, the Hillsborough
Property Appraiser puts the fair market value of the house at just
$40,216. This pattern, buying an inexpensive house and getting a large
mortgage on it, is repeated by Cox and others associated with him in
numerous Tampa Heights sales.
Walker, Cox and Arnauts founded Urban Equity Inc., an
Ybor City real estate investment company placed in receivership two
weeks ago as a result of the ongoing criminal inquiry.
Rivers never met any of the three businessman, nor
was she ever introduced to anyone purporting to be Redd.
Rivers said she and her husband only dealt with Keyla
Burgos, who runs a property management company and is Cox's ex-wife.
Burgos signed the lease, took the deposit and acted
as the rental agent for Redd.
"Keyla said they had to make some minor repairs,
but they would have to have a tenant in there before they could
start," Rivers said. "We didn't know there wouldn't be any
electricity or water."
There wasn't much relief offered when cold weather
blew in during November. It was difficult to pick up and leave because
the family has no car. Burgos did offer to put them up in a hotel and
handed them a $50rbill, Rivers said. That paid for one night in a
Nebraska Avenue motel. But no more cash was offered, she said.
Some repairs were made, and the water and electricity
were turned on. But the windows were never fixed and the wall-unit heat
pump proved insufficient to heat the 1,105-square-foot house on cold
nights.
Then, one day, a Tampa police officer knocked on the
door. Rivers said he told her about the investigation and advised her
not to make any more rent payments. Put the rent into an escrow account,
the officer said.
Rivers did. But in December, Burgos delivered an
eviction notice for nonpayment of rent.
Rivers explained why she wasn't paying. Burgos went
away. No more eviction notices came.
Burgos declined to return phone calls from the St.
Petersburg Times to discuss the home at 1013 E Columbus Drive.
Previously, she has said she knew nothing about another phony investor,
this one given the name Brandon Green, for whom she acted as rental
agent. Burgos said she never met that investor but delivered rent
receipts from his tenants to Cox or Arnauts.
Since June, only Redd's name has been on the deed for
the property at 1013 E Columbus Drive. Yet Tampa's code enforcement
records indicate that the last "contact" for the property, in
late October, was Cox.
Cox purchased a silver 1998 Mercedes Benz in October,
made one payment, then disappeared in late November or early December,
as the Times was preparing to publish the first installment of a series
focusing on the investigation into inflated sale prices on homes in the
Tampa Heights area.
The Times series has cataloged widespread use of
phony buyers, forged mortgage satisfactions, falsified deeds, fake
notary seals and fraudulent mortgage applications in the purchase of the
higher- priced homes.
Cox is being sought as a fugitive by federal and
state authorities on violation of probation charges. In 2002, he was
sentenced to three years' probation after pleading guilty to grand theft
and mortgage fraud.
Rivers, meanwhile, fears another knock on the door,
and wonders whether someone else is going to ask her and her family to
leave.
She says she's holding her rent money until the legal
problems get worked out.
Does that mean no one is making monthly payments on
the Redd loan and foreclosure proceedings might begin, leading to her
eviction? Rivers doesn't have any answer.
"We've been trying to find a way to own our own
home for a long time," she said. "I thought we were getting a
great deal. I like this house, except for the traffic. And the neighbors
are nice, but I'm afraid we'll be forced to move.
"It's a terrible feeling."
- Jeff Testerman can be reached at testerman@sptimes.com
or (813) 226-3422.
