Veteran Wages a New Fight: For His Home

New York Times

To find Stanley Theodore’s house, turn down 182nd Street in Springfield Gardens, Queens, and look for the ramshackle house with the grand old oak tree and the six-foot-wide American flag draped from the front window.

He opens the door before you can knock. Mr. Theodore is a long, lithe drink of water with a breeze-soft Trinidadian baritone. He has a Vietnam Veterans baseball cap pulled down over gray dreadlocks; he wears shorts and his beloved Jimi Hendrix T-shirt.  

He smiles and ushers you into the home he shares with his children. He is a retired postal carrier who won one customer service prize after another. But post-traumatic stress disorder trailed him after his Vietnam military service like a hound dog on a scent.

Some years back, after 33 years on the job, he began to have palpitations and panic. He felt obliged to take retirement.

“I couldn’t do the job as I wanted; I love this home, this neighborhood, this country,” he says. “I know every sanitation man, and of course, man, I know my postal carrier.”

His retirement should have been a net safely sewn. He had his pension and veteran benefits. He owned a house with a mortgage all but paid off.

That latter fact, however, laid him low.

For a decade now, mortgage and foreclosure scammers have crawled like locusts over the black homeowner belt of southeast Queens. Their collective goal was to persuade unwary homeowners to unlock the equity wrapped inside their homes.

These con men stole deeds and took cash. In Queens and the other boroughs, district attorneys did little to stop them.

Mr. Theodore retired in 2007 and his pension took a few months to kick in. He fell three months behind on his mortgage. When he mailed in the late checks, the bank refused to cash them.

One day a man showed up at his front door. Brother, this man said, you’ve got mortgage problems, I can help you. Mr. Theodore was a trusting man. Soon enough, in April 2008, he met with Countrywide bank representatives.

He thought they had a plan to save him.

Countrywide was much celebrated back then. The business press latheredAngelo R. Mozillo, the company’s chief executive, in adoring suds.

That day in 2008, Mr. Theodore said Countrywide’s representatives listened as that man persuaded him to sign over his mortgage. Give us your deed for a year, the man purred, and your credit problems will disappear.

Mr. Theodore agreed to keep making mortgage payments to an accomplice of the man; after all, he assumed it was still his house.

Just like that, his home was gone.

During the financial crisis, Bank of America devoured Countrywide. Both banks should wear a perpetual shroud of shame. Listen to Preet Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan, two years ago when he filed a lawsuit:

“Countrywide and Bank of America systematically removed every check in favor of its own balance. They cast aside underwriters, eliminated quality controls, incentivized unqualified personnel to cut corners.”

Mr. Theodore was one such corner.

Bank of America officials said they knew few details of this old scam; they knew only that they controlled Mr. Theodore’s foreclosed home.

Fear did not chase after Mr. Theodore when he was 18 years old and got his draft notice. He fought waist deep in the jungle muck, invaded Cambodia, saw friends blown up. “I guess I saw too many John Wayne movies,” he says. “I didn’t get scared until I came back.”

He took a Postal Service job in Brooklyn. His patrons adored him, sent him postcards and waved to him — a New York Times article 10 years agodescribed his mail route as akin to “a royal procession.”

Then palpitations sneaked in, and fainting spells. “It was embarrassing,” he says. “I miss my job. I miss the camaraderie.”

Of late, there are whispers of hope. After trying to evict him, Bank of America would prefer to keep this veteran in the home he never should have lost. We are, a bank spokeswoman said, “working to resolve this issue and keep him in his home.” (In a separate case, prosecutors last week arrested the man accused of parting Mr. Theodore from his deed. He is charged with defrauding banks.)

Mr. Theodore sits down on his front steps. Some days his trembles allow him to go no further. “On a wing and a prayer, that’s my life,” he says. “I just want to keep myself and my children safe. That’s all I ask of my country.”