[StBernard] Judge: $10K for post-Katrina debt harassment

[Westley Annis]

Judge: $10K for post-Katrina debt harassment
By JANET McCONNAUGHEY Associated Press Writer
Published: Thursday, November 4, 2010 at 6:01 a.m.
CitiMortgage Inc. lost its right to collect from a Chalmette couple who
defaulted after Hurricane Katrina because it lost their mortgage - and must
pay them $10,000 for years of harassing phone calls, a state district judge
has ruled.

Company phone logs and the testimony of David Michael Cefalu and Rebekah
Anna Cantrell Cefalu "clearly establish a pattern of continued, persistent
and excessive phone calls" even after they told CitiMortgage to call their
lawyer, Judge Robert Buckley wrote.

He also rejected CitiMortgage's argument that, as a subsidiary of Citibank -
a federally regulated national bank - it wasn't subject to Louisiana's debt
collection laws.

If other courts uphold the verdict, "That would be enormous," said Marx D.
Sterbcow, a real estate attorney not connected to the case.

"It makes these foreclosure mills - foreclosure law firms, but they're
really foreclosure mills - it's going to make those guys do their homework
more than they've been doing," Sterbcow said. "Not just those guys, but
banks as well."

CitiMortgage's Louisiana attorneys did not immediately return calls for
comment. Citigroup Inc. spokesman Mark Rodgers, reached Wednesday afternoon,
said he probably would not be able to provide comment Wednesday.

The Cefalus got the $66,462 mortgage in August 2000 from Hibernia National
Bank, which transferred servicing rights on the loan to CitiMortgage on
March 1, 2005, according to a post-trial memorandum filed by CitiMortgage.

Even though the Cefalus acknowledged their debt, CitiMortgage still had to
prove its case and didn't have the records needed to do that, Buckley wrote.

Its "sloppy record keeping ... seemed to eerily presage" recent allegations
about sloppy paperwork and legal procedures nationwide as mortgage lenders
foreclosed on millions of homes, the Cefalus' attorney, John Redmann, wrote
in an e-mail.

The couple stopped making mortgage payments after Katrina destroyed the
Chalmette house where they had lived for five years. Rebekah Cefalu said
Wednesday that they immediately notified CitiMortgage that they couldn't
afford the payments and filled out all the company's "workable solution"
paperwork, but were unable to work out payments they could afford.

They applied for Road Home assistance. "But that was kind of held up, too
with this lawsuit because they needed to pay off ... the mortgage company.
And that was in debate - what the amount was," she said.

Among other things, that amount kept growing because of interest. The
company called daily, she said.

After two years, they got a $20,870 check from their homeowners' insurance -
they had no flood insurance. "As soon as we got that check, we sent it" to
CitiMortgage, Cefalu said.

That was when CitiMortgage stepped up its calls, Judge Buckley wrote.

"They were calling, like, three times a day, calling my husband at work,"
Cefalu said. And each call, she said, started with the same questions, as if
there were no records of what they had said earlier.

They retained Redmann in 2008. He discovered that the company did not have
either the mortgage itself or a legal advertisement saying they didn't have
it, Cefalu said.

CitiMortgage said the Cefalus acknowledged the debt by a copy they had
identified, and that the legal ad had been filed as an exhibit. However, it
was an attachment to a brief, not a piece of legal evidence, the judge
ruled.

"The fact that something is in the record does not mean that it becomes
admissible evidence at trial," he wrote.

Redmann said CitiMortgage didn't own the mortgage, but was the "enforcer,"
and had only a one-sided copy, a letter and testimony to argue that the note
was owned by Ginnie Mae, the Government National Mortgage Association.

CitiMortgage never tried to get someone from Ginnie Mae to testify or even
provide an affidavit "stating they had made any effort whatever to look and
see if they indeed had the note or not," he wrote in an e-mail.

Rebekah Cefalu, a preschool teacher, said she and her husband now live in
New Iberia, where the insurance office where David Cefalu works relocated
after the hurricane.

Buckley's ruling was dated Oct. 29, but Redmann said he received it Tuesday.

Rebekah Cefalu said that when she learned about it Tuesday, after "more than
five years of just total misery," she was "almost wondering if I was
dreaming at first."

Then, she said, "I was jumping up and down, crying, just elated. I was very,
very, very, very happy."