Mystery At Wolf Creek

Only the two of them knew that the peace was about to be shattered. Neither had slept much the night before. Neither had told their spouses or friends what they knew, and they had been warned not to discuss the secret by cell or cordless phone. Too excited to wait in their respective houses, Cathy Makley and her neighbor Alan Kates hunkered in his Honda Accord in the driveway of the model home at their subdivision’s entrance, keeping watch. Later, Makley would say she felt like a sentry waiting for the cavalry to arrive.

At 9:30 a.m. their wait was over. Police squad cars and a mobile crime scene unit had mustered at nearby Alcova Elementary School. They surrounded and penetrated Wolf Creek’s quiet streets and cul-de-sacs. Out swarmed Gwinnett County police in bulletproof vests with battering rams and guns. Officers entered 14 properties that day with warrants and intent to use force if needed. Police went into the first six suspect houses on their list simultaneously, so that none of the occupants could alert cohorts living nearby.

In one house, they seized an assault rifle. Once those houses had been searched, teams moved to the remaining eight, one house at a time. They hauled out computers and boxes of paper evidence. Months in the making, the all-day raid was no drug bust or child-porn sting. Rather, it was the first calculated sweep of a metro Atlanta neighborhood to weed out Georgia’s most pervasive white-collar crime: mortgage fraud. The payoff at the end of the day: two arrests for racketeering and theft, evidence to support mortgage fraud indictments later on and—sweetest of all—revenge for Cathy Makley and the “Mad Mommies” of Wolf Creek who had set the event in motion.

When Cathy and Morgan Makley bought their two-story cottage in Dacula’s Wolf Creek subdivision in 2003, cookie swaps and potluck suppers were the norm. Black, Asian and white professionals alike moved there because they shared the same hopes for their young families. Houses went up, moving vans backed in, and neighbors welcomed newcomers on a first-name basis. Cathy Makley soon joined a close-knit group of 10 stay-at-home mothers who met regularly while their children played. She was happy to find playmates for her boys—Morgan Joseph, 5, and Samuel, 4. In summer, the play group met at the neighborhood pool. They drank lemonade on each other’s porches or in the Makleys’ wooded backyard, within earshot of a waterfall. They caravanned to the mall and to movies. The women shared their personal histories as well as food, recipes and laughter. On weekends, their husbands joined in to host cookouts. The Makleys, who had previously lived in Macon, Charleston, Charlotte and Jacksonville, felt they had found a place of kindred spirits. Cathy, who always wears a gold “miraculous medal” necklace that was blessed by Pope John Paul II, felt that its promise had come true.

In the fall of 2003, Morgan and Cathy began to notice some strange shifts around Wolf Creek. A few of the other play-group mothers also noticed the changes as they drove through the subdivision with groceries or walked their kids to friends’ homes. “For Sale” signs would come down in front of newly built homes, but no one would move in. Mail and UPS parcels would be delivered to the vacant houses, to be mysteriously picked up during the night by strangers. If residents did move in, they arrived after dark, sometimes in pickup trucks with a few belongings in plastic bags.

When Cathy and friends went to greet the newcomers, they were met with silent stares. No identities were offered in return for the words of welcome. By winter 2004, the changes were more obvious. A growing number of yards went neglected; trash accumulated; fences and shutters sagged. Some of the houses were rented to families on government assistance. Cathy wondered, “Who buys a $260,000 house and rents it as Section 8 [government subsidized] housing?” Within one year, 30 Wolf Creek houses were either vacant or changing owners in rapid succession.

One neighbor in particular drew stares from the play-group mothers. The man walked his dog through the neighborhood early in the morning in his bathrobe, talking on his cell phone. He seemed to be watching the houses. When a “For Sale by Owner” sign went up, neighbors said, he would knock on the door, offering to help the homeowner find buyers. Sometimes—it was rumored—he told the owner to structure kickbacks of up to $30,000 to him at sale time. He had a bluff, hail-fellow manner and introduced himself as “the mayor of Wolf Creek.”

In winter 2004, the play-group mothers tried to get answers about the vacant and deteriorating houses from the subdivision’s then developers, to no avail. (Note: Wolf Creek is currently under different management.) By spring, they started calling themselves the “Mad Mommies,” and in late April, they put flyers into all the Wolf Creek mailboxes, inviting everyone to a Sunday poolside neighborhood meeting to discuss the changes that concerned them. “We didn’t want to point fingers or be all negative,” Makley says, “but we wanted to hear what everyone else thought about the changes we were seeing. We hoped we could find solutions, but do it in a friendly, sociable way.”

Meanwhile, Cathy visited Alan and Karen Kates, whose backyard, like hers, was starting to show signs of erosion. As they discussed how to get the developer to correct the problem, Alan mused about the house next door to his. It seemed to have been sold several times—but with no occupants. Why were “For Sale” signs going up, then down? On the Saturday before the poolside meeting, one of the Mad Mommies heard about an article in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that detailed recent events at Waters Edge, an upscale subdivision in DeKalb County. The problems there exactly mirrored those in Wolf Creek: rapid real estate deals, vacant houses, escalating prices on homes that were rented to low-income families. Reading the article, Makley and her friends saw the phrase “mortgage fraud” for the first time. Kates, in particular, was stunned. Was he living next door to a crime scene? How could this be happening in their midst? “I am quasi-Internet savvy,” says Kates, “and I wanted to find out how much these houses were selling for.” He called a friend who gave him a password to go onto a realtors’ Web site where he could see multiple listings of homes. He checked the selling prices for 100 houses closest to him and the Makleys. That night, Cathy, the Kateses, plus neighbors Kim Murphy and Jeff and Samantha Gusaeff gathered at the Makleys to discuss the situation. Kates had found that 30 overgrown or abandoned properties peppering Wolf Creek averaged $100,000 more than what the Makleys’ well-kept home would fetch. Moreover, many of the houses that had recently been bought were already in foreclosure.

The group knew they had stumbled onto something huge. They just weren’t sure exactly what it meant. They sat up late, talking in the Makleys’ kitchen about how to alert other neighbors in Wolf Creek. The next day, 100 homeowners showed up at the poolside meeting. Amid the socializing, people talked about their concerns: the deterioration of some properties in the subdivision; new incidents of petty theft and vandalism, like toys and tools disappearing from open garages; a few residents worried that the escalating home sale prices could drive up their taxes. “It was all still very friendly, and we had to be careful because we thought that some of the people at that party might have been involved in the frauds, themselves,” Cathy says. The group wanted more information. In early May, Kates started digging further into the Georgia Superior Court Web site, where he pulled the titles and deeds for every house in the neighborhood and created a spreadsheet on Wolf Creek. “It sort of became an obsession with the three of us—Kim Murphy, Alan and me,” Makley recalls. “We stayed up late into the night on our computers. After the kids and Morgan were in bed, I’d stay up till 2 a.m. in the kitchen, my fingers just flying. It became my night job.” The trio researched and e-mailed each other with every new piece of information. By day, they reported their findings to the other Mad Mommies, whose group, by now, included several Mad Daddies as well.

By the end of June, using what knowledge they had, the group again put flyers in all Wolf Creek mailboxes, saying: Mortgage fraud is a big problem. This is how it impacts you as a tenant. This is how it impacts you as an owner. This is what it looks like. This is how it works. As the sales and re-sales continued, and homes continued to fall into disrepair, Makley, Kates and the rest knew that it was clearly time to call the law. But who? Kim Murphy went to see Danny Porter at the Gwinnett district attorney’s office with their findings and suspicions. Porter said he would forward the information to his investigators in the white-collar crime unit. But at the time, he hadn’t enough manpower to investigate the dozens of suspect house sales on the Mad Mommies’ list. He told Murphy to file a report with the Gwinnett police. But when a police officer came to the subdivision, he had nothing in his codebook that covered mortgage fraud. Georgia had no law on the books to address the problem in Makley’s backyard. “We were so unbelievably frustrated,” Kates recalls. He and Makley contacted the FBI and even the Secret Service after they turned up several foreign-sounding names among the property owners. None seemed interested in helping the Wolf Creek homeowners. Terrorism and homeland security were their priorities.

In October, Kates was surfing the Web late one night when he stumbled across a Web site for an organization called GREFPAC, the Georgia Real Estate Fraud Prevention & Awareness Coalition. Excited, he e-mailed Makley. Here was a group that seemed to have it all figured out. The two couldn’t believe it: They were not alone. Others around Georgia were experiencing the same fraud in massive numbers, and they had answers to all their questions. Kates called GREFPAC immediately. A woman named Ann Fulmer told him how to get public utility records that would show who was paying the water and electric bills at the vacant houses and those with mysterious occupants who never seemed to come outdoors. She instructed the Wolf Creek group to prepare a package of information, and she put them in touch with Assistant Attorney General David McLaughlin. She also put out the word to mortgage underwriters across the nation, asking them not to approve any new loans in Wolf Creek for a while.

It wasn’t the justice that would come later, but Makley and friends were ready to put on the gloves. They were getting close. A shape-changer, mortgage fraud moves from place to place, suburb to suburb, under the noses of neighbors too busy or too honest to see the signs. Now the secret’s out: Atlanta has the worst epidemic of real estate fraud in the nation. This fraud knows no economic boundaries. It takes root on inner city blocks where houses last sold for $70,000 as well as in upscale, outlying suburbs where houses appraise for $1.5 million. What it takes to pull off mortgage fraud is a team of con artists working to scam homeowners and lenders. Typically, a crooked appraiser certifies a house’s worth at far more than its real value. The appraiser, in collusion with the buyer and seller, files papers with a mortgage company. They may use a fake photo of a house that looks better than the actual house to support the phony appraisal. Or they may have a partner inside the bank or lending company who approves the bogus loan application. Usually, the buyer borrows far more than the house’s real worth and shares the difference with the appraiser and seller. They then leave town, only to resurface in another place under different aliases.

A fraud house may change owners, or “flip,” several times a month, with the price going up each time. If the buyer is a crook, he or she has no intention of making the mortgage payments, so the house often sits empty until squatters or drug dealers move in. In a variant form of mortgage fraud called “block busting,” a crooked buyer or team of investors deface several houses and yards so badly that neighbors will sell their homes at deflated prices and flee. While it takes a team to pull off a scam, it also takes a village to raise awareness and fight the fraudsters.

Around Atlanta, the pioneers in combating mortgage fraud were Alicia Sheppard, who lives in The Moorings IV subdivision of South Gwinnett, and Ann Fulmer, who lives in DeKalb’s Smoke Rise. They uncovered the problem separately in the mid-1990s, but after meeting up in 1996 and comparing experiences, they recognized the need to create a victim’s association: GREFPAC. In the early days, their main goal was to bring the situation to the attention of law enforcement. At one time, DeKalb police told Fulmer, who had filed numerous complaints, that she needed “a better hobby.” Because so little was understood about mortgage fraud in the nineties, some officials told the women that—despite drug dealers moving into their communities, retaliation from fraudsters and nighttime shootouts—they were not “victims” and that only the mortgage lenders were victims.

It took Fulmer and Sheppard until 2000 to convince federal authorities that mortgage fraudsters victimize everyone around them. The first GREFPAC meeting was held in March 2001, and with every meeting thereafter, the coalition has grown. Four years later, trying to piece together the crime puzzle in Wolf Creek, Alan Kates became the beneficiary of Fulmer and Sheppard’s considerable experience. Makley recalls the flood of relief she felt when their group met other victims through GREFPAC. “It was like, ‘Thank God, we are not alone. No one had listened to us, but now we will be okay.’” With Fulmer’s help, the Wolf Creek group, in late 2004, put together a dossier of the 15 worst examples of fraud in their subdivision. They brought their evidence to a meeting with McLaughlin and representatives from the GBI, the Georgia Department of Banking and the state Board of Appraisers. They gave an extensive list of addresses, names and evidence about the suspect houses to officials. It would take time, they knew, for a full investigation. “But at least we knew that, finally, someone was going to help us,” Makley says. “We had to believe that all our hard work wasn’t for nothing.” In May 2005, because of the lobbying efforts of GREFPAC, the Georgia General Assembly passed the Residential Mortgage Fraud Act, a tough law making mortgage fraud a state crime.

The new law opened the way for Gwinnett police to arrest fraudsters. Alicia Sheppard called it “a hammer coming down.”

In June 2005, two years after Cathy and Morgan Makley had moved into their new home, police swept into Wolf Creek on that early morning raid. By the end of 2005, dozens of mortgage fraud–related arrests were made in DeKalb and Gwinnett counties under Georgia’s new law.

A grand jury indicted four fraudsters in November, and McLaughlin has 38 new mortgage fraud cases that will go to grand juries this year, including several from the Makleys’ neighborhood. When Cathy and Morgan talk about the events in Wolf Creek nowadays, it’s usually while they sit in the family room after the kids are in bed or while they’re cleaning up after dinner. She and Kates exchange information by e-mail, not by phone, because, she says, they’re “still paranoid about using cordless and cell phones.” She calls their mood “cautiously optimistic,” as they all continue to closely monitor the sale of any houses in Wolf Creek, and they continue to contact law enforcement about any suspicious properties. But she senses a shift in her neighborhood, and it’s a good one. Over the recent Christmas holidays, the Makleys hosted a party for 40 neighbors and friends. Black, Hispanic and white neighbors of all ages filled their home, laughing and talking easily. “It was wonderful. On balance, the close relationships we’ve formed with our neighbors outweigh the negative impact of the fraud,” she says. Wolf Creek subdivision is now more than half completed.

A new Gwinnett County police precinct is opening down the road, and that makes the play-group mothers feel even more secure. “We know that mortgage fraud is an ongoing problem in Atlanta,” Makley says. “But I will tell you this: The one place you don’t want to commit mortgage fraud is in my neighborhood. We are watching every home sale like you would not believe. You’d have to be the dumbest crook in the world to come here.”

Source: Atlanta Magazine, by Gita Smith