HousingWire – Fraudulent reductions in Home Equity Lines of Credit (HELOCs), revolving credit collateralized by one’s home, may become the focus of a forthcoming series of state-led hearings in Tallahassee, and the man behind the plan is setting big banks in his sights.

Florida State Senator Mike Haridopolos is calling for a round of investigations to explore claims that banks fraudulently or arbitrarily reduced HELOCs to improve their bottom lines, according to a press statement this weekend.

“I have heard the stories of this happening across our state and our country, and the courts are filled with lawsuits,” Haridopolos said. “This needs to be investigated because, if true, it’s outrageous.”

The Republican State Senator is also calling on Congress to conduct national hearings. Specifically, Haridopolos is urging the examination of this alleged practice within banks that received government funds through the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP).

“When Congress gave away the taxpayers’ money to the banks, they guaranteed the public that if the banks did not use it to lend money, they would immediately call for hearings and hold the banks accountable,” Haridopolos said.

He added: “Since then, we have seen the President sit down with the leaders of the big banks and refuse to meet with the average Americans who are being hurt by their practices… I can tell you, the banks may control [Washington] DC, but the people control Florida and we’re going to keep it that way.”

Haridopolos is calling for hearings to feature testimony not only from homeowners, but consumer groups and banks, “so that everyone has a chance…to weigh in,” according to the press statement.

Federal regulations allow HELOC suspensions under adverse financial circumstances and in situations where the underlying property experiences a significant decline in value. According to the statement from Haridopolos’ office, homeowners claim banks allegedly use false pretenses in order to freeze their family capital.

Florida is not immune to the substantial peak-to-trough house price declines. And a spokesperson for Haridopolos told HousingWire some borrowers claim banks order no appraisals and make no assessment of actual property value decline before freezing their HELOCs.

Similar claims by an Illinois homeowner recently resulted in a suit against JP Morgan Chase (JPM: 39.21 +0.13%). The suit alleged Chase froze a HELOC without disclosing its valuation methods or explaining to the borrower to what degree the house value fell.

Despite the allegedly fraudulent HELOC freezes and the scarcity of new HELOC lending, consumers in hard-hit areas like Florida are still buying in ways that aren’t measured against the backdrop of local foreclosures and price declines.

Time to get those Banksters.

For the eyes of the Lord [are] over the righteous, and his ears [are open] unto their prayers: but the face of the Lord [is] against them that do evil.

Sarah Bloom Raskin, Maryland Commissioner of Financial Regulation, announced that her office, a division of the Department of Labor, Licensing and Regulation, has summarily suspended the collections activities of Rockville-based Mann-Bracken, which describes itself as one of the nation’s largest debt collections law firms. This enforcement action follows an investigation which revealed that Mann-Bracken was ceasing business activities, such as failing to cash checks that had been sent to the firm in connection with collection related matters. Last week, the firm notified Maryland courts that it “will be closing at the end of the month” and was “working with clients to transfer cases.”

“We are determined to make sure that consumers receive the protections they deserve whether collections are done through the mail, on the phone or, increasingly, through our courts. When they do not, we will act and act quickly,” DLLR Secretary Alexander M. Sanchez said.

The State Collection Agency Licensing Board, a board within DLLR’s Office of the Commissioner of Financial Regulation, issued a summary order today that suspends all of the firm’s consumer debt collections activities, including collections actions in Maryland courts, and prohibits the filing of further collections-related cases.

“This is yet another in a string of problems we are uncovering as the collections industry has made a headlong rush for our state’s courtrooms,” Commissioner Raskin said.

Last month, the Commissioner of Financial Regulation reached an agreement with Encore Capital, Midland Credit Management and related parties to settle alleged violations of federal and state debt collection laws. That settlement included a civil penalty of $998,000 and an agreement to alter certain business practices to ensure that both their litigation-related collection activities and their non-litigation (or “traditional”) debt collection activities comply with all applicable state and federal laws. Mann-Bracken represented Encore-Midland, as well as various other businesses, in thousands of collections-related actions initiated in Maryland courts over recent years.

Measure to help bring stability to home values and accelerate sale of vacant properties

In an effort to stabilize home values and improve conditions in communities where foreclosure activity is high, HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan today announced a temporary policy that will expand access to FHA mortgage insurance and allow for the quick resale of foreclosed properties.  The announcement is part of the Obama administration commitment to addressing foreclosure. Just yesterday, Secretary Donovan announced $2 billion in Neighborhood Stabilization Program grants to local communities and nonprofit housing developers to combat the effects of vacant and abandoned homes.

The waiver will take effect on February 1, 2010 and is effective for one year, unless otherwise extended or withdrawn by the FHA Commissioner.  To protect FHA borrowers against predatory practices of “flipping” where properties are quickly resold at inflated prices to unsuspecting borrowers, this waiver is limited to those sales meeting the following general conditions:

• All transactions must be arms-length, with no identity of interest between the buyer and seller or other parties participating in the sales transaction.  
• In cases in which the sales price of the property is 20 percent or more above the seller’s acquisition cost, the waiver will only apply if the lender meets specific conditions.
• The waiver is limited to forward mortgages, and does not apply to the Home Equity Conversion Mortgage (HECM) for purchase program.

Specific conditions and other details of this new temporary policy are in the text of the waiver, available on: FHA 90 Day Waiver

My husband and I were one week from closing on a house when we got a denial call from the mortgage company. When they check his credit to prequalify they found that My husband has or had 0 credit. When they went back to check our credit before closing, they found a 2600.00 collection debt on my credit. upon some investigating it appears to be my husbands debt. It appears that they placed it on my credit report, instead of his is that legal?

he sublease [without having him sign any papers] his apartment to a friend who moved out oweing rent. I had nothing to do with that. wh and how can they go after me?

Curry (more…)

Pro Publica – Nathan Reynolds is something of an expert on the government’s foreclosure prevention program. A mortgage broker who’s worked in the Chicago area since 1998, he’s seen both his business and his home’s value plummet in the past few years. After receiving his own trial loan modification from JPMorgan Chase, he’s helped others apply for modifications through the program on his own time.

But in November, after Reynolds had made trial loan payments for seven months, Chase told him his mortgage would not be permanently modified. Chase had determined that his personal financial troubles were only temporary — because Reynolds had expressed optimism that the administration’s policies might rescue the housing market, boosting his income.

That’s not a legitimate reason for a loan servicer to deny someone’s modification, according to the Treasury Department’s guidelines for the program. And Reynolds’ experience — along with the cases of two other homeowners examined by ProPublica, shows how servicers have created unnecessary hurdles that, in some instances, violate the loan program’s rules.

Housing advocates say they frequently see homeowners rejected or kept in a trial modification for questionable reasons. “There’s a real resistance on the servicers’ part to making permanent modifications,” said Diane Thompson of the National Consumer Law Center.

The administration set a goal of helping up to 4 million homeowners through the $75 billion mortgage modification program as a way to blunt the boom in foreclosures. Treasury has produced a growing number of mandatory guidelines for banks and other loan servicers to review applications and perform the modifications. In exchange for tailoring loan payments to 31 percent of the homeowner’s monthly income, both the servicer and the owner of the loan receive incentive payments.

Servicers representing 85 percent of the housing market have signed up to participate. Applicants must first go through a trial period before their mortgage payments can be permanently reduced. But servicers have been slow to convert hundreds of thousands of trials into permanent modifications — as of November, only about 31,000 had been made permanent. That spurred Treasury to publicly criticize the servicers’ performance and to put out new guidelines in recent months to speed up the process.

Treasury said recently that the effort has resulted in a “significant increase” in offers of permanent modifications, but numbers demonstrating how significant won’t be available until February.

ProPublica has reported since last June on homeowners’ frustrations in receiving a prompt answer from servicers, particularly the program’s largest servicers — Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo and CitiMortgage. In response to widespread complaints, those servicers have dramatically increased staffing and touted other improvements, such as new document management systems.

But when homeowners do get an answer, the reasons don’t always jibe with how the program is supposed to work. Housing advocates say this is a direct result of a lack of effective oversight of servicers in the program, something ProPublica has focused on before.

‘An Excuse to Deny Someone’

Reynolds was a prime candidate for a loan adjustment and was among the earliest homeowners to receive a trial modification.

His mortgage brokerage business had followed the market downward, and as a result, he’d fallen three months behind on his interest-only mortgage. Area real estate cratered. His own home, bought in 2001 for just over $400,000, had rocketed up to about $1.2 million in value in 2006, and then down again to about $350,000. With a refinancing in 2005 and a home equity line of credit with Countrywide, his mortgage debt exceeded his home’s value by more than 70 percent.

Soon after the loan program was announced last February, Reynolds applied. He received an application in late April and was accepted, making his first payment of about $2,400 (down from $3,300) in May. He made six more payments. Like many borrowers in the program, he says he was asked over and over to send the same documents and later, updated versions of those documents. Finally, in late November, he received an answer: He was denied a permanent loan modification.

The reason? A Chase employee explained to Reynolds that they’d determined his financial difficulties weren’t permanent. In his application, he’d written that he believed that the government’s rescue efforts would “save the U.S. housing market” and that his business “will once again be profitable.” The Chase employee told him that statement indicated his hardship was only temporary.

“That’s just nonsense,” said Thompson of the consumer center. “To me, that sounds like an excuse to deny someone.”

Chase spokeswoman Christine Holevas told ProPublica that Reynolds had been denied “because the skill and ability is still there to earn the income.” Since he’d “stated in his letter that business would be picking up,” it was “not considered a permanent hardship,” Holevas said.

Such a determination contradicts Treasury’s guidance to servicers for the program. A FAQ issued to servicers says the program does not “distinguish between short-term and long-term hardships for eligibility purposes.”

When ProPublica asked about this guideline, Holevas did not directly respond. She did offer another reason for denying Reynolds: Chase’s review of financial information showed his income had not decreased.

Reynolds, who has a wife and two small children, says no Chase employee had made such a claim to him and that the documents he provided show that his mortgage business dropped more than 50 percent in 2009. He submitted a new hardship statement in December, in which he tried to make clear that his troubles are real and lasting. Holevas said those documents would be reviewed.

Now, Reynolds says his finances are at the breaking point and bankruptcy appears unavoidable if Chase denies him again. “I did everything that was asked of me, but Chase has me backed into a corner that I cannot get out of.”

The Nine-Month Trial

Six months into a trial modification, Gary Fitz of California still doesn’t know whether or when his mortgage will be permanently modified, and he’s been told he’ll have to wait for a few more months.

Under the program’s design, the trial period was supposed to last three months, giving time for the servicers to collect and evaluate the homeowner’s financial information. At the end of the trial, if the homeowner fit the program’s criteria and had made all three modified payments, the servicer was supposed to promptly make the modification permanent.

Instead, trial modifications routinely last more than six months, homeowners and housing advocates say.

There are a number of adverse consequences of a trial period’s dragging on, said the consumer law center’s Thompson. Because a homeowner is not making a full payment, the balance of the mortgage grows during the trial period. The servicer reports the shortfall to credit reporting agencies, so the homeowner’s credit score can drop. And most importantly, says Thompson, the homeowner isn’t saving money in case the modification fails and the home is foreclosed. “Keeping someone in a trial modification really does not do them a favor,” she said.

Fitz’s case shows why some homeowners have remained in limbo so long.

He sought a loan modification in the spring of 2009 because his wife’s salary had been cut. Like millions of others, he applied soon after the administration announced the program last February. He was accepted for a trial modification and made his first payment in July.

Fitz was prepared for an uphill struggle. A Wells Fargo customer service representative told him early in the application process that he should make seven copies of his financial information — because Wells Fargo would likely lose it more than once. He says he’s sent the same paperwork in five times.

When the trial stage lasts so long, servicers commonly ask homeowners for updated financial information months into the trial period. Fitz, for example, submitted his paperwork for the first time last spring. But when Wells Fargo requested an updated package in December, it showed that he’d received a pay raise last June of about $80 per month.

Because of that, Wells Fargo started him over on a new trial period – even though his trial payments climbed just $27, from $1,733 to $1,760. His first payment on the new trial period is due Feb. 1, meaning that by the time he completes it, he will have been making trial payments for nine months.

Wells Fargo spokesman Kevin Waetke said the company does not comment on individual borrower’s cases. He did say, however, that “the federal guidelines require a final review of updated financial documents before moving any Home Affordable Modification from trial status to complete.”

That’s not true. In a Treasury guidance to servicers issued in October, meant to streamline the review process, it says there is “no requirement” to “refresh” the homeowner’s documentation as long as it was up-to-date when it was originally received.

Wells Fargo also appears to have begun Fitz’s second trial period contrary to Treasury guidelines. A Treasury guidance last April said that a servicer should not begin a new trial period if a homeowner has only a minor income change (defined as exceeding the “initial income information by 25 percent or less”). Guidelines issued later are even more restrictive about starting a new trial period. The reason is clear: The purpose of the trial period for the homeowner is to demonstrate the ability to pay, and such a small change in income is unlikely to affect that.

Asked to respond, Waetke said that “given the complexity of the program, the volume of calls we receive and the number of modifications currently in process, there is the potential for a mistake to be made.” He added that Wells Fargo would continue to review the case.

Buying Time

Sometimes there seems to be no reason at all for a trial period to drag on.

Cynthia Mason of Texas, another homeowner with a Wells Fargo mortgage, also recently restarted her trial period after several months.

Last spring, she sought a loan modification because medical and other expenses had made it impossible for her to afford her mortgage payment on a fixed alimony income. She’d planned to supplement that income with a job, but has been unable to find anything. Like Fitz, she began the program in July.

In October, good news came with a phone call: She’d been accepted for a permanent modification. She waited for the final paperwork to arrive, but it never did. Instead, while speaking to a Wells Fargo employee about an unrelated issue six weeks later, she found out that she’d in fact been denied. When Mason inquired why, she says she was told some documentation was missing, but the employee could not tell her what it was. She also learned she owed late fees because she’d paid the modified payment, not the original, full payment, in November and December.

When she complained about the late fees (which were eventually canceled), she was passed to a different employee who told her she was being put back into a trial period. She didn’t understand why. Another representative finally told her that she’d been denied because of a negative “Net Present Value” test. The test is the calculation at the center of the Treasury Department’s program: It determines whether the loan’s owner (sometimes the lender, sometimes a mortgage-backed security’s investors) is likely to make more money modifying the loan or not. A negative result means the servicer has no obligation under the program to modify the loan and is a common reason for denial.

But in Mason’s case, a Wells Fargo employee told her she’d nevertheless been put back into the trial period in order to “buy time.”

Wells Fargo spokesman Waetke declined to speak about Mason’s case but did say that the bank sometimes extends the trial period “to allow customers time to get the documents so we can complete the review.” Mason says she doesn’t know of any documents that might be missing, and she’s not optimistic about receiving a permanent modification. By extending the trial, Mason told ProPublica, Wells Fargo is “just prolonging the inevitable” – denial.

DSNews.com – Although the Obama administration has worked to suppress foreclosures, it appears these efforts may not be enough, according to Bank Foreclosures Sale, a foreclosure listing service.

High unemployment continues to plague the real estate market, and according to a recent article in the New York Times, an estimated 2.4 million foreclosed homes will be added to the list of 2010 foreclosures. As a result, Bank Foreclosures Sale predicts prices will decrease another 10 percent.

Simon Campbell, a real estate analyst for the company, said it appears the real estate market may see a surge of shadow inventory properties appear on the market. These are properties that have not been calculated into official inventory numbers and include homes repossessed by lenders through foreclosures and similar actions and homes where owners are 90 days or more delinquent on payments.

Unemployment remains at a record high, and congressional leaders continue to look for ways that millions of people who have lost their jobs will be able to stay in their homes. While current statistics show lenders may finally be closer to finding a solution for the home mortgage crisis, Campbell said the question now is about how fast these lenders can work to stem potential foreclosures.

“Until we see a reduction in the number of foreclosures, we cannot get too hopeful about restoring housing industry stability,” Campbell said.

Hi Paul,

My soon to be Ex-Husband and I bought a home in December of 2008.  We are currently going through a divorce.  I chose to stay in the home with our children, after our seperation.  Now, several months later, I am unable to make the $2,200.00 Mortgage Payment on my own.  We have only owned the home for 1 year and our principal has only decreased by about $6,000 since we purchased it.  This leaves no room to pay a realator’s comission and the closing costs, even if we could get it to sell for the original purchase price.  To make matters worse, our neighborhood builder went bankrupt.  We now have a new builder.  The new homes that are being built are smaller, but also much cheaper.

I have almost maxed out my credit card, taken a loan out against my 401K and borrowed money from my parents, just to pay the mortgage by the end of each month.  I have not yet fallen behind by 30 days, but I am creaping much closer. 

My real estate agent suggested a short sale.  My credit is not super and I am very concerned that by doing a short sale, it will drop my score considerably.  I have three children to support and need to be able to find somewhere else to live.  I want to make sure that my decision is a sound one. 

My lender (Citi Mortgage)offered to lower my payments to $1,450 for twelve months and submit a loan modification request to FHA (I have a FHA Loan – 30 yrs fixed @ 6.25%).  However, Citi Mortgage would expect a baloon payment of $10,000 at the end of the 12 months.  I can’t afford to pay that kind of money.  If I was to request the Loan Modification, would I be allowed to put my home on the market? 

I am having a very hard time figuring out what to do.  I can’t afford to pay the Mortgage and am starting to drown in debt because of it.  Which of these options would you suggest, given my circumstances?  Loan Modification or a Short Sale?  Any advice that you can offer would be great!!

Thanks,
Renee (more…)

F.S. 718.116(1)(b)  The liability of a first mortgagee or its successor or assignees who acquire title to a unit by foreclosure or by deed in lieu of foreclosure for the unpaid assessments that became due prior to the mortgagee’s acquisition of title is limited to the lesser of:

1.  The unit’s unpaid common expenses and regular periodic assessments which accrued or came due during the 6 months immediately preceding the acquisition of title and for which payment in full has not been received by the association; or

2.  One percent of the original mortgage debt. The provisions of this paragraph apply only if the first mortgagee joined the association as a defendant in the foreclosure action. Joinder of the association is not required if, on the date the complaint is filed, the association was dissolved or did not maintain an office or agent for service of process at a location which was known to or reasonably discoverable by the mortgagee.

LasVegasSun – As Las Vegas limps into a new decade, let us return to the now-hazy origins of our current sickness: 2005.

It would seem the entire Las Vegas Valley had been slipped a drink laced with a financial hallucinogen — a powerful narcotic that combined Ecstasy’s feelings of well-being with methamphetamine’s urge to be busy.

Even the city’s most accomplished business and political elites could not resist its influence. They were spaced out, convinced that the laws of the economic universe had been suspended, that housing prices could expand into space, that borrowing money was as holy as prayer.

“We thought we had a recession-proof economy, we thought we would grow forever,” says Elliott Parker, a UNR economist.

Parker describes an “illusion, that we could create wealth from nothing, that we could keep consuming beyond our income, that housing prices would keep rising, that investments could yield high returns without risk, since we were all so clever …”

If they weren’t addicted to the drug themselves, Las Vegas denizens acted as street corner touts — marketing the magical drug for a living — and were always shouting its wonders.

We were, in Parker’s words, “selling high roller fantasies to gamblers and expensive houses to people who sold their homes elsewhere for even more insane amounts of money. We thought it would continue forever, and we made no contingency plans for the alternative.”

Illusion. Fantasy.

When skeptics pointed out that perhaps a dangerous real estate bubble was forming, the crowd responded with mockery:

“The only bubble you’ll see in this market is in a Champagne glass,” a well-known real estate player said in our now fated year of 2005.

But in fact, here’s what was happening in the Las Vegas real estate market: After years of slow and steady growth, a mania took hold. Home values had increased more than 35 percent in 2004 alone.

It was a classic bubble by 2005, right up there with phony Silicon Valley technology companies 10 years ago, and phony Amsterdam tulip futures 375 years ago.

For a while, Americans could borrow unlimited sums of money against their rising home values to come to Las Vegas to spend money. So we built new resorts.

We needed construction workers to build those resorts. We needed other construction workers to build homes for the first construction workers.

Simple logic

This wouldn’t — couldn’t — go on forever. At some point, Americans would hit their limits and the growth of tourism would slow, and we wouldn’t need so many construction workers to build resorts, and then we wouldn’t need so many construction workers to build those houses for the first construction workers.

Once we didn’t need those construction workers, they would be laid off and stop making mortgage payments on their homes. And the sell-off would begin. Throw in all the subprime loans that borrowers couldn’t pay to begin with and you’d get a fire sale. Welcome to 2007.

It’s simple logic, really. Any college freshman who got suckered into a pyramid scheme could explain the illogical underpinnings of it all. It was an economic house built without a foundation on a sandy desert hillside. And there it goes, into the wash.

Sure, we had the resorts, and the wealth they created was real, but the Strip was living on borrowed time, larded with debt, a bad recession away from near collapse and in some cases, bankruptcy.

“A growth-addicted economy produced phony prosperity,” says Hugh Jackson, proprietor of the Las Vegas Gleaner blog and a policy consultant to the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada, a liberal advocacy group.

Phony. Like the happiness of a drug.

This isn’t to say that the decade didn’t begin with hopeful signals — low unemployment and rising wages, and the tax revenue needed to improve schools, health care and social services. The Strip kept attracting more customers and building more hotel rooms to house them.

But the 9/11 terrorist attacks should have provided a clear warning that a dip in tourism could pummel the city. When tourism quickly resumed, however, that warning went unheeded.

Plus, debt was accumulating, in households here and among potential customers around the world, and on corporate balance sheets.

It should have been a portentous time, a ripe time for Cassandras.

“The decade began with a facade,” Jackson says of those go-go years.

A facade. Soon it was a Potemkin village of steel and stucco, massage parlors and pawn shops.

So wrong

In the reality-based world, many people knew the intensifying speculative bubble in real estate wasn’t sustainable and tried to warn others. Bill Robinson, a UNLV economist, sold his house in 2005, patiently explaining to neighbors the laws of economic reality and the coming crash.

“Everybody who was independent of all this saw it coming,” Robinson says. Meaning everybody sophisticated enough to understand economic data and not a paid representative of the resort or development industries.

(And, in fairness, some people from those industries tried to pull the fire alarm early on.)

What is striking about our real estate player, the one who sneered about there being no bubbles except those in Champagne, isn’t that he turned out to be so wrong. After all, people are wrong all the time. The sun revolved around the Earth for centuries after Ptolemy, and many smart and well-meaning people, even the high priest of laissez faire capitalism Alan Greenspan, were wrong about the housing bubble.

No, what’s striking is the tone of triumph and arrogance, like he’s pulled one over on the stupid herd.

It turns out, our addiction’s true power was so much like that of other drugs: It gave the user great powers to deceive.

We were good at deceiving others.

“Hardly anything we did this decade was upfront,” Robinson says.

Illusion has always been part of Las Vegas’ appeal — that we would not succumb to mathematical certainty at a card table; that we could come here and remake ourselves into glamour gods; that buildings that look like the New York City skyline can approximate the feeling one would get from actually being in New York City.

Illusion is one thing.

Deception, done with malice and for the most selfish ends, is something else.

Deception in Las Vegas took many different forms this decade.

Easy to con

On the Clark County Commission, four members would eventually be convicted of what amounted to dishonest service for taking bribes. Erin Kenny told us she was acting on the community’s behalf when she pushed approval of a CVS drugstore at Desert Inn Road and Buffalo Drive. Really, it was for a $200,000 bribe.

From the sensational to the prosaic: The real estate loan officers who extended money to people knowing they couldn’t repay, demanding no documentation, employing no safeguards or due diligence.

So, waddya make last year?

Oh, that’s good enough.

“Stated income,” we called these loans, employing our bottomless ability for euphemism.

Or, our lenders weren’t straight with borrowers — many who didn’t speak English — about what would happen to their monthly payment in a year or two after a “reset.”

On the other side of the ledger, there were speculators and plenty of average people who took out loans they had no intention of repaying.

“The easiest con for a con artist is another con artist,” says Mike Green, the Nevada historian. “If you want to believe you’ll always be living on the Big Rock Candy Mountain, then it’s easy for someone to sell you another piece of worthless land.”

Once things started to collapse, a whole new set of scam artists — “loan modification specialists” — preyed on vulnerable homeowners, promising to keep them in their homes but running off with cash instead.

For so many — and at great expense to the rest of us — the decade was a giant con, a bamboozlement, a flimflam.

“We have a history of benefiting from all that flimflamming,” Robinson notes.

“It’s kind of our culture. So at some point it was inevitable that if there was an easy-money climate, we would fall prey to it,” he says.

Which brings us back to another kind of deception, perhaps most damaging of all — self-deception.

“It’s easy to delude yourself into believing something you want to be true. And here we are,” says Mike Sloan, a gaming consultant and former state senator.

We were deceived, we were narcotized, because we wanted to be deceived.