Notorious mortgage fraudster Brent Barber back in Kansas City, serving out the rest of his 2006 sentence in a halfway house

Brent Barber’s presence in Kansas City was once likened to that of a hurricane.

That comparison was made by the U.S. Attorney who in 2006 prosecuted the Belton man for his mortgage fraud scheme, which left sections of midtown and the East Side in ruins.

Barber pleaded guilty and received a 12-year sentence, along with an order to pay $11.2 million in restitution to his victims, for a wide-ranging real estate flipping scheme involving 300 fraudulent loans. Barber’s sentence rousted him from his Loch Lloyd residence on a quaint strip of road called “Street of Dreams” to a prison in Leavenworth at first, and then to federal prison facilities elsewhere in the Midwest.

Now Barber is back in Kansas City. U.S. Bureau of Prisons records show that he has been transferred to a halfway house in downtown Kansas City, Kansas, to serve out the remainder of that 12-year sentence, which expires on May 25, 2016.

In 2007, he gave a jailhouse interview to a USA Today reporter to impart how easy it is to pull off mortgage fraud schemes. But since then, little has been heard from him.

Barber rode the wave of the early 2000s housing boom and the infamously loose lending requirements at the time to carry out his scheme. The details of his work were profiled exhaustively in The Pitch here. But the basic version is this: He’d buy rundown houses, score phony appraisals to inflate the value of his properties, and market them as rental investments, promising cash flow from monthly rental payments.

In some instances, he would use the names and credit scores of ordinary people to help him buy houses, putting the names on the deed. He’d promise to rehab them, lease them out and then eventually sell the houses, giving his original investors a cut of the proceeds.

Barber’s scheme was blamed for continuing the disinvestment in low-income neighborhoods in Kansas City, a legacy that lives on today.