Home Wrecker
Sue Cooper expects to turn on her TV one day, flip to Dateline and see Brent Barber’s face.
“It’ll be one of those programs that talk about con artists and what they’ve done to people,” she predicts as she sits at her kitchen table, drinking coffee. Until just a few months ago, Sue and Frank Cooper, who did not want their real names used for this story, feared they would lose their dream house — a simple, cheery ranch on several acres down a long, gravel road near Liberty.
The Coopers remember the day three years ago when they went to meet Barber — just to make sure he was a real person. They’d made an appointment to talk with him at the Gladstone branch office of Ameriquest Mortgage Company. They’d already heard about him through a mortgage broker they knew and about his reputation as a “big wheel.” They’d heard he had millions of dollars in the bank. And they knew he drove a shiny Cadillac Escalade SUV and lived in Loch Lloyd, an opulent gated community of million-dollar homes in Belton.
The Coopers liked Barber right away. “He was a blond-headed, nice-looking family man. Seemed real friendly and easy to talk to,” Sue says. “Real busy, too, you could tell.”
“Lots of energy,” Frank adds. “High-strung.”
Sitting down with Barber at a desk in the Ameriquest office, they reviewed the details of his investment program: He would use their good credit to buy as many as ten homes, in their names, from real estate companies. Then he’d fix up the properties, lease them out and manage them, using the rent money to repay the mortgages. After a year or two, he’d sell and pay the Coopers a portion of the proceeds.
In the meantime, he told them, they’d benefit from a hefty deduction on their income taxes. Frank wanted to retire soon, and Sue wanted to quit her part-time job — it sounded like a good deal. They looked forward to having more time with their grandchildren. “We didn’t even go look at the properties,” Sue explains. “As far as we were concerned, it wasn’t even our property. It was his property. It just had our names on it.”
They didn’t think much more about it until March 2002, when the mortgage companies started calling about late payments — on all ten houses. Soon bill collectors began phoning day and night. Desperate, the Coopers called and stopped by Barber’s office, but he was never in and he wouldn’t call them back. On Easter Sunday 2002, before heading out to a family gathering, they drove into Kansas City’s east side to see what they owned. The first thing that struck them was that the properties were not worth the amounts of their loans — which averaged $60,000 for each house.
At the first few addresses, the Coopers made notes: “Looks fairly decent but needs new roof.”
But the properties kept getting worse. “After three or four, we didn’t write anything down, because we were too sick to our stomachs,” Sue recalls. One of the homes, on the city’s east side, was a former crack house that looked like a bombed-out shell. “It had caught fire, and the windows had blown out,” Frank says. The house was boarded up amid a perimeter of yellow police tape. The yard was a dump, littered with trash bags, whisky bottles, old tires and a stained mattress. “It was just disgusting,” Sue says. “A nightmare.”
Then warning letters about code violations from the Kansas City Neighborhood Preservation Division began arriving in the Coopers’ mailbox. They paid a hauling company $1,000 to clear the junk off their properties. Meanwhile, their tenants made requests for repairs, and the couple paid to fix toilets, unclog drains and buy a new refrigerator. But some repairs were too costly, and the Coopers had to say no. “You’ve heard of slumlords,” Sue says. “Well, all of a sudden you realize: Oh my God. I am one.”
A few of the tenants weren’t paying rent. All were African-American, most of them poor. One renter drove an ice-cream truck for a living. Another worked in a cafeteria, and a few flipped burgers. “Some of them were single mothers working two or three jobs. I felt really sorry for them,” Sue says. “Some would call and cry on my shoulder. I was like a counselor.”
Barber, they subsequently learned, had acquired many of his properties through a yearly tax foreclosure auction held on the steps of the Jackson County Courthouse. Each August he could buy homes, usually in bad shape, for pennies on the dollar. When the county began barring property owners with outstanding taxes or code violations from buying — county records show that Barber still owes about $20,000 in back property taxes from 2001 and 2002 on nine properties he owns in Kansas City — he continued to purchase properties as a representative of various companies.
Most of the properties he bought and resold were in Kansas City’s urban core, usually in historically black, working-class, neighborhoods on the east side — Ivanhoe, Blue Hills and Town Fork Creek. After buying the houses at auction for a few thousand dollars, Barber would often deed them to a real estate company called National Foreclosure Properties, which would then sell them to “investors” for $50,000 or more.
Barber refused to be interviewed for this story. “I’d love to answer your questions,” he said in a brief telephone call, “but I just don’t think it would be prudent at this point.”
He’s probably right. Jackson County Court records show that the 37-year-old, licensed real estate broker has thirty lawsuits on file against him, and more than $800,000 in unpaid judgments. Just last summer, the Missouri Real Estate Commission released him from a one-year probation based on incidents that provoked the Kansas Real Estate Commission to revoke his license there in September 1998. (The Kansas revocation came after the commission learned he’d acted as an agent without a broker’s license and then had misrepresented those activities on his license application.)
About three years ago, Blue Hills Neighborhood Association President Karen Wright started noticing that cheap yellow “for sale by owner” signs were springing up like dandelions in the front yards of some of the area’s more dilapidated houses.
“We used to call them the yellow-sign people,” she says of the strangers who would come through the neighborhood setting up the placards. To find out more, she dialed the phone number on the signs. “They told me they were an investment company that bought houses, rehabbed them and sold them,” she explains.
Soon Wright’s neighbors who had bought houses from Barber started calling the neighborhood association to complain. “They were doing shoddy work. And repairs that they had promised to do weren’t being done,” she says. She passed along the complaints to Michael Simmons, the neighborhood’s codes enforcement officer. (Simmons declined the Pitch‘s interview request for this story.)
For several years, Barber himself owned what Wright calls the worst house in Blue Hills, at 4929 Michigan. (One of his investors bought it in 1999 and sold it just a few weeks ago.) The house is a hovel — a tilting, stucco bungalow with pieces of plaster ripped off the sides, broken windows, and gang graffiti spray-painted on the exterior. A pile of tree branches and trash spills out of the yard onto the sidewalk, laden with garbage bags, an old laundry basket, a rusty chair, an old tire, a red lace garter and a broom. An empty bottle of MD 20/20 Banana Red liquor sits on the porch.
“Those people are the worst of the worst,” Wright says of Barber and his business partners. “They’re why we have a bad taste in our mouths about these so-called investors — because they come in and rape and pillage a neighborhood. They don’t care about the properties, and they don’t care about the people. They just want the dollars so they can live out in … in wherever it is they live,” she says, waving her hand to indicate far-off suburbia.
And suburbia is where Brent Barber lives. He and his wife, Lisa, receive their mail — and get served with legal paperwork — at a $1 million mansion at 150 Street of Dreams.
It’s in Loch Lloyd, an exclusive “Scottish-inspired” community at 168th and Holmes, built in the late 1980s by trinket-and-gift purveyor Harry Lloyd. At the entrance to Loch Lloyd, a uniformed watchman stands next to a stone guardhouse, ostensibly making sure that only residents and their guests enter. Beyond, a road lined with redbud trees winds to a sprawling stone clubhouse that boasts a terrace overlooking a 30-foot waterfall. Behind the clubhouse, an Olympic-sized swimming pool shimmers turquoise near tennis courts and soccer and softball fields. Several hundred yards away, golfers cross the perfectly manicured hills of the PGA-caliber course.
Farther on, “private road” signs discourage curious visitors from driving past palatial houses. At the far end of the development, a few huge estates sit atop a wooded bluff, overlooking a cobalt-blue lake — Loch Lloyd — and shiny fishing boats and sailboats bobbing near a pier.
The Coopers say that when they finally confronted Barber’s employees by phone, his workers refused to hand over keys to the couples’ properties. Then in May, they say, Barber sent a work crew to remove all the window air-conditioning units from their tenants’ homes. “We found out he had a little warehouse, and he probably took the air conditioners and put them in there,” Sue says. “The tenants were asking for their AC back because it was getting hot, and we had to tell them there wasn’t going to be any air that summer.” The Coopers couldn’t afford replacement units.
While the Coopers tried to deal with their six tenants and their four vacant houses, Sue purchased a fax machine and took on the overwhelming task of negotiating with creditors to try to persuade them not to foreclose on the properties, which would ruin the couple’s credit. But that September, the Coopers were served with legal paperwork advising them that they were being named in a federal lawsuit filed by Ameriquest Mortgage Company. They had taken out three of their ten home loans through Ameriquest. (Ameriquest has its own questionable past. Community groups have accused Ameriquest of predatory lending practices, and in July 2000 the company entered into an agreement with the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, a nationwide grassroots organization of low- and moderate-income households, to cease those practices.)
The Ameriquest lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court of Western Missouri, alleges that more than fifty defendants conspired to defraud the mortgage company. Among those named are Brent and Lisa Barber; his mother, Wanda Barber; several companies with ties to Barber (National Foreclosure Properties — which sold Barber-owned properties to many of his investors — was registered in 2001 by Ron Dotson, who is Barber’s mother’s next-door neighbor, but the lawsuit alleges that Barber owns it); several former Ameriquest employees; property appraisers; and additional Barber investors. As a result of Barber’s schemes, the lawsuit claims, Ameriquest made $4.2 million in bad loans on more than 75 properties in the Kansas City area. The lawsuit accuses the defendants of violating federal anti-racketeering laws.
Bob Moore also believed in Barber. He had friends who worked as mortgage brokers — again at the Gladstone branch of Ameriquest — a few buddies with whom he’d attended Hickman Mills High School back in the ’80s. As a handyman, he drove the metro area a lot, and he’d stop in to say hello. On several occasions, he met Barber, who would hang out and chat up Ameriquest employees.
“He looks for new brokers, people who are new in the business, because he knows he can take advantage of them,” says Moore, who maintains that that’s exactly what happened to his friends. Barber would offer to pay them cash for approving large numbers of loans for him. “Then he’d offer to do all the paperwork himself. That way he could do tricky stuff,” Moore says. “He still owes my friends money.”
The lawsuit outlines Barber’s alleged pattern: He would approach Ameriquest employees and tell them that he owned a company called Express Mortgage, which specialized in sub-prime loans. (A sub-prime loan allows people with poor credit and low incomes to borrow money at higher-than-prime interest rates.) Barber would say he was looking to get out of sub-prime lending and was willing to refer refinances from his businesses to Ameriquest. Then Barber would refer his investors to the Gladstone branch office, where the mortgage brokers who were allegedly cooperating with him worked. (According to state records, Express Mortgage is no longer in business.)
The lawsuit claims that “the loan applications falsely represented that the borrower had owned the property for a number of years … [and] misrepresented the value of the property and other income and credit information regarding the borrower, and misrepresented that the purpose of the application was to finance allegedly existing loans.”
The lawsuit also contends that the Ameriquest employees directed the title work to attorney Lance Stelling, an employee at Pinnacle Title, and that Stelling falsified titles for Barber. (State records show that in 2000, Stelling listed himself with the secretary of state as the registered agent for Brush Creek Management, a company the lawsuit alleges belongs to Barber, located at 6301 Rockhill Road, Suite 101.) According to Jackson County court records, Stelling, who is listed as a member in good standing of the Missouri Bar Association, represented Barber in at least one lawsuit in November 2001. County real estate records show that Barber deeded four properties to Stelling between 1999 and 2001. The Pitch was unable to reach Stelling; residential and business phone numbers listed in his name are no longer in service.
Barber forged financial and income information for some of the borrowers, the Ameriquest lawsuit contends, in some cases creating fictitious home buyers and then depositing loan money in his own bank account.
Moore says he does not believe his friends were in cahoots with Barber. Rather, he thinks that they were taken in, too. “[Barber] knows how to talk. He knows how to get people to do things,” Moore says. “The big kicker is, he comes in and says, ‘I buy a lot of homes, I sell a lot of homes,’ and you think, hey, this guy will make a good contact.”
Through his friends, Moore got caught up in Barber’s plan. He and his wife, both in their early thirties, had just bought their first home on a quiet street in Greenwood. His wife was pregnant with their first child, but as an administrative assistant and a handyman, they didn’t make much money. They had perfect credit, though. And Moore’s friends said Barber would pay him $1,000 cash for each home loan he let Barber take out in his name. Barber would then transfer the loans to his own name after three months. Moore says he let Barber use his 401(k) as collateral. “I thought, man, you can’t go wrong,” he recalls.
He and his wife bought four homes through Barber in the spring of 2001. A year later, Moore got his first letter, a warning from Countrywide Home Loans that he was behind in his mortgage payments. For the first time, he drove by the houses he had bought. “Some of them were so bad, I wouldn’t let my dog live there,” he says. One of the houses had been condemned and had city notices tacked up all over it. Just a single house was occupied, by an elderly woman.
Once, Moore got a phone call from her at 2 a.m., complaining that her windows were broken, her chimney was falling off, her sink was leaking and her toilet didn’t work. He and his wife scraped together $600 for a new toilet but told her they couldn’t afford the other repairs. “We figured she’s gotta go to the bathroom,” he says. “She couldn’t go outside.”
In the following months, the Moores spent $4,000 trying to get the mortgages on their four investment houses caught up. “That put us in another bind,” Moore says. “Our credit is horrible.” In fact, a few weeks ago, the Moores received a notice in the mail telling them that their Kohl’s department-store credit card limit had been reduced to $100. Their application for a Phillips 66 gas card was rejected. “This really tears up my wife,” he says.
He blames the property appraisers and Barber. “He’s a slick whistle. He gets a lot of blue-collar workers, gets ’em thinking they’ll be able to go do some stuff, maybe pay off some bills.”
Tom and Marta Osbern aren’t rich — he’s a lab technician, and she’s a pastor — but they’ve saved and managed their finances conscientiously. Their house in Shawnee has a bright kitchen decorated in rooster motif, an elegant living room with high ceilings and leather furniture, and a pastoral back yard. The Osberns mail out their bill payments ten days before the due dates, balance their checkbooks and keep meticulous records. For them, it’s an issue of personal integrity. “That’s just our lifestyle. It’s just who we are,” Marta Osbern says.
So when the Marta’s old car was about to die and they decided to buy a slightly used SUV, they didn’t think for an instant about credit. They just drove to Molle Chevrolet one February day in 2002, got a salesman’s attention and picked out a vehicle they liked. As they waited to complete the deal, the finance manager came in and delivered bad news: Their loan application had been denied. The manager was polite and showed them a copy of their credit report: late payment, late payment, late payment. Humiliated, the Osberns left the dealership in their old car. “I went home and started investigating,” Marta says.
The delinquent payments were all on ten houses they had purchased as investments through Brent Barber in July 2001.
By June 2002, the Osberns were five months behind on the house payments; they owed nearly $25,000. Letters arrived daily from their three mortgage companies, threatening to turn the loans over to collection agencies. Finally they did, and the Osberns’ phone started ringing a lot — often at 9 or 10 at night.
Because they believed they were owners in name only, the Osberns hadn’t gone to look at the homes they’d bought. But they soon wished they had. In July 2001, for example, the couple had purchased the house at 2521 Poplar for $55,000. The seller was National Foreclosure Properties. Yet six months before the purchase, the Kansas City Dangerous Buildings Division had filed a notarized document with Jackson County, declaring the house a “dangerous building and public nuisance” and slating it for demolition. The house was in danger of collapse. And even earlier, in September 2000, a city inspector had noted that the yard was full of debris and weeds, and the house, which apparently had burned, had suffered water damage to walls and floors. “Found large hole in roof on north side,” the inspector wrote. “Roof shingles are curling and pitted. All windows broken out and ceiling collapsing. Dead dog (large) on floor.”
Tom Osbern didn’t know this when he agreed to buy the property, and when he closed on the house, the lender — National City Mortgage Company, located near St. Louis — apparently didn’t discover the status of the property, something that would have been uncovered through a routine title check. “If you get a mortgage, 99 percent of the time, the bank that’s doing the loan will do a title search,” says Nathan Pare, the city’s Dangerous Buildings Division manager. “I would find it odd if a bank didn’t order a title check.”
Almost a year later, when the Osberns were desperately trying to sell their houses, their insurance agent went out to take snapshots of the house on Poplar for her records. After driving around the neighborhood, she called Marta and said, “I can’t find it. I drove to where it should be, but there’s no house there.” Confused, Marta checked the address and repeated it to the agent. “I know the address,” the agent said. “But I was just there, and I couldn’t find it. It’s gone.” The house had been demolished two weeks after the Osberns had bought it. Now they own a vacant lot that, according to Jackson County appraisal records, is worth $307.
That was just one of their fiascoes. One night the Osberns received a call from a tenant; the woman said a notice had arrived in the mail from Rycor Realty, a company located at 62nd and Oak that the Osberns and others had hired to manage their properties after Barber stopped collecting rents and making mortgage payments. The notice informed the tenant of the Osberns’ ownership and advised her to send future rent payments to Rycor. Rycor owner Brian Bucksner would winterize the houses and have the lawns mowed for property owners who could afford it, and he would try to “short sell” the houses — that is, negotiate with lenders to accept less than the mortgage amounts for the properties rather than foreclose.
But the caller was telling Marta that her own family had bought the home a year and a half earlier from Barber, through contract-for-deed, a mortgage-style arrangement in which a house is deeded to the occupant in exchange for monthly payments that include interest; a single late payment could nullify the contract. “So they’d been paying for a year and a half on this house they thought was theirs,” Marta recalls. “They said they had put a lot of their own money into fixing up the house, and they were not happy. They were so mad, they just quit making the payments altogether. I felt bad for them. I mean, they had been shammed, too.”
Several other tenants living in Barber investor properties, including another of the Coopers’ tenants, also had phony contract-for-deed agreements, Bucksner says. In some cases, titles were forged. “I’d have to meet with the occupants and explain to them they didn’t own the homes,” he says. “Most of them were in tears.”
Debra Lenoir, a 28-year-old single mother, had bad credit but wanted to own a home so that she and her two small children could move out of her mother’s house. When she heard Barber’s company could help people in her situation for just $1,000 down and $500 a month, she signed a contract-for-deed on a house at 2502 East 69th Street. She moved in and spent about $3,000 buying new curtains and carpet, fixing the garage door and buying a new toilet, a chandelier and two air-conditioning units. Then, she says, she got a notice from Rycor Realty, telling her she had thirty days to move out. Last summer she moved back in with her mother.
Lenoir is one of about thirty people who have filed complaints or inquiries about Barber with the Jackson County Counselor’s office in the past year. “We are not an investigative agency,” says Deputy County Counselor Bill Snyder, “but we’re keeping a folder of complaints and records in case the police or the FBI approach us about this.” His office handles legal matters related to county business, he says; the responsibility of pursuing Barber would lie with law enforcement agencies and the county prosecutor’s office.
One complaint in his files is from the Woodside Housing Resource Foundation, located in New York City, which accuses Barber of creating a fictional employee of the real estate company to falsify a deed transfer on a property. It also alleges that he forged a document to release himself from his obligation to pay court-ordered monetary damages to the company and that he fraudulently transferred 25 properties to National Foreclosure Properties, the company that owned the houses many of his investors bought. A Cass County lawsuit brought in 2001 by Woodside and another company, Pacific Carlton, alleges that Barber bought properties in the names of both companies at Jackson County tax-foreclosure auctions and that he had failed to repay $155,000 that he owed each company. The Missouri Court of Appeals, Western District recently upheld the county court’s decision in the companies’ favor.
Another complaint from an individual alleges that Barber forged the complainant’s dead father’s signature on a quit-claim deed so that Barber could deed the deceased’s property to National Foreclosure Properties and then take out a mortgage on it.
“I don’t know how he can be out there walking around. He’s still doing it,” says Conrad Miller, a lawyer in Olathe who represents a large group of Barber’s investors.
The Osberns had been thinking about filing for bankruptcy until they heard about Miller. Eventually there were so many people who wanted Miller’s help that he called a group meeting at a community center in March 2002. “There were about 25 people there, all screaming and hollering about Barber,” Miller recalls. “Pretty much everybody just wanted out.”
Dealing with his new financial troubles was making Tom Osbern a nervous wreck. He suffered from blinding headaches, and his doctor had diagnosed him with stress-induced migraines. “I got to the point where I couldn’t even go to the mailbox,” he says. “I didn’t want to answer the phone. In fact, I couldn’t even talk to [the bill collectors] anymore. I couldn’t sleep. I was sick to my stomach. All I was doing was worrying about what was going to happen to me — I mean, they’re talking about foreclosing on these homes. It was just driving me crazy.”
So last December, Tom and Marta Osbern sued Brent Barber, National Foreclosure Properties and all the lenders that had financed their homes: National City Mortgage, First Magnus Financial Corporation and Washington Mutual Home Loans. They’re not asking for any money — just that the Jackson County courts recognize that the homes were sold to them fraudulently and that they be placed in Barber’s name and removed from their credit report.
The Osberns’ lawsuit alleges that Barber lied about the properties and told the couple the houses had been assessed by a legitimate appraiser, that they were habitable and could be rented or would be renovated, that Barber would manage and rent the properties and make all mortgage and tax payments, and that he would sell the properties and grant 10 percent equity to them. Instead, the lawsuit alleges, he “converted the funds … to his own personal use.” The mortgage companies are also responsible, the lawsuit contends, because they did not “adequately underwrite the loans and verify the appraisal and other information” about the properties.
Two appraisers, Phillip D. Thomas of Thomas Appraisal Service and Mark S. Murphy of Murphy Appraisal Company, prepared fraudulent appraisals for Barber, the lawsuit alleges. (Thomas did not return phone calls; the Pitch was unable to find business or residential phone listings for Murphy.) According to Jackson County land records, Brent Barber deeded an expensive Lee’s Summit home in Jacomo Ridge Estates to appraiser Thomas in January 2001. On the deed transfer documents, Barber listed himself as a “trustee of the Richard Gill Trust.” As a result, Richard Gill is suing Barber in Jackson County Court.
“There is no Richard Gill Trust,” says Gill’s lawyer, Peter Smith. “This is fraud with a capital F.” Smith says Gill and his wife were planning to sell their house because they were having trouble making payments on it, and Barber agreed to buy it but never closed the sale. “He was just stringing them along,” Smith says. The Gills’ lender ultimately foreclosed on the house, and Barber bought it from the lender and deeded it to Thomas, who took out a $1.2 million mortgage on the property, according to county records. Gill’s is just one of thirty Jackson County lawsuits on file. In Cass County, Barber has six lawsuits against him and almost $1.9 million in unpaid judgments.
Miller says that small groups of people who knew one another became investors in Barber’s schemes. “One guy got his mother-in-law involved,” Miller says. “Imagine that.” Miller believes more than 100 people in the Kansas City metro area have invested in Barber homes.
“Just when you think it can’t get any worse, you turn around and it’s worse,” says Miller, who has been investigating the scheme and talking with investigators from Ameriquest and Freddie Mac, a secondary mortgage company that buys up “packages” of loans from banks and other primary lenders.
Miller says Barber had unimaginable gall: He not only obtained loans fraudulently but also would take a house he had sold to one investor and “flip it” — sell it to another buyer. Barber sold one of Miller’s clients, Harlan Murray, a house at 503 North 29th Street, in Kansas City, Kansas. Then Barber, who said he was renting out the property for Murray, allegedly got a Pinnacle Title employee to write up a new title that didn’t reflect the previous sale of the property. Barber obtained a new loan on the house for Ruth Rucker, a mentally disabled woman who cannot read or write. She is now suing Barber, his associate Ron Dotson, as well as Murray, Pinnacle Title and appraiser Peggy Ries in Wyandotte County Court.
Rucker claims that she agreed in 1999 to buy a house from Ron Dotson, Barber’s associate, for $3,000. She gave Dotson $1,500 cash. A few days later, he knocked on her door and told her he couldn’t sell her the house immediately because it needed major repairs and had been condemned by the city — a lie, according to her lawsuit. Dotson, allegedly passing himself off as an Ameriquest employee, persuaded Rucker to sign a contract for a $48,000 mortgage, which he said included the renovation. (Ries’ company, Appraisals by Peggy, allegedly had appraised the house at $60,000 — far more than its actual value.) Rucker’s attorneys claim that “Dotson failed to make any repairs, and further, refused to respond to inquiries from Ms. Rucker.”
Miller maintains that his client Murray — whom Rucker is suing — is as much a victim as Rucker. “Barber walks away with 70 grand and there are forged deeds and forged title work, and [Rucker is] suing my client for defrauding [her],” Miller says.
Another Barber investor, Miller says, is a 67-year-old retired Lucent employee who makes $3,000 a month between Social Security and carpet-cleaning jobs. He’d obtained a mortgage in 2001 on a house next to Barber’s in Loch Lloyd, with a payment equal to his monthly salary. Miller believes that Barber created phony W-2 forms showing a higher income for the man. Barber told the investor that the rent money would cover the mortgage payment. But no tenant moved in, and the mortgage company foreclosed on the house. “His credit is ruined, his savings are gone,” Miller says of that client. “He’s just a nice guy, very simple. He had no idea about real estate.”
Yet another client, Randy Shaw, a 45-year-old door-to-door salesman from rural Cass County who did not want his real name used for this story, discovered that Barber’s mother was living in a house Shaw had bought in Raymore.
One day, Brian Bucksner from Rycor called the person living at 1013 Brookside, a ranch-style house worth $120,000, to tell the tenant to pay rent to Rycor. The elderly woman who answered the phone told Bucksner to talk to her son — Barber.
“I called Barber up and said, ‘You need to pay rent, or I’m going to evict your mother,'” Bucksner says.
Shaw was not paying on the mortgage, and the bank was about to foreclose on the house when Bucksner persuaded Barber to give him $6,200 to get the payments caught up. After that, Bucksner says, Barber apparently called the lender, said he was Randy Shaw and made payment arrangements with them.
Shaw can’t sell the house because Barber’s mom won’t give him access to it. “She turned off her answering machine and stopped answering her phone.”
It’s been exactly a year since the Coopers discovered they were tangled in a bad deal. In the past month, they’ve been able to relax a little; they narrowly averted having to file for bankruptcy. “The months we spent thinking they were going to come after everything we had, that was nerve-racking,” Sue says. First she tried to find investors who would purchase their homes as a package deal. But one investor’s offer was too low, and another backed out at the last minute.
After telling her story to what seemed like scores of people, Sue finally found a sympathetic Ameriquest employee who helped her persuade a lender to accept the deeds to the properties rather than foreclose. But another lender foreclosed on the remaining two properties, so the Coopers’ credit is badly blemished.
Moore still has all four of his properties. He is relying on Bucksner to sell them and negotiate with the mortgage companies. If he’s successful, his credit will show that the bank did not receive the full amount for the properties, which looks bad — but not as bad as a bankruptcy.
And the Osberns are hoping their lawsuit will prove they were defrauded and that their properties will revert to Barber’s name and be removed from their credit history. “To him, it may not be a big deal,” Tom Osbern says. “But to the people affected, it’s a big deal. He’s ruined people’s lives.”
So far, investigators seem not to have caught up with Barber. The Internal Revenue Service has interviewed a few of Miller’s clients, and one was contacted by the FBI. The Missouri Attorney General’s Office is investigating a complaint it received about Barber in May 2002.
But Barber is still in business.
