| Fear & foreclosure in Las Vegas |
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Page 6 of 7 Rojas says she wishes she’d never heard of the company. About four years ago, she and her boyfriend, Peter Altmann, wanted to look at a house in their neighborhood that was for sale. They called the listing agent: Eve Mazzarella. They passed on that deal and instead bought another from her, and a rental property.Rojas, then a manager at a supermarket, was so impressed by Eve that she applied for a job at Distinctive. Mazzarella hired Rojas as a receptionist for $12 an hour on June 7, 2005. Most days brought a steady stream of calls from “investors.” No one was to talk with the investors except Mazzarella and Grimm, Rojas says. Mazzarella was adamant about that. One day, Mazzarella asked Rojas, by then an agent at the company, about her credit score. It was high. Mazzarella asked if she wanted to be an investor and earn $5,000 for putting her name on mortgage documents. Rojas agreed. Mazzarella asked her to sign a blank application. Mazzarella said she would do the rest. “I was thinking, ‘Yes! I hate filling out this crap,’” Rojas says. In October 2007, Rojas purchased three houses for $1.5 million, transferring each to Crojas LLC. The entity listed Grimm as registered agent, according to Nevada records. Altmann bought three houses, too. One was used in the Martin Scorsese film Casino as the home of Nicky Santoro, who was played by Joe Pesci. “She had to have it,” Rojas says. Other employees became investors. Chad Loucel, now 26, had just recovered from Hodgkin’s disease and had been working at a carwash when he joined Distinctive, also as a receptionist. They offered him $2,500 to be the straw purchaser of houses selling for less than $300,000 and $5,000 for those selling for more, he says. He needed the money; he had not been insured initially for the cancer treatments and owed thousands of dollars in medical bills. After a bone-marrow transplant from his brother, Loucel developed graft-versus-host disease, which keeps him in pain despite heavy doses of steroids. Loucel says he bought four houses in December 2006. Mazzarella and Grimm found renters for each of the houses and covered the mortgages for him. “We all had it in our minds that we would be successful,” Loucel says. The idea didn’t last long. In mid-2007, Mazzarella and Grimm told Loucel they weren’t going to pay the mortgages on his houses any more. The market was heading south, and rents weren’t covering the mortgages, Mazzarella said. “She said we were throwing good money after bad,” Loucel says. Mazzarella and Grimm suggested he declare bankruptcy. Rojas and Altmann got the same treatment. She started getting default notices and calls from lenders as late as 3 a.m., she says. In the midst of it all, Mazzarella drove up to the office in her brand-new Mercedes. “She quit paying everyone’s mortgages in the office, and she drives up with a brand-spanking-new SUV,” Rojas says. “She’s a piece of work.” Rojas and Altmann, now her fiancé, finally filed for bankruptcy, and the calls and letters stopped. She says she has since seen the loan applications Mazzarella filed in her name. One claimed Rojas made $10,000 a month. “I didn’t even make $10,000 every three months,” she says. Loucel’s applications said he made $80,000 a year. One of his mortgages charged him 14-percent interest, he says. Loucel left Distinctive in late 2007. Rojas stayed on and passed information to the FBI, which was investigating. Grimm and Mazzarella found a more vocal adversary in Helena Garcia, a real-estate agent and founder of Latinos en Accion, an advocacy group for Hispanics. She took up the cause of Eduardo Gonzalez, a 36-year-old father of seven who says he bought a house from Grimm in 2006 for $480,000, putting down $100,000. Grimm said he owned the house outright, so Gonzalez could just send him $1,850 a month. Yet when his wife went to the water company to switch the billing to her name, they told her that the house was owned by Agripina Davenport, who turned out to be a Grimm straw buyer. Like Hayward, Gonzalez was faced with buying a house he thought he owned already. With help from Garcia, he negotiated a deal with the bank to buy it for $280,000. Garcia filed complaints against Mazzarella with the Greater Las Vegas Association of Realtors and the state real-estate regulator. She also taunted Mazzarella with e-mails calling her a “scumbag.” |
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