| Fear & foreclosure in Las Vegas |
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Page 1 of 7 Bloomberg Specials Written by Anthony Effinger / Bloomberg News Tuesday, 18 November 2008 22:48 Eve Mazzarella was a Las Vegas success story. The high-school dropout and former housemaid moved to the Nevada city in 2000 from Seattle, got a certificate from the ABC Real Estate School and started selling houses in what would become the hottest market in the country. In 2006, Mazzarella recorded sales of $13.8 million and made the National Association of Realtors’ “30 Under 30” list, which names the best young agents in the nation. Mazzarella started her own company, Distinctive Real Estate & Investments Inc., in December 2003. She whipped around town in a Mercedes-Benz sport utility vehicle. She planned to build a three-story office building in Vegas’s shabby downtown north of the Strip and preserve a historic house on the site by lifting it onto the roof. Her competitors were impressed. “She was an up and comer with a brilliant future,” says Forrest Barbee, a broker at Prudential Americana Group, a Las Vegas agency where Mazzarella once worked. The dream ended at about 5 a.m. on March 13, when federal agents smashed through the door of a stucco home on a quiet, grassy cul-de-sac looking for Mazzarella, 31, and her husband, Steven Grimm, 45, an erstwhile mortgage broker. The day before, the US Attorney for Nevada had indicted the couple on six counts of bank fraud, later revised to 13. Prosecutors say the pair recruited fake—or “straw”—buyers to apply for loans to purchase 227 properties worth $107 million. They told the straw buyers they would pay the mortgages. Then they skimmed thousands of dollars from each of more than 432 transactions, the indictment says, stashing the cash in 80 bank accounts. |
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