Word: loaning
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...months, the Bush Administration has viewed the savings and loan crisis much as a fire hydrant regards an approaching dog. White House officials generally dismissed signs that the cost of the bailout was steadily rising. Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady contended last October that the $50 billion to be borrowed under Bush's S&L bailout plan would be plenty to do the job. "I know of nothing that would change my view," he said. Even as Treasury officials and banking regulators bickered over the need for more money, Bush aides downplayed the mess. "It's just not on our scope...
Crooked savings-and-loan executives are not the only ones running off with loot these days. Old-fashioned stickup men are doing pretty well too. Bank robberies in the U.S., which declined during the first half of the 1980s, increased to 6,691 last year, a 23% rise from 1985. Unfortunately, crime often pays. Of $50 million taken from banks last year, only 20% has been recovered. The most common technique is the tried-and-true "note job," in which a robber simply hands a threatening note to the teller...
...question produced by the rampant fraud that has wiped out hundreds of banks and thrifts in recent years. But Edmund Pankau, a Houston private eye, knows how to find the booty. Case in point: last fall a real estate developer who was two years delinquent on a $2 million loan suddenly showed up at his Houston bank and offered to settle for $200,000. Bank officers wondered whether he might be harboring far more cash. They called in Pankau, who combed public records and found that the developer had come into a big inheritance. When confronted, the businessman agreed...
Investigators like Pankau are playing a growing role in helping sort out the savings and loan mess, a debacle that could cost more than $300 billion over the next three decades. According to top federal regulators, fraud was responsible for as much as 60% of all S&L failures in 1989. By hiring investigators to pick up the paper trail where overburdened prosecutors have left off, the new buyers of old thrifts can often recover a hefty share of the loot. "There's a real demand for specialists who can read between the lines," says Joseph Wells, chairman...
Some delinquent borrowers have tried to seek refuge behind Texas' homestead law, which shelters a debtor's home from hungry creditors. But Pankau nailed one scamp after he used proceeds from a commercial loan to hide $1 million in a River Oaks mansion. "If it's out there, we're going to find it," he insists. "The money all went into somebody's hands. It didn't go up in smoke...