CHAPTER 6
“WE’RE GONNA DRIVE YOUR DAMN COMPANY INTO THE ATLANTIC OCEAN”
In late 1998, a Durham school bus driver named Freddie Rogers came to a Self-Help credit union to inquire about its new “fix-it” loan. The loan’s stated purpose was to help homeowners repair or improve their homes. Rogers’s home had drainage problems, which had led to a flooded basement and mold so bad that he and his daughter couldn’t live there.
Lanier Blum, the Self-Help employee who met with Rogers, learned that Rogers had a mortgage with Associates First Capital, a Texas-based lender that at the time was a subsidiary of Ford Motor Company. Blum called Associates to find out how much Rogers owed. The lender’s phone operators were evasive, and so she called over and over—“We ...
Get Infiltrated: How to Stop the Insiders and Activists Who Are Exploiting the Financial Crisis to Control Our Lives and Our Fortunes now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
