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By Jason Graziadei
I&M Staff Writer
 For a small-town lawyer
on Nantucket, where most attorneys focus on real-estate closings, Jamie Ranney
is something of an oddity. What began with Ranney taking the foreclosure-eviction case
of an elderly island couple in 2009 has evolved into a personal crusade against the nation’s
biggest banks.
“I think it is personal to me in lots of ways,” Ranney said. “I
have a certain type of moral compass about the type of behavior the banks have engaged
in with borrowers, and I have seen what I call the ‘Parade of Horribles’ that
has been visited upon borrowers who are in default . . . I feel very strongly
about the rule of law and that it’s not being followed and borrowers
have, wholesale, been excluded from the legal process and their day in court.”
For the past four years, Ranney has been playing David to
the Goliaths that are the big banks, thwarting dozens of foreclosures
on Nantucket, securing loan modifications or settlements for his clients, and keeping
them in their homes.
Ranney has been going toe to toe with who he calls the “fancy
lawyers” working on behalf of the titans of the American financial
system. He forces them to prove that they own the mortgages they claim to, demands
that they produce authentic loan documents, countersues if they haven’t followed
the laws intended to protect homeowners in default, and is generally a massive thorn in
their sides.
And he doesn’t hide the fact that he relishes playing that
role.
“I’ve
never seen a single foreclosure
done in
accordance with the law.”
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“I sue banks,” Ranney said with a grin late last month, explaining
what he tells friends and family when they ask him what he’s been doing since he
transformed his law office in the wake of the last recession.
Sitting barefoot and in spandex bicycle-shorts in his modest
office on Thirty Acres Lane, he said confidently, “I’ve never seen
a single foreclosure done in accordance with the law.”
Proving that assertion in court has become Ranney’s obsession.
Since he took his first foreclosure-defense case in 2009,
Ranney claims to have amassed a portfolio of 180 clients, roughly half of them on Nantucket,
and taken on the likes of Bank of America, Citibank,
Wells Fargo, Chase and Deutsche Bank, to prevent people
from being evicted.
Dozens of Nantucket residents facing foreclosure are now
paying Ranney a relatively small monthly fee to fight their eviction instead of paying the
banks their monthly mortgage bill.
It could be the island restaurateur who fell on hard times
and lost his business, a Nantucket tradesman who fell behind on his mortgage payments
when construction work dried up, or the elderly couple saddled with an adjustable-rate mortgage
that is unaffordable on a fixed income. Ranney represents all comers.
“The common thread is that most people have tried to work
very hard with the banks to work out their loan issues, and almost universally, their attempts
have been rebuffed or negligently handled or completely ignored,” Ranney said.
“There’s been almost zero effort on the part of any of the
banks in any of these cases to actually make a business decision
about trying to keep someone in their home on a paying basis.”
Foreclosure defense has consumed his legal practice to the
point that he doesn’t handle criminal cases anymore, or just about any other type of legal
matter. He’s the only attorney on Nantucket who litigates foreclosure cases, and it’s
clearly become something more to him than just his day job.
“I’ve seen families broken up, people who’ve had drug and
alcohol issues arise, all from an inability to financially support
their families and keep a roof over their heads and I look in large measure at that situation
being caused by the banks, and it makes me angry,” Ranney said.
Ranney, a graduate of Vermont Law School who grew up
on Nantucket, balances his legal battles against the banks with a family life that includes
five young children, and his role as one of the organizers of a major summer event, the Nantucket
Triathlon. But get Ranney talking about foreclosures and banks, and he seethes with
anger.
From the robo-signing of millions of documents through
the law firms he calls “foreclosure mills,” to the failure to
properly notify homeowners facing eviction and the dizzying number of off-the-books mortgage
assignments among financial institutions, Ranney can quickly rattle off an oral dissertation
on what he believes to be fraudulent and illegal conduct by the banks.
“People need to forget about all the preconceived notions
they have about banks and how they do business because they need to understand that they’re
not any different than anyone else in business: they will cut corners, they will cheat, they
will lie, they will misrepresent, and they have,” he said.
But for Ranney, it goes beyond that. Over the past year,
he has brought the fight to the doorstep of the attorneys representing
the banks seeking to evict his clients, suing them personally for alleged violations
of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act or the Consumer Protection
Act.
“I’m suing them for being willfully blind to the nature of
the process they’re engaged in,” Ranney said. “If they’re on the
firing line, as my clients are, they might be more thoughtful about the types of cases
that they bring and not just pile unsupported documents into court
and assume the judge is going to grant them judgment, because if that’s one of my cases,
I’m coming for them.”
On a near weekly basis, Ranney is matching wits with attorneys
representing the major banks, filing motions for discovery, filing cross motions for
summary judgment, deposing bank executives, scouring loan documents for defects, or hiring
a forensic analyst to review mortgage notes.
Just last month he put a Nantucket Bank executive on
the witness stand during a foreclosure eviction case. Under cross examination, Zona Butler,
Nantucket Bank’s market CEO, invoked her Fifth Amendment right in response to one of Ranney’s
questions, briefly bringing the trial to a halt while the judge mulled how
the case should proceed. Ranney eventually secured a directed verdict
in favor of his clients, John and Kate O’Connor, the former owners
of the Atlantic Cafe on South Water Street. In one of his final cases on
the bench, Judge Joseph Macy ruled that Nantucket Bank had failed to
introduce evidence that a notice to vacate had been served, and that the bank had not complied
with the state’s foreclosure laws.
“When you plead the Fifth you’re worried you’re going to
incriminate yourself, and that was sort of gratifying to me because
I’d always operated under the assumption that bank employees lie, they don’t tell
the truth, they sign things that aren’t true and courts routinely
accept those things,” Ranney said.
Both Butler and Mary Ellen Higgins, the vice president of
public relations for Sovereign Bank, declined to comment
about the case.
The O’Connors will get to stay in their home a little
longer, or, perhaps, for good, if Nantucket Bank decides to settle
the case.
For Ranney, success isn’t necessarily measured in wins
and losses in the courtroom. Winning means keeping his clients in their homes for as
long as possible, forcing banks to negotiate a settlement or agree to a loan modification.
He boiled down a complex legal strategy into simple
terms.
“They’d like you to believe that it’s somehow incumbent
upon you as the homeowner or the defaulting borrower to feel shame and
embarrassment and you should just leave and let them have whatever it is
they’re asking for,” Ranney said. “I don’t do that with my clients.
I don’t do anything unless they (the banks) do something. I play
defense because that’s what I do, I’m in foreclosure defense. I
make them prove every single thing, and when I feel like I’ve been aggrieved by a court decision,
I appeal it. My goal is to defend my clients to the absolute last possible appeal in
every single case.”
One of those clients is Michael Sturgis, the former
owner of the Amelia Drive restaurant Cinco. After failing to reach an agreement on a loan
modification, Nantucket Bank foreclosed on both his commercial
property and his home on Flintlock Road in 2011, and sued Sturgis in federal court for
the deficiency on the loans, seeking more than $1.1 million.
Sturgis, a fixture of the island restaurant industry for
decades, hired Ranney after speaking with friends and acquaintances
in similar situations. In a counterclaim against Sovereign
Bank, the parent company of Nantucket Bank, Ranney compared the institution
to “schoolyard bullies and petty thugs,” and alleged that it had failed to comply with
notification requirements of the state’s foreclosure laws.
Even after a foreclosure auction in which the bank took possession
of his property in March 2011, Sturgis remains living at the home on Flintlock Road to
this day as the court process plays out.
“Jamie has been of great value to a lot of people in the
community who have been put in an uncomfortable position,”
Sturgis said. “All I’m trying to do is hopefully maintain control
of my house. I’m not trying to do anything more than restructure
what I have and what I owe the bank, that is fair and just.”
By definition, the clients Ranney is taking on are not
going to make him rich. They don’t have the money to pay thousands of dollars toward
their mortgage every month, but they might have enough to pay Ranney hundreds per
month to defend them in court – far below his hourly rate, but
enough to sustain his legal
practice.
If not jumping to join Ranney in the field of foreclosure
defense, other island attorneys have noted his work with both curiosity and respect.
“He’s identified and he’s exploring what I think is a very
important legal issue about how the banks handle paperwork, very important paperwork,
related to mortgages,” said attorney Michael Wilson. “I find it interesting that he’s
holding banks accountable to a level the banks hold customers to. And banks don’t like that.”
Like Wilson, attorney Steven Cohen has referred island residents
facing a foreclosure eviction to Ranney.
“If they say ‘I want to fight the banks,’ we say we know a
guy locally who does that,” Cohen said. “Jamie is engaging in some new areas of the law
and we’re all very interested to see what happens, and see how
to protect our clients and what mistakes were made that shouldn’t be repeated. It’s a new
area of the law.”
To
have them turn around and say, well
‘we’re not going to work
with you,’ the
very people who
supported them during
the financial
crisis, is particularly galling.”
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Ranney is well aware that his chosen field of practice has
its detractors, and the perception of what he’s doing in the eyes of homeowners who have
struggled and sacrificed to pay their mortgages while facing some of the same challenges
that his clients have.
Why should dozens of people get to stop paying their mortgages
yet still remain in their homes?
“I don’t have a single client that is asking for a free house.
They’re asking for a loan they can afford to pay,” Ranney said.
“The banks made those loans because they chose to. They
knew what the risks were when they made those loans to borrowers
that potentially couldn’t afford them. To blame the borrower for that, is like blaming
the crack addict when you should be blaming the guy who deals him the drugs.
“Another way to look at it is the banks, who precipitated the
financial crisis, were bailed out by the taxpayers,” he said. “We
saved them. They came to us and said we can’t pay our bills and we supported them. To
have them turn around and say, well ‘we’re not going to work
with you,’ the very people who supported them during the financial
crisis, is particularly galling.”
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