Matthew Cox: preference

Transcript context

…This kid’s got something. I was driving a new … I just pulled in in a new car and I just bought a house that was four or five blocks away from his house, from where I grew up, from where he lived at that time, six blocks away from where my sister’s married to her lawyer husband. I’m doing pretty good. And then, within three months, my new wife, we buy a quadplex, and then we’re buying a triplex and another quadplex and a 10 unit and a duplex and another duplex and a quadplex. And it’s like what the hell’s going on? This guy is blowing up. He’s going on vacation here and vacation here. So when the FBI comes in and they indict me, and I take the three years’ probation, probably the worst thing in the world other than going to prison would’ve been just having to just sell everything and go move in and start over and sell used cars. Not that there’s anything wrong with selling used cars, but I just felt like I just didn’t want to disappoint him any more than I already had. So I thought, “I’m going to flip houses and then I’ll start maybe a development company. So I’ll buy some vacant lots and all this and that.” The problem is these houses I’m buying for 50,000, if I fix them up and sell them, maybe I make $20,000, $25,000. And then you got to find a qualified borrower. It’s very hard to find a qualified borrower that wants to live in Ybor City back then. I still think it’s rough but those same houses are going for three and 400,000. So I’m buying houses. I got to get qualified borrowers. I do all the renovations. It’s a nightmare. Looking back, it’s like, “Well, then you got to bite the bullet. It’s just what you have to do.” I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want to do it. Whether it was laziness or, I don’t know, I just thought, “I’m good at this. I’m going to run. I’m just going to start running a scam. I’m going to figure out how to drive the prices up, buy the houses for 50, record them at 200,000, and then have these synthetic identities, buy all the properties, refinance them, pull out the cash, make six months’ worth of payments, let them all go into foreclosure.” And that really, really started working well, very well. I had one time where I had a guy, it was James Red, the synthetic identity was James Red and he had bought two or three houses, and there was somebody at the office who was friends of somebody who knew the title company where we were closing the loans, and he called her, her name was Mary, and said, “Mary, this guy, James Red, like Cox is doing something shady. James Red doesn’t even exist.” She goes and looks at her last couple files and she realizes, of course obviously, this guy never showed up. She remembers Cox picked up the files, and he’s saying he doesn’t exist. So she freaks out. She calls the mortgage broker. Mortgage broker calls me, mortgage broker calls me up and says, “Listen, Mary said she’s not closing the next loan unless James Red shows up.” And I went, “Wow, that’s a tough one.” e mortgage broker. Mortgage broker calls me, mortgage broker calls me up and says, “Listen, Mary said she’s not closing the next loan unless James Red shows up.” And I went, “Wow, that’s a tough one.” And she’s like, “Okay, so what do you want to do? Do you want to go to another title company?” We’re supposed to close in three days, two, three days. I said, “Well, I mean he’s going to have to show up then. I’ll figure it out. Give me a couple of days. Let me figure this out.” And she’s like, “Okay, well, I don’t know how that’s going to happen. He didn’t exist.” Keep in mind at this point I don’t need IDs. I don’t need a real ID. I figured out how to make a real ID. I could make one. I could take sandpaper and sand off the information on a regular ID, and then I would print the corrected information in reverse on a piece of transparency, and I would glue it over there and you could still see the holograms and stuff. It actually worked pretty good. It’s not going to pass mustard with a cop but somebody at the bank like I was able to go in and I would open a bank account with it. Well, so one of the things I had done when I was closing these loans was I would go online and you have to pick a photo of somebody to put on the driver’s license. So I’m not making a fake ID for all these guys because I don’t need a fake ID for all these guys, not with my picture on it, but I need a copy of an ID, but I need a picture. Where do I get the picture? So I go to Hillsborough County’s arrest website, and I would find people that I knew that had been arrested. So I found a guy named Eric Tamargo who had been arrested. He had, I don’t know what it was, a DUI or domestic violence. I forget what it was but there was a picture of him. So I print out the picture, I cut it up, I paste it onto a driver’s license, and I make a copy of it for James Red. That’s what I’ve been giving the title people. When I would close, I’d sign all the documents and I’d leave them that copy so that it looked like they made a copy of it. And then they would notarize all the documents, even though they’d never seen this person. They have a copy of his driver’s license. Everything’s signed. Cox said he signed it. It’s good, notarized. Here’s your check. So what I do is I think let me see if I can get Eric to do this. I knew he’d been to prison before, so I call up Eric and I remember one of my buddies like, “He’s never going to do this.” And I was like, “I think he will. I think he will.” And that’s really that kind of like, “You think? What do you think? No.” “Let me try. Let me call him.” “I don’t know, bro.” That’s the kind of conversations you’re having but really, looking back-…

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