I noticed that the OC Register has made available a brief video segment from CNBC's House of Cards. It concerns Orange County, the "birthplace of the sub-prime mortgage."In the video, with the help of a Register reporter, we're introduced to one Daniel Sadek, a guy with a 3rd-grade education, who owned Quick Loan Funding, a seriously sleazy operation that specialized in giving loans to people who shouldn't get loans.
Click here to see the video. (You'll have to endure 15 seconds of a commercial first.)
Here's a recent (January) OC Register article about Sadek: How Citi bailed out an O.C. subprime lender:
..."There's a big irony, when thousands of people are struggling to get affordable loan modification offers from servicers that aren't responsive, that someone who has perpetrated harm would get a loan modification," said Paul Leonard, of the Center for Responsible Lending. "It's incredible."
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Quick Loan Funding, which Sadek founded in 2002, wrote about $4 billion in subprime mortgages before it collapsed in 2007. Sadek made, and eventually lost, a fortune through Quick Loan. He bought a Newport Coast mansion, a fleet of exotic cars and a condo in Las Vegas where he became a high roller at the blackjack tables.
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In May 2007, The Orange County Register reported that Sadek took out a $1 million marker from the account of his escrow company, Platinum Escrow, to gamble in Las Vegas.
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"The Feds just worried that [Citi is] so big, so interconnected with the rest of the financial industry, that they can't let it fail," said Kurt Eggert, a Chapman University law professor and former advisor to the Federal Reserve Bank.
"It's poetic justice that Citi was in bed with this guy [Sadek] and they're stuck with him," Eggert said. "But why is it so hard for regular Joes to get loan mods when this guy, who seems like a terrible loan risk, can do it?" ....
Sadek made a film starring his girlfriend. It was called Redline. I think he spent his—or somebody else's—last dime on it. It stunk and tanked, losing tens of millions.
