The Smiths Get Their Dream House

Back in the ‘70s I had a friend who liked to claim that Los Angeles’ history was nothing more than a collection of real estate stories. Understand the real estate stories, he would say, and you will understand L.A.

Of course, the stories change with each era. We all know the boom stories from the ‘70s and ‘80s--and we know the bust stories of the ‘90s.

But there’s a sub-story of the ‘90s that hasn’t gotten as much attention. Its elements are vaporous and elusive, yet somehow it fits the city perfectly. Maybe my friend was right.

This story flows out of the recession when houses fell into foreclosure like sick beasts. One morning you got up and saw that the neighbors across the street had left in the night. Their house had caught the disease.

In Jan Barnow’s case, a foreclosure house appeared in her neighborhood sometime in 1995. It was the beginning of her sad tale.

*

Barnow’s street curls through the hills of Studio City. During the ‘80s boom, people lined up with satchels full of cash to buy houses like hers. Now, just across the street, a house went begging.

Soon the predictable happened. Squatters--or apparent squatters--crept into the house and began living there. They played loud music at all hours and generally terrorized the neighborhood.

Barnow is hardly a rube in these matters. She’s a real estate agent and knew how to put the kabosh on the squatters. She did, and soon they were escorted away.

But, as I say, it was only the beginning. A few months later Barnow noticed that her property tax bill had not arrived. She called the assessor’s office and ordered up a duplicate copy.

The duplicate never arrived. Now suspicious, Barnow asked a friend in the escrow business to make an inquiry. The news was not good.

“He called back and said, ‘Well, someone has transferred the grant deed on your house.’ ” Barnow says.

The someones were Melvin, Mary and Barbara Smith. At least, those names appeared on the new grant deed. As far as the county was concerned, they now owned the house, not Barnow.

How had they done it? Easy, it turns out. The “Smiths” had simply walked into the county recorder-registrar’s office with a new grant deed containing Barnow’s signature--forged, of course--their own signatures and a fraudulent notary seal.

Barnow actually stared at this amazing document a few days later at the recorder-registrar’s office. It was incredible, unbelievable, how easily someone had turned her life upside down.

Then something clicked in her brain. It had turned out that the squatters at the foreclosure house had actually leased the house from people posing as the owners. The poseurs had given their names as “the Smiths.”

The same Smiths? Perhaps. But why would they try to pull off a paper theft of her house?

“It struck me that they had meant to transfer the grant deed on the foreclosure property and simply gotten the addresses mixed up,” Barnow says. “They made a stupid mistake and got mine instead.”

*

In effect, Barnow’s house had turned into real estate road kill of the Los Angeles recession. And though she was neither the first nor the last target of this con--other cases have gone back to the early ‘90s at least--the outcome for Barnow would be the same.

Which is to say, nightmare. You might think Barnow could have marched into the recorder-registrar’s office with a basketload of documentation and simply reversed the false claim on her property.

But no. Neither the recorder-registrar nor the assessor’s office nor the Department of Real Estate would take corrective action against the false claim.

They wouldn’t because they couldn’t. “The truth is, no agency is responsible for determining who owns real estate,” says Timothy Bissell of the county’s Real Estate Fraud Office. “The only way to do it easily is catch the crooks and get them to reverse what they did.”

But thus far the “Smiths” have not turned up. The police tracked them back to a location on La Brea and then lost the trail.

Barnow hunted down the notary whose seal was used. He submitted to a lie detector test at Parker Center and promptly failed it. But that failure, by itself, has not provoked an arrest.

And so it goes. Barnow must now hire a lawyer and go to court to win back her house. The process will take months to complete and consume thousands of dollars in legal expenses.

In the end, Barnow likely will never know for certain why someone decided to steal her house. But every few days she gets a chance to wonder when she goes to her mailbox and finds mail--junk mail--addressed to the Smiths.

They are, after all, the owners of record.