There was another guy, he lied on his application about the fact that he’d been in prison for strangling his wife and throwing her in Tampa Bay. And they found out about it, but by the time they’d found out about it it was a day late, so they’re “eh, what’re you gonna do?”

TA: One thing I like was you continued to pull the thread. You started with the background checks and did some reporting and got this Almeida guy. And then recently you’ve followed him up the chain to Orson Benn (the lender, who worked for Argent Mortgage, a subprime shop bought by Citigroup last year).

JD: That was always my intention from the start—the mortgage brokers, it’s kind of retail.

Everybody knew there were some crooked brokers out there. I wanted to go up the food chain, and the first step was the regulators. I’ve never seen an agency so disorganized and just not prepared to do its job. But also, the fact of the matter was, in order for the brokers to get away with just blatantly forging documents, there had to be a banker willing to accept those and Orson Benn was just wonderful [for these guys].

He was an aggressive young guy with no real banking education who just saw if you don’t scrutinize the income statements and don’t really care that the credit report looks like it’s been cut and pasted, you can make a lot of money. And they just went wild.

TA: Who was funding him? Was he securitizing those things to Wall Street?

JD: Absolutely. In one of his statements to police they touched on it really briefly. He said when the guys from Wall Street came in to buy groups of mortgages that they would then go off and bundle, he said they actually had to pay more if they wanted to scrutinize them first. And very few people did. There was absolutely no culture of checking at Argent, the lender he worked for, which became the biggest subprime lender in the country for awhile.

TA: My operating assumption is that Wall Street saw they could package these things and make tons of fees off them and kept this meat grinder going and put pressure on down the chain. The mortgage brokers are the little guys, sort of like your…

JD: Street-level dealers

TA: …right. Street-level dealers compared to your don up on Wall Street. Is that what you saw after looking at this for a year and a half?

JD: Yeah. It absolutely is. I know from interviews all up and down the chain of the industry. The sense that I got down here was that Countrywide and IndyMac—if Countrywide was willing to accept, say, a 600 credit score, two weeks later IndyMac would come back and say 580.

It was a race to the bottom and it didn’t really matter to them because, it’s a sort of tired tale, but in our parents’ generation, they went to the bank and the guy sitting across the office from them had to decide whether they could pay him back. If they didn’t he lost money. Now one of the great pieces of “progress” of the financial revolution of this decade was that just inherent common-sense checks and balances was just gone completely.

You can’t even find your mortgage. Nobody knows who has it anymore.

TA: We keep hearing about the cuts, and newspapers are in terrible shape, but stories like this show that the metro papers still have some scrap in them. How was it doing this with the level of resources you have versus what you were used to earlier in your career?

JD: It’s not like my editors ever said “Don’t do that it’s too expensive.” But you do a lot of self-editing. When I was at the Hartford Courant, which is not the biggest circulation paper in the country. I was doing a story about the medical schools which produce the doctors who get disciplined most frequently. They flew me to Guadalajara, Mexico, for two weeks. St. Lucia for two weeks. I wouldn’t dream of asking for that now.

TA: Do you think this went on in other states? Have other reporters talked to you? Maybe other states didn’t have a regulator as asleep at the switch as Florida…

JD: I’ll bet they were pretty drowsy.

TA: But have you heard of any other reporting on this line?

JD: I haven’t. There are the obvious daily stories of “There’s been a $10 million mortgage fraud case, or a $20 million case”. If you search those there ‘s an endless supply of them, but I didn’t see anybody else do what we did, and I’m absolutely certain they could have.

TA: I like the matter-of-fact tone in this series. You guys called a spade a spade when you found wrongdoing or gross negligence. I think this is part of what’s been wrong with newspapers in years past, was that when they found stuff they too often made their readers read between the lines.

JD: We’ve all been beat reporters and done dailies, and you don’t know the answers often. You’ve got what this guy said and what that guy said and you’ve got to try to balance it. If you spend eight months and looked at 200,000 criminal backgrounds, by the end of it you know the answer. You’ve presented your findings to everybody who’s gonna get named and had long, sometimes contentious interviews with them.

My editor is a guy named Mike Sallah. I’m a much more flowery writer than he is, and he just said “No. Just tell it.” Like a sledgehammer. And we fought over that a lot, but I think he was right.

TA: Are you still working on this? Is there a lot more out there?