The real crime of Whitewater
Crime/Corruption News
Source: "Partners in Power"
Published: Copyright 1996 Author: Roger Morris
Posted on 06/24/1999 17:47:19 PDT by Lizzie
Behind the Whitewater advertising lure was the fine print of a harshly punitive real estate contract. If the elderly buyers defaulted on their monthly installments for more than thirty days they found that all their previous payments were classified merely as "rent" and that they had no equity in the land at all, regardless of how much they had put down or paid in. The results could be devastating. Clyde Soapes, a grain-elevator operator from Texas, put $3,000 down and faithfully made thirty-five monthly payments of $244.69 to the Clintons and McDougals, altogether just short of the $14.000 price of the lot. When he fell desperately ill in 1987, however, he could no longer make his payments and quickly lost the land and all his previous investment. Soapes was a typical case. More than half those who bought Whitewater lots from the future president, his wife and their extravagant partners would lose their land and all their equity payments. Partial records showed at least sixteen different buyers paying in more than $50,000 and never receiving property deeds. Meanwhile Whitewater carried on a flourishing traffic in repossessions and resales, selling some lots over and over when aged buyers faltered or when someone else simply came along and unilaterally bought out the purchasers and took the land by completing the payments. Typically, Clyde Soapes's planned fishing retreat was resold to a couple from Nevada for $16,500, then taken back again after only a few payments, and resold to yet other buyers - all for the same middling but pitiless profit wrung from the struggling and the old. "That is clearly not a very consumer-oriented method of selling at all," an American Bar Association real estate expert would say. Others were less delicate. "They screwed people left and right," said a local businessman who watched the sales. "Taking advantage of a bunch of poor old folks on a land deal…The future President and First Lady. That ought to be the real Whitewater scandal." freerepublic.com |
