Callahan’s Cleveland Diary

It turns out that the gas explosion that levelled 2022 West 83rd St. this afternoon, ripping through the surrounding neighborhood and leaving dozens homeless, is part of a whole other story.

Waaaay down at the bottom of the Plain Dealer’s online  article about the tragedy we find this:

James and Irene Garman sold the home in December 2008 for $13,500 to EZ Access Funding LLC,  according to Cuyahoga County Auditor records.

That’s EZ Access Funding LLC of Newport Beach, California.  3920 Birch Street, Suite 105, Newport Beach 92660, to be precise.  The same address as the Marc R. Tow Law Offices. And the Preferred Equity Group, LLC.  And Preferred Default Management, Inc.  And Orpheus Capital, LLC.  And the Diamond Housing Group, LLC.   And (get ready for this) the USA Wealth Institute, LLC.

All of these organizations have at least two things in common, according to the California Secretary of State:  They’re all located in Suite 102, 104 or 105 of 3920 Birch Street, and they all have Marc R. Tow listed as their agent.

Elsewhere, we find that Mr. Tow is a cofounder of the USA Wealth Institute with a gentleman named Michael Alexander… not to mention the president of Preferred Default Management and manager of Orpheus.  And here we find a CNN video clip of Mr. Alexander, identified as the president of EZ Access, discussing how and why that company has bought up 250 foreclosed houses in Detroit.   I ran across that link via the Preferred Equity Group website,  which seems to be peddling a few of those Detroit houses and also features this helpful “executive summary” of the business relationships among the USA Wealth Institute, Preferred Equity and Diamond Housing — all for the benefit of potential investors in Diamond, whose money is to be managed by Preferred Equity (Mr. Tow) to buy foreclosed houses identified by USA Wealth (Mr. Alexander).

Apparently not all of Mr. Tow and Mr. Alexander’s previous investors have found their investments satisfying. This guy isn’t too happy either. (In fact, just google “marc tow scam” and see what pops up.)

But, well, you get the idea.

Luckily, Tow and Alexander don’t own 250 properties here — just 88 in Cleveland and another 4 in East Cleveland and Garfield Heights.

Unluckily, one of them is (was) 2022 West 83rd Street.

I wonder whether anyone has called Marc Tow at his law office (949-975-0544) or the EZ Access office (949-419-9093) or the Preferred Equity office (949-379-2758) to find out what he intends to do about it.

Update 2/1: WCPN talks to an EZ Access investor and to Housing Court Judge Pianka.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 26th, 2010 at 2:17 am and is filed under Foreclosure crisis, Poor Cleveland, Shrinking city. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.