FEBRUARY 24-MARCH 2, 2011 | VOLUME 14 | NUMBER 17 BROWARDPALMBEACH.

COM I FREE
FBI PROBES POLITICAL INCEST. PAGE 8 SISTRUNKS SHY SOUL FOOD. PAGE 30
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Photo by Michael McElroy
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T
erry Smith gunned his late-model Chevy down the Ronald Reagan
Turnpike toward a house that wasnt his, racing to move his family and
all his possessions.
Minutes earlier, he had been driving a tractor-trailer in Fort Pierce
when he noticed four missed calls on his cell phone from his son Tavares. Terry
pulled over and called back.
Whats going on, son? he asked on the phone.
Dad, theyre kicking us out of the house, said 19-year-old Tavares.
What do you mean?
I mean theyre throwing us out, right now. Tavares handed the phone to a
sheriffs deputy, who confirmed the news from the doorstep of their home in
North Lauderdale.
Terry maneuvered a U-turn and headed back to the office. It was late morning
on January 12, and a chilly wind blew down the coast. I have to go, he told his boss.
Meanwhile, Terrys wife, Melesia Dubose, had been doing volunteer nurs-
ing work at Primenet Medical Center, where she used to work. At about 11:45, a
deputy told her over the phone that her familys eviction was to begin at noon.
She drove home wearing her patterned scrubs and met her father, who had been
on his way to a radiation appointment to treat his throat cancer. In a faltering
voice, he begged the sheriffs deputy to let the family have a few more hours to
move out. The deputy agreed, and said shed be back at 7 p.m.
Melesia explained to anyone who would listen that she and Terry didnt
think the eviction letters were meant for them, because they bore the names
of the previous owner. But the time for clarifications had passed. By 1:30, their
21-year-old son Jerome had rented an extra-large U-Haul truck and pulled it up
on the lawn. Melesia had imagined this day, this nightmare scene. She watched
her full-grown son haul a mattress just slightly larger than himself up a ramp,
into the truck. The family had been through this before, been told to leave their
previous home by another deputy with another piece of paper in his hands. This
time was supposed to be different.
While the boys moved the furniture out the front door, all she could do was wait
and think of her children: her two younger girls, ages 12 and 10, still in their school
uniforms; the boys who were dismantling the house in a hurry; her 24-year-old
daughter Martina who kept her company doing volunteer work at the hospital.
Jeromes 3-year-old daughter, Samairah, serenely pushed a toy stroller across
the doorstep. How could she explain this to the children?
There are good people and bad people, she told them that afternoon. Unfor-
tunately, when we paid money to move into this house, we gave it to a bad person.
By 2 p.m., the living room was nearly bare. A couple of pieces of fabric hung
over the wall where the TV cabinet used to be. Scraps of packing material and
splinters of furniture covered the floor. Inside the garage, Melesias son Tavares
pulled an electric drill down from a high shelf still cluttered with belongings.
He blamed all of this on a man named Mark Guerette.
Throughout his troubled life, Mark sold drugs and rip-off Corningware and
mortgages and credit scores, and finally the fantastical notion that empty houses
shouldnt be empty as long as there are people who need them. With a firm
handshake, a pious demeanor, and an official-looking lease, Mark had offered
Terry Smith a chance to make a home for his family. But in the course of a few
months, Marks plan had gone terribly wrong.
Hes a crook, said Tavares. And I hope I can tell him that to his face.
L
ike most salesmen, Mark Guerette has a story. The story he told about
his long and varied career was a story about finding God, in which Mark
censored the curse words he said as a teenager and broke into blue-collar
grammar only when recalling the most difficult parts of his past. Now
47, with a pale, youthful face and short brown hair, he spoke with a constant hint
of a smile, like a schoolboy whos done something bad and wants to be caught.
I tried taking my life for the first time at the age of 16, he said, because I
just couldnt take my parents anymore. In fact, they werent really his parents
at all, just some people who made him miserable. He said these people abused
him, screamed at him, and put duct tape all around his shoes when any other kid
in Nashua, New Hampshire, would have gotten a new pair.
After renouncing his adoptive parents care as well as their religion, Mark got
a job as a prep cook at the Chart House in Nashua and discovered the healing
trifecta of LSD, pot, and alcohol. His drug habits would follow him well into his
30s until he decided to give them up for God.
Mark Guerette matched needy families with
empty homes. And then he got caught.
By Stefan Kamph
>> p12
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As an adult, Mark was prone to less con-
ventional ways of making money: first dealing
drugs in Massachusetts in his 20s, then, going
door-to-door selling 30-piece sets of glass
cookware when his girlfriend, Angie, ended
up pregnant with their first daughter in 1990.
After the cookware company made some
bad investments, he and Angie packed up a
U-Haul van and drove to Florida. Ending up
in Hollywood, he took a string of odd jobs and
spent every night drinking a case of beers and
fishing on a catwalk over the Intracoastal.
Mark found a new accomplice one night
out on the docks. Mark said Terry Backs told
him they could make good money collecting
wooden shipping pallets and selling them back
to pallet yards for two or three bucks apiece.
Another friend, Willie Lofton, told them
about a place where there were hundreds of
pallets just waiting to be hauled away. One
night in April 1994, behind Central American
Produce in Pompano Beach, they backed their
truck up to the loading dock. On their second
trip around, they got busted by the cops and
arrested on charges of grand theft later re-
duced to petty theft. Broward County Circuit
Judge Bernard Bober sentenced Mark to com-
munity service and six months of probation.
I had to make a living for my
family, said Mark. If it hurt some-
one, I really didnt care.
The arrest record, the constant drinking,
and a stupid job making telemarketing calls
pushed him into a self-indulgent hole. Angie
moved out in 1996 and took their two young
children with her. Mark had drunk and fought
and sold his way into his mid-30s. He took a
bunch of pills in his squalid apartment on Young
Circle, closed his eyes, and waited for the end.
When he woke up under the harsh lights
of the inpatient ward, Mark says he de-
cided it was time to look for God. He said he
found Him a few weeks later at the altar of a
Spanish-language church in Hialeah, and it
felt like wind was blowing through his hair.
Now Mark needed a respectable job and a
good woman. He found both at the American
Express debt collection offices on Oakland
Park Boulevard. In 1997 he got a job making
calls there, and when one customer named
Marlene paid her bill, Mark called back and
asked her out on a date. They went to see Ti-
tanic. One-hundred-and-ninety-four minutes
later, they knew they would be together.
After he moved in with Marlene in Febru-
ary 1998, Mark set his sights on real estate. His
internet research led him to start a credit-im-
provement consulting service, and he worked
part-time from home until a friend with a
mortgage-lending business let him set up shop
at an empty desk. By 2004, Mark was ready to
open a mortgage business of his own in Coral
Springs, called Mortgages for America. Finally,
in 2006, Mark sent away for the Real Estate
Investors Success Packet from the website
cashflowinstitute.com. There, buried among
the lessons on refinancing and survey markers,
was a strange concept: adverse possession.
The law has been in the Florida statutes
since 1869, mixed up with other remnants
of frontier litigation that are mere trivia
in the modern world of subdivisions and
mortgage fraud. It says that if you take over
somebody elses land, let the county know,
and pay the taxes, its yours to keep after
seven years. If the rightful owner comes to
kick you off the property before the seven
years are up, youll be forced to leave.
In 2008, when Mark read about adverse
possession, the South Florida dream of acces-
sible luxury had ripened in the sun for half a
century. Almost overnight, South Florida was
filled with foreclosures and overbuilt, empty
developments. Mark realized there might
be a way he could put people in foreclosed
houses, sidestepping the banks, and it would
all be legal. He could even charge rent, and
make enough money to support himself,
Marlene, and their two children. He would
call the business Saving Florida Homes.
He remembered the doctrine of biblical
tithing: Ten percent of ones income should
go back to the Lord. Mark said he made a
promise: Lord, for every ten houses that I
get, Im going to take one house and give it to
someone you need to be there. He prayed.
Its one of the hardest things Ive done
in real estate, and the biggest part is, its
uncharted territory, he said later. Adverse
possession has been on the books since time,
but no one has looked at it the way I hap-
pened to look at it, and do with it what I did.
E
d and Shelly Nichols had nowhere to go.
They had three kids between
them, and Shelly was pregnant
with a new baby. Ed lost his job in
construction, and Shellys complicated preg-
nancy forced her to leave her job at Royal
Caribbean. With no other option but home-
lessness, the couple put their things in stor-
age and moved into their mothers houses.
The living arrangement, her hormones, and
his bruised ego threatened to split them for
good. Sometimes they would all pile onto the
couch at Eds moms house to watch cartoons
on the big TV, but they could never relax there.
One night during the week before
Thanksgiving in 2009, Ed and Shelly went
down the street to visit their friends, Fabian
Ferguson and Juslaine Charles. This couple
was also on the dark verge of homelessness:
They were being forced out of their home
at the end of the week. After talking with
Shelly, Juslaine called a pastor she had met
in church once, who said to call if she was
ever in financial trouble. Pastor Jerry said
he knew a man who might be able to help.
On Wednesday, Shelly got a phone call
from Mark, who said he could get her a house.
Not an apartment, not a duplex. A house,
for a price they could afford. On Friday, the
two young couples drove to meet him.
At a strip-mall office on Kimberly Boulevard
in North Lauderdale, they met Mark Guerette
and his business partner, a bald-headed,
olive-skinned man named Mark Laird. Come
on, Ill show you some houses, said Mark
Guerette. He got into his white Hummer and
they all followed him in Shellys truck, driv-
ing around North Lauderdale. They stopped
at a few houses. They stepped inside, walked
around on the carpeting, and heard their voices
echo in the hallways and bedrooms.
The Lord of Squat from p11 Top: An uncertain future faced Melesia
Dubose and her granddaughter, Samairah,
when they were evicted in January from
the house they rented from Mark Guerette.
Bottom: Fabian Ferguson mows the lawn
at his adversely possessed home on a
quiet street in North Lauderdale.
ere are good people and
bad people. Unfortunately,
when we paid money to move
into this house, we gave it
to a bad person.
Stefan Kamph
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Juslaine and Fabian got first choice, be-
cause they were the ones who had found Mark.
Then Shelly and Ed picked their house, a two-
bedroom on a quiet street just across from City
Hall. It had a big fenced yard in the back where
their dog could play. They followed Mark
back to his office, trying to contain their joy.
Mark explained that the houses were
foreclosures, owned by the banks. He said
he had teamed up with the city to let fami-
lies live in the houses. They would have to
agree to take care of them, mow the lawns,
and pay the utility bills and taxes. And if
anyone ever comes and says that theyre
the owner, he said, call me directly.
He handed them some leases to sign.
The rent was under $300 a month. There
was an addendum at the back of the lease,
and Mark explained that it said someone
from the banks might come to kick them
out. Call me, he repeated, and well just
move you right into another house.
It was almost too easy. But here was a
kind, earnest-sounding man, giving them an
affordable lease on a home. When they were
done signing, Mark gave each couple the
code to the lock box on their door, and shook
their hands again and sent them out into the
sunlight. They werent homeless anymore.
A week later, Shelly made Thanksgiving
dinner for her whole family in the first house
she and Ed had ever shared. She cooked a
turkey in the oven, bending over her baby
to reach the counter. The young couple
spread out blankets on the floor and ate the
turkey picnic-style with their kids and their
parents. Shelly had never been happier.
Theres a tendency not to want to ask ques-
tions when you get a great deal. Having a house,
and the promise of a new one if somebody took
this one away, was enough for Shelly and Ed.
Mark had just rented out the first two houses
he didnt own, and he was planning to rent
more. They werent all going to be so cheap.
T
erry Smith and Melesia Dubose signed
their lease two days before Christmas
in 2009. Over the course of a few
weeks, Mark had streamlined his
process, filing batches of adverse possession
claims with the county and renting out proper-
ties through a few complicit real estate agents.
Terry and Melesia met their agent at the
house, she opened a lock box on the door,
handed over the keys, and turned to leave. She
didnt even wait until they had opened the door.
Terry estimated that they put $10,000 in
renovations into the house since they rented
it on an as-is basis. They didnt pay any
mind to the letters that started coming from
Deutsche Bank, topped with a bright-red
sticker from the sheriffs department saying
Notice of Eviction. The letters werent ad-
dressed to them, but to the previous owner.
In fact, their names werent on anything
except the lease and the electric bill.
The possibility that the whole deal could fall
apart was too much for Terry to contemplate.
He waited for somebody to call him about the
bank notices, to say, Terry Smith, this is whats
going on. Heres whats going to happen.
He did get a call from Mark in February.
Im having some legal trouble, said Mark,
who explained that he would send a nota-
rized letter authorizing Terry to stop paying
rent. Terry could live there for free, for the
foreseeable future. Mark continued: Some-
one from the State Attorneys Office will be
coming to see you. When he comes, you can
talk to him, or you can tell him to take a hike.
After sunset on March 5, 2010, a man pulled
up to Terry and Melesias house. He introduced
himself as an investigator for the state attor-
ney. They welcomed him into the living room,
which was warm and dark, dominated by a tele-
vision cabinet. Cloudy glass cabinets held a few
religious trinkets. He set down a tape recorder.
Joe Roubicek was a compact, gray-haired
man who wouldnt look out of place on any
of the Law & Order franchises. He retired
from the Fort Lauderdale Police Department
Economic Crimes Unit and went on to work
in the State Attorneys Office. In his free time,
he self-published true-crime accounts of the
cases he worked. Now, tasked with building a
case against Mark, he was looking for victims.
Terry told Joe that he had met
Mark before moving in, briefly.
So what did he tell you?
the detective asked.
Well, Mark told me that the way this
thing works is that there are hundreds of
houses out there that were just abandoned,
and the banks have them, said Terry. He
said he works with the bank. He rents the
properties out, gets them fixed up, and he
says hes going to have them for seven years.
Uh-huh.
And after seven years, you know,
well be able to buy it from him.
Joe explained that Mark didnt own the
property, and that all he had done was send
a notice to the county, pay the water bill, and
walk through the door. Terry and Melesia
began to understand what adverse posses-
sion really meant. Joe finished the interview
after 13 minutes. He handed Terry a busi-
ness card emblazoned with the Great Seal
of the State of Florida. In God We Trust.
Terry had a bad feeling, like he was close
to a truth he couldnt stand to face. His voice
filled with uncertainty, he asked the detective,
Does the bank know that were in this house?
Joe said he was just gathering informa-
tion and didnt know the answer. He said
he had a feeling that something criminal
could be going on. He recommended that
Terry get a lawyer. Then he drove off, feeling
vaguely sorry for these people who didnt
have a clue what was happening to them.
Oh my God, Melesia said to Terry
behind the closed door. Were living
in somebody elses fucking house.
W
hile Terry and Melesia were being
evicted this January, Mark was
a few blocks away in North Lau-
derdale, explaining the process
he used to find foreclosed homes to rent. He
stood on the lawn outside a small, tidy house.
There were no curtains on the windows. You
could see into the empty living room. There
was a hallway in the back that led to a kitchen
full of dormant appliances, ready to be turned
on. The walls held no pictures and the floors
were broom-clean. In fact, there was only one
sign that the house wasnt ready for occupancy
right away, and it was taped to the inside of
the windowpane. No trespassing, it said.
And that, said Mark, is
our only problem.
The white Hummer, paid for by >> p17
The Lord of Squat from p12
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Hallandale Beach Library
300 S Federal Highway Hallandale
Yoni Markhoff (786) 463-4436
www.markhoffesq.com
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the now-defunct mortgage company that
Mark said earned him $30,000 a month before
the housing crash, idled in the driveway. He
crunched across the thick grass to survey the
rest of the house. This is definitely a house
Id look at if I were still doing adverse posses-
sion, he said. If only that sign werent there.
He got back in the air-conditioned Hummer
and pulled into the street, retracing the path
he took in late 2009 when he decided to make
North Lauderdale his own personal Monopoly
board. Armed with a list of recent foreclosures,
he explained, he and his partner, Mark Laird,
cased every block in the city. He said they were
looking for bright orange placards stuck to
doors and windows: notices from the city de-
claring abandoned buildings a public nuisance.
An orange sign on a house meant nobody had
lived there for a while. Real estate and no
trespassing signs were dealbreakers: They
meant somebody still had interest in the house.
I developed an eye for this, said Mark,
peering though the windshield. Indeed, upon
closer observation, the orange signs are a com-
mon sight: here a small cottage, marooned
in untrimmed grass; there a fanciful stucco
facade pocked by boarded-up windows. Fore-
closures ravaged all classes of Florida neigh-
borhoods, but the modest single-family homes
the first rung of comfortable home owner-
ship saw the most cleanly broken dreams.
Mark filed over a hundred notices of
adverse possession in Broward County, but
most of the homes he rented were here in
North Lauderdale. At the peak of his busi-
ness, Mark said, he was renting 17 houses
for varying amounts of rent. Most of his
tenants paid him about $1,200 per month,
plus a $200 deposit for the water bill.
Mark said that much of the rent money went
toward maintenance and business costs. Still, in
the eyes of the state, he seemed to be profiting
on others misfortune. A Coral Springs police
detective noticed Mark checking out some
houses, and in late 2009, he notified the State
Attorneys Office. Alesh Guttmann and T. Don
Tenbrook, two professorial economic-crimes
prosecutors, took on the case. They sent Joe
Roubicek to gather information. Over a period
of two months, the detective visited six homes
and got six taped statements. All of them would
be used as evidence against Mark in court.
Later that year, Mark sat down twice
with the prosecutors, once with his lawyer
and once without. Mark handed over all the
information they requested, including cop-
ies of leases and the addendum his tenants
signed, stating that they were aware that the
properties were under adverse possession.
If Im breaking a law, tell me which one,
he remembers asking the prosecutors.
The state never arrested or charged
Mark for trespassing. But they did argue
that he had no legal interest in the proper-
ties. When it got illegal, said Guttmann,
is when he started charging rent.
Mark pleaded no contest in Novem-
ber 2010 to organized fraud, a felony. His
lawyer was willing to fight the charges, but
Mark said he didnt want to risk ending up
in jail and leaving his wife and kids stranded
without a husband and father. Circuit Judge
Matthew Destry sentenced him to two years
of probation and 100 community service
hours. One of the stipulations of his probation
was that he could not file any more claims
of adverse possession. None of his former
tenants came forward to collect restitution.
By this time, Marks story was of na-
tional interest. On November 8, 2010, the
New York Times published a story about his
adventures in adverse possession, with the
headline At Legal Fringe, Empty Houses Go
to the Needy. Fabian Ferguson and Juslaine
Charles, who moved to another one of Marks
houses after being kicked out of the one they
found with Ed and Shelly, were the center
of the story. In the days after its publication,
TV stations, reporters, and photographers
appeared at their doorstep. Fabian refers
to it as the New York Times incident.
By now, the tenants were on their own to
face the banks. When Mark heard about Terry
Smiths eviction in January, he expressed little
sympathy for Terrys family. They were liv-
ing rent-free for more than six months, he
said. They shouldnt really be complaining.
Its true that the family saved thou-
sands since Marks lawyer advised him
to stop collecting rent. But in Terrys
mind, his rent-free months were a small
atonement for being conned into think-
ing the house was within his reach.
A
nd God is able to make all grace
abound toward you; that ye, always
having all sufficiency in all things,
may abound to every good work...
Once again, Ed and Shelly Nichols had
nowhere to go. They stopped paying rent at
Marks request in April 2010. Later, a man from
the bank came and offered them a check for
a thousand dollars to hand over the keys and
leave the house. This is a trifling nicety offered
by banks to give the appearance of a transaction,
so that evictions will go smoothly. Ed and Shelly
swept the house broom-clean and moved back
in with Eds mom. They piled back onto the
couch one evening to watch Michael Moores
Capitalism: A Love Story, and toward the end,
Ed felt the hairs stand up on the back of his neck
with a jolt of recognition. The man who had
given them a check to leave their home was on
the screen, doing the same thing with a family
in Miami. The man from the bank had a neutral
expression, his tone patient but unyielding.
After the movie ended, Michael Moore
was not there to bring light to Ed and
Shellys problems. He could not highlight
some grave injustice that had robbed them
of a home. Once again, they were simply
another family without enough money.
H
e has the power to restore, the
power to forgive, the power to
cleanse you of all your sins!
Yes! Mark says, now as clean-
shaven as hell ever be. He stands up in church:
his vestments wool slacks and an ironed shirt, a
golden-ringed hand raised toward the ceiling of
Grace Family Worship Center in Coral Springs.
His other arm is around his wife, who holds
out her palms, opening the life before her like
a book. And now theyre singing, praising, say-
ing Jesus, and theres an eight-piece band and
somebody in the back row wails, just straight-
up wails, until the priest comes over to hold her,
and everybody sways, hands are clapping, and
Yes, Jesus, and they feel him here in the room...
Marks story doesnt end in a victory: no
great wealth, no accolades, no more houses
for the needy. Its not a tragedy or a comedy
and its certainly not part of the endless
upward trajectory that people associate with
the American dream. He avoided jail, and he
tries to stave off his own foreclosure day by
day. He says that after paying for his legal de-
fense, Saving Florida Homes actually lost him
money. But nobody has ever told him that
adverse possession is illegal, and not all of his
former tenants think of themselves as victims.
A few of them have been able to work out
temporary rental agreements with the banks.
Mark thinks about the future, and what
his role in it will be. He has a new project that
hes not ready to discuss yet. Ive never done
things conventionally, he says. Whenever
my pastor talks about risk, he looks at me.
Stefan.Kamph@BrowardPalmBeach.com
The Lord of Squat from p14
Mark Guerette spent long days driving looking for abandoned houses.
Michael McElroy
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