By Joel Gilbert
How did Letitia James’s claim that she married her father in order to qualify for her first loan evolve into a lifetime of mortgage and bank fraud?
It all began in the spring of 1983, when a 24-year-old Letitia James and her father, Robert James, posing as “husband and wife,” took out a real-estate loan for $30,300 from Kadilac Funding Ltd. for the purchase of a two-story townhome in Queens. The loan document, signed by both, listed “ROBERT JAMES AND LETITIA JAMES, HIS WIFE” in three separate places. This was no clerical error.
At that time, young Letitia likely lacked sufficient income or credit to qualify for a mortgage as a single woman. The fraudulent claim of marriage to her father allowed her to obtain financing she otherwise couldn’t have, an act that meets the legal definition of mortgage fraud under state and federal statutes.