''Visit the office of John O'Brien, register of deeds in South Essex County, Massachusetts, and he'll eagerly show you stacks and stacks of documents. He calls it a crime scene''

From American Banker

''Why? These documents, a plethora of mortgage-related assignments, were used as legal justification for evicting millions of families from their homes through a deeply flawed foreclosure process, enabled by the Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems industry consortium. There's nothing that gets O'Brien's Irish up more than a discussion of the rampant fraud he sees perpetrated on the court.

"In America we don't taken someone's home away with fraud," he says with a South Boston swagger and no-nonsense boom to his voice. "There was a Profiles in Courage moment for the administration when the five banks were brought to the table to answer for the robo-signing scandal, and they let it pass."  

O'Brien is in good company on this bully pulpit. Other registers like Jeff Thigpen of Guilford County, N.C., have taken up the cudgel, declaring that MERS has effectively bypassed centuries of property law (an inheritance from English common law) mandating that real property be recorded at the time of transaction in a place accessible to the public: a registry.''

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