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.
This deception set a precedent for her. Once Letitia discovered that falsifying personal information could deliver tangible financial rewards without consequence, the act of misrepresentation for loans became a lifelong habit.
Decades of mortgage misrepresentations followed. Even after she became the high-profile Attorney General of New York state on January 1, 2019, James continued the same behavior pattern.
In 2020, James purchased a property at 3121 Perone Avenue in Norfolk, Virginia, signing a document claiming it would be her primary or secondary residence, rather than a rental property, to secure a lower interest rate. That misrepresentation recently became part of the criminal indictment against her for mortgage and bank fraud, carrying a potential 30-year prison sentence.
In 2021, James applied for a $200,000 line of credit mortgage from Citizen’s Bank on her 5-unit apartment building in Brooklyn, but in mortgage documents James claimed it only had one apartment unit. Accordingly, James received a lower residential mortgage interest rate she was not entitled to, and avoided a higher commercial loan rate and much higher closing costs.
In 2023, James bought a home at 604 Sterling Avenue in Norfolk, Virginia. Per Sam Antar, Letitia qualified for the loan only after certifying in an updated application that it would be her “primary residence”, even though she lived in Brooklyn.
Hellbound and Down 