Robin Rombach, Post-Gazette
	Jason and Shannan Zablo with their children on the porch of their Bellevue home. Mrs. Zablo is on the brink of missing her first mortgage payment and is surprised to hear she owes a second mortgage. Click photo for larger image.
	Listen In: Hear more about the Easy Realty Solutions story Attorney General seeks witnesses Pennsylvania Attorney General Tom Corbett this week said his office is probing Easy Realty Solutions and its president James C. Platts. Kevin Harley, a spokesman for Mr. Corbett, issued the following statement regarding ongoing reports about Easy Realty: Attorney General Tom Corbett's Bureau of Consumer Protection previously investigated James Platts and Easy Realty Solutions. That investigation concluded in 2005 with James Platts and Easy Realty Solutions paying $17,000 to the Attorney General's Office for penalties, costs and restitution. Since 2005, the Attorney General's Office has received numerous consumer complaints relating to the current practices of Easy Realty Solutions and James Platts. These complaints have indicated serious allegations of consumer fraud as well as issues of predatory lending and mortgage fraud issues that the Attorney General intends to aggressively investigate and prosecute. The office is asking that buyers or sellers who have dealt with the firm contact them. The toll-free line is: 1-800-441-2555. A local number is 412-565-5134.

A North Hills real estate dealer used aggressive legal filings and furtively arranged second mortgages to extract millions of dollars in fees and settlements from cash-strapped home buyers, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has learned.

James C. Platts, president of Easy Realty Solutions, a company neither licensed to sell real estate nor to broker mortgages, routinely files "lis pendens" -- the first notice of a lawsuit -- against sellers in the home deals he arranges. In most cases the writ notifying the sellers of the lawsuit is never delivered and they never know it has been filed.

The tactic puts the property out of reach for other buyers by placing the deed to the property under a cloud, meaning that the owners cannot sell it without settling with Mr. Platts. Usually, they never know the writ has been filed against them and the settlement often appears as an obscure line on the settlement papers.

The lis pendens appears to assure Mr. Platts of a payment for overseeing the sale. He is not permitted to charge a seller's fee outright because his real estate license was revoked two years ago by the Pennsylvania Real Estate Commission.

Easy Realty, which lists a post office box in Wexford, has filed 186 such legal notices in Allegheny County. In many instances, the settlement papers are notarized by Bernard J. Flugher, an attorney who represents Mr. Platts in home transactions. In other instances, the writs are notarized by another member of Mr. Flugher's family.

Repeatedly, the home sales arranged by Mr. Platts have included second mortgages, listed as payable to the home seller. Inevitably -- and usually on the same day the second mortgage is filed in the Recorder of Deeds Office -- the loan is signed over to Easy Realty.

Some sellers and buyers have told the Post-Gazette that they were unaware second mortgages had been taken out.

Within a year, the buyers often receive a notice urging them to refinance their high-interest mortgage, a tactic that would result in Mr. Platts receiving a payoff for the second mortgage he worked into the deal -- often for amounts ranging from $10,000 to $20,000. In many instances, the customers hold first mortgages with hefty early payment restrictions, meaning refinancing could cost them thousands of dollars in penalties.

Last week, the Post-Gazette revealed that Mr. Platts orchestrated the sale of a $96,000 home to a learning disabled couple who could not read and whose income was vastly overstated on a home loan application. At the time, the company that arranged that mortgage, S&P Mortgage Services of Franklin Park, said it had stopped doing business with Mr. Platts several months ago.

But on July 15, Richard Thompson, one of Easy Realty's customers who ended up with an unexplained $9,000 second mortgage, got a letter from Easy Realty.

It advised him to contact S&P Mortgage to arrange refinancing.

"We were taken in there and didn't even know about the second mortgage," Mr. Thompson said.

A similar refinancing letter went to Jason and Shannan Zablo of Bellevue. A stay-at-home mom with a disabled daughter and now separated from her husband, she's on the brink of missing her first mortgage payment, and surprised to hear she owes a second mortgage worth more than $24,000.

"This man has done a lot of damage and he's continuing to do more," said Mrs. Zablo, who, with her husband Jason, bought 530 Carolyn Ave. in Bellevue through Mr. Platts on March 31 of last year.

Their story illustrates the tactics Mr. Platts has employed in repeated transactions in Western Pennsylvania.

The Zablos paid $132,000 for the house, which had sold in 1994 for $60,000. Allegheny County records show a 2006 market value assessment of $72,000.

In the preceding year, the property had been listed for sale for $134,900, re-listed for $129,900 and listed at $119,900.

By the following year, the sale price had been moved back up to $150,000.

When the time came to close the sale, a third page was added to the Hud 1 settlement statement given to the Zablos. It showed an assessment to the seller of $15,572.50, payable to Easy Realty Solutions with the notation "lis pendens" beside it.

On the same day, the Zablos were presented with papers to sign. One of them turned out to be a mortgage, but it wasn't the $118,000 contract they'd reached with New Century Mortgage Corp. of Irvine, Calif.

The Zablos signed a second mortgage due to the sellers, Darren and Sarah Augustine. On the settlement sheet, the second mortgage is valued at $6,600. On the mortgage note, which had a return address for the Flugher Law Offices in Cranberry, the original figures are scratched out and changed to $24,849.12.

The original due date is listed as March 1, 2036. That date is scratched out and the note is rescheduled to come due March 1, 2008.

The second mortgage was filed with the Allegheny County Recorder of Deeds on April 12 of last year, but doesn't include the $24,849 figure. Rather, it claims to assign a mortgage for $6,600. On the same date, a separate filing at the Recorder's office assigns the mortgage not to the Augustines, but to Easy Realty Solutions.

Mrs. Zablo said she was never aware of the second mortgage, even though her initials and signature appear on the document.

"They were talking so fast and everything was happening so quickly I didn't know what the hell was going on," she said.

The Augustines were surprised to hear about the second mortgage, although their signatures appear on papers assigning the mortgage to Easy Realty.

"We shouldn't be involved in that at all," said Sarah Augustine, who said she understood that she was selling the home to Easy Realty for $103,000. As in dozens of other cases involving the firm, no transfer of deed ever took place to Easy Realty. Rather, the property was immediately sold to the Zablos for $132,000.

Mrs. Augustine said she and her husband were never told of a pending legal action against them or their property.

The settlement documents in the sale to the Zablos -- a sale that lists the Augustines, not Easy Realty as the seller -- includes an attached exhibit showing the settlement of the lis pendens for a total of $15,572.50 due to Easy Realty.

The conflicting numbers and pending lawsuits never filed left the Augustines, as well as authorities looking into Mr. Platts, wondering about his tactics.

"I'm kind of confused. Where does this leave us?" Mrs. Augustine said.

It leaves them, along with dozens of others waiting for a decision by Pennsylvania Attorney General Thomas Corbett.

His office last week said it has launched an investigation into Mr. Platts for possible abuse of the legal process, selling real estate without a license and floating mortgages without a license.

While most of the second mortgages held by Easy Realty are signed over from the sellers, roughly 40 of the second mortgages filed in Allegheny County in Easy Realty related sales are directly from Mr. Platts and his company.

Repeatedly, former customers of Easy Realty told the Post-Gazette that they did not understand that they were signing second mortgages and, in the cases of second mortgages listed with the sellers as the lenders and later reassigned to Easy Realty, the sellers say they didn't know about the documents.

Ken and Christine Legler, a West View couple who sold a home through Easy Realty in late 2005, were shocked when they were presented with a copy of a second mortgage in which they were listed as the lenders.

"I've never seen this document in my life," Mrs. Legler said.

As was the case in many of the mortgages examined by the Post-Gazette, the purported lender's signature never appears.

Instead, the Leglers' signatures show up on the document assigning the mortgage to Easy Realty. They said they had no idea what they were signing.

Neither did Georgia Newhams. She and her husband, Craig Hinton, bought a house with Mr. Platts acting as the agent and Mr. Flugher handling the settlement.

"Every time I went to ask him a question he got exasperated with me, like how dare I ask him a question," Ms. Newhams said. "Nobody told me I had a second mortgage because I sure as hell would have said something about that."

The Pennsylvania Attorney General's office last week said it is aggressively investigating Mr. Platts and Easy Realty over both the lis pendens and the second mortgages.

A preliminary count by the office put the dollar value of the lis pendens settlements claimed by Easy Realty at $1.5 million and the value of the second mortgages in excess of $1 million.

The practice of lis pendens is rare in residential home sales, according to Severin Russo, a Pittsburgh real estate attorney who estimates he has worked on more than 30,000 sales in a 30-year career.

"It is an improper use to use it to get money," Mr. Russo said. "I can't remember ever using it in a residential instance."

The Pennsylvania Department of Banking said it would not comment directly on Mr. Platts and his business practices, but said the activities described generally would require a mortgage lending license.

"It seems that the activity includes arranging and negotiating secondary mortgages," said Heather Tyler, a spokeswoman for the agency. "It appears that a person is receiving a fee in the sense that the mortgage is assigned to that person. If so, the person meets the definition of a secondary mortgage broker and would have to be licensed."

Mr. Platts did not return phone calls or emails seeking comment. His lawyer, Brad Dornish, said his client is out of town and aware of growing legal disputes over his business practices.

"Am I saying that if it's established that Mr. Platts did the things that are claimed that I would defend those actions? No. I'm saying I'm defending whether those things occurred," Mr. Dornish said.