The Lord of Squat: Mark Guerette Got Busted for Putting Families in Foreclosed Homes

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 reduced to petty theft. Broward County Circuit Judge Bernard Bober sentenced Mark to community service and six months of probation.

"I had to make a living for my family," said Mark. "If it hurt someone, I really didn't care."

Michael McElroy

Fabian Ferguson mows the lawn at his adversely possessed home on a quiet street in North Lauderdale.

Michael McElroy

Mark Guerette spent long days driving looking for abandoned houses.

Related Content

• Broward County Has Three of Florida's Eight Lowest-Scoring Middle Schools
  January 31, 2012
• Man Goes on Broward Asian-Food Burglary Spree (VIDEO)
  May 1, 2012
• Cigarette Thieves Are on the Loose in South Florida
  August 14, 2012
• North Lauderdale Old-Lady Rapist on the Loose
  June 13, 2011
• Broward County Tallies Four Drownings in Five Days
  March 6, 2012

More About

• North Lauderdale
• Terry Smith
• Mark Guerette
• Coral Springs
• Foreclosures

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 decided 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 Titanic. One-hundred-and-ninety-four minutes later, they knew they would be together.

After he moved in with Marlene in February 1998, Mark set his sights on real estate. His internet research led him to start a credit-improvement 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 Investor's 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 else's land, let the county know, and pay the taxes, it's yours to keep after seven years. If the rightful owner comes to kick you off the property before the seven years are up, you'll be forced to leave.

In 2008, when Mark read about adverse possession, the South Florida dream of accessible 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 one's income should go back to the Lord. Mark said he made a promise: "Lord, for every ten houses that I get, I'm going to take one house and give it to someone you need to be there." He prayed.

"It's one of the hardest things I've done in real estate, and the biggest part is, it's uncharted territory," he said later. "Adverse possession has been on the books since time, but no one has looked at it the way I happened to look at it, and do with it what I did."

Ed 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 Shelly's complicated pregnancy forced her to leave her job at Royal Caribbean. With no other option but homelessness, the couple put their things in storage 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 Ed's mom's 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.