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

Terry told Joe that he had met Mark before moving in, briefly.

"So what did he tell you?" the detective asked.

Michael McElroy

Mark Guerette

Stefan Kamph

An uncertain future faced Melesia Dubose and her granddaughter, Samairah, when they were evicted in January from the house they rented from Mark Guerette.

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More About

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

"Well, Mark told me that the way this thing works is that there are hundreds of houses out there that were just abandoned, and the banks have them," said Terry. "He said he works with the bank. He rents the properties out, gets them fixed up, and he says he's going to have them for seven years."

"Uh-huh."

"And after seven years, you know, we'll be able to buy it from him."

Joe explained that Mark didn't own the property, and that all he had done was send a notice to the county, pay the water bill, and walk through the door. Terry and Melesia began to understand what "adverse possession" really meant. Joe finished the interview after 13 minutes. He handed Terry a business card emblazoned with the Great Seal of the State of Florida. In God We Trust.

Terry had a bad feeling, like he was close to a truth he couldn't stand to face. His voice filled with uncertainty, he asked the detective, "Does the bank know that we're in this house?"

Joe said he was just gathering information and didn't know the answer. He said he had a feeling that something criminal could be going on. He recommended that Terry get a lawyer. Then he drove off, feeling vaguely sorry for these people who didn't have a clue what was happening to them.

"Oh my God," Melesia said to Terry behind the closed door. "We're living in somebody else's fucking house."

While Terry and Melesia were being evicted this January, Mark was a few blocks away in North Lauderdale, explaining the process he used to find foreclosed homes to rent. He stood on the lawn outside a small, tidy house. There were no curtains on the windows. You could see into the empty living room. There was a hallway in the back that led to a kitchen full of dormant appliances, ready to be turned on. The walls held no pictures and the floors were broom-clean. In fact, there was only one sign that the house wasn't ready for occupancy right away, and it was taped to the inside of the windowpane. "No trespassing," it said.

"And that," said Mark, "is our only problem."

The white Hummer, paid for by the now-defunct mortgage company that Mark said earned him $30,000 a month before the housing crash, idled in the driveway. He crunched across the thick grass to survey the rest of the house. "This is definitely a house I'd look at if I were still doing adverse possession," he said. "If only that sign weren't there."

He got back in the air-conditioned Hummer and pulled into the street, retracing the path he took in late 2009 when he decided to make North Lauderdale his own personal Monopoly board. Armed with a list of recent foreclosures, he explained, he and his partner, Mark Laird, cased every block in the city. He said they were looking for bright orange placards stuck to doors and windows: notices from the city declaring abandoned buildings a public nuisance. An orange sign on a house meant nobody had lived there for a while. Real estate and "no trespassing" signs were dealbreakers: They meant somebody still had interest in the house.

"I developed an eye for this," said Mark, peering though the windshield. Indeed, upon closer observation, the orange signs are a common sight: here a small cottage, marooned in untrimmed grass; there a fanciful stucco facade pocked by boarded-up windows. Foreclosures ravaged all classes of Florida neighborhoods, but the modest single-family homes — the first rung of comfortable home ownership — saw the most cleanly broken dreams.

Mark filed over a hundred notices of adverse possession in Broward County, but most of the homes he rented were here in North Lauderdale. At the peak of his business, Mark said, he was renting 17 houses for varying amounts of rent. Most of his tenants paid him about $1,200 per month, plus a $200 deposit for the water bill.

Mark said that much of the rent money went toward maintenance and business costs. Still, in the eyes of the state, he seemed to be profiting on others' misfortune. A Coral Springs police detective noticed Mark checking out some houses, and in late 2009, he notified the State Attorney's Office. Alesh Guttmann and T. Don Tenbrook, two professorial economic-crimes prosecutors, took on the case. They sent Joe Roubicek to gather information. Over a period of two months, the detective visited six homes and got six taped statements. All of them would be used as evidence against Mark in court.

Later that year, Mark sat down twice with the prosecutors, once with his lawyer and once without. Mark handed over all the information they requested, including copies of leases and the addendum his tenants signed, stating that they were aware that the properties were under adverse possession.

"If I'm breaking a law, tell me which one," he remembers asking the prosecutors.

The state never arrested or charged Mark for trespassing. But they did argue that he had "no legal interest" in the properties. "When it got illegal," said Guttmann, "is when he started charging rent."