Activists bare teeth over foreclosures

"We lost about 90 percent of our funding overnight," Seifert recalls.

The nonprofit staggered. If it was going to be confrontational, it needed to keep the foundations that fed its budget in the loop.

Fighting foreclosures became their new cause. But they brought along old tactics — a brand of confrontation honed by Saul Alinsky, the legendarily radical Chicago organizer.

"Power is not only what you have," Alinsky schooled his followers, "but what the enemy thinks you have."

ESOP was banking on anger. Clevelanders were losing their homes, organizers concluded, because aggressive lenders had put people in mortgages they couldn't possibly afford.

In 2002, the group began going after lenders, servicers and mortgage brokers.

At one protest outside a branch of Charter One Financial Inc., a police officer confronted an ESOP volunteer in a shark suit.

"Are those your sharks?" the officer demanded, scooping plastic predators from the ground.

"No," protester Christine Regula replied. "I had my tubes tied."

They also pressed public officials to stall foreclosures proceedings. One, Steven Bucha, chief magistrate in charge of foreclosures in Cleveland's courts, recalls being invited by ESOP to a public forum. More than 200 people packed a church basement. Bucha was seated as far as possible from the door.

"A woman gave a fiery speech about how the system had done her wrong, how the system was in collusion with the court — and here's the guy responsible! And she pointed at me. I really couldn't get a word out," Bucha says. "It was like nothing else I've ever experienced in my life."

Rescue program begins to work
Bucha and others say the "guerrilla warfare" approach was counterproductive.

"Nobody likes our tactics, which is precisely why we use them," Seifert says.

One after another, the group squeezed and cajoled eight companies and their subsidiaries into signing pacts giving it direct access to a single executive with the authority to restructure problem loans. The companies have agreed to cut interest rates and waive penalty fees and past-due balances.

Last year, ESOP — one of four groups that counsel homeowners referred by Cuyahoga County's foreclosure rescue program — says it got mortgages reworked for about 1,500 homeowners, most already in foreclosure.

"You know, there's a fine line," says Rocky Ortiz, the local director of the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, which provides part of ESOP's funding. "Mark and his people have learned to walk it."

Maybe, but in early going, some of ESOP's targets were local or relatively small. Even some of the biggest were vulnerable, or at least open to discussion.

Could ESOP take on the biggest lender in the country? It was time to find out.

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