At least six empty houses owned by the estates of Philadelphians ended
up in the hands of William Ernest Johnson III, a violent felon currently
on parole; the houses were then sold on to developers who renovated and
flipped them.
The houses were stolen by providing Philadelphia’s city deeds office
with forged deed transfers, either bearing the stamps of notaries who
say they were tricked, or forged notary stamps (either from nonexistent
notaries, or from notaries who say the stamps were forged – including
the wife of a former state senator).
Pennsylvania does not require that notaries capture a thumbprint when notarizing a document.
There have been other waves of house thefts in the past,
but those were sophisticated identity-theft crimes that involved
merging multiple data-sets from online breaches to impersonate the
house’s owner and secure a duplicate deed. However, in this case, it
seems that a combination of poor checking at the Philadelphia city deeds
office and lax standards for Pennsylvania notaries meant that even a
dumdum could simply rip off houses wholesale.
Johnson denies being that dumdum. However, at least one of the flipped
houses was laundered through his wife, who was convincingly angry and
surprised when the Philadelphia Inquirer asked her about it, implying
that she’d been scammed by him. Then Johnson called the reporter and
said, “I wanted to know if I could offer you something. What is it going
to take for you not to mention my wife’s name?”
The stolen houses had been owned by longtime residents who died without
clear estates, or whose distant relations had not moved quickly to sell
them on.
