Home Wrecker

Sue Cooper expects to turn on her TV one day, flip to Dateline and see Brent Barber's face.

"It'll be one of those programs that talk about con artists and what they've done to people," she predicts as she sits at her kitchen table, drinking coffee. Until just a few months ago, Sue and Frank Cooper, who did not want their real names used for this story, feared they would lose their dream house -- a simple, cheery ranch on several acres down a long, gravel road near Liberty.

The Coopers remember the day three years ago when they went to meet Barber -- just to make sure he was a real person. They'd made an appointment to talk with him at the Gladstone branch office of Ameriquest Mortgage Company. They'd already heard about him through a mortgage broker they knew and about his reputation as a "big wheel." They'd heard he had millions of dollars in the bank. And they knew he drove a shiny Cadillac Escalade SUV and lived in Loch Lloyd, an opulent gated community of million-dollar homes in Belton.

The Coopers liked Barber right away. "He was a blond-headed, nice-looking family man. Seemed real friendly and easy to talk to," Sue says. "Real busy, too, you could tell."

"Lots of energy," Frank adds. "High-strung."

Sitting down with Barber at a desk in the Ameriquest office, they reviewed the details of his investment program: He would use their good credit to buy as many as ten homes, in their names, from real estate companies. Then he'd fix up the properties, lease them out and manage them, using the rent money to repay the mortgages. After a year or two, he'd sell and pay the Coopers a portion of the proceeds.

In the meantime, he told them, they'd benefit from a hefty deduction on their income taxes. Frank wanted to retire soon, and Sue wanted to quit her part-time job -- it sounded like a good deal. They looked forward to having more time with their grandchildren. "We didn't even go look at the properties," Sue explains. "As far as we were concerned, it wasn't even our property. It was his property. It just had our names on it."

They didn't think much more about it until March 2002, when the mortgage companies started calling about late payments -- on all ten houses. Soon bill collectors began phoning day and night. Desperate, the Coopers called and stopped by Barber's office, but he was never in and he wouldn't call them back. On Easter Sunday 2002, before heading out to a family gathering, they drove into Kansas City's east side to see what they owned. The first thing that struck them was that the properties were not worth the amounts of their loans -- which averaged $60,000 for each house.

At the first few addresses, the Coopers made notes: "Looks fairly decent but needs new roof."

But the properties kept getting worse. "After three or four, we didn't write anything down, because we were too sick to our stomachs," Sue recalls. One of the homes, on the city's east side, was a former crack house that looked like a bombed-out shell. "It had caught fire, and the windows had blown out," Frank says. The house was boarded up amid a perimeter of yellow police tape. The yard was a dump, littered with trash bags, whisky bottles, old tires and a stained mattress. "It was just disgusting," Sue says. "A nightmare."

Then warning letters about code violations from the Kansas City Neighborhood Preservation Division began arriving in the Coopers' mailbox. They paid a hauling company $1,000 to clear the junk off their properties. Meanwhile, their tenants made requests for repairs, and the couple paid to fix toilets, unclog drains and buy a new refrigerator. But some repairs were too costly, and the Coopers had to say no. "You've heard of slumlords," Sue says. "Well, all of a sudden you realize: Oh my God. I am one."

A few of the tenants weren't paying rent. All were African-American, most of them poor. One renter drove an ice-cream truck for a living. Another worked in a cafeteria, and a few flipped burgers. "Some of them were single mothers working two or three jobs. I felt really sorry for them," Sue says. "Some would call and cry on my shoulder. I was like a counselor."

Barber, they subsequently learned, had acquired many of his properties through a yearly tax foreclosure auction held on the steps of the Jackson County Courthouse. Each August he could buy homes, usually in bad shape, for pennies on the dollar. When the county began barring property owners with outstanding taxes or code violations from buying -- county records show that Barber still owes about $20,000 in back property taxes from 2001 and 2002 on nine properties he owns in Kansas City -- he continued to purchase properties as a representative of various companies.

Most of the properties he bought and resold were in Kansas City's urban core, usually in historically black, working-class, neighborhoods on the east side -- Ivanhoe, Blue Hills and Town Fork Creek. After buying the houses at auction for a few thousand dollars, Barber would often deed them to a real estate company called National Foreclosure Properties, which would then sell them to "investors" for $50,000 or more.