Most people might think of their local Registry of Deeds office as a sleepy backwater. But most people haven’t met John O’Brien and his assistant, Kevin Harvey.

They’ve made the South Essex County registry office in Salem the launching pad for a crusade against what they see as serious abuses of the land recordation system. Armed with stacks of records, piles of press releases and a few poster boards, O’Brien and Harvey have attracted attention from registrars around the country – and from Attorney General Martha Coakley. Coakley’s office announced earlier this month that she was investigating Mortgage Electronic Registration System (MERS), the bank consortium which has been O’Brien’s greatest nemesis.

John O’Brien and Kevin Harvey

Title: Register of Deeds and First Assistant Register of Deed for Southern Essex County

Age: 60 and 57

Experience: 35 and 4

When was the first time you heard about MERS?

O’Brien: Oh, I heard about MERS back in 1998. And the MERS model in 1998 [was] not a problem; they came in, they recorded, they followed the rules. It’s what they did from the recording of the mortgage on [that was the problem]. And as registers, we would have no idea how they were slicing and dicing and selling the mortgage [after it was recorded]. I had a constituent come in here last October, and she told us this horror story. She was facing foreclosure and she was paying one bank, but that bank wasn’t the servicer. And I said to her, “Well, there must be an assignment.” That sort of got me going. I said to myself, “Why is it that MERS isn’t recording assignments when it transfers them? We have over 400,000 assignments recorded here. Why did those people record? If they don’t have to do it, why did they come in here and pay $75 [in the first place] and record?” I think that MERS was designed for the purpose of avoiding recording fees, and more particularly, hiding from the public what they were up to.

Attorney General Martha Coakley met with you and other registers recently to discuss her investigation. How did the meeting go?

O’Brien: I think she’s very focused on [the investigation]. I was kind of surprised at the Real Estate Bar Association’s (REBA) reaction [to her investigation], to be honest with you. I was actually shocked….Yesterday, they issued a press release, defending MERS – I mean, trying to defend MERS is like trying to defend the plague. MERS had fleeced the taxpayers of billions of dollars nationwide in lost recording fees, they have completely devastated the chain of title of homeowners across this country and trampled on property rights. So why the Real Estate Bar Association would support that – other than, and I’ll be blunt with you, It tells me they’re in the tank for the banks. Harvey: You saw the cease and desist order and the consent order that MERS entered into with the other federal regulators, where MERS admits its unsound practices and illegal and unsafe operational risks etc. Why would REBA, after MERS has already come out and admitted to these practices, defend someone’s practices after they’ve already admitted to the federal regulators that they were [flawed]? It makes no sense.

Well, I think their argument would be that it’s not your job to decide what documents are fraudulent.

O’Brien: Well, my answer to that is, if it’s not my job, whose job is it? I’m the Register of Deeds, I’m the keeper of the records, and I answer to the people of my county who elected me. And I don’t think they sent me here to record documents that are going to taint people’s chain of title. Harvey: Or to be a rubber stamp. O’Brien: All I’m trying to do is raise the issue, and say that somebody with much more authority than me has got to come in and take a long hard look at this thing. I truly believe that the land recordation system has been damaged so much in this country, I don’t know how they’re going to correct it. Sitting on that table right there are 26,000 documents of people who now have a cloud on their title though no fault of their own. A lot of these people are not people in foreclosure, these are just regular folks who have an assignment of mortgage that we consider to be fraudulent. I’ve had people say to me, “Well, these people are being foreclosed on. They didn’t pay their mortgage.” And I say, “We do not take people’s homes with fraudulent documents in America, whether they paid their mortgage or they didn’t pay their mortgage.” We have property rights. And the banks have to follow the same rules as everyone else. And they haven’t done that…The mortgage fraud statute that was enacted in this Commonwealth back in August of 2010, I read it both ways. If the banks or law firms knowingly record something that’s fraudulent, it’s in violation of the law. But I also interpret it to mean, if I know that something is fraudulent, and I record it, I’m in violation of the law. And I’m not going to help banks take people’s homes with phony documents. I’m just not going to do it.

I know you spoke earlier this summer at a meeting for registers across the country – did that help bring some of these issues home to people, or were they already well aware?

O’Brien: It was amazing. We were scheduled to speak from 9 to 10; we got off the podium at 12:15. What was amazing about it is that every single one was supportive of what we were doing. Register of Deeds – it’s not the most glamorous position. We’re not senators. We’re kind of low on the totem pole. But we have a responsibility.

Top Five ‘Robo-Signed’ Names On Documents Filed With The So. Essex County Registry:

• Linda Green
• Christine Baldwin
•  Brent Bagley
•  Brian Bly
• Crystal Moore/Linda Burton