Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert, the Comic Sans-styled defender of everything holy and Midwestern, runs a business that habitually craps on its employees and customers alike. A business other than the Cavaliers!
Quicken Loans, which Gilbert founded in 1985, touts a clean image, free of the subprime lending and other predatory practices that ravaged the industry a few years ago. Gilbert says, "Our people bring their ‘A' game with them to work every day."
But Quicken is going to trial in federal court on Tuesday—several former employees, seeking overtime pay, have accused Gilbert's company of bullying homeowners into high-interest-rate loans or otherwise inflated mortgages.
Among other things, Quicken's employees were taught to "bruise" customers by identifying credit report red flags, then telling potential borrowers they wouldn't get loans elsewhere. In one fraud case decided last year, Quicken was found to have slapped a balloon payment of $107,000 on the end of a $145,000 loan, after 30 years. And Quicken issued that $145K loan despite a bogus appraisal that tripled the home's actual value.
Gilbert pulls this all despite claiming to be Mr. Cleveland.
"The majority of people hired for the casino, 90 to 95 percent of them, will be from the Cleveland area," said Marcus Glover, the general manager of Gilbert's new casino. "That's the philosophy of Dan Gilbert."
His philosophy is also, evidently, playing in a taxpayer-funded arena whose construction nearly bankrupted Cleveland's schools while trampling on those same taxpayers with aggressive lending. A "cowardly betrayal" of Cleveland in its own right, no?
As a man once (almost) said:
Some people think they should go to heaven but not have to pay 8.5 percent interest to get there.
How's that championship season coming, again?
Claims of High-Pressure Sales, Fraud At Odds With Quicken Loans' Straight-Shooting Image [Center for Public Integrity]