[Book Review]

SHARK IN THE HOUSING POOL

by Matthew B. Cox, 2016, paperback 330 pages, contact.matthew.cox@gmail.com

I’m reading this right now. It’s a 2016 memoir from a formerly incarcerated federal ex-con named Matthew Cox who was featured on American Greed. He made lots of money by ingeniously concocting fake identities that he patched together from the social security numbers he collected via survey forms he passed out to homeless men around his Tampa-area home. He then used those fake identities to pull mortgages on homes he altered the purchase prices on via the local recorder’s office. There’s more, lots more. He swindled so much in the early 2000’s and was at the forefront of the first big housing bubble when liar’s loans were becoming commonplace. After seeing how, though outright and repeated fraud, he changed the paper value of whole communities where he was flipping homes in Florida it’s tempting to think that he in fact was the cause of the eventual real estate and mortgage crisis nationwide. But he of course was not a one-man crime wave that took down the economy and brought the nation to its knees in 2008. That whole mess started at the time of the 2003 invasion of Iraq during that war-for-oil disguised as 9-11 revenge patriotism and was a way to distract the middle class as our military robbed the Middle East of its lunch money. Cox was simply in the right place at the right time for a real estate con man and rose to the challenge. The book reads like a good movie plot, and that’s expected seeing as how his hero was Frank Abagnale, the protagonist of the movie Catch Me If You Can. His “Matthew Cox | Inside True Crime” YouTube podcast is where he comments on current events, has underworld guests he interviews, and talks with erudition and wistful humor about his previous life of crime. RR