Back in January 2015, I began reporting on the story of Mark Diamond, a Chicago contractor who was recently sentenced to more than 17 years in prison for a scam involving elderly Black homeowners.
The story started through my relationship with the Rev. Robin Hood, whom I met at Columbia College, (where I was teaching?). One of my top sources, the veteran community organizer said that Lillie Pearl Williams, his 88-year-old aunt, was in danger of losing her North Lawndale home after taking out a reverse mortgage.
Reverse mortgages are HUD-backed loans that allow seniors to convert a portion of their home’s value into cash. The money generally doesn’t have to be repaid until the person moves out of the house or dies. Family members then must pay the debt to keep the home.
Hood said that an African American woman named Cynthia had visited Williams and told her about a government program that could help her get free home repairs. Diamond showed up the next day and drove Williams to his office on the North Side before pressuring her to sign paperwork without explaining the loan’s terms, Hood told me.
Williams’ inability to pay mandated insurance fees meant that the family’s emotional heart and financial legacy were at grave risk. Diamond pocketed more than $100,000 from the home, which had been paid off before she took the reverse mortgage.
I checked local and federal court records, discovering dozens of lawsuits against Diamond stretching back to the 1980s. Many told of similar swindles to the one Williams endured. Lillie Hopson, a blind woman who ended up paying rent to Diamond in the house she had owned, was one of the victims.
Clyde Ross, a major figure in the Contract Buyer’s League that advocated for residents’ housing rights in the 1960s, was another. Diamond cheated him after he wanted to make his home accessible for his son, a disabled Marine who was injured in the Iraq war, according to testimony in Cook County court.
I later learned that Diamond had been the subject of local news coverage starting in the 1980s and featured in mortgage fraud exposes by CBS News and The New York Times. State authorities had fined him and revoked his mortgage broker’s license, while U.S. Senate testimony contained descriptions of his illicit activities.
Following Diamond’s scam over the years
Still, his reign of financial terror on Black seniors, most of them women from the city’s South and West sides, continued unabated.
My brother Jon Lowenstein, a photographer, and I went to Williams’ house. She told us in a calm and firm voice how much the home she and her sister had purchased after moving to Chicago from Mississippi had meant to the family and related what Diamond had done.
I wrote a story for The Chicago Reporter, a nonprofit investigative magazine focused on issues of race and poverty, in late January 2015. The FBI raided Diamond’s office in March. In August, then-Gov. Bruce Rauner signed into law a bill filed by then-state Sen. Jacqueline Collins, D-Chicago, that required counseling by government agencies and a three-day cooling off period before completing a reverse mortgage loan.
Hood and the Illinois Anti-Foreclosure Coalition he founded contributed to other change. He encouraged residents to attend and speak at a hearing convened by then-State Sen. Patricia Van Pelt, D-Chicago. He forged a partnership with attorneys from a Northwestern Law School clinic who represented Diamond’s victims for free and sought to have foreclosures associated with some Diamond homes reversed.
But criminal accountability for Diamond had remained elusive.
Until now.
Knowing that Diamond, who is in his late 60s, will live out most, if not all, of his remaining years behind bars provided a measure of satisfaction for Hood.
Yet if the sentencing was a victory, it was an incomplete one.
The glacial pace of justice for a criminal who was so well-known for so long is a source of pain. Many victims died before this day came. For some, like Farragut High School football legend “Mini-Mack” Herron, Hood believes that the stress of potentially being homeless — he had used money earned playing professional football to help his mother buy the home, and she had dementia when she signed the paperwork for it — helped hasten their deaths.
I draw solace from the courage of Williams, the daughter of the South who moved to the North, bought a home with her sister, and pushed through whatever shame she might have felt at being duped by Diamond to report what she did to her.
And I’m grateful for Hood, her nephew with the legendary English name who has fought tirelessly for his community and, through the course of this project, transformed from a trusted source into a cherished friend
Jeff Kelly Lowenstein is the founder and executive director of the Center for Collaborative Investigative Journalism and the former Padnos/Sarosik Endowed Professor of Civil Discourse at Grand Valley State University.
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