What a Relief!

[SlickTony]

Yesterday this guy in the editorial department at my work, who occasionally chooses to run a beady eye over the paper after it's been printed, checking it for errors (geez, what good is that?) came to me because it appeared that the list of Florida tax liens had been repeated. Well, the lists sometimes get repeated in the website itself, which is very confusing--Lord knows I have enough to do I wouldn't put them in twice myself. But I just told him I'd try to make sure it didn't happen again. I then said I was surprised that he hadn't come to me about these contractors' liens I'd had to put in a few months ago, the ones with all the zeros (really, some of them were for more money than there probably is in the world) and apocalyptic rants and cartoon figures all over them. Obviously this guy was as crazy as a shithouse rat. The editorial guy said to let him know next time I ran into one. I said I could produce one right then, and I went back to my machine so I could pull one up.

I should mention that when I'd first started encountering the liens I went to the boss to ask him if we should record them, and he very snarkily said that if the guy had paid to file them, we were obliged to put them in the paper.

Imagine my surprise when I "Duvalled" the guy's company name and not one of those liens was there!

Fortunately I had a copy of the Adobe image of the lien in my computer at home, so when I got home I printed it out. Then I entered the book and page number in the Duval County search engine, and guess what? The document had been voided.

Evidently someone in the Clerk of Courts office must have thought it was as bogus as I did. I wanted to attach the picture of the thing, but for some reason the setup we have here won't accept pdfs.

It had given me such a turn when I searched for those liens and didn't find a trace of them. I felt rather as if I'd fallen into a Philip K. Dick novel.

 

[TxRad]

Can you say money laundering?

The same thing went on in south Fla for years with the buying and selling of homes in the courthouse. All on paper but it left a trail to cover drug money if you didn't dig to deep.

Ask She Read' about it. I think her house got involved when she wasn't looking.

 

[SlickTony]

Considering the confusing saga of her house, I can believe that. But in this case, I think we had a real genuine case of a contractor who was Loony Tunes. I mean, you should have seen these liens. There were apocalyptic rants and cartoon drawings and the amounts named had so many zeros that really, they probably ought to have been expressed in scientific notation. I mean, literally hundreds of them. But I was told to transcribe the info from them as I found it, so I had to COUNT every one of them. I do wish I could attach the image of the document that I saved. Why can't you attach a .pdf in this forum?