WNYC-

When New York State Senator John Sampson was arrested last month for allegedly embezzling $440,000 from foreclosure sales, the curtain pulled back on a little known corner of the state’s justice system – the job of foreclosure referee.

These are the private attorneys state court judges appoint to figure out how much is owed on a mortgage and to oversee any sale at a foreclosure auction.

WNYC spent weeks trying to understand how these court appointees operate — reviewing property records, real estate data and hundreds of court files – and found a system with little oversight, rife with irregularities and dominated by political insiders.

While more than 2,500 attorneys have been eligible to act as referees over the past few years, about 3 percent received a third of the cases, according to a WNYC analysis of data from real estate information service PropertyShark.

[WNYC]

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