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Ever wonder what the County Sheriff's job is? Managing just the county jail? No. It also includes stomping on folks when they're down on their luck. Seems to me that contradicts the PR he's spewed over the years. But whata I know. At least the streets are free of criminals and deadbeats. Or are they?
Reporter Beth Healy of the Boston Globe writes: Goldstone, the debtors’ bane, is back at it. Using legal loophole, hires others to collect. Keep in mind that in two weeks the link will be behind a paywall. So read the full story today.
He has been disbarred, put on notice by regulators, and briefly left town, but Daniel W. Goldstone, once among the state’s most aggressive debt collectors, is back, and state authorities say there’s nothing they can do about it.
Goldstone’s Norfolk Financial Corp. is again seeking payments on old court judgments against consumers who owe small debts, and his lawyer is hiring constables and sheriffs to tow away their cars to satisfy those bills, according to lawyers in the business and consumers he has sued. And he can do it without a license, regulators say, because of a loophole in state law: by hiring other attorneys to handle his cases and do the actual collecting.
Four years after a Globe Spotlight investigation detailed the harsh debt collection practices of Norfolk Financial among others — and how the small-claims court system permitted the activity and let sheriffs and constables profit from it — some consumers are again complaining about the same tac tics.
