President Bush‘s pardon of Isaac Toussie is a nightmare for homebuyers who watched their houses – and their lives – fall apart around them.
“The politically connected get what they want, and little people like us are just left to sink or swim,” groused Maxine Wilson, 42. “Thanks to the President for the worst Christmas gift you could have ever given us.”
In 1997, Wilson bought her home from Toussie in Coram, L.I., and she moved in with her husband and their five kids.
Soon the problems with the $146,000 ranch house started piling up, she said. The boiler went. The toilets backed up. The basement flooded. Closet doors fell off. The foundation cracked.
Wilson is still fighting Toussie in court. She has since moved to Georgia, but hasn’t stopped paying the mortgage and taxes on the house here. “I have hope and I have faith – and I believe in karma,” she says.
Alfred Boozer, 50, a security guard at the Museum of Modern Art, said he lost his money – and his marriage – after he bought a Toussie house in Staten Island.
“I think Bush stinks anyway,” said Boozer, who now rents a studio in Queens.
Beverly Sanchez, 42, a mom of three who bought her Middle Island, L.I., house for $157,000 from Toussie in 1997, was horrified to learn of the pardon. “We wanted the American Dream. We wanted the house, we wanted the white picket fence – and instead, we got nothing but heartache,” not to mention floods and mold.
Some, like mom Norine Hurtado, were as frustrated as they were disgusted.
“It’s unfortunate, but there’s nothing I can do. I don’t have the money or the power like he does to get [it] over on people,” said Hurtado, 36, whose two-story colonial bought in 1999 became a money pit. Without help from relatives, she would have lost the house.
Hurtado called the pardon a shame.
“Who pays the price? It’s your average working family who’s struggling, [and] then you have these [people] whose only motivation is greed and they don’t care who they destroy,” she said. “President Bush – in my eyes – he’s just as guilty.”