Some experienced white-collar hands assembled for closings Monday in one of the few federal mortgage fraud cases to hit a Northern California jury.
Judy Yeung, a Chinese-American woman well known in political circles — her business cards read “The Honorable Lady of San Francisco” — is accused of using straw buyers to obtain fraudulent mortgages totaling $6.5 million. Yeung’s case is fairly representative of the Justice Department’s local mortgage fraud docket; since the housing market collapsed federal prosecutors haven’t brought any large-scale indictments against corporate lenders in the Bay Area.
