Mortgage processor admits racketeering

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WOOD) - The former president of a mortgage document processing company has pleaded guilty to a racketeering charge in Michigan.

The state attorney general's office says Lorraine Brown pleaded guilty Monday in a Kent County circuit courtroom. She faces up to 20 years in prison when sentenced on May 2.

The state says that the  51-year-old Brown orchestrated a robo-signing scheme in which employees fraudulently signed another authorized person's name on mortgage documents to expedite foreclosures.

"This process created documents with false signatures and I allowed it to happen under my direction," Brown said in court on Monday.

One name seen frequently on documents across the country was Linda Green.

"There was a real Linda Green and she was authorized to sign these documents," said Joy Yearout, a spokesperson for Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette. "The problem is DocX got paid per document, so Lorraine Brown told other employees to sign Linda's name so the company could make more money."

Brown pleaded guilty to a federal charge in Florida last year and reached a plea agreement on related state charges in Missouri.

Under a plea agreement Brown will be able to serve whatever time she gets in Michigan in a federal prison along with her federal sentence for fraud. Guidelines estimate her state time at between 24 and 40 months out of a maximum 20 years for racketeering.

"In many of these cases it's possible the homeowners may have been facing foreclosure whether the documents were valid or not," Yearout said, "but this had the net effect of speeding up the process."

Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette recently reached a $2.5 million civil settlement with the parent company of DocX, a mortgage processing company run by Brown.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.