I was trying to figure out how to do the right thing when every option felt wrong.
What I didn’t know yet was that Craig was about to make the decision for me.
Chapter 5: Legal and Strategic Planning
My attorney’s name is Ed Palant.
Mid-50s, former bank counsel, looks like a high school football coach who accidentally went to law school.
I’ve worked with him since I started buying properties.
He’s not dramatic. He doesn’t give speeches. He just tells you where you stand and what it’ll cost to move.
I sat across from his desk and laid everything out.
The portfolio acquisition, my parents’ mortgage being in it, the refinances, Craig, the tenant visits, the fake loan story, all of it.
Ed listened, took a few notes, and then said something I wasn’t expecting.
“How much do you care about staying in this family?”
I didn’t answer right away.
He held up a hand.
“I’m not being philosophical. I’m asking because it changes the legal strategy. If you want to preserve the relationship, we handle this one way. If you’re done, we handle it another way. But either way, you need to protect your business first.”
“I want to protect my business, and I don’t want to be the guy who forecloses on his parents’ house.”
Ed nodded.
“Then here’s what we’re going to do.”
First, the tenant interference.
Ed said what my parents and Vanessa did was textbook tortious interference.
They went to my tenants, misrepresented the situation, and tried to get them to break their leases.
In Marcus’s case, they nearly succeeded.
Ed drafted cease-and-desist letters to my parents and to Craig and Vanessa, but I asked him to hold off on sending them.
I wanted documentation first.
Over the next two weeks, I quietly reached out to every tenant in my portfolio. Not just the ones who’d been contacted. All of them.
I told them I was doing a routine check-in and asked if anyone had been approached by outside parties about their lease or the building.
Four tenants total had been visited. Three by Vanessa, one by my dad.
I got written statements from each of them. Dates, descriptions, what was said.
Marcus even had a Ring doorbell clip of my dad standing on his porch.
I saved everything.
Second, the fabricated loan.
Ed said this was trickier.
Craig telling the family I owed him $15,000 was defamation in theory, but suing your brother for a family rumor isn’t practical.
What mattered was making sure the lie couldn’t be used against me in any future legal or financial context.
So, I pulled together every record from my company’s founding.
The credit union loan, the bank statements, the hardware store pay stubs, the timeline.
I had a paper trail that proved down to the dollar how I funded my startup.
No one named Craig appeared anywhere in it.
Ed put together a sworn affidavit for me.
If the loan fiction ever became a legal issue, I had the documentation to shut it down immediately.
Third, the mortgage.
This was the hard one.
Ed explained my options clearly.
I was the legal note holder. My parents were in default.
I could initiate foreclosure proceedings, which would be ugly, public, and final.
I could sell the note to another servicer and wash my hands of it, but then someone else would likely foreclose.
Or I could reach out to my parents directly, disclose that I held the note, and try to work out a modification.
“There’s a fourth option,” Ed said. “You do nothing. You sit on it. But you should know that as the note holder, you have a fiduciary duty to the portfolio. If you’re selectively ignoring a defaulted loan because it’s your parents and your investors or partners find out, that’s a problem.”
He was right.
I couldn’t just pretend I didn’t know.
I told him I wanted to wait. Not forever, just until I understood the full picture.
Why were my parents this far underwater?
I knew the refinances went to Craig, but I wanted to understand the mechanics.
Were they making any payments at all?
Did they know how bad it was?
Ed’s office pulled the payment history from the servicer records.
My parents hadn’t made a full mortgage payment in seven months.
They’d made a few partial payments, $200 here, $400 there, but they were nowhere close to current.