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When Scott Almeida walked out of federal prison and into the mortgage business, he took a gamble. He admitted on his license application that he had been convicted of cocaine trafficking.

Florida regulators -- responsible for protecting borrowers from predatory brokers -- could have rejected him on the spot.

Instead, they asked for a character reference: He gave them a note from his mom. They said he needed a reputable supervisor for his practice: He chose a guy he met in the prison visitor room.

They asked for a copy of the court file but never demanded the police report, which shows that he had been caught with a small arsenal of assault rifles and ammunition, in addition to the cocaine.

Their background investigation complete, regulators circled ''approved'' at the bottom of the screening checklist, collected a $215 license fee and looked the other way.

Over the next three years, in a crime spree that stretched from Tampa to Miami, Almeida arranged nearly $3 million in fraudulent loans and fleeced 30 people -- many of them elderly and disabled.

Twice, the Florida Office of Financial Regulation -- which polices the mortgage industry -- failed to act on warnings that Almeida was stealing from clients, allowing his scam to thrive until police threw him into jail.

The Almeida case highlights one in a series of breakdowns in the state's enforcement system created to protect borrowers. Since 2000, regulators failed to weed out people with criminal histories, monitor scam operations and discipline crooked brokers, a Miami Herald investigation found.

State regulators allowed thousands of ex-convicts to enter a profession that gave them access to the most sensitive and personal financial information: credit cards, bank accounts and Social Security numbers.

Those criminals went on to commit nearly $85 million in mortgage fraud, the newspaper found. They stole their customers' identities. They stole their money. They even stole their homes.

''I was disgusted, I had to cry, because it was the first time in my life I'd been scammed,'' said Mary Taylor, 62, one of Almeida's victims.

Beyond the licensing, regulators routinely overlooked or ignored complaints, allowing rogue brokers to flourish amid one of the biggest housing booms in state history.

As the median home price reached an all-time record in Florida, and the Miami skyline erupted with gleaming new residential towers, fortune seekers rushed into the mortgage business in unprecedented numbers.

But Florida regulators, who introduced the nation's first licensing requirement for mortgage brokers in 1959, failed to keep pace.

During an eight-month investigation, The Miami Herald analyzed computer records for more than 222,844 Florida mortgage professionals, examined thousands of records from the Office of Financial Regulation, reviewed hundreds of court files and interviewed dozens of regulators, brokers and victims.

The newspaper found:

• From 2000 to 2007, regulators allowed at least 10,529 people with criminal records to work in the mortgage profession. Of those, 4,065 cleared background checks after committing crimes that state law specifically requires regulators to screen, including fraud, bank robbery, racketeering and extortion.

• More than half the people who wrote mortgages in Florida during that period were not subject to any criminal background check. Despite repeated pleas from industry leaders to screen them, Florida regulators have refused.

• Confronted with a growing epidemic of mortgage fraud -- Florida now has the highest rate in the nation -- the number of license revocations declined over the last five years, leaving borrowers at the mercy of predatory brokers.

• During the peak of the housing boom, the Office of Financial Regulation ignored a state law enacted in 2006 that compelled it to perform nationwide criminal background checks on applicants. That failure allowed people convicted in other states -- and in federal court -- to peddle loans in Florida without any scrutiny.

• Regulators allowed at least 20 brokers to keep their licenses even after committing the one crime that seemed sure to get them banned from the industry: mortgage fraud.

''I knew we had a problem. I had no idea how bad,'' U.S. Sen. Mel Martinez, R-Fla., said when told of The Miami Herald's findings.

Martinez is co-sponsor of an amendment to a sweeping federal housing bill that would ban anyone convicted of a felony from selling mortgages for seven years.

While much attention on the national mortgage crisis has focused on questionable Wall Street practices, the damage done by criminal brokers began on a far more basic and intimate level.

In brokerages at nondescript offices in strip malls across the state, the frauds ran the gamut, from simple schemes to boost reported incomes and assets, to elaborate enterprises with straw buyers and bogus appraisals.

Sometimes banks were the targets of the fraud; other times, borrowers.

Don Saxon, commissioner of the Office of Financial Regulation, said he didn't know why his staff issued licenses to bank robbers and racketeers, but would look into the cases cited by The Miami Herald.

''You're asking me to get into the heads of the people who made those choices,'' Saxon said. He added: ''Certainly we are not proud of the fact that these people have gone on to do bad things.''

OFR officials who do the screening said there is no single standard they use to decide who gets a license: The criminal background check is just one of many factors.

''We look at all the facets around, you know, whatever file, and we predicate on the fact that everybody deserves another chance,'' said Terry Straub, director of the OFR's Division of Finance, which regulates the mortgage industry in Florida.

Miami-Dade schoolteacher Candace Young said she expects more vigilance from regulators.

She ran up a $100,000 legal bill while fighting to get her house back after broker Michael Fletcher -- who has a conviction for grand theft -- allegedly slipped the deed into a stack of documents he got her to sign. Young said she thought she was simply refinancing.

She got the house back. A civil-court judge nullified the deed transfer because the notary whose signature is on the documents admitted she was not present for the deal.

Fletcher could not be reached for comment for this report.

''I think it's horrible,'' Young said. ''Why would you let someone convicted of grand theft just go and raid the public? What does it take to lose a license?''
THE BOOM YEARS

When Almeida made the jump from cocaine trafficker to mortgage broker in 2002, he joined a wave that would nearly triple the number of brokers in Florida by the summer of 2007.

They were the first, and only, contact most buyers had with the banking industry.

Their role was simple: to persuade banks to lend their customers the money they would need to buy into the booming real-estate market.

To make their case, they gathered the most intimate details about their customers' financial lives.

The mortgages they peddled -- including many that required no money down and minuscule payments for the first few years -- lured previously unqualified buyers into the market and sent home prices to all-time highs.

Through it all, state regulators were the only line of defense, empowered to keep criminals out of the mortgage industry and revoke licenses to protect consumers from fraud.

But the OFR almost never rejected applicants based on their criminal records. The Miami Herald analyzed the same criminal database that the OFR uses and discovered 4,065 new applicants between 2000 and 2007 who had been found guilty of crimes that the law specifically requires regulators to screen.

Those include crimes involving fraud, dishonest dealing and ''moral turpitude''. Any conviction counts, as does any case where the applicant pleaded no contest, or where the court withheld adjudication.

As a group, they were guilty of 2,821 financial crimes, including 922 larcenies, 752 frauds, 327 burglaries, 161 forgeries and 67 robberies.

There were at least 1,588 crimes that the law describes as ''moral turpitude,'' including 835 assaults and batteries, 253 illegal drug sales, 84 sex crimes and 15 homicides.

During the same period, regulators rejected only 29 applicants based on their criminal record.

The OFR's mission statement declares that it is dedicated to safeguarding the public from fraud.

State lawyer William Gene Cole described that responsibility in a 1999 order refusing to license a Miami man guilty of grand theft because it would ''place him in a position of trust over other people's money, in a transaction that is often the most important investment a person will ever make -- buying a house.''

But as the industry boomed, and new applications piled up on regulators over the last eight years, they veered away from applying that standard, licensing 186 people guilty of the same theft statute, The Miami Herald found.

Among them: Anthony Hollis of Orlando, who got a license to own a mortgage brokerage in 2003, despite convictions for car theft and passing bad checks.

He didn't even make it through the 24-hour mortgage-broker training class without breaking the law, court records show. He persuaded a classmate who worked for Sprint PCS to sell him cellphone customers' Social Security numbers.

Hollis used his training to pull his victims' credit histories without their knowledge, court records show. He opened credit-card accounts in their names and stole more than $200,000 -- much of that blown in Las Vegas -- before his conviction for racketeering in 2004.

The Miami Herald reviewed the complete application files for 100 mortgage professionals -- violent offenders and those with the most serious financial crimes, like bank robbery and racketeering -- to see how the OFR handled high-priority cases.

The list includes brokers arrested and convicted in Florida, those who had been imprisoned in other states, and those convicted in federal courts.

Most had been found guilty before they applied for their license. The rest were found guilty after getting into the industry.

Of 64 with criminal histories when they applied, 36 disclosed their records. In those cases, regulators started the vetting process by demanding character references.

They accepted one from an Almeida business associate, Joel K. Hill, who has since been arrested, and acquitted, on charges of grand theft and exploiting the elderly. They accepted another from Almeida's mother, who noted that her son struggled with the exam after his training course: ''It took Scott three times but he passed and he didn't give up,'' she wrote.

Regulators also routinely asked offenders for a written explanation of their crime and subsequent rehabilitation.

''I had to write a letter. It took three seconds. It wasn't a battle,'' Almeida told The Miami Herald. With that, the OFR issued his license.

When South Beach real-estate speculator Richard Crowder applied in January 2003, he explained that his prior burglary case was ''my only altercation with the law and something I will be forever ashamed of.''

The same month he wrote those words, court records show, Crowder embarked on one of the most ambitious mortgage-fraud schemes in recent Florida history, netting $37 million in fraudulent loans by systematically lying on mortgage applications, fabricating supporting documents and arranging bogus appraisals.

Crowder spent the money on luxury condos in gleaming new towers, which have become the very symbol of Miami's real-estate bubble.

His empire included 14 waterfront units -- with access to a rooftop pool and 24-hour concierge -- at the Continuum in South Beach, one of the most expensive addresses in the southeastern United States.

After Crowder pleaded guilty in January, he told The Miami Herald that he hoped for a light sentence so he could devote himself to teaching ''credit literacy seminars'' in area high schools. In April, U.S. District Judge Jose E. Martinez sentenced him to nine years in prison.
EVADING THE TRUTH

Dozens of applicants simply lied to get their licenses, The Miami Herald found.

Twenty-six with criminal records checked ''no'' to the question on whether they had ever been convicted of a crime involving fraud, dishonest dealing or moral turpitude. The OFR's background check -- which until recently searched only Florida police and court records -- uncovered convictions for eight of them.

But even when regulators caught applicants lying, they still granted licenses, despite a provision in state law that says any ''material misstatement of fact'' is, by itself, grounds for a denial.

In 2003, Kissimmee broker Donald Lewis Smith checked ''no'' to the crime question on his application. In fact, he had been sentenced to 17 years in prison for strangling his wife and dumping her body into Tampa Bay, court records show.

When their background check revealed that Smith had lied, it was too late to reject him.

Under state law, after regulators receive an application, they have 30 days to request more information, said OFR Bureau Chief Pam Epting. In Smith's case, they didn't get the results of the background check until the 30th day -- they missed their chance to ask him about the murder conviction.

''The agency ended up having to issue the license, and the reason for that is our own mistake,'' OFR lawyer Peter Fisher said.

So instead, they asked whether Smith would be willing to go on probation. He said no, records show.

The OFR gave him a license, no strings attached. Smith could not be reached for comment.

In other cases, applicants omitted their most serious offenses from the follow-up paperwork or shaded the facts in their own favor.

Almeida told regulators he had been convicted of ''possession with intent to distribute.'' They asked for certified copies of all court records pertaining to the case, but their file doesn't include a copy of the police report.

It shows that when police raided his Tampa apartment in 1998, they found the tools of a large-scale trafficker: two kilograms of cocaine, two semiautomatic assault rifles, a stolen Glock pistol, Ecstasy, steroids, syringes, sophisticated scales, and a mold for pressing cocaine into one-kilogram packages.

Regulators did not demand a copy of the report, a standard part of any criminal file. Instead, they asked Almeida to sign a probation agreement -- a promise not to own a brokerage or break any mortgage-industry law for five years.
PROBATION DEALS

Of the 4,065 mortgage brokers and lenders with criminal records who got licenses between 2000 and 2007, 269 applicants signed similar probation agreements, The Miami Herald found. Among them were 40 people convicted for assault or battery, 39 for grand theft, 23 for burglary and one for kidnapping.

But the state's probation does not require monitoring -- no mandatory reports, no visits from regulators.

''We do not have the personnel to go out and review their files,'' said Fisher, the OFR lawyer.

The system even allows convicts to choose their own probation supervisors.

In 2003, Almeida chose his boss, Frank Giffone, whom he had met in federal prison. Almeida was an inmate; Giffone was visiting a mutual friend, Almeida told The Miami Herald.

Shortly after going into business together, the pair sent salesmen to search out elderly, often disabled people living in ramshackle houses in poor neighborhoods of Hillsborough, Polk and Lee counties.

They promised home-equity loans for badly needed renovations.

State regulators received two written warnings in 2004 that Almeida was lying on the loan applications and stealing money. One was from the daughter of a 76-year-old victim, the other from investigators at the Hillsborough County Consumer Protection Agency.

But despite the fact that Almeida was on probation, and had promised not to break the law, regulators took no action against his license.

Almeida later pleaded guilty to stealing from both borrowers. Giffone pleaded guilty to racketeering.

After the warnings, Almeida went on to scam 12 more victims in deals involving $1.1 million in fraudulent loans, including several routed through a brokerage in Homestead, records show.

As the number of applicants rushing into the business peaked in the last three years, criminals with even longer and more troubling rap sheets got licensed, The Miami Herald found.

State regulators allowed Eric Goldstein into the industry early last year despite no-contest pleas to two counts of racketeering, conspiracy to traffic cocaine, and possession of a machine gun with the serial number filed off.

In his explanation of the 1997 racketeering charge, Goldstein told regulators he had been been running ''an adult entertainment establishment'' -- police called it an illegal escort service -- when an undercover cop offered to process credit-card payments for him.

Under the law, any of his convictions would have justified immediate denial of his license application. But the OFR ''has to ensure that we are considering the possibility of rehabilitation,'' said lawyer Peter Fisher.

In Goldstein's case, the agency noted that he got probation for the racketeering offense, and hadn't served jail time since the cocaine-trafficking and weapons charges in the early '90s, Fisher said.

Two months after the OFR granted his license, Goldstein was arrested again, for extorting money from a partner in a proposed real-estate deal. He pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of making harassing phone calls. ''In retrospect, I agree, our decision does look questionable,'' Fisher said.

Nevertheless, Goldstein still has an active license. He told The Miami Herald that he's not practicing, however, ''because of all the problems in the industry.''
FBI SCREENING

Sometimes state officials themselves broke the law.

In 2006, the year license applications and home-sale prices peaked, the Florida Legislature changed the law to close a significant gap.

The new provision required state officials to send would-be brokers' fingerprints to the FBI to screen for convictions in other states and in federal court, where serious financial crimes and drug-trafficking cases are often prosecuted.

But state officials didn't follow the law. Last February, more than a year after the statute was changed, Greg Oaks, chief of the OFR's Bureau of Regulatory Review, told The Miami Herald that running the FBI checks using the old-fashioned hard-copy fingerprint cards took too long.

''It's conceivable a person might have an FBI record and we wouldn't see it,'' Oaks said. The agency began to run FBI checks in March of this year, officials said.

Here's what the OFR missed:

• Miami broker Jack Lux checked ''no'' to the criminal-history question. In fact, he had pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit money laundering and was sentenced to two years in federal prison, court records show. The OFR granted his license in February 2007.

• Nilsa Albaron, who had pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit bank robbery, got her license in 2007, too. She checked ''yes'' to the criminal-history question, but wrote in her letter of explanation that prosecutors had dropped the charges.

Not true. Miami-Dade prosecutors dropped one charge, but transferred the bank-robbery case to federal court.

Albaron said she doesn't know how OFR administrators missed her federal judgment. ''Ask them,'' she said before walking away from two Miami Herald reporters.

Gary Kafka, former body builder with a long rap sheet and violent past, wrote millions of dollars in mortgages in South Florida without ever applying for a state license.

Fresh out of prison after serving time for bank fraud, he never went through a criminal background check before selling loans. He never took a competency exam.

He never had to.

More than half the mortgage professionals registered in Florida -- 120,563 -- entered the industry this decade without being licensed by the state, The Miami Herald found.

Known as loan originators, they perform the same job as mortgage brokers but aren't bound by the same rules.

Time and again, industry leaders asked Florida regulators to bring this group under their watch by imposing mandatory licensing. But regulators refused to press for any changes, claiming that lawmakers would never approve.

The state's refusal proved costly during the biggest housing boom in Florida history: Thousands of loan originators entered the industry with criminal histories, state records show.

While The Miami Herald found breakdowns in the state's licensing system for mortgage brokers, the lack of controls over originators created even more problems for an industry steeped in the highest fraud rate in the nation.

The special group was created by state lawmakers 17 years ago to make it easier for lenders to hire people as the industry was growing.

But in the past eight years, more people with criminal records jumped into the business as loan originators than as any other category of mortgage professionals.
'IT'S EMBARRASSING'

''It's more than disappointing, it's embarrassing,'' said Joseph Falk, a Miami mortgage broker and former president of the National Association of Mortgage Brokers, who tried to get regulators to license loan originators in 2002.

''It was pretty easy for someone to enter the industry because there were no standards. If there's no one policing, anyone who wanted to join the industry could do so.''

Pamela Simmons turned to a loan originator with a criminal past in 2005 to refinance her three-bedroom house in Pompano Beach, but ended up losing it.

''This was everything to me,'' said the single mother, tears in her eyes as she stood in front of the house. ''It's the only home I ever owned.''

A review of thousands of pages of court documents, state industry reports, internal e-mails and police reports shows that from 2000 to 2007:

• 5,306 people with criminal histories became loan originators -- a rate of nearly two a day. Worse, those include 2,201 who had committed financial crimes, such as fraud, money laundering and grand theft.

• Even large lenders hired loan originators with criminal backgrounds. The Miami Herald found that in at least 30 companies with 50 or more employees, more than one in five originators had a criminal record.

• Nearly two dozen people stripped of their licenses as mortgage brokers were able to sidestep regulators by becoming loan originators. Nine others who were denied licenses because of prior crimes or regulatory violations were able to do the same.

''It's a huge hole,'' said Ronald Brenner, a former Florida mortgage regulator who once led the agency's Miami office. ''You could get the worst thief in the world, a fraudster to the nth degree, and when he gets out of jail he can come work at your mortgage operation, and if he doesn't have a broker's license, all the better.''

Kafka, 48, joined America's Best Lending in Boynton Beach in 2004 after living in a halfway house.

While his federal probation officer said in court records that Kakfa should not be working in the mortgage industry, he went on to join two other firms without disclosing his past.

Two years after he began to peddle mortgages, he was convicted of cheating lenders of $2.7 million in loans at America's Best Lending by inflating incomes, boosting assets and misrepresenting other finances.

''You never would have guessed it,'' said Philip Sencer, who hired Kafka at a Wellington firm in 2006. ''He was the type of guy you'd invite to your home for a barbeque.''
BURDEN ON LENDERS

State regulators say they don't license loan originators, but they regulate those who hire them: mortgage lenders. The 1991 law allowing originators made it clear: The burden is on the lenders to ensure that everyone follows the law.

If a lender refuses to act on complaints against a loan originator, the state can discipline the lender, said Terry Straub, recently appointed director of the Office of Financial Regulation's Division of Finance.

''We hold them accountable,'' he said. But The Miami Herald found that in at least nine major cases when originators were arrested for mortgage fraud, no action was taken against their lenders.

While Florida requires lenders to report the names of their loan originators every quarter, the newspaper found that hundreds of companies don't follow the law. In the first half of 2005 -- during the peak of the boom -- 355 didn't file required reports, according to the state's own records.

Falk, the former president of the National Association of Mortgage Brokers, said the lack of reporting in the state system allows too many gaps.

The lack of tracking leads to even more problems: Without any central registration and with no requirements for entry, loan originators with criminal histories can move from firm to firm without divulging their past.

There is no state law requiring lenders to check their background.

If they had, they would have found that Kafka spent nearly three years in federal prison for loan fraud in 1999 and illegally keeping an arsenal of guns and ammunition while a resident of Ocean Ridge, near Boynton Beach.

Sencer, who hired Kafka at Financial Security in Wellington, said he learned of Kafka's police record only after federal Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents showed up at his office in 2005. Sencer said that when he met with prosecutors, 'they told me, ''You got duped.' ''

Assistant U.S. Attorney Neil Karadbil, who prosecuted Kafka, said the former loan originator was able to conceal his past while peddling loans, partly because he didn't have to submit to criminal background checks.

''There has to be some way to know in this industry whether you're dealing with a convicted felon,'' Karadbil said. ''At least borrowers or employers should know that.''

Even before his latest conviction, Kafka had a criminal record dating to 1977, including 15 arrests and four felony convictions, court records show. The charges include grand theft, burglary and possession of contraband in prison.

He is now back in prison -- serving 57 months -- for the most recent mortgage scheme.
A NEW CALLING

Harry Rolle was a convicted felon who had declared personal bankruptcy three times before he became a loan originator in 2001 for International Lenders of South Florida in Oakland Park.

Within months, he found his first victim: Elsa Erarte, a single mother who worked at Walgreens in Miami. Rolle pocketed a $16,000 down payment she had given him while he was supposed to help her find a home, saying it was nonrefundable.

She sued Rolle in Miami-Dade Circuit Court and got her money back in a judgment in 2004. ''It was all the money she had,'' recalled her attorney, Joel Friedman. ''She had spent years saving it.''

But the court case didn't stop Rolle.

The 53-year-old loan salesman went on to cheat four more borrowers through a variety of means: pocketing their down payments, skimming from their loans, and selling their homes without their approval, court records state.

''The guy was a consummate con artist,'' said Joseph Wilson, an investigator for the Office of Financial Regulation, who referred the case to police. ''He had the ability to gain people's confidence by saying what people wanted to hear.''

In 2005, the Miami-Dade County state attorney's office finally prosecuted Rolle as a habitual offender on fraud charges -- for ripping off Erarte and others. A judge gave him a year in jail.

Under state law, there is nothing to stop loan originators convicted of ripping off borrowers from returning to the industry.

Because they aren't licensed, there are no records of discipline or past crimes involving money or moral turpitude -- and no files for public inspection.

Bernard Williams, who pleaded guilty to stealing $6,000 from two elderly women -- the bills ripped from the seams of their clothes -- said he found the easiest route to sell home loans by becoming a loan originator in 2001.

''I didn't have a problem getting in,'' he told The Miami Herald.

Williams, 54, said he decided to sell loans because the market was booming and he knew that ''there was money to be made.'' Over the next five years, he worked for three separate lenders.

But while he was writing loans for dozens of working-class families, he and several co-conspirators were accused by Florida's attorney general of fleecing 80 people of nearly $2 million, according to a civil fraud suit filed in Broward County Circuit Court in January.

The suit says Williams, who has not been criminally charged, joined others in a scheme to siphon money from loans designed to save people from losing their homes. Like Pamela Simmons, several claim that Williams put their homes up for sale without their permission. He and others then pocketed tens of thousands of dollars in profits in each case by charging inflated fees, the suit alleges.

''I worked hard -- three jobs -- to get that house,'' said Simmons, 40, who has five children.

Williams insists he did nothing wrong, saying the suit will be resolved in his favor. ''This is all a headache,'' said Williams, who continues to work as a loan originator in North Miami-Dade.

He refused to talk about his guilty plea in 1994 for stealing from two elderly women, drawing a 30-day sentence and five years of probation.
`FEEDING FRENZY'

As the housing boom exploded in 2001, so did the number of people rushing into the mortgage industry, with loan originators leading the way. But as their numbers rose each year -- 66 a day in 2005 -- so did the number of former criminals.

With home sales rising more than 20 percent a year in parts of Florida, mortgage companies were hiring loan originators at an unprecedented rate, state records show.

''Back then, it was such a feeding frenzy,'' said David Velazquez, 37, a former loan originator in Broward who served time in prison for drug trafficking. 'People were saying, `We need loan originators. We'll train you.' It was so busy. They were pulling in anyone they could.''

In all, more than 5,300 people with criminal histories rushed into Florida's mortgage industry as loan originators since 2000. Even for people who had five or more convictions, there were no impediments to getting in.

According to state Department of Corrections data and county court records:

• Brian Lendin served six prison terms totaling a dozen years between 1983 and 2000 for crimes including grand theft, manslaughter and aggravated battery.

• Rosendo Perez was convicted of mortgage fraud, grand theft and forgery between 1990 and 2000.

• Ronald D. Collins was convicted 37 times between 1983 and 2000 on charges including grand theft, forgery and writing worthless checks.
REJECTION OVERCOME

The Miami Herald also found 31 instances of people with stripped or denied mortgage-broker licenses who managed to get work as loan originators. Others were turned down over incomplete applications.

Florida denied Antonio Ramos a broker's license in 2004 after he failed to submit his arrest record and other documents on his prior crimes. On his state application, he admitted a grand-theft conviction, explaining he was young at the time: ''Please accept me, because I am honest and want to be a success in the future.''

Ramos became a loan originator.

Over the next three years, prosecutors say, he and several co-conspirators embarked on a massive fraud spree targeting luxury homes in Broward County. They inflated home values in Southwest Ranches and used straw buyers to rip off lenders for $8.3 million.

Ramos is serving 60 days of home detention and four years of probation.

The Miami Herald also found that 22 brokers stripped of their state licenses returned as loan originators. Among them: four charged with felonies while working as mortgage brokers, two who dipped into their clients' accounts, and three who were charging excessive fees.

Chris Francis said he knew that he had to become a loan originator to get into the business in 2002. The reason: He had spent nearly a year in federal prison for a $4 million mortgage fraud in Maryland.

''I did my homework, and this was my way in,'' said Francis, who works for a lender in Lee County. He's now in charge of compliance for his firm. ''Who better than me to make sure everything is done right?'' he said.