Reciprocal Disbarment

A federal judge in Camden, New Jersey, imposed a $5,000 sanction on a Pennsylvania lawyer for filing a frivolous suit against Wells Fargo Bank.

In a suit with 19 separate counts that sought $145 million in damages, Joshua Louis Thomas sued the bank on behalf of a property owner in foreclosure, even though the owner never spoke to Thomas or authorized him to file the suit, Senior U.S. District Judge Noel Hillman said when he imposed the sanction.

Hillman also referred Thomas to the chief judge for further disciplinary proceedings.

“The straightforward questions here then are whether Mr. Thomas had an objectively reasonable basis, after having conducted an inquiry reasonable under the circumstances, to file the complaint in this action and assert the factual allegations found in the complaint, in essence whether Thomas had a proper purpose for filing this lawsuit. The singular answer is even more straightforward: no,” Hillman wrote.

Hillman said Thomas leaves a long trail of cases in which the attorney files a “lengthy boiler-plate complaint presenting convoluted, disjointed and disproven conspiracy theories about the manner in which mortgages are originated, recorded and serviced with a goal of complicating and forestalling the residential real estate foreclosure process.”

“His motive is financial. In exchange for delaying the foreclosure and eviction process through his frivolous pleadings, he convinces the mortgagor, or in some cases a tenant, to pay him the mortgage or rental payment rather than the mortgagee,” the judge wrote.

Thomas, who is based in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, was hit with a two-year suspension by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in October 2021.

Thomas, reached by email, said of the sanction from Hillman, “The judge made several statements that were not based on facts, made no effort to verify almost everything claimed, and were simply incorrect, and a motion for reconsideration is going to be submitted as well as other potential pleadings as well.”

Thomas sued Wells Fargo on behalf of Anthony Edwards, the former owner of a house in Burlington, New Jersey, that was foreclosed on by Wells Fargo in 2017, and Marvin Minney Jr., who lived in the house and made the mortgage payments for a while.

The property went into foreclosure after Minney stopped making payments.

In March 2019, after the final judgment of foreclosure was entered and the house sold to another party at a sheriff’s sale, Thomas filed a “motion to set aside [the] sheriff’s sale” in the foreclosure case in Burlington County Superior Court.

Thomas did not specify who his client was, and after his motion was denied in April 2019, Thomas filed the Wells Fargo suit in federal court.

In January 2020, Edwards contacted Hillman, saying he had not authorized Thomas to file a suit in his name. Hillman said Edwards appeared to be a straw buyer of the Burlington property.

The claims against Wells Fargo were voluntarily dismissed in October 2020.

In imposing sanctions against Edwards, Hillman wrote that he found the attorney had improper motives for filing the Wells Fargo suit.

“The court, faced with this troubling history and with Thomas’ decision to pursue this lawsuit without having ever spoken with Edwards, is forced to conclude that he filed the complaint in this action for the patently improper purposes of harassing the defendants, tying up the property in question for an indefinite period of time by asserting claims and factual allegations for which he had no support, and needlessly delaying any resolution of the question of who properly owned the property at the center of this dispute,” Hillman wrote.

The judge added that Thomas “simply does not have any remaining credibility with this court or likely almost any other court that he has litigated before in recent years, and has long since forfeited the right to be taken at his word or given the presumption of truthfulness that this court would generally grant the lawyers appearing before it.”

(Mike Frisch)