C Stairs Loan Shark

 

I’m writing this from 5/26/2020 because it came up in another context and I don’t think it was mentioned in my diary before.  If you search the public records from 1950 until 1981 when I met Don, you will see he only had owned a house, his used car lot in a bad part of town and a lot that he later built a house on for his wife in Brandon. 

 

One day in 1984, while standing in line at the bank, Don overheard a bank officer say he had a $20,000 loan in default he would be glad to sell for $2000. Don got the information and, because he could not read beyond a first grade level, asked me to look into it. In brief, we bought the loan, foreclosed, and sold the property for a substantial profit. That is what got us into the real estate business. We started buying defaulted loans from banks and going to tax deed sales. This was before this became a popular business. There were few people doing it. With me doing the research, negotiations and title clearing on the properties we built this to a portfolio of properties to rent or resell that was worth around $5 million dollars at the time of his disappearance.  My maiden name was Stairs and I was the person all the bankers and people in the industry dealt with. 

 

I told everyone my name was Gilda Goldman and that I was working for a tough businessman named C.Stairs, because a woman couldn’t get the time of day in that field in the 80s.  My business card said C.Stairs, Loan Shark on it and I’d answer the phone as if I was just the secretary.  The image was my name: C. Stairs in the shape of a shark I drew bearing down on a little fish.  I chose the tag line and graphic because we were the last people anyone should borrow from as we charged 18%.  We would tell people to go anywhere and everywhere before borrowing from us because the interest was so high and we would foreclose on them if they defaulted.  We were willing to deal with people who had horrible credit and would likely default and trash the security, because that is a high risk, high reward business. 

 

When Don and I married people were always calling him Mr. Stairs because they figured he’d been the shrewd man behind the curtain all that time.  Everyone was initially confused about why I called him Don.

 

We kept the properties in land trusts. During the roughly ten years we were partners before his divorce and our marriage there were properties we bought together and some Don bought on his own or with another woman, Pam Enriquez. When we married I put all of those I had not worked on into one trust. The ones from our joint efforts were kept in a separate trust. The trust holding the properties I was not involved in was set up with his children as beneficiaries if he passed and called the PRSL Land Trust. I was the beneficiary of the trust holding the properties I was involved in.  Anyone can search his name in the public records from 1950 – 1997 to see this is true.  Anyone can also check the conservatorship case to see that the Will, Power of Attorney and Trusts were all authenticated by multiple firms and stipulated to be authentic by all parties to the conservatorship, including Don’s daughters.