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Trump Scrambles to Pardon Corporate Criminals He Once Prosecuted - The American Prospect
As the Trump administration tells the story, Barry Sturner is an ordinary small-business owner who had his life’s work and reputation destroyed by Rohit Chopra’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) in a “seven-year harassment saga,” after some power-mad lawyers got ahold of some “innocuous” comments he’d made about crime on an AM radio show and decided to “spen[d] years persecuting and extorting” his “small Midwest firm.”
What really happened is this: Sturner and his longtime partner David Hochberg co-owned a mortgage brokerage called Townstone that derived some 90 percent of its business from its eponymous personal-finance call-in infomercials broadcast on the venerable Chicagoland AM radio station WGN. No one at the CFPB knew about the radio show until a periodic examination of mortgage lending data for signs of potential abuse flagged Townstone as a brokerage with a suspiciously low percentage of home loans in “majority minority” neighborhoods—a curious finding given that 60 percent of Chicago residents fall into an ethnic minority. Staffers began listening to the radio shows, with help from transcription software, and found that Sturner and Hochberg had characterized the South Side of Chicago as a “war zone,” downtown Chicago as a “jungle” that turned on Friday and Saturday into “hoodlum weekend,” a Jewel-Osco supermarket in the neighborhood as “a scary place,” and predominantly Black Markham as a “crazy” place through which one must “drive very fast” while “look[ing] at the dashboard” and making sure not to “look at anybody or lock on anybody’s eyes.” For good measure, the men also advised prospective house sellers to “take down the Confederate flag” before they listed.
There’s nothing illegal about holding these opinions, of course. But Townstone’s radio show is an infomercial, which generates 90 percent of the brokerage’s leads, which the brokerage pays WGN to air, presumably punctuated at regular intervals by some phrase along the lines of “an equal housing lender” (LOL), because as everyone who has ever been exposed to a five-minute radio commercial break knows, America has laws—the Fair Housing Act, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, the Community Reinvestment Act—to protect borrowers from lending discrimination. It also has enormous multitrillion-dollar pools of money in Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, etc., which buy virtually every single mortgage Townstone and operations like it originate, which is literally the only reason men like Sturner and Hochberg can actually turn a profit peddling fixed-rate 30-year loans to people who still listen to the radio. Sturner and Hochberg went to mortgage broker academy; they know the rules.
And when the Trump administration’s CFPB contacted him in 2017 about all the “jungle” references he’d made on his infomercial, Sturner knew he’d been caught, and he knew he’d done wrong. He updated Townstone’s website for the first time in years, replacing the bare-bones home page with a montage of stock photos featuring Black and interracial families. And he transferred $2.4 million of the brokerage’s money to his personal bank accounts, instantly and dubiously rendering Townstone an insolvent shell company.
What really happened is this: Sturner and his longtime partner David Hochberg co-owned a mortgage brokerage called Townstone that derived some 90 percent of its business from its eponymous personal-finance call-in infomercials broadcast on the venerable Chicagoland AM radio station WGN. No one at the CFPB knew about the radio show until a periodic examination of mortgage lending data for signs of potential abuse flagged Townstone as a brokerage with a suspiciously low percentage of home loans in “majority minority” neighborhoods—a curious finding given that 60 percent of Chicago residents fall into an ethnic minority. Staffers began listening to the radio shows, with help from transcription software, and found that Sturner and Hochberg had characterized the South Side of Chicago as a “war zone,” downtown Chicago as a “jungle” that turned on Friday and Saturday into “hoodlum weekend,” a Jewel-Osco supermarket in the neighborhood as “a scary place,” and predominantly Black Markham as a “crazy” place through which one must “drive very fast” while “look[ing] at the dashboard” and making sure not to “look at anybody or lock on anybody’s eyes.” For good measure, the men also advised prospective house sellers to “take down the Confederate flag” before they listed.
There’s nothing illegal about holding these opinions, of course. But Townstone’s radio show is an infomercial, which generates 90 percent of the brokerage’s leads, which the brokerage pays WGN to air, presumably punctuated at regular intervals by some phrase along the lines of “an equal housing lender” (LOL), because as everyone who has ever been exposed to a five-minute radio commercial break knows, America has laws—the Fair Housing Act, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, the Community Reinvestment Act—to protect borrowers from lending discrimination. It also has enormous multitrillion-dollar pools of money in Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, etc., which buy virtually every single mortgage Townstone and operations like it originate, which is literally the only reason men like Sturner and Hochberg can actually turn a profit peddling fixed-rate 30-year loans to people who still listen to the radio. Sturner and Hochberg went to mortgage broker academy; they know the rules.
And when the Trump administration’s CFPB contacted him in 2017 about all the “jungle” references he’d made on his infomercial, Sturner knew he’d been caught, and he knew he’d done wrong. He updated Townstone’s website for the first time in years, replacing the bare-bones home page with a montage of stock photos featuring Black and interracial families. And he transferred $2.4 million of the brokerage’s money to his personal bank accounts, instantly and dubiously rendering Townstone an insolvent shell company.
https://prospect.org/justice/2025-03-28-trump-scrambles-pardon-corporate-criminals-townstone-boeing-cfpb/
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