The home of Dominick DeVito, a builder and renovator who has served two prison sentences but is once again working in the high end real estate market in Greenwich, Conn. Below, Round Hill Road, according to Christopher Fountain, is representative of the ills of not just an out-of-whack property market, but a wider business world that has gone ethically astray. (NEW YORK TIMES PHOTOS)
' One of the gaudy estates is owned by a hedge fund kingpin now residing in prison; others belong to a real estate investor just coming out of prison and an investment adviser who steered his clients and their billions to Bernard L. Madoff. Then, to cap it off, a guy in an 8,000-square-foot mansion is charged with crushing his wife's skull in with a baseball bat.
This is "Rogues Hill Road," or so Fountain has called this 3.5-mile stretch of asphalt. "All these aspirational schnooks came out here thinking that they had really made it," said Fountain, a real estate broker, blogger and lifelong Greenwich resident. "But then the tide went out and what you are left with is a bunch of crooks."
Believe it or not, Fountain actually makes a living brokering mega-mansion real estate deals to these so-called schnooks, among others.
And his blog, For What It's Worth, has attracted a cult following among those he lampoons â€" the financial titans who can afford to plunk down $5 million or more on a house but who nonetheless seem to appreciate his scabrous take on Greenwich residents' run-ins with the law, debt-fueled implosions or plain old bad taste.
Indeed, Fountain would seem to spend as much time selling schadenfreude as houses.
The essence of his complaint â€" that decades of easy money and ceaseless greed have created a glut of unsalable houses that will remain a blight on his hometown for many years â€" highlights one of the more curious anomalies of today's explosion in asset prices.
Though the Federal Reserve's policy of rock-bottom interest rates over the last few years has revived the value of many of the nation's subdivisions and sent stocks soaring to historic highs, it has prompted only modest interest in the over-the-top Greenwich mansion, a classic emblem of quick riches.
Fountain likes to point to the prominent Greenwich characters in the public spotlight as part of the problem. Topping Fountain's list of homeowners are Raj Rajaratnam, the hedge fund executive now serving an 11-year prison sentence on charges of insider trading, and Frederic A. Bourke Jr., co-founder of Dooney & Bourke, the high-end handbag accessories store, who has just been imprisoned for bribery and whose house is on the market for $13 million.
He also likes to skewer Walter Noel, a founder of Fairfield Greenwich, the investment firm that raised more than $8 billion for Madoff and subsequently became the target of investigations. Noel's 175 Round Hill address is just across the road from Bourke's home. The estate of Steven A. Cohen, whose hedge fund pleaded guilty to insider trading charges in November, is six miles east of Round Hill Road.
Fountain includes in his gallery plenty of lesser-known people pushed into bankruptcy after overreaching, borrowing millions to build 15,000-square-foot houses that no one wanted to buy.
Fountain's contention that the legal and financial troubles bedeviling Greenwich big shots have contributed to this slump â€" a view that is hotly disputed by his more established competitors â€" is more anecdotal than scientific. Still, the numbers are stark.
According to Trulia, the real estate website, the average price per square foot of a four-bedroom house sold in Greenwich in the last three months was $442, down 40 percent from a year ago and 11 percent from 2009.
Fountain says that more than 43 houses are on the market for at least $10 million â€" many of them unsold for more than a year.
What will it take to sell them?
"My rule of thumb now is divide the asking price by two," he said. "Although the owner's ego always makes that very hard to do."
Fountain began to vent on his blog about two years ago.
"I'm sure Greenwich attracted some nefarious characters back in the '50s and '60s, but the past decade has seen just a parade of sad sack crooks," Fountain wrote in a cri de coeur about how the 100-acre pastures and graceful mansions of his youth had been replaced by garish castles squeezed onto four-acre lots.
This was especially true, he felt, of Round Hill Road. "The road, to me, represents all that is sordid in our modern business world, money-grubbing poseurs putting on airs, until the handcuffs are slapped on."
It is tempting to dismiss this as an old-money lament from someone who missed out on the past decade's asset boom. While Fountain's father rode the train into Grand Central every morning to a Wall Street job at White Weld, a white-shoe investment firm that is now defunct, his own career path has been rockier.
After practicing law in Bangor, Maine, Fountain returned to Greenwich, where he spent most of his time defending small investors suing big Wall Street banks over dubious investment advice. He quit his job in 2000 after publishing his first book, "The New Millionaire's Handbook: A Guide to Contemporary Social Climbing." But his writing career stalled, and in 2001 he beat a retreat to selling houses. At the age of 60, Fountain has had three careers over the last decade and now rents a modest farmhouse in North Stamford, Conn., about 10 miles from Round Hill Road.
Nevertheless, his outbursts over new-money excesses in Greenwich have struck a vein, attracting readers who, Fountain says, include not just bankers and local real estate mavens but also followers in Europe and Asia. Cliff Asness, the billionaire hedge fund manager, has commented on the blog, and Fountain's taste for Greenwich gossip makes him all the more appealing.
"Fountain is great," said a defense lawyer for a legally encumbered Greenwich resident who has come in for punishment on the blog. "He is really catnip for all of us."
One investment banker who recently used Fountain to sell and buy a house appreciates his forthrightness.
"If he thinks the house you are trying to sell is worth $1 million and not $5 million he will tell you," said the banker, who spoke on condition of anonymity because his firm did not permit him to speak to the press. "Plus, his blog is hilarious."
Much of it consists of his rightward-leaning libertarian and politically incorrect rants in which he mercilessly sends up â€" in equal measure â€" what he sees as the big-government vanities of the Obama administration and the arrogance of those who think they have arrived just because they could secure a $10 million mortgage.
With his raspy growl of a voice, his pickup truck and his trusty bow and arrow, which he deploys when deer-hunting season rolls around, Fountain might be as close as Greenwich comes to a redneck. And even if it is all a bit of an act, the shtick â€" selling real estate requires self-promotion of one kind or another â€" has been great for his business.
"The hedgies love me â€" it's amazing how successful you can be if you tell the truth," he said. "Last year was great, but it really kicked off when I started going on about Walter Noel and Rogues Hill Road."
Still, in the competitive Greenwich market, where 1,000 people out of a population of 61,000 are licensed to sell houses, there are those who wonder if Fountain's footprint is as big as he contends. While the $20 million in sales that he and his business partner generated in 2012 put him in the top tier of the local broker pool â€" 2013 was a harder slog, he says â€" some rival agents say his presence was hardly felt in previous years.
They also reject his assertion that the market for big-ticket houses is in terminal decline.
"It really bothers me when he talks about the market like this because it is just not true," said David Ogilvy, the long-standing dean of the mansion market in Greenwich, who also has suffered his share of pokes on the blog.
To prove his point, Ogilvy ticks off his firm's sales in recent months: $13.4 million, $14.5 million, $24 million.
But other real estate agents say large houses often sell for far less than the asking price these days.
"This is still a buyer's market," said W. Harry Pool, a longtime investment banker turned real estate broker at Halstead Property in Greenwich. "If you want to sell your $10 million house, you really have to have the best $10 million house out there."
When he is not hunched over a laptop or in pursuit of deer, Fountain spends most of his days cruising around town in his pickup.
"I mean this is insanity â€" it's just a garish pile of bricks," he growled in the fall, as he drove past yet another 10,000-square-foot, slightly worse for wear and quite empty house. Like so many of its ilk, the house had been slapped together in a few months by a highly leveraged speculator; unable to pull in the $9 million needed to clear his debts, he had to surrender it to the bank.
And who signed off on the mortgage? "Patriot Bank, of course," Fountain said, spitting the words.
Of the many that have suffered a whipping from Fountain over the years, few have been subjected to as much sustained abuse as Patriot National Bank, the small regional lender that is based nearby, in Stamford, and bankrolled some of Greenwich's most egregious mortgage disasters.
"Patriot was in a pretty bad place when we took over," concurred Michael A. Carrazza, whose investment firm, Solaia Capital Advisors, rescued the bank in 2010 and restored it to good health. About one-third of the bank's loan portfolio, he said, consisted of nonperforming loans belonging to those owning high-end houses in and around Greenwich. Many of the loans went to highflying Wall Street titans, but a surprising number were directed to other borrowers, like Jianhua Tsoi, an acupuncturist and aspiring artist, who borrowed $40 million to build at least five houses in and around Greenwich, few of which he was able to sell.
Another Patriot borrower was Dominick DeVito, a builder and renovator of big homes who, when he took up residence on Round Hill Road in 2005, had already served a term in prison for real estate fraud.
After a profitable run, he became overextended, borrowing $6 million from Patriot in 2006 to build and flip his most spectacular house yet.
When the market collapsed, DeVito's bankers got cold feet, shut down his credit line and took possession of his nearly completed house. In 2009, he was sent to prison again on mortgage charges related to his earlier real estate activities in New York.
That DeVito â€" an Italian-American kid from the rougher side of Eastchester, N.Y., and with no college education â€" would end up on Greenwich's most prestigious thoroughfare is in itself a bit of a curiosity.
"I mean I was a paint contractor," said DeVito in an interview last year, as he took in the swimming pool, the rolling green hills and the white picket fence from the front porch of his house. "Now I am on Round Hill Road?"
Since his release from prison in early 2013, DeVito has jumped back into the real estate game with a vengeance â€" plying the back roads of Greenwich in search of unloved mansions that he might snap up, tear down and sell for a profit.
"I am done with the banks, though," he said. Instead, he is looking to rich people in Greenwich to put up the cash, with profits to be split down the middle.
"I mean," he said with one of his signature, flashing white grins, "it's not rocket science, is it?"
For the Wall Street types, however, headline-grabbing failure is harder to brush off.
Consider Joseph F. Skowron III, known as Chip, whose $8 million house is on 16 Doubling Road, just a few miles east of Round Hill Road. A hedge fund investor, he was caught in 2011 doling out envelopes of cash in return for nonpublic stock tips and was sent to prison for five years. Once worth around $20 million, he left behind a wife, four small children and a garage once full of high-end sports cars.
Having already paid $7.7 million in fines to the U.S. government, Skowron was ordered in December to pay $24 million in past wages â€" beyond the $10 million he has already paid to his former employer, Morgan Stanley.
When a guy named Chip, with a dimple in his chin and a luxurious home on the edge of the local country club, commits and then admits to an egregious financial crime, the knives come out quickly.
"How warped can a guy get just to accumulate a 10-car collection of speedsters and a big Greenwich house," wrote Fountain on his blog late last year, no doubt exaggerating the number of cars Skowron owns. "He now has plenty of time to ponder that question. Chump."
Peter Tesei, the town's first selectman, is quick to point out that a vast majority of Greenwich's 61,000 residents are citizens in good standing. But even some of those have their pasts. And perhaps no one is better qualified to add a bit of heft to Fountain's thesis than David A. Stockman, who was the budget whiz kid of the Reagan administration.
In his 712-page book, "The Great Deformation," Stockman argues that the relentless money-printing of the Federal Reserve has created a pernicious cycle of greed and excess.
"This is just not sustainable â€" the bubbles are getting bigger and the busts are becoming more traumatic," Stockman said. "And with each subsequent reflation the wealth and income is flowing into a smaller set of hands at the very tippy-top of the economic ladder."
Stockman speaks from experience.
In the 1990s, he was a top executive at the private equity shop Blackstone and erected a 15,000-square-foot estate in the gated Greenwich community of Conyers Farm.
When the debt bubble burst in 2007, Stockman's final private equity play â€" a car parts supplier â€" failed spectacularly. Federal prosecutors charged him with fraud but withdrew the case two years later.
In 2012, Stockman put his trophy home â€" with its 11 bathrooms, swimming pool and tennis court â€" on the market, asking $19.75 million.
Weak as the market was, the listing was removed â€" and Fountain is not surprised.
"For $9 million, it's a nice little house," he said. "But these types of houses don't age well. There is just too much horse crap out there on the polo fields."
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