The rising tide of the mortgage industry lifted some pretty spurious boats here in Orange County, so it’s fun now to watch the subprime sinkhole laying them low.
Example: John Lynch, the “surfing banker,” executive VP of Secured Funding Corp., specialists in home equity loans and second mortgages to people with bad credit.
I had this guy pegged as a moron years ago, around the same time OC Metro ran a fawning blowjob of a profile on him:
For the foreseeable future, he will continue as a master of both the surfboard and the boardroom — plus anything else that he decides to do.
Well, that was then and this is now:
The party is over in Orange County. These days, Secured Funding’s once-buzzing office building in Costa Mesa, near John Wayne Airport, is gutted.
The imprint of “Secured Funding” is all that remains of the corporate logo that once graced the outside of the two-story building. Above it is a “For Lease” sign advertising the 82,333-square-foot (7,649-square-meter) building.
Lynch was so, so chatty with the press in 2004. What does he have to say now?
Neither [Lorne] Lahodny nor his partner in Secured, John Lynch, responded to messages left by phone and in person at their offices.
I remember this guy. I was assigned to cover him for a regional business pub, came to the same conclusion as you (a total moron). I met a few of the sales guys off campus and found out what a hell-hole that place was to work. I reported back to the editor. I lied. I told him I couldn’t find anything to write about, so we passed on the story. In retrospect, I wish I had dug deeper. Then again, I doubt that my editor would have had the stomach to print what I might have come up with.