The letter arrived in April last year, a mishmash of strange numbers and words. This at first did not alarm Rose. Most letters are that way for her frustrating puzzles she cant solve. Rose, who can scarcely read or write, calls herself a lead kid. Her childhood home, where lead paint chips blanketed her bedsheets like snowflakes, affected me really bad, she says. In everything I do.
She says she cant work a professional job. She cant live alone. And, she says, she surely couldnt understand this letter.
So on that April day, the 20-year-old says she asked her mom to give it a look. Her mother glanced at the words, then back at her daughter. What does this mean all of your payments were sold to a third party? her mother recalls saying.
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The reality, however, was substantially different. Rose sold everything to Access Funding 420 monthly lead checks between 2017 and 2052. They amounted to a total of nearly $574,000 and had a present value of roughly $338,000.
In return, Access Funding paid her less than $63,000.
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Before his April death after being severely injured in police custody, before this hollowed-out city plunged into rioting, the life of Freddie Gray was a case study in the effect of lead paint on poor blacks. The lead poisoning Gray suffered as a child may have contributed to his difficulties with learning, truancy and arrests all of it culminating in a 2008 lead-paint lawsuit and a windfall of cash locked inside a structured settlement. By late 2013, Gray was striking deals with Access Funding.
People like Gray who have suffered lead-poisoning as children are especially vulnerable to predatory transactions. Many are impulsive and mentally disabled, but not so much that the law regards them as incapable of acting on their own behalf, as long as theyre 18.
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Access Funding, located in Chevy Chase, isnt the biggest player in the industry. But the companys court documents nonetheless illuminate the mechanics of this trade, as well as how little scrutiny it receives. The firm has filed nearly 200 structured settlement purchases in Maryland since 2013. A review of two-thirds of those cases, which primarily funnel through one judges courtroom in Prince Georges County Circuit Court, shows nearly three-fourths involved victims of lead poisoning.
Every case spells out the deals worth. It lists the aggregate value of the lead victims payments, their present value and the agreed purchase price. A random survey of 52 of those deals shows Access Funding generally offers to pay around 33 cents on the present value of a dollar. Sometimes, it offers more. And sometimes, much less. One 24-year-old lead victim sold nearly $327,000 worth of payments, which had a present value of $179,000, for less than $16,200 or about 9 cents on the dollar. Another relinquished $256,000 worth of payments, which had a present value of $166,000, for $35,000 or about 21 cents on the dollar.
Taken together, the sample shows Access Funding petitioned to buy roughly $6.9 million worth of future payments which had a present value of $5.3 million for around $1.7 million.
