Harry Droz photo
Jacqueline Polverari (middle) with WNHH’s Babz Rawls-Ivy and Jeff Grant.
Mortgage fraud sent Jacqueline Polverari to federal prison for six months. A compulsive perfectionism and a desperate commitment to her family put her on the path to white-collar crime in the first place.
Polverari told that story on the latest episode of WNHH FM’s “Criminal Justice Insider with Babz Rawls-Ivy and Jeff Grant.”
A trained social worker and longtime title company manager from Branford, Polverari recounted how she found herself in 2009 at the corner of “desperation and opportunity,” to quote Rawls-Ivy, with a collapsing housing market, overextended promises to family members, and a company payroll she couldn’t meet.
The result, she said, were six months in Danbury Federal Correctional Camp for Women, three months at a Hartford halfway house, and a newfound commitment to helping women who have committed white-collar crimes reintegrate into society after prison.
Polverari said her path towards the criminal justice system began after she burned out after spending nearly five years as a social worker in New Haven. She said she went through a divorce and decided to start her own real estate business to support her three children.
She said the business started as a small closing company in 2008. And then she took on notary closing work. And then she took on title search work. She said the business, called Evolution Title and Escrow Services, LLC, grew and grew both in responsibilities and employees.
Then, she said, she made the cardinal business mistake. “I hired my family,” she said. “I hired all of my family. My mother, my brother, my father, my aunts, my best friends, my new-to-be husband. I hired everybody.”
Her best friend served as her business manager. A loan officer rented space in her company’s office to make the location a one-stop-shop for real estate transactions. She said her company at its height had 45 employees and was conducting 100 title searches and 30 closings a day.
“We were pretty big,” she said. “Too big, I learned.”
In 2009, her business manager told her that they didn’t have enough money to cover payroll. Polverari got a second job as a loan officer, but she still wasn’t making enough. She applied for a small business loan, but was denied.
Then, she said, she decided to refinance her house. She was initially denied because she didn’t have enough equity in the house to cover the mortgage.
She then made a decision. It took 20 minutes to make. It would affect the rest of her life.
She lied on her mortgage application, turning in the title on her Branford home without listing her first mortgage. She also forged her new husband’s signature, as the house was technically in his name.
“My job was to fix it for my family and not let them know,” she said. “I wanted to prove myself and make my father proud.”
She said she has always been a people pleaser, a control freak, a fixer. Someone who doesn’t know how to say no.
“For me,” she said, “the only option was perfection.”
The subprime mortgage crisis accelerated soon after she got her loan. She found that more and more real estate attorneys who were involved with loans were getting in trouble.
In May 2010, she said, FBI agents raised her home to look at her business’s financial records. She plead guilty to two counts of mortgage fraud. For four years, she waited to be sentenced as the FBI investigated her business partners.
In August 2014, a federal judge in New Haven sentenced her to a year and a day in federal prison as well as three years of supervised release. On Jan. 5, 2015, she self-surrendered to Danbury Federal Prison Camp for Women. She was released on July 22, and then spent another three months in a Hartford hallway house.
Reflecting on what drove her to commit her crime, she said that most entrepreneurs she knew straddled the line of illegality and business savvy.
“As an entrepreneur,” she said, “we’re not accountable to anybody but ourselves and our employees. And the pressure of performance for those employees is astronomical. I know a lot of self-employed people, I know a lot of entrepreneurs. I’d say 85 [percent] come very close to stepping over that line.”
After her release from Danbury and the Hartford halfway home, Polverari joined a white-collar crime support group. She kept her title search company, scaling down its workload and workforce so that she now only employees two family members. And she started her own reentry support group, called Evolution Family Reentry Services.
“Our job is to help women and men and families come home and reestablish themselves in a positive way,” she said. She said her group’s goal is to get ex-felons talking with ex-felons, and to hook up the recently released with “felon-friendly professionals” who can help them basics like a home, a job, and a driver’s license.
“I am now branded with a scarlet “F” on my back as I am a felon,” Polverari wrote in a 2016 blog post for the Progressive Prison Project blog. “I can never go back to my old life-style. In an electronic world of the internet, I can never get away from this crime. So I have decided to embrace who I am and let the world know that I am here and I will make a difference.”
Read previous “Criminal Justice Insider” articles:
Teen Encounter With Cops Spurred Reform AdvocateFrom Second Chance To No Chance Connecticut?Project Longevity Coordinator Works Off A DebtEx-CEO Serves Justice Reform “Life Sentence”Ganim Describes Path Back From PrisonTransition Time For Teens In TroubleParole Holds A Key To Reentry PuzzleOrganizer Takes “Sawdust-On-Floor” TackFemale Ex-Offenders Band TogetherGerman-Inspired Reform Calms PrisonSon’s Arrest Helped Shape Porter’s Politics“Criminal Justice Insider” airs every first and third Friday of the month on WNHH FM at 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. Listen to the full interview by clicking on the audio player above or Facebook Live video below.
