Philly lawyer buys billboard in war with bank
Lawyer paid $25,000 for the billboard ad.
A billboard reading "Santander: The Bank that Robs You", was unveiled Friday morning along the northbound and southbound lanes of I-95 in Fishtown, Philadelphia, on Nov. 4, 2016.
Charles Mostoller
Photo:
Thousands of commuters driving through Fishtown during the weekend were exposed to the latest tactic in a Philadelphia lawyer's ongoing fight against Santander Bank.
At 6 a.m. Friday, a billboard went up over I-95 near the interchange with I-676 that looked just like an ad for Santander Bank.
Same color. Same logo. Different message.
“Santander: The Bank That Robs You,” the electronic billboard reads, with “Paid for by peruto.com” in fine print below.
“It may get me sued, but I'm in it to win it,” said Philly defense attorney Chuck Peruto, who is suing Santander over what he claims is fraud, while picketing outside Santander under the Clothespin in Center City on Friday around noon. “They robbed me.”
Santander declined to comment on Peruto's billboard.
Peruto plunked down $25,000 for the billboard after months trying to find an advertising company willing to let him put it up. A company agreed to accept his billboard idea only after he agreed to accept all legal liability related to it, he said.
Peruto said he took out a $1.9 million loan in 2012 for a real estate investment. When he paid the loan back early several months ago, he was hit with a $267,400 penalty—more than ten times what he expected based on reviewing the paperwork, he said.
After months of failing to make headway, Peruto took to the streets as he sued the bank. He has been picketing various Santander branches for weeks.
Peruto's lawsuit was filed in the Court of Common Pleas, but was shifted over to federal court, where it was dismissed by a judge last month. Peruto is appealing that decision.
“Santander has prevailed in this case in the trial court," a Santander spokeswoman said via email. "This case is entirely without merit and we will continue to defend ourselves vigorously and pursue all legal options.”
Peruto groused on Friday that the federal judge dismissed his suit without a hearing or any testimony.
He now claims the paperwork that articulates the complex mathematical formula for calculating early repayment penalties wasn’t even in the documents he reviewed when he agreed to the loan's terms.
He said that document was added just before he sent his son, with power of attorney, to sign the final paperwork. He said he had no idea his son was signing off on papers he had not reviewed.
“They don’t have my signature on it. Nothing,” he said. “They snuck that in there. That was not in there before.”
Peruto said the amount he was fined was equivalent to years of savings.
Peruto has hit the streets with flyers and friends carrying picket signs outside Santander branches 10 times so far, he said. He claims sheriffs in Media, Pennsylvania. threatened to arrest him for protesting, but he wouldn’t back down.
Peruto already paid the penalty, but he wants it back. Even then, he said he’ll keep crusading against the bank.
“After they pay me, I’m not stopping. No,” he said. “Everybody in the world should be aware of what they do.”
CIVIL DOCKET FOR CASE # 2:16-cv-04092-GEKP
FYI:
The below 10 documents are from the Philadelphia case where a US lawyer is suing Santander Bank, N.A.
The first 3 are just to show how extensive the filing is, the next 7 are the lawyers for Santander asking the Federal Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania to take the case away from the state where it was filed initially.
As the newspaper articles show the case was dismissed initially by the Federal judge but the dismissal is being appealed by the Plaintiff Peruto.
If you are interested in reading the entire case you can obtain a PACER* account and both view and download the documents. Go to: https://www.pacer.gov/
An initial sign up is required but you get 150 free pages each quarterly billing cycle. You have to provide a credit card # but if you are under the 150 pages the card is not charged (10 cents a page as I recall).
W. Harris
FYI:
The below 10 documents are from the Philadelphia case where a US lawyer is suing Santander Bank, N.A.
The first 3 are just to show how extensive the filing is, the next 7 are the lawyers for Santander asking the Federal Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania to take the case away from the state where it was filed initially.
As the newspaper articles show the case was dismissed initially by the Federal judge but the dismissal is being appealed by the Plaintiff Peruto.
If you are interested in reading the entire case you can obtain a PACER* account and both view and download the documents. Go to: https://www.pacer.gov/
An initial sign up is required but you get 150 free pages each quarterly billing cycle. You have to provide a credit card # but if you are under the 150 pages the card is not charged (10 cents a page as I recall).
W. Harris
================================================
* Public Access to Court Electronic Records
(PACER)
is an electronic public access service that allows users to obtain case and
docket information online from federal appellate, district, and bankruptcy
courts, and the PACER Case Locator. PACER is provided by the Federal Judiciary
in keeping with its commitment to providing public access to court information
via a centralized service.
==============================
This filing runs 11 pages, the first page is above, for the other 10 pages use this direct link and go to:
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Who's that picketing Santander Bank? Why it's lawyer Chuck Peruto
Let's say you are a customer having trouble with your bank. What do you do?
You get a lawyer.
What if you are a lawyer?
If you are criminal defense attorney Chuck Peruto Jr. you file suit against the bank and then picket its branch offices.
That's where I saw the celebrity barrister Friday, outside the Santander bank branch at 1500 Market Street, supervising pickets and handing out leaflets, almost like a Local 98 electrician. All he was missing was the giant inflatable rat.
"What's going on?" I ask him in the shadow of the Clothes Pin.
"These people are thieves," Peruto replies, jerking a thumb in the direction of the bank storefront.
Thieves are usually his clients, but this case is different. He is the victim, he says.
The facts, as laid out in a civil suit he filed against the bank (and in leaflets he periodically distributes outside bank branches), say in 2012 he took a $1.9 million, 10-year loan from the bank.
The loan was to purchase the 43-unit Drexelbriar Apartments in Havertown, which he planned to hold for a while and sell.
Four years later, he had an agreement of sale from a buyer and notified Santander he wanted to pay off the loan early.
The bank demanded a $267,440 prepayment penalty.
"Plaintiff Peruto nearly lost his mind," according to the complaint. He had been told to expect a 1 percent penalty, in the neighborhood of $19,000.
I ask if he had read the fine print.
"I never had time to read the fine print. It was furnished at settlement with 40 other papers that had to be signed and they slide them over to you for signature," says Peruto.
"You try not to hold anybody up. When you act in good faith and are told it is 1 percent, you don't sit there and take an algebra class."
The prepayment schedule says "the prepayment premium shall be the greater of" either 1 percent of the principal or "the product obtained by" a truly incomprehensible formula so complex it would baffle Stephen Hawking. To me, a red flag would have been the words "greater of."
Peruto went to closing without a Realtor or a broker, saying he has bought and sold properties many times before without incident. "Everything is straight forward and when people tell you something, you seem to take their word for it."
It is not a mistake he will repeat, he says.
He tried to get the bank to accept less, he says, and when it refused, he filed suit.
There are two sides, at least, to every story, so I contacted the bank.
"Santander cannot comment on pending litigation, however, the bank is fully committed to transparent lending practices and always treating our customers fairly," says spokeswoman Ann Davis.
"We've gone through a couple of pre-trial hearings," says Peruto, with "the bank saying it's there in writing and I say it's not in English."
Peruto is acting as his own attorney and has requested a jury trial. He has decades of experience in seducing juries to view his clients with favor. This time he is his own home team.
"Their eyeballs will grow bigger than their ears when they hear the numbers," says Peruto. "I could call Joey Merlino to testify. I could get the money cheaper from him," says Peruto of the one-time, alleged head of organized crime in Philadelphia.
As this case meanders through the courts, Peruto goes out once or twice a week with volunteers to picket various Santander branch offices, such as the one where I found him.
So here's this famous, rich attorney standing outside a branch handing out leaflets like a union schlepper.
Why?
"The reason for the protest is to make others aware of what they do, with the hidden charges they slap on you," says the aggrieved attorney.
"They should have the decency and the morality, not just the legality, to point that out to you," says Peruto.
In his filing, Peruto claims he has paid $700,000 on that $1.9 million loan in four years.
He is asking for the return of the $267,440 prepayment plus interest, costs and attorney's fees.
Barring a settlement, the courts will decide who is right. Meanwhile, the famous barrister and friends will keep picketing the bank.
stubyko@phillynews.com 215-854-5977 @StuBykofsky
Blog: ph.ly/Byko Columns: ph.ly/StuBykofsky
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The Dead Girl in Chuck Peruto’s Bathtub
Julia Law was a pretty paralegal dating the city’s most famous defense attorney. But the story of how she ended up dead in his house in May is one of secrets and lies.
“There’s a girl in your bathtub.”
It’s 10 a.m., the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend, when he gets the call. He’s at the Shore. Chuck is always at the Shore, particularly the first weekend of “Chuck’s season,” as his friends call summer. This isn’t unusual. Nor is it unusual for this particular 58-year-old man, Chuck Peruto Jr., a hugely successful criminal defense attorney and son of one of the most esteemed lawyers in Philadelphia history, to be waking up to the ring of his cell phone at 10, having spent much of the previous night at the legendary beach bar that is the Princeton in Avalon.
Last night, though, he was preoccupied, texting back and forth with his 26-year-old girlfriend, Julia Law (“What the hell are you doing without bubble bath in your house?” she wrote around 10 p.m., followed quickly by “I love my Chuckie Pie”), who was at his stunning Rittenhouse Square apartment back in the city. That night, he says, he went home with someone else—specifically, Trent Cole, the linebacker for the Philadelphia Eagles. They crashed together at a mutual friend’s house. (Later, Chuck would remember the look on the detective’s face: Trent Cole is your alibi witness?) But that’s Chuck. Fun, lovable, wild and crazy Chuck, as much a Philadelphia institution as the Liberty Bell, and much more entertaining. Or was.
There’s a girl in your bathtub.
That’s the first thing Chuck says Jaime Santisteban told him after he groggily answered the phone. Jaime (pronounced “Hi-me”) is Chuck’s Peruvian majordomo, who had been dispatched to the lawyer’s abode to pick up a shirt he’d forgotten and deliver it to the Shore. There would be a great many eyebrow-raising moments in the days and weeks to come, this being one of them. To pick up a shirt?
English is Jaime’s second language, but he knew enough, apparently, to say: There’s a girl in your bathtub.
“She’s allowed to be there,” Chuck recalls replying. “That’s my girlfriend.”
But Jaime presses, tries to tell Chuck that the girl isn’t moving. Chuck remembers thinking: Please don’t let him tell me she’s dead.
“Get her out of there! Pull her out! Wake her up!” Chuck orders through the phone. And then Jaime tells him he thinks she may be … muerta. Now Chuck is shaking, crying, he’s throwing on his sweats from the floor and running to his car, he’s not believing this can be happening. “What color hair does she have?” he says he asked Jaime. An odd question, to say the least, but as he tells it now, “I wanted to believe it was anyone but her.”
He tells Jaime to call 911. Then he calls 911. The call somehow goes to dispatch in Sea Isle City, not Avalon, which, he says, will later give the cops pause. (“I have no idea why,” Chuck says.)
He gets into his white Mercedes, not even stopping to brush his teeth, and drives a hundred miles an hour to get back to the city. From his car, more phone calls. His 33-year-old son Chas, his only child and the father of Chuck’s two grandchildren, has also gotten a call from Jaime. To Chas, Jaime seemed unhinged; it was hard to understand what he was saying. Chas says he instructed Jaime to take a photo with his cell phone. The photo comes through. A gruesome picture. Now there is no doubt. On the phone with his father, Chas tries to let him believe there’s still hope, so he doesn’t kill himself on the road. His father is sobbing.
Chuck calls Rich DeSipio. Rich is the top lawyer in Chuck’s office and will figure prominently in the days to come, the person who will serve as Chuck’s spokesperson
to the media—a disastrous choice by any measure. For now, DeSipio, in the checkout line at Wegmans with his elderly mother when he first heard the news from Chas, tries to calm Chuck down. Says he’s on his way to the Delancey Place apartment. He’ll be there, he tells Chuck. Rich DeSipio will always be there.
to the media—a disastrous choice by any measure. For now, DeSipio, in the checkout line at Wegmans with his elderly mother when he first heard the news from Chas, tries to calm Chuck down. Says he’s on his way to the Delancey Place apartment. He’ll be there, he tells Chuck. Rich DeSipio will always be there.
It’s almost 11 a.m. when Chuck pulls into the driveway off Delancey. The place is already teeming with cops, news trucks. A reporter sticks a microphone in his face, and he recoils. He will later recount that some cops greeted him with hugs. Everyone knows Chuck, including cops he will sometimes eviscerate on the witness stand, then take out for a drink.
They won’t let Chuck inside. He goes to his office around the corner—twice—before eventually the cops take him down to Homicide, where, for seven hours, he answers questions. It’s a joint he knows well from representing “alleged” criminals all these years. His brother-in-law, also a lawyer, accompanies him, but Chuck insists it was in the role of brother-in-law, not lawyer. “I wasn’t going to lawyer up,” says Chuck, a peculiar thing for a $500-an-hour defense attorney to say, and he knows that. He admits that none of the things he did in the days and weeks to come were things he’d allow one of his clients to do.
His father, the venerable Chuck Peruto Sr., now 86, who heard the news on television, calls him on his cell phone while he’s being questioned by homicide detectives, and “He’s freaking out,” remembers Chuck. “He’s like, ‘What are you giving a statement for?’” Chuck also fields a call from Genna Squadroni, his 25-year-old recent ex-girlfriend of three years, who is also freaking out, though in her case apparently not due to a girl being found dead in Chuck’s bathtub, but to the fact that Chuck had been dating that girl at all, a paralegal she’d hired at the law offices of A. Charles Peruto Jr. As Chuck is being peppered with questions from the cops, Genna leaves a string of expletive-filled rants on his cell phone. Welcome to Chuck’s world.
His father, the venerable Chuck Peruto Sr., now 86, who heard the news on television, calls him on his cell phone while he’s being questioned by homicide detectives, and “He’s freaking out,” remembers Chuck. “He’s like, ‘What are you giving a statement for?’” Chuck also fields a call from Genna Squadroni, his 25-year-old recent ex-girlfriend of three years, who is also freaking out, though in her case apparently not due to a girl being found dead in Chuck’s bathtub, but to the fact that Chuck had been dating that girl at all, a paralegal she’d hired at the law offices of A. Charles Peruto Jr. As Chuck is being peppered with questions from the cops, Genna leaves a string of expletive-filled rants on his cell phone. Welcome to Chuck’s world.
The homicide detectives, the coroner, the forensic experts, spend a good 10 and a half hours at the scene. And while Chuck says they later privately told him they “knew this was an accidental death,” it was a 26-year-old woman found dead, naked, facedown in a watery grave. They had to do what they had to do.
Chuck returns home around 8 p.m. The homicide detectives still aren’t finished, still won’t let him inside, so he sits on his stoop for a while, then takes a long walk, ends up at Little Pete’s. (He ordered eggs.) Once they finally let him in his house, he answers more questions, points out “some things that they missed.” He says there were two empty half-gallon orange-flavored vodka bottles in his recycling bin that they hadn’t noticed and didn’t take. He tells them his theory: From the photograph he saw, there were towels in the water. On the rack above the tub, a few decorative towels were hanging, larger ones folded on top. It was—and remains—his supposition that Julia tried to grab onto the towels to get out, then fell back into the tub.
Eventually, the homicide detectives clear out. Chuck is alone in his gorgeous place, which has suddenly become a very creepy place. It’s a mess (and Chuck is meticulous), covered with the residue of charcoal fingerprint dust—on his leather chairs and crystal lamps, even his antique gumball machine. His bed has been stripped of the sheets where he and his love spent their last “euphoric” night together, two days earlier.
He wanders around aimlessly. He needs a shower, but is afraid to go into the bathroom. Finally, he does.
He stands there and stares for a long time. At the tub in which she died. And he cries. It’s a beautiful tub, not some cheesy big Jacuzzi as many would assume, but a tasteful European-style deep soaking tub, white porcelain with claw feet. In it, he can see her bodily fluids. Feces and blood. (Both can be excreted in the initial hours after a drowning.) The tub has been drained to about two inches of water. Now it’s clogged.
Days later, when his pal Rich DeSipio tells the Inquirer that Chuck even cleaned the bathtub, for the dead girl’s “dignity,” a great many red flags are raised. It’s a curious thing for two criminal defense attorneys to put out there. But Chuck says he did what he had to do: “I didn’t want a cleaning service to do it. I wanted to do it. That’s where she died. I wanted to clean it myself. So I did.”
He says it took him a good 90 minutes. He started with Windex, but that didn’t work—fingerprint dust is a bitch—so he switched to Tilex. When the tub was finally clean, he says, he filled it and got in. He is telling me all of this exactly one month later, in his living room on Delancey. I’m curious: Why? Was he trying to figure out how it happened?
A long pause. “I was just lost,” he says. “I was praying that it was a dream. I wasn’t positive that it wasn’t a dream.”
He says he stayed in the tub until he was “like a prune.” Then he got out and dried himself off.
Read more at http://www.phillymag.com/articles/dead-girl-chuck-peruto-julia-law-bathtub/#4UXWfsb1wxYof4L6.99
Man Takes Down Anti-Santander Billboards
After Bank Sues For False Advertising, Defamation, Trademark Infringement
November 14, 2016 11:07 am EST
POKING THE BEAR SANTANDER PHILADELPHIA LAWSUITS
TRADEMARK INFRINGEMENT
A Philadelphia man who is upset with Santander Bank wanted to
voice his opinion in a pair of recently posted billboards in the city. His
message was short-lived, however, after the bank responded by filing a lawsuit
against him in federal court.
Chuck Peruto, a well-known criminal defense attorney in Philly, has been very public about his dispute with Santander over a $270,000 early repayment penalty he faces for paying back a $1.9 million loan years earlier than planned.
He sued Santander over that matter back in June, but in late October the judge dismissed the case. Peruto had already been protesting Santander outside its Philadelphia offices, but after the dismissal (he has appealed), that’s when two digital billboards went up near a very busy section of I-95.
The billboards — using the familiar Santander color scheme,
typeface, and logo — declare, “Santander/The Bank That Robs You” along with a
line mentioning Peruto’s website.
In the below video (the accompanying article appears to have
been removed) from Metro, he claims that it took months to find a billboard
owner willing to take his ads, and that they cost him $25,000.
In response to the billboards, Santander filed a federal lawsuit [PDF https://consumermediallc.files.wordpress.com/2016/11/santanderperuto.pdf] against Peruto on Nov. 7, alleging a variety of violations of the law.
The bank accused Peruto of false advertising because the
billboards look like ads for a civil attorney looking to solicit clients for an
action against Santander. The complaint contends that the billboard give the
inaccurate impression that Peruto has experience “representing the general
public in cases against Santander.”
Then there are the allegations of commercial disparagement,
defamation, and trade libel for the statements made on the billboards — and in
Peruto’s comments in public — that Santander maintains he knows are not true,
and which he made knowing they could inflict financial harm on the
bank.
Santander also hit Peruto with an allegation of tortious
interference, claiming that one of his objectives was to convince others to not
do business with the bank. The complaint notes that at least one Santander
customer withdrew all their money from the bank because of Peruto’s
actions.
And let’s not forget about the charges of trademark
infringement and dilution. Even though most people would probably guess that
Santander would not publicly advertise that it “robs you,” the bank nonetheless
contends that the use of the trademarked logo and name is “likely to cause
customer confusion.”
The case did not last long. By Nov. 11, barely a week after
the billboards went up, the anti-Santander messages were down, and the case had
been suspended [See PDF at: https://consumermediallc.files.wordpress.com/2016/11/santanderperuto.pdf] as “parties have agreed to enter into good faith
negotiations aimed at reaching an amicable resolution to the current
dispute.”
As part of that deal, Peruto has agreed to not put the
billboards — or any others — back up before Dec. 1. However, he tells
Philadelphia Magazine that “If the settlement talks are not fruitful, it goes
back up,” but with a twist: “I’ll change the logo to a devil with a
pitchfork.”
November 14, 2016, By Chris Morran@themorrancave
POKING THE BEAR SANTANDER PHILADELPHIA LAWSUITS TRADEMARK INFRINGEMENT
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