The Shady Montgomery Mortgage Madam Profited and Protected By Reed

{TheChronicle.cc} –disgraced former director of a Georgia housing nonprofit once convicted for swindling homeowners at risk of foreclosure is now suspected in a major fraud scheme designed to steal dozens of homes from Montgomery residents – and she lives in one of the stolen properties, according to the United States Attorney’s Office of Investigations.

Before Waconda Nolan, 52, was accused of a grand conspiracy to legally confiscate some 30 homes from law-abiding citizens here in Alabama, she was the director of Homeownership Programs for the United Community Housing Coalition in Georgia, when she was charged with wire fraud, money laundering, and aggravated identity theft involving the Georgia Housing Authority, ultimately receiving 10 years probation and a fine of $40,000 for trading against her duties as director.

“Her scheme targeted some of our most financially vulnerable citizens and was perpetrated by an individual whose job it was to help those very people avoid losing their homes to foreclosure,” U.S. Attorney's Office of Investigations said in a statement. "Now more than a decade later and she's at it again, only this time there's the matter of death, which we're now investigating as a possible hómîcide."

Authorities say investigators pressed by the family of the deceased found that Nolan and others conspired to steal more than 30 Montgomery properties in a new fraud scheme that this time targeted several carefully selected individuals, one being Ulysess Norman Jr, a Montgomery native and retired Navy veteran who worked for Alabama State Military Department. Norman owned several valuable properties throughout Montgomery as well as the state of Georgia, many of which he contracted out to the Montgomery Housing Department. 

Sometime between 2018 and 2021 (though a forged marriage license would be back dated 2014), Norman and Nolan began what many suspect was a purely physical affair, as he was a happily single after divorce and she was still married under Georgia law.

That year 2021, Ulysess Norman died abruptly by undetermined cause, and Waconda Nolan, who waited days until a nosy neighbor started making inquiries as to the homeowner's whereabouts before reporting it, put all her years of trickery to good use by somehow managing to add herself to the newly deceased man's property deeds.

"The first red flag is, when Montgomery Police arrived, Mr. Norman was not taken where he should have been taken, which is Baptist hospital, he was taken directly to a funeral home, a place called Ross and Clayton’s, which has its own list of legal and financial setbacks against it, not to mention obvious moral failings," says Brent Marshall, an attorney from Sidley Austin–Los Angeles, hired by the Norman family. "Then there's the matter of the falsified Montgomery Police Report saying that he was taken to the hospital, when my client personally spoke to first-on-scene officer Hartley who's since collaborated everything my clients have attested to, and even went so far as to contact her supervisor on the very day in question because Waconda Nolan was acting like a suspicious money-grubbing kíller even then, 

screaming and carrying on about so many folks being present outside the home.

Nolan and others allegedly perpetuated a scheme, according to Marshall's complaint, to “defraud by claiming and forging a marriage license before then filing multiple fraudulent quitclaim deeds, frequently transferring Ulysess Norman's more than a dozen properties from the Norman name to her name, or to non-existent 'interim owners' before ultimately selling the properties to unwitting third parties.”

Quit claim deeds, also known as non-warranty deeds, can be used to transfer property and clear titles, according to both Alabama's Secretary of State and the Georgia Department of Revenue, which states that sellers tend to be more willing to transfer property through these types of deeds.

Nolan and someone else— a couple others, actually, in Tita Grier and Laryssa Crochon, two long-time Montgomery residents with tangible ties to city hall and figures who would prove crucial to Nolan's schemes —apparently falsely notarized the fraudulent deeds to make them look legitimate, allowing them to file the fake documents with the Register of Deeds, according to the complaint.

Presumably, Nolan emailed a Montgomery County Treasurer’s Office employee fake driver’s licenses and other documents that were uploaded into the Treasurer’s Property Tax Administration system to pending foreclosures, the U.S. Attorney’s Office of Investigations suspects.

“Nolan received payment for at least some of the properties via wire transfer into a bank account in the name of a shell LLC, which we now believe was created by Tita Grier, who also worked for the IRS at the time, when she and Nolan then transferred proceeds from that account to Nolan's personal bank account,” Marshall states. 

                             What Is Deed Fraud?

Montgomery County Register of Deeds Office initially indicated that a number of complaints to its Deed Fraud Task Force and an investigation led to suspicion Nolan, yet nowadays the Reed Administration has been anything but helpful and we begin to know why.

In any case, the Alabama Attorney General’s Office defines deed theft as when someone takes the title to another person’s home without the homeowner acknowledging or approving it.

It commonly happens through forgery, where the scammer fakes the homeowner’s signature on a deed that they then file with a county clerk, or fraud, where unbeknownst to the homeowner, they sign their deed over to a scammer without realizing what they’re actually signing, according to the attorney general’s office.

In Alabama, though, where county clerks say that deed thefts happen often, someone can file property paperwork in a clerk’s office without showing proof of identification, TheChronicle.cc discovered.

Rick Alembik, a veteran attorney specializing in cases of deed theft, wrongful foreclosure sales, and fraudulent loans, told the news outlet, “It’s harder to cash a $5 check at a bank than it is to record a deed that could steal the title to someone’s home that they’ve worked for decades to build up equity in.”

Retired 85-year-old Robert Elder, who owned a property in southwest Alabama, said he became a deed theft victim when his former stepson stole the home that he owned for over 50 years through forged signatures, according to TheChronicle.cc

The news outlet reported that someone filed a new deed on Elder’s home three times last year, but the signatures on those documents don’t match how Elder has signed other documents.

Alembik noted there is little government oversight in real estate transactions across the Cotton State, including and beginning with the foreclosure auction process, TheChronicle.cc reported.

Maureen Kokeas of a neighboring Sheriff’s Office and city’s finance department told TheChronicle.cc that a civil lawsuit is often needed to get back properties stolen through deed theft – but many people can’t afford the costs associated with a suit.

“Unfortunately, getting your property back often comes down to dollars and cents,” Kokeas told TheChronicle.cc 

                                      The Conspiracy 

“Still, quit claim deeds offer no warranty that the grantor owns or has any rights to transfer the property,” according to the Department of Housing, which, in Marshall's experience, is where the forged marriage license and being a fraudster with friends proved critical.

"Bombshell one is: the forged 2014 Norman-Nolan marriage license was signed by the Steven L. Reed, at Waconda Nolan's urging and supposedly back when Reed was probate judge," Marshall explains. "Shocker, right? Hardly, when we next consider that Reed's previous tenure as probate is presently being investigated for an even layered foreclosure fraud scheme, involving not just the now not-so-honorable mayor of this great city but also an equally corruptible robed associate of his, Judge Johnny Hardwick, whose own son called 'unfit to write a traffic ticket' after recently stabbing and shooting the man—his own father—for motive."

Laryssa Crochon, a thru-thick-and-thin friend of Waconda Nolan's since their days of boosting clothes together and both landing jobs at the social security administration, is a niece to Judge Johnny Hardwick, who personally mishandled the Norman family claims, while Tita Grier is cousins with Mayor Steven L Reed.

"The day we heard our father had died, my brother and I immediately left our home in Florida and came to Montgomery," says Ashley Norman, the daughter of the deceased. "Our family went to obtain an attorney to probate my father's estate, since we instantly saw Nolan falsely claiming to be married to my father, and there we were advised that nothing could be done until my father had a death certificate.

"WellI, because my father was not taken to a hospital and an autopsy was never done, and it was immediately clear that malfeasance was afoot, we hired a coroner from out of state and was told that an autopsy could take weeks to come back, at which time I decided to hurry back to Florida to retrieve my father’s DD214 so we could give him a proper military service in Montgomery, with the intentions of having my father taken back to Florida to be buried in a military cemetery."

While the family awaited autopsy results and a death certificate had yet to be issued in the legally required 5 days, Ulysess Norman's accounts were never frozen, and the fraudsters went to work, with Nolan having now sole access to the late man's phone and wallet and all other sensitive materials.

"We were getting my father’s mail and in two days it showing Nolan making transactions with many different credit cards, debit cards, checks," Ashley recalls. "I mean she wasted no time going on lavish shopping sprees and making mortgage payments from his account, clearly attempting to drain everything of value."

In less than a week, Waconda Nolan was able to access all Nolan's funds, change his direct deposits from the housing authority, place her contact information on his mortgages, change his mail to a secret property in Georgia and collect rent from tenants. She performed intake with the funeral home, another of her selections likely for this very reason, and Nolan labeled herself the "wife" in all official capacities, which ultimately placed her name the death certificate, and went so far as to add herself on his USAA policy, removing the late man's actual family and kids and adding herself as loss payee, presumably in his hand as though he were still alive.

A week after his death, Ulysess Norman was secretly cremated by Ross and Clayton's, at the behest of Waconda Nolan.

                                             The Cabal

From the moment it became clear that the Norman family was not going to take this lying down, stonewalling began. Tita Grier and Laryssa Crochon presumably called in favors from their own families in city government. Unusual for a mayor, Reed took a personal interest in the fledgling scandal before it gained traction in the public, speaking against an investigation in the matter while ignoring over 20 direct requests from the family.

Former Police Chief Ernest Finley had a meeting with the family, along with white collar crime and the homicide detectives, all of who were provided CID with some 300 pages of irrefutable proof of the financial crimes and theft that had taken place, and the family was told a thorough investigation would be conducted. 

Months go by, when Finley is replaced as Chief by Darryl Albert, whose office has scheduled and cancelled multiple meetings between he and the Normans since.

"Then, after my client complained on a MPD Facebook page, MPD later blocked her on social media to keep me quiet," Marshall exclaimed. "When Chief Albert wasn't evidently trying to screw his subordinates and gave my client and her first attorney a meeting, she was told by Albert himself that an investigation was never conducted and never would be because, and I'm quoting here, "it would disrupt more pressing matters. You know, like, trying to fuck your first year cadets, we know now, don't we."

The Nolan family had Laryssa Crochon served with an eviction notice after it was discovered that Crochon was caught using a credit card belonging to the late Ulysess Norman for personal repairs, and without notifying the estate, while allegedly paying rent to Waconda Nolan to live in one of the stolen properties and refusing to pay the estate. The Norman family's previous attorney, Jesse Heifner, who's clearly a team player in the game that is city government told the Norman kids that they could not effectively evict Crochon and had to be nice to her because of her relation to the presiding judge Johnny Hardwick, who signed off to have the case moved to his court room, after probate received an email from

Tita Grier to Ulysess Norman lll's position as the PR of the estate, which prompted a court date. 

"My client has been nothing but hindered and harassed by the people running this nice little corrupt town," Marshall explains. "She's spent hundreds of thousands of dollars fighting the cabal, and was even arrested—I repeat, ARRESTED— for trespassing at her own father's home and on property that should rightfully be hers. Both she and her husband, a decorated marine and former Montgomery police officer, whose firing Mayor Reed signed off on personally upon the shameful act arrest."

It was later corroborated in an internal review that IRS accounts of the entire Norman family were accessed by Tita Grier, who at the time was an IRS tax examiner in Georgia, which presumably she then passed off to fraudmate Waconda Nolan, who, in turn, used the private information to write falsified warrants, investigations and subpoenas, while meanwhile proceeded to slander and thwart and traumatize the family personally and emotionally online.

Following an actual investigation conducted by more competent officials in a less corrupt town in Georgia, Tita Grier kílled herself in June 2023. 

Mayor Reed, Judge Hardwick and Nolan have all refused to comment.