Millionaire Foreclosures.

Why does everyone love to see millionaires stumble and fall? Bankrupt and foreclosed upon seems to have all the New York media abuzz with the recent rise in distressed properties in the Hamptons, NY. The Hamptons, located on the eastern end of Long Island, New York, is a beachfront community composed of some of the wealthiest towns in the world. Villages such as Southampton, East Hampton, Sagaponack and Sag Harbor are home to such worldclass billionaire celebrities as Christie Brinkley, Jerry Seinfield, Barbra Steisand and Sean (P.Diddy) Comes, to name a few. The Hamptons has been a summer refuge for Wall Street millionaire tycoons for decades, as well as media moguls, internet magnates, foreign diplomats and anyone else of wealth. There is no shortage however, in the Hamptons, of the wealthy wannabes. The latter generation touts their money on the back of credit cards, home equity loans, equity leveraging and just plain old bullsh!t.

I know all about the Hamptons. I should. I lived there for 16 long, hard years. I watched all the crap come and go. I moved there in 1985 during the last housing crisis. I was able to buy a $250,000 Hamptons home (expensive back then) for only $135,000 because I had the one thing most Hamptonites didn't: cash. (I later sold in 2001, at the height of the housing boom for a 6 figure profit.) I watched so called big-shots roll in the dough on a Tuesday and then be broke on a Friday back in October 1987. I witnessed the 1990's recession take it's toll on my fellow neighbors. I suffered gently during the dot com craze of the 2000's only to see most everyone's fortune wither and die by 2001. I lived through the shock of September 11, 2001.

It's easy to dislike millionaires. They have an arrogance about them that is undeniable. They are impossible to work for. When one of my bosses wanted to take an extended trip on his yacht one week, I and my fellow employees would get our work week hours cut. I'd watch some of my bosses put in $70,000 kitchens, despite the fact that their wives nor themselves cooked, only to impress a fellow partner or business associate. $30,000 for a dining room table shipped from the bowels of the rain forest in Brazil was just another day in paradise for some. I would laugh in glee as these very same people would lose most of their money during a down period on Wall Street. Yes, most of these millionaires were only so because of Wall Street and the paper profits the street would generate. And yes, I find solace once again in the fact that the economic woes of 2008, has done nothing to teach these fools anything about the economic world of today. Same old. Same old.

The NY Post, a local newspaper, was brave enough to finally list the deadbeat millionaires by name. Some of the Hampton high rollers feeling the pinch are:

* Janice Becker, a regular on the Southampton village social circuit, is facing foreclosure on her multimillion-dollar Wyandanch Lane property.

* Advertising veteran Ransel Potter is defaulting on a $1.8 million mortgage on an Amagansett parcel.

* Real-estate honcho John Conroy is in lis pendens for a $3.5 million mortgage on a Bridgehampton spread on West Pond Drive.

* Former UBS executive Marc Warren is in lis pendens on a $1 million mortgage for a Mitchells Lane pad in Bridgehampton.

* Investor Roger Thanhauser is trying to sell a home on Main Street in East Hampton village to avoid foreclosure.

The Post contacted 13 Hamptons homeowners currently in lis pendens for loans exceeding $1 million. None returned calls for comment.

Nothing shatters a Hamptons' Millionaire more than publicly having other people know that their wealth is in question. Image is everything to these people. It's all a game of smoke and mirrors. With their leased Lexus, BMW's and Benz's, designer clothes, posh eateries, name dropping (guilty), lavish parties, it's enough to make anyone sick. And sick of them I was. I left the Hamptons in 2001 and I have never been back. Ugh!

And so it goes.
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