Teixeira’s mother: Chance to work for Crisp was ‘a job he couldn’t refuse’
BY STEVEN MAYER, Californian staff writer
Jerald Teixeira’s mother won’t make a lot of excuses for her son, even as he faces up to 20 years in prison.
The McFarland High graduate, who served three years as a Marine before joining the now-disgraced Crisp & Cole real estate firm, pleaded guilty Monday to defrauding mortgage lenders and helping principals in the company get rich through well-placed lies and deceit.
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Jerald Teixeira from the advertisement for Tower Lending, the mortgage arm of Crisp and Cole Real Estate, June 2006.
“He was never in trouble,” said Dixie Teixeira, Jerald’s mom. “Then David Crisp offered him a job. It was a job he couldn’t refuse.”
The luxury cars, the expensive clothes, the image of runaway success Crisp exuded were impossible to ignore, Dixie remembers.
“Now I ask him, ‘Jerry, do you ever wish you hadn’t taken the job you couldn’t refuse?’” Dixie said.
The answer is now “yes,” but Jerald, 29, can never go back, and he appears to be at some level of peace with that.
“I want to accept responsibility for what I’ve done, and pay whatever debt I have to pay,” he said Monday. “Then I can move on with my life.”
He holds down a job he loves, his mom said. It won’t make him rich, but helps him earn a decent living to help support his longtime girlfriend and the couple’s 3-year-old daughter.
And these days, maybe that’s enough.
Teixeira’s attorney, David Torres, said he doesn’t believe his client will have to serve the maximum sentence. Not after Jerald tells investigators everything he knows. The plea deal clearly lays out the government’s case, that principals at Crisp & Cole fraudulently obtained more than a million dollars in real estate loans by using straw buyers with falsely inflated incomes to apply for the loans.
It’s time to lay it all out so the world can see the truth, Jerald said.
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