‘Zombie Debts’ Refuse To Die, Haunting New Yorkers For Decades

In recent months, New York Focus has been reporting on “sewer service,” the term for when plaintiffs in a lawsuit fail to properly inform defendants that they’re being sued.

Sewer service is particularly widespread in the debt collection industry, where it frequently results in creditors winning cases and garnishing a defendant’s paycheck before those defendants even realize they’ve been sued.

It’s often the result of dishonest process servers — people hired by plaintiffs to hand-deliver lawsuits to defendants — who lie about having done their job.

High-profile lawsuits over sewer service in the early 2000s prompted government crackdowns and reforms designed to rein in lawless servers. Since then, some of the most notorious actors have been banned from the industry.

Yet the fraud can still haunt New Yorkers years later. That’s because a plaintiff can collect a debt up to 20 years after winning a judgment in New York, even if serious doubts arise about the process server’s integrity. Industry experts refer to these delayed debt-collection attempts as “zombie debt.”

New York Focus found several examples of zombie debt persisting for years after a server was credibly accused of widespread fraud. In most cases, the defendants never fight back. Here are three stories of defendants who did.

After serving time in prison from 2003 to 2007, Luz Texidor tried hard to get her life back on track. She started working in a Brooklyn nursing home and made enough money to pay for food and rent.

One day in November 2020, everything threatened to unravel. The city marshal notified Texidor’s employer that she had been sued 12 years earlier for unpaid debt, had lost, and now owed nearly $4,000 plus interest. The letter ordered her employer to withhold 10 percent of her paycheck until the debt was paid off.

“I’m really bugging out, because how am I supposed to pay my rent?” Texidor said, recalling her reaction. “Without me having a roof over my head, I’ll have to go into a shelter or halfway house.”

Texidor said she’d never heard of the lawsuit or the debt. Plus, she had evidence that she’d never been served with court papers: At the time, she was living at an address miles away from where a process server had dropped them off, proved by a letter from New York’s parole agency confirming that her address on file at the time wasn’t where the papers had been delivered.

The server in Texidor’s case, Azzam Abderrahman, had his New York City server license permanently suspended in 2014 after the city’s Department of Consumer Affairs accused him of falsely claiming to have served defendants on seven different occasions. But that didn’t stop the city from ordering Texidor’s wages to be garnished six years later based on Abderrahman’s work.

Many sewer service victims aren’t aware if their servers have been disciplined or found to be engaging in misconduct “because there’s no way to track every case that server worked on,” said attorney Elena Rodriguez, who helps clients with sewer service cases at the nonprofit New Economy Project.

“If anything, every default judgment that server touched should be automatically reviewed, not left to chance until it’s too late,” she said.

Unlike most accused debtors, Texidor took the step of challenging the judgement. After several months of fighting in court, she got it tossed out.

Like Texidor, Timothy Williams had served time. And the same law firm that sued Texidor, called Tromberg, Morris, & Poulin, had sued him, leading to a $3,500 wage garnishment.

The garnishment was based on a 2008 default judgment that Williams said he didn’t hear about until 2021, when a city marshall told him that money would be taken out of his wages to pay off the debt. Williams didn’t know about the lawsuit for a simple reason: he was in prison on the day that the process server, Gene Gagliardi, claimed to have served him at a Brooklyn apartment.

Gagliardi would go on to be one of the chief suspects in a case then-Attorney General Andrew Cuomo brought against fraudulent process servers in 2009.

Cuomo’s team found that in 2007 and 2008, Gagliardi had recorded serving defendants in two different places at once on 450 separate occasions. On one day, Gagliardi swore he served two defendants more than 80 miles apart within one minute.

As a result, his New York City process server license was permanently revoked in 2009 — the year after he purportedly served Williams. But the judgments he enabled remained on the books, allowing Tromberg to garnish Williams’s wages in 2021.

Williams became homeless in August 2022. His attorney said it was due in part to Tromberg, Morris, & Poulin refusing to return the money it had garnished from him, despite a judge ordering the firm to do so.

The issue isn’t confined to New York City.

Westchester County resident Barbara Stinson faced an attempt to collect nearly $20,000 from her in 2018 due to a default judgment from a dozen years earlier.

She, too, had strong evidence that she had never been served: Process server Harry Torres swore he had given the papers to a relative with the same name as Stinson’s son, who had died 25 years earlier at the age of three years old. She was able to get her case dismissed.

Torres worked for a company called Serves You Right, owned by a fellow process server named David Warshall.

In 2010, Cuomo sued Warshall and Serves You Right, alleging that they had committed widespread service fraud, including over 800 instances of servers claiming to deliver papers to two defendants in different locations at once. Torres was personally responsible for 40 of those instances, according to the suit.

Serves You Right was dissolved shortly after. Warshall was banned from the service industry and fined $50,000 — but there were no consequences for Torres.

In fact, enforcement against shady servers, it turns out, is severely limited.

If defendants claim they were never served, a judge can order a hearing to investigate. But this happened fewer than 700 times out of more than 400,000 cases in New York during a recent five-year period, according to records obtained by New York Focus.

In New York City, the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection can revoke a process server’s license if they violate laws or regulations, but this is also a rare occurrence. In the rest of the state, no license is needed.

There’s no way of knowing how many cases that hinge on ethically dubious process servers, like Torres and Gagliardi, are still pending in New York’s courts.

Stinson, Texidor, and Williams’ cases stand out because they retained lawyers and fought back. Most defendants are not so lucky — there is no right to a lawyer in civil cases. Less than a fifth of defendants even responded to the debt lawsuits brought against them in New York City from 2019 to 2023.

For Texidor, fighting back was a matter of principle.

“I am a credible person, and I do handle my business,” she said. “I refuse to accept something that I didn’t do.”

https://www.newsfromthestates.com/article/zombie-debts-refuse-die-haunting-new-yorkers-decades