Not until federal agents raided his headquarters was the full extent of the company's wrongdoing revealed. Investigators found desk drawers stuffed with blank copies of tax forms and bank statements, used to inflate the incomes and credit-worthiness of borrowers.

Biggins continued to work in the industry for three more years, but his license wasn't revoked by state regulators until after his conviction on fraud charges in 2003. He declined to comment for this report.

Saxon said prosecutors routinely asked his agency not to revoke a license when someone is the subject of a criminal probe, "the last thing we would ever want to do is impede an investigation."

Asked for the name of a prosecutor who had ever made that request, Saxon would not provide one.

David Weinstein, spokesman for the the United States Attorney's Office in Miami, which prosecuted Biggins and Samantha Johnson, said his office "did not ask OFR to refrain from taking license action" in either case.

He added, "We do not routinely ask OFR to refrain from taking license action during an active criminal investigation," and said his agency would "never" ask OFR not to revoke a license once criminal charges are filed.

FRAUD EPIDEMIC

Industry experts say the new opportunities for easy money, and the sheer numbers of new brokers entering the business, drove a nationwide epidemic of fraud. Florida became the center.

The state had the seventh-highest rate of mortgage fraud in the country in 2003. It ranked 5th in 2004, 3rd in 2005 and 1st in 2006 and 2007.

By last year, one out of every five fraudulent mortgage applications filed in the United States was written in Florida, according the Mortgage Asset Research Institute, a Virginia-based industry analyst.

But instead of more aggressive enforcement, state regulators actually did less. In fact, the single most effective tool they had, license revocations, declined as the fraud rate soared, records show.

During the land boom, the number of licensed brokers and brokerage business owners nearly tripled from 31,319 in 2000 to 91,207 last year. Over the same period, the number of license revocations dropped by more than half, from 42 to 20, according to the agency's final orders and its own published newsletters.

In 2005, the peak of the housing boom, the OFR revoked only 11 licenses.

Regulators turned to license suspensions -- another effective tool -- even less often: an average of one per year, The Herald found.

'CALL THE COPS'

Candance Young went to the OFR's Miami office in 2005 after losing her house in a questionable mortgage deal with Miami broker Michael Fletcher.

Young, then pregnant, said she approached Fletcher for help refinancing her Kendall home. Instead of taking her to his office, she said, he held the closing at a Burger King, and asked her to sign a stack of documents in the dark on the trunk of his car.

Months later, Young said Fletcher showed up in her driveway and said he owned the house. It turned out that one of the documents she had signed had been the deed to her property.

To this day, Fletcher denies he duped her, saying "she knew what she was doing. I didn't try to steal her house."

Frustrated, Young said she went to the OFR's Miami office and turned over all the documentation.

Regulators immediately recognized she didn't own her home anymore, Young said. But instead of launching an investigation, Young said they told her they couldn't act unless Fletcher had been convicted of a crime. "They told me to call the cops," she said. "It was like they were saying, ‘You're not dead yet, I don't feel like being bothered with this thing.' "

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