Like the housing industry, real estate “guru” Mark Bosworth is in crash mode

Bosworth threw $5,000 on the bed, Mow says: "He said, 'I won this at the races. This is what you would have won if you had been there.'"

In May 2005, Richard Mow died of complications from diabetes. Bosworth spoke at the funeral — which he paid for. Two weeks later, according to Martha Mow, he called the widow into his office and explained that there was a problem with her real estate investments. Bosworth told her she would have to sign over one of the two houses to him to make things right.

And in her state of mourning, Mow says, she did just that.

"Mark Bosworth sold it two weeks later," says Judd, her attorney brother. An escrow statement provided by Judd shows Bosworth cleared about $150,000 in the deal.

A few weeks later, Mow says, Bosworth told her to clear out of the Mesa home because he was selling it. She took $30,000 she had received from her husband's life insurance policy and bought a mobile home.

Bosworth then managed to sell Mow's sixth and final investment property.

Tired of getting blown off every time she tried to reach Bosworth to find out what was going on with her investments, she complained to her brother, who told her to look at the deeds filed with the Maricopa County Recorder's Office.

As she talked on the phone to New Times from her home in Tennessee, Mow, 60, began to cry as she talked about what she saw on the deed of one of the rental homes sold behind her back.

On the paperwork Bosworth filed with the Recorder's Office to complete the sale of the home, someone had forged her signature.

"I was just appalled!" she says. "Mark had professed to be such a good friend to me; I couldn't wrap my head or my heart around it."

To Bosworth, Mow's $57,000 "had become $300,000" from the sale of her properties, which had increased in value during the time Mow owned them, Judd says. "He didn't give her any of it."

Mow sued, and in March, Superior Court Judge Paul Katz ruled against Bosworth, who admitted to two forgeries involving Mow's property.

Mow received $35,000 from a title company because of the forgeries. And Judge Katz ordered Bosworth to pay Mow triple her original investment. He also slapped Bosworth and his lawyer with an additional $1,000 sanction because they hadn't cooperated in the case.

Two employees of Bosworth's at the time, Bob Bornholdt and Kathryn Watkins, had their notary licenses revoked because of the forgeries. Bornholdt responded to a request for comment by e-mail, stating he notarized the paperwork as a favor to his boss, figuring Mow wanted Bosworth to sign a deed for her.

"After all," Bornholdt writes, "there is no one stupid enough to sign someone else's name on a deed, sell the property and pocket the money . . . or at least I thought that."

As bad as the Mow lawsuit makes Bosworth look, it's the least of his problems these days.

Anybody reading a recent Better Business Bureau report can sum up Mark Bosworth pretty quickly: a big shot with baggage.

The November report lists him as the CEO of Mark Bosworth and Associates LLC, a Scottsdale company. It states he also does business as Property Masters of America, Home America Property Management, GoRenter.com, and other LLCs.

And it lists 52 complaints against him and his companies in the past three years.

The report breaks the complaints into categories: contract, billing or collection, delivery, repair, service, customer service, and refund or exchange. Every category is peppered with unresolved complaints.

Bosworth tells New Times that his is a "messy" business. He contends that he must wade through the whitewater of tenant-landlord disputes on one hand and the complex and sometimes-risky game of real estate investing on the other. He knows there are hundreds of people out there who "hate my guts."

Yet Bosworth's mess has gotten out of control, and it's clear that he is the crux of most of his problems.

As he turned a modest living of flipping houses into a minor real estate empire in the late 1990s and early 2000s, a pattern of unprofessionalism and greed weighed down his enterprises with customer complaints, lawsuits, massive money shortfalls, and bankruptcy.

Ultimately, his business style led to the demise of his short-lived role as real estate millionaire. Barring a legal miracle, "The Boz," as he likes to be known, appears finished as an investment "guru," a title he bestowed upon himself in advertisements.

Last November — which featured signs of both the high and low watermarks of his career — was the turning point.

That was the month when he and two of his employees, Berne Fleming and Bosworth's cousin, Rod Howell, appeared in the Arizona Republic's "Match Me With My Wheels," a feature that appears Fridays in the newspaper's automotive classified ads section.

The other men in the article sport decent rides. But Bosworth shows off a Ferrari F430 Spider convertible.

"[It's] one of the list of things you have to check off in life," Bosworth boasted to the Republic.

By then, Bosworth had left a long trail of unhappy customers and investors. Some of them told New Times they were outraged by the article. (According to Bosworth's bankruptcy paperwork, he collected insurance money on the Ferrari after it burned up while in for repairs at a dealership. That was in October, a month before the Republic feature ran).