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79 dollars on the line, accusations flying between all involved parties, and even the very public involvement of PGA golfer Dustin Johnson, who loaned Hardwick $3 million in 2014. At the time, Johnson was unaware of Hardwick's misappropriations of funds. "e default side of the firm, which I ran, was very robust," Wittstadt said. "We had budgets. We did forecasting—six months, a year, 18 months into the future, trying to plot where the firm needed to go and what changes it needed to make in order to keep up with the times. We had business plans and continuity of business to be able to see us through both sides of the real estate market." Wittstadt told DS News that, had things gone differently, he expects MHS would still be one of the larger real estate closing and default operations in the country. Mark Wittstadt remembers the day the phone rang without even having to think about it—July 31, 2014. At the time, Wittstadt's career was enjoying a high point. Having become an equity partner, along with his brother, in the firm of Morris Hardwick Schneider just about a year prior, Wittstadt was running the firm's default practice from Baltimore. Hardwick was running the title business from Atlanta, serving as CEO of LandCastle Title and Managing Partner of the firm. It was in the midst of an outside financial audit when an email came through from Hardwick, requesting that the Wittstadts convene for an "emergency call." e bad news was bad indeed—Hardwick informed Wittstadt that some $750,000 was missing from the firm's closing trust accounts. "All the escrow accounts were separate," Wittstadt recalled. "Closing had their own escrow accounts and default had their own escrow accounts, and [Hardwick] indicated that it was an error that his CFO had made. He said he had directed that $750,000 be moved from the operating account back into the escrow account." During that initial call, Wittstadt was actually on vacation with his family at the beach. As he made follow-up calls to try and figure out what was going on, he told DS News that he had an increasing feeling that "things weren't adding up." He flew back to the office in Atlanta and set about making arrangements to bring in a forensic fraud examiner to go over the books carefully. "I wanted a full reconciliation of the books and the accounts," Wittstadt said. "I wanted to know what was gone, where it went, and how it got out." e examiner and his team worked between August 2 and August 13, 2014, and they eventually came to a stark conclusion. e escrow accounts were short—to the tune of $37 million. THE MAKINGS OF A MOVIE Wittstadt said that, after the initial emergency call, Hardwick had told his partners that he would personally borrow or sell assets to help offset the shortfall. However, even before the final tally came from the forensic fraud investigators,

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