Fight over who has legal right to foreclose makes mess worse

When Randy Persten's mortgage was foreclosed in 2008, he looked at the paperwork and found a mystery. A company he'd never heard of — called Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, or MERS — was bringing the foreclosure action against him.Something didn't seem right. So he got a lawyer and fought the foreclosure, arguing that MERS couldn't foreclose because it didn't own the mortgage note he'd