Police found 10 handguns, two assault rifles, nine shotguns and nine rifles in the suspects’ two-story home on West Street. Authorities also found on the premises two Crossman air rifles, one umbrella with a dagger in the handle, one sword, one machete, three daggers and one hunting knife.

Numerous pills, a large amount of ammunition and ingredients for making ammunition were also found on the premises, according to police. Sources said the weapons were not being sold.

The Sianos’ house is directly across the street from P.S. 216, which teaches pre-kindergarten through fifth-grade students. Neighbors said the family had a reputation for drunkenness and for being gun enthusiasts. “It’s outrageous and it’s shocking. Right next to a school, when someone tells you that they find this kind of stuff in a house, especially when you have all these young kids around. They play ball on the streets,” said one local.

“I knew them since they were kids, since they grew up. I knew the mother,” said another. “All I knew was that they used to drink. They drink, that’s all.” “I just don’t think it’s anything, other than they’re just troublemakers,” said a third.

Sources said the father and son seemed to be responsible for the guns.

After the housing market went bust, the FHA became the major source of funding for first-time homebuyers. But the agency, which insures roughly 30 percent of new loans, has seen its losses rise dramatically. While the agency has avoided a taxpayer rescue so far, its reserves have sunk below the minimum level required by Congress.

There also have been fears that subprime lenders have shifted their business to the FHA after the subprime business went bust.

The agency has already taken action against several problem lenders. One of the nation’s biggest mortgage bankers, Taylor, Bean & Whitaker Mortgage Co. of Ocala, Fla., was banned from the FHA program in August and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Another mortgage company, Lend America, was kicked out in November.

On Tuesday, Department of Housing and Urban Development’s inspector general, Kenneth Donohue, said he wanted to determine why defaults are so elevated among the 15 companies being probed and whether any have committed fraud.

“Many of these target loans didn’t last but a short time before defaulting,” Donohue said. “We will conduct an investigation, if appropriate, to determine who is responsible and will recommend that appropriate action be taken against individuals and corporations.”

The FHA does not make loans, but rather offers insurance against default. Borrowers are willing to pay for the insurance because FHA loans only require down payments of 3.5 percent of the purchase price.

The lenders targeted by FHA officials include some of its worst-performing active lenders. For example, almost one in five loans made by Alethes LLC of Lakeway, Texas, over the past two years went into default, compared with a national average of about 5 percent.

“We are reviewing each of these files to determine what commonalities there are, if any,” said Danny Smith, president of Alethes, wrote in an e-mail. He later added that the subpoena requested “information which has already been provided.”
Two other FHA lenders being scrutinized, Alacrity Lending Co. of Southlake, Texas and Pine State Mortgage Corp. of Atlanta, each had default rates of about 15 percent.

“We intend to comply and get as much information to them as fast as we can,” said Lonnie Brantley, chief executive of Alacrity.

The government inquiry, he said, applied to a small portion of the company’s loans, and attributed the company’s high default rate to “bad economic times.”

Pine State Mortgage could not be immediately reached for comment and the company’s Web site was down Tuesday afternoon.

The largest lender under the FHA’s magnifying glass was First Tennessee Bank, a subsidiary of Memphis, Tenn.-based First Horizon National Corp. A spokesman said the company sold its mortgage division in August 2008 and scaled back dramatically on new FHA loans since then. That could be artificially inflating the company’s default rate because the company is making fewer new FHA loans.

The crackdown was welcomed by John Courson, chief executive of the Mortgage Bankers Association. “We’re concerned about the viability of the program and we want to make sure that the bad apples and the bad players, frankly, are eliminated,” he said.