Category Archives: Uncategorized

Attorney General listed in Investigation

Washington State, where Mr. Pennington resides, is a model of the way the national fraud, a federal RICO, operates on a state-by-state basis according to both the court record and legal experts. In Washington, the suit alleges, complicit public officials act jointly at the direction of the States’ Attorney General (AG) and the States’ insurer.

(link to full report= https://goldbarreporter.wordpress.com/2020/10/16/18528/)

The State Attorney General directs, operates, and controls the State Bar Association, attorneys under contract with the State called “Special Assistant Attorney Generals (SAAGs),” “Special Assistant Prosecutors,” prosecutors, judges, and the State Commission on Judicial Conduct. The AG acts at the direction of the State’s insurer, the Association of Washington Cities (AWC). AWC, in turn, is essentially an operating unit of Lloyd’s of London, according to court records.

Exert from – https://goldbarreporter.wordpress.com/2020/10/16/18528/

Nurse argues with mother and is put on the APS registry-Attorney General won’t let her have a hearing

Nurse goes though years of appeal just to get a chance to have a hearing prove herself innocent- The Attorney General fights to deny her a hearing

NURSE/ DAUGHTER: Goes on registry for an argument with her own mother
A nurse got in a argument with her mother. Her mother lived alone and could care for herself. There was no evidence stated in records that the mother was distraught or in any way effected.
Neighbors must have complained to APS.
APS agent writes daughter up and mails 30 day deadline letter to mother’s house certified which was returned undeliverable. This is repeated.
APS mails same letter regular mail and puts daughter on abuse registry in 30 days
Nurse/daughter finds out when she is fired from her job
DSHS does not allow Nurse/ daughter a hearing to get off the registry- too late.
Nurse goes though years of appeal just to get a chance to have a hearing prove herself innocent
I don’t know the ending- lawyer are expensive- she may have ran out of money

Abuse registry used to get family and friends out of the way

APS wants guardian to break the law- Attorney General Agrees

This case is a horrible waste of tax dollars and abuse of Process by the Office of the Attorney General. The Attorney General fights to put Raven on the APS abuse registry for NOT violating state laws. She had to go all the way to the Supreme court to get the Attorney General off her back- 10 years and $100,000 later she got free.

Resa Raven: APS agent wanted Raven to violate state laws and/or coerce Ida into going into a facility against her will. Raven had taken Ida at a greatly reduced rate (about $125 a month) and spent more time on her case than cases which she charged $400 a month.
Raven tried getting a court order and the judge refused, so APS put her on the registry.
Administrative hearing favored Raven
DSHS Board of Appeals stated that Raven should have tried harder and reversed. DSHS order is based on speculation of what might happen is Raven had spent more time trying to convince Ida into going into a facility
Superior Court stated it was not abuse and reversed
DSHS appeals and Appeals court sides with DSHS BOA
Supreme court reversed, but did not grant legal fees saying that DSHS was justified.
The only reason we think that the Supreme court reversed was that multiple well known and crooked guardianship lawyers sent in Friends of the court letter in favor of Raven. We think that the letters were because they didn’t want APS coming after a guardian.

The AG spends lots of state dollars to “defend” DSHS
Abused registry is used to help DSHS bring up the numbers.

Inslee $5 million no-bid contracts

The research in this is good: Original article at: https://culpforgovernor.com/jay-inslee-private-lockdown/

Our state was devastated by high priced consultants hired by Jay Inslee.

Short Version: our governor utilized state funds to personally choose a high priced consulting firm that was unproven in results. He avoided seeking competitive options to safeguard Washington. He ended up with a biased set of actions that left hundreds of thousands unemployed, a huge number underemployed, devastated our economy, bankrupted thousands of businesses, and destroyed an untold number of families.

The Long Version…

Today’s topic of discussion is about how Jay Inslee destroyed the state economy and decided to keep the state in perpetual lockdown.

Do you know that Jay Inslee spent $165,000 a week for corporate COVID analysts to tell us how our state needs to behave?

(If you want to read it, here is the contract.)

The contract in question is with McKinsey & Company – a U.S. based consulting firm boasting worldwide employees with over $8B in revenue.

Contracts that literally affect the entire state and future of our population are generally deemed important. Our state has a specific process for collecting bids from capable vendors to prevent exclusive and favorable contracts. Jay Inslee chose to use a no-bid process and eliminate these competitive bids using “special market conditions” and emergency procurement processes through the Washington Department of Enterprise Services (RCW 39.26.130) (*Instead of consulting with the Legislature?)

Jay Inslee authorized a $1.32M contract that quickly escalated into roughly $5M of additional business with the State of Washington. The McKinsey team then turned around and used Washington’s no-bid case study to engage similar projects in other states such as New Jersey, Ohio, Virginia, and Maine. It became a never ending cash cow that generated upwards of $100M in additional McKinsey contracts. 

An example from Maine’s $2.84 Million dollar project reads:

(You can read the Maine.gov contract here HERE)

The total of the three no-bid Washington pandemic response contracts that McKinsey was given by Jay Inslee had a combined $5 million value. These included making the governor a tool ($1.32 Million), figuring out how messed up the employment security fraud situation was (another $2.4 million), and work to match coronavirus tests with Medicaid ($1.2 Million.)

How did Jay Inslee choose to lockdown Washington?

The truth is that we still don’t know!

As Jay Inslee’s decision to shutdown our state needed support, he turned to the McKinsey team for the ‘data and the science’ he preached in his daily press conferences. His decision to utilize a no-bid process meant that he could contract with a vendor that supported his personal assumptions and political motives with no oversight by the people he serves.

We do know the data and key metrics that were ultimately used to lockdown our state for over six months was orchestrated by the McKinsey team.

This data was never shared with the public. 

The reports, formulas, and agreed goals of the ‘science’ used were never shared.

The team was never vetted or compared to other firms due to Jay Inslee using a no-bid contract.  

This team consisted of 10 people.

(*We created a graphic detailing how consulting teams are generally structured.)

What do we know about this team?

As a consulting group, McKinsey saw the value of influencing state and national industry changes that affected core business sectors. McKinsey rotated hundreds of employees to provide Covid-19 business consulting around the globe and scrambled for the consulting revenue (check out McKinsey.com)

We know that this team of 10 people were not full time on Washington’s shutdown project. In fact Dr. Jordan VanLare was a named Engagement Director on a similar $5.4M Covid-19 contract with the state of New Jersey happening at the same time (contract here.)

Almost all of this team was virtual and had little expertise or understanding of Washington state community or economic impacts. Only one member of the executive partners was operating out of Bellevue, WA. Other ‘core experts’ resided in Washington D.C., New York, and Maryland.

Why did this destroy our economy?

The McKinsey team responsible for designing our shutdown metrics had no SMB expert (Small and Medium Business) – the lifeblood of our local communities and employment. The McKinsey team acted as quickly as possible to secure multiple state contracts and used Washington as the guinea pig.

Do not let Jay Inslee and corporate consultants destroy our state.

Share. Vote. Take a stand.

If you are asking why Seattle is a glimmer of what it was, why unemployment and underemployment is the new norm, why lockdowns oppose World Health Organization recommendations, and why small businesses are being destroyed in favor of big brands….

Just follow the money.

WA Attorney General- Ferguson

Bob Ferguson needs to be put out of office- We can’t afford Ferguson—-Get the criminals out of office—–

Tell the truth: What has the office of the Attorney General done to make life harder for you or someone you know?

Have you had a court case where the attorneys from the WA AG’s office lied in court?

Have you made a complaint about misconduct or criminal activity to WA state Office of the Attorney General and they made some excuse for not doing anything?

www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/09/how-the-elderly-lose-their-rights

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/09/how-the-elderly-lose-their-rights

How the Elderly Lose Their Rights

Guardians can sell the assets and control the lives of senior citizens without their consent—and reap a profit from it.

For years, Rudy North woke up at 9 a.m. and read the Las Vegas Review-Journal while eating a piece of toast. Then he read a novel—he liked James Patterson and Clive Cussler—or, if he was feeling more ambitious, Freud. On scraps of paper and legal notepads, he jotted down thoughts sparked by his reading. “Deep below the rational part of our brain is an underground ocean where strange things swim,” he wrote on one notepad. On another, “Life: the longer it cooks, the better it tastes.”

Rennie, his wife of fifty-seven years, was slower to rise. She was recovering from lymphoma and suffered from neuropathy so severe that her legs felt like sausages. Each morning, she spent nearly an hour in the bathroom applying makeup and lotions, the same brands she’d used for forty years. She always emerged wearing pale-pink lipstick. Rudy, who was prone to grandiosity, liked to refer to her as “my amour.”

On the Friday before Labor Day, 2013, the Norths had just finished their toast when a nurse, who visited five times a week to help Rennie bathe and dress, came to their house, in Sun City Aliante, an “active adult” community in Las Vegas. They had moved there in 2005, when Rudy, a retired consultant for broadcasters, was sixty-eight and Rennie was sixty-six. They took pride in their view of the golf course, though neither of them played golf.

Rudy chatted with the nurse in the kitchen for twenty minutes, joking about marriage and laundry, until there was a knock at the door. A stocky woman with shiny black hair introduced herself as April Parks, the owner of the company A Private Professional Guardian. She was accompanied by three colleagues, who didn’t give their names. Parks told the Norths that she had an order from the Clark County Family Court to “remove” them from their home. She would be taking them to an assisted-living facility. “Go and gather your things,” she said.

Rennie began crying. “This is my home,” she said.

One of Parks’s colleagues said that if the Norths didn’t comply he would call the police. Rudy remembers thinking, You’re going to put my wife and me in jail for this? But he felt too confused to argue.

Parks drove a Pontiac G-6 convertible with a license plate that read “crtgrdn,” for “court guardian.” In the past twelve years, she had been a guardian for some four hundred wards of the court. Owing to age or disability, they had been deemed incompetent, a legal term that describes those who are unable to make reasoned choices about their lives or their property. As their guardian, Parks had the authority to manage their assets, and to choose where they lived, whom they associated with, and what medical treatment they received. They lost nearly all their civil rights.

Without realizing it, the Norths had become temporary wards of the court. Parks had filed an emergency ex-parte petition, which provides an exception to the rule that both parties must be notified of any argument before a judge. She had alleged that the Norths posed a “substantial risk for mismanagement of medications, financial loss and physical harm.” She submitted a brief letter from a physician’s assistant, whom Rennie had seen once, stating that “the patient’s husband can no longer effectively take care of the patient at home as his dementia is progressing.” She also submitted a letter from one of Rudy’s doctors, who described him as “confused and agitated.”

Rudy and Rennie had not undergone any cognitive assessments. They had never received a diagnosis of dementia. In addition to Freud, Rudy was working his way through Nietzsche and Plato. Rennie read romance novels.

Parks told the Norths that if they didn’t come willingly an ambulance would take them to the facility, a place she described as a “respite.” Still crying, Rennie put cosmetics and some clothes into a suitcase. She packed so quickly that she forgot her cell phone and Rudy’s hearing aid. After thirty-five minutes, Parks’s assistant led the Norths to her car. When a neighbor asked what was happening, Rudy told him, “We’ll just be gone for a little bit.” He was too proud to draw attention to their predicament. “Just think of it as a mini-vacation,” he told Rennie.

After the Norths left, Parks walked through the house with Cindy Breck, the owner of Caring Transitions, a company that relocates seniors and sells their belongings at estate sales. Breck and Parks had a routine. “We open drawers,” Parks said at a deposition. “We look in closets. We pull out boxes, anything that would store—that would keep paperwork, would keep valuables.” She took a pocket watch, birth certificates, insurance policies, and several collectible coins.

The Norths’ daughter, Julie Belshe, came to visit later that afternoon. A fifty-three-year-old mother of three sons, she and her husband run a small business designing and constructing pools. She lived ten miles away and visited her parents nearly every day, often taking them to her youngest son’s football games. She was her parents’ only living child; her brother and sister had died.

She knocked on the front door several times and then tried to push the door open, but it was locked. She was surprised to see the kitchen window closed; her parents always left it slightly open. She drove to the Sun City Aliante clubhouse, where her parents sometimes drank coffee. When she couldn’t find them there, she thought that perhaps they had gone on an errand together—the farthest they usually drove was to Costco. But, when she returned to the house, it was still empty.

That weekend, she called her parents several times. She also called two hospitals to see if they had been in an accident. She called their landlord, too, and he agreed to visit the house. He reported that there were no signs of them. She told her husband, “I think someone kidnapped my parents.”

On the Tuesday after Labor Day, she drove to the house again and found a note taped to the door: “In case of emergency, contact guardian April Parks.” Belshe dialled the number. Parks, who had a brisk, girlish way of speaking, told Belshe that her parents had been taken to Lakeview Terrace, an assisted-living facility in Boulder City, nine miles from the Arizona border. She assured Belshe that the staff there would take care of all their needs.

“You can’t just walk into somebody’s home and take them!” Belshe told her.

Parks responded calmly, “It’s legal. It’s legal.”

Guardianship derives from the state’s parens patriae power, its duty to act as a parent for those considered too vulnerable to care for themselves. “The King shall have the custody of the lands of natural fools, taking the profits of them without waste or destruction, and shall find them their necessaries,” reads the English statute De Prerogative Regis, from 1324. The law was imported to the colonies—guardianship is still controlled by state, not federal, law—and has remained largely intact for the past eight hundred years. It establishes a relationship between ward and guardian that is rooted in trust.

In the United States, a million and a half adults are under the care of guardians, either family members or professionals, who control some two hundred and seventy-three billion dollars in assets, according to an auditor for the guardianship fraud program in Palm Beach County. Little is known about the outcome of these arrangements, because states do not keep complete figures on guardianship cases—statutes vary widely—and, in most jurisdictions, the court records are sealed. A Government Accountability report from 2010 said, “We could not locate a single Web site, federal agency, state or local entity, or any other organization that compiles comprehensive information on this issue.” A study published this year by the American Bar Association found that “an unknown number of adults languish under guardianship” when they no longer need it, or never did. The authors wrote that “guardianship is generally “permanent, leaving no way out—‘until death do us part.’ ”

When the Norths were removed from their home, they joined nearly nine thousand adult wards in the Las Vegas Valley. In the past twenty years, the city has promoted itself as a retirement paradise. Attracted by the state’s low taxes and a dry, sunny climate, elderly people leave their families behind to resettle in newly constructed senior communities. “The whole town sparkled, pulling older people in with the prospect of the American Dream at a reasonable price,” a former real-estate agent named Terry Williams told me. Roughly thirty per cent of the people who move to Las Vegas are senior citizens, and the number of Nevadans older than eighty-five has risen by nearly eighty per cent in the past decade.

In Nevada, as in many states, anyone can become a guardian by taking a course, as long as he or she has not been convicted of a felony or recently declared bankruptcy. Elizabeth Brickfield, a Las Vegas lawyer who has worked in guardianship law for twenty years, said that about fifteen years ago, as the state’s elderly population swelled, “all these private guardians started arriving, and the docket exploded. The court became a factory.”

Pamela Teaster, the director of the Center for Gerontology at Virginia Tech and one of the few scholars in the country who study guardianship, told me that, though most guardians assume their duties for good reasons, the guardianship system is “a morass, a total mess.” She said, “It is unconscionable that we don’t have any data, when you think about the vast power given to a guardian. It is one of society’s most drastic interventions.”

After talking to Parks, Belshe drove forty miles to Lakeview Terrace, a complex of stucco buildings designed to look like a hacienda. She found her parents in a small room with a kitchenette and a window overlooking the parking lot. Rennie was in a wheelchair beside the bed, and Rudy was curled up on a love seat in the fetal position. There was no phone in the room. Medical-alert buttons were strung around their necks. “They were like two lost children,” Belshe said.

She asked her parents who Parks was and where she could find the court order, but, she said, “they were overwhelmed and humiliated, and they didn’t know what was going on.” They had no idea how or why Parks had targeted them as wards. Belshe was struck by their passive acceptance. “It was like they had Stockholm syndrome or something,” she told me.

Belshe acknowledged that her parents needed a few hours of help each day, but she had never questioned their ability to live alone. “They always kept their house really nice and clean, like a museum,” she said. Although Rudy’s medical records showed that he occasionally had “staring spells,” all his medical-progress notes from 2013 described him as alert and oriented. He did most of the couple’s cooking and shopping, because Rennie, though lucid, was in so much pain that she rarely left the house. Belshe sometimes worried that her father inadvertently encouraged her mother to be docile: “She’s a very smart woman, though she sometimes acts like she’s not. I have to tell her, ‘That’s not cute, Mom.’ ”

When Belshe called Parks to ask for the court order, Parks told her that she was part of the “sandwich generation,” and that it would be too overwhelming for her to continue to care for her children and her parents at the same time. Parks billed her wards’ estates for each hour that she spent on their case; the court placed no limits on guardians’ fees, as long as they appeared “reasonable.” Later, when Belshe called again to express her anger, Parks charged the Norths twenty-four dollars for the eight-minute conversation. “I could not understand what the purpose of the call was other than she wanted me to know they had rights,” Parks wrote in a detailed invoice. “I terminated the phone call as she was very hostile and angry.”

A month after removing the Norths from their house, Parks petitioned to make the guardianship permanent. She was represented by an attorney who was paid four hundred dollars an hour by the Norths’ estate. A hearing was held at Clark County Family Court.

The Clark County guardianship commissioner, a lawyer named Jon Norheim, has presided over nearly all the guardianship cases in the county since 2005. He works under the supervision of a judge, but his orders have the weight of a formal ruling. Norheim awarded a guardianship to Parks, on average, nearly once a week. She had up to a hundred wards at a time. “I love April Parks,” he said at one hearing, describing her and two other professional guardians, who frequently appeared in his courtroom, as “wonderful, good-hearted, social-worker types.”

Norheim’s court perpetuated a cold, unsentimental view of family relations: the ingredients for a good life seemed to have little to do with one’s children and siblings. He often dismissed the objections of relatives, telling them that his only concern was the best interest of the wards, which he seemed to view in a social vacuum. When siblings fought over who would be guardian, Norheim typically ordered a neutral professional to assume control, even when this isolated the wards from their families.

Rudy had assured Belshe that he would protest the guardianship, but, like most wards in the country, Rudy and Rennie were not represented by counsel. As Rudy stood before the commissioner, he convinced himself that guardianship offered him and Rennie a lifetime of care without being a burden to anyone they loved. He told Norheim, “The issue really is her longevity—what suits her.” Belshe, who sat in the courtroom, said, “I was shaking my head. No, no, no—don’t do that!” Rennie was silent.

Norheim ordered that the Norths become permanent wards of the court. “Chances are, I’ll probably never see you folks again; you’ll work everything out,” he said, laughing. “I very rarely see people after the initial time in court.” The hearing lasted ten minutes.

The following month, Even Tide Life Transitions, a company that Parks often hired, sold most of the Norths’ belongings.  read rest of article at:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/09/how-the-elderly-lose-their-rights

Tucson Court to Hear Extradition of Woman Accused of Feeding her Mother

Tucson Court to Hear Extradition of Woman Accused of Feeding her Mother:  link to Activist Post   

June 25, 2017

By Janet Phelan

On Tuesday, Pima County Superior Court in Arizona will hear a case involving a fugitive from justice and the request for extradition to Miami-Dade County, in Florida. The fugitive, a former New York attorney, is a 64-year-old woman named Barbara Stone.

Stone was originally arrested for feeding her mother.

Barbara Stane and her mom, Barbara surprised her mom, with a party

Yes, you read that correctly. Specifically, the 2013 charges against Stone were launched after she took her mother, who was under a guardianship with a “professional guardian” named Jacqueline Hertz, to lunch. Stone had visited her mother, Helen Stone, in the facility wherein Hertz had placed her. Finding her mother on a feeding tube and clearly emaciated, Barbara Stone took her to Denny’s.

She was arrested the same day and charged with the following: 1) Custody interference; 2) Elder abuse; 3) False imprisonment, and 4) Violation of a protective order. According to Miami-Dade, there was no action taken on charges 2-4 and the threat of the five-year prison term attached to the first count was enough for Stone to take a plea. She was sentenced to three years probation.

The warrant for her arrest in Arizona, which was executed on June 16, 2017, states that she violated the terms of her probation on four counts. Three of them reveal a virtual gag on Stone.

1) Barbara Stone is charged with “failing to comply with the plea agreement…..(stating that Stone) shall not file any documents in the pending guardianship case, or in any other court of competent jurisdiction, concerning her mother or any other parties/participants unless said documents are filed by and through an attorney licensed to practice in the State of Florida, and as grounds for belief that the offender violated her probation, Officer Nakesha Tucker states that the offender submitted a letter to Linda Kearon, General Counsel, on August 27, 2016.”

2) As to the second count, “Officer Nakesha Tucker states that the offender submitted an email to Liz Consuegra, attorney ad litem on August 30, 2016.”

Got it. Letters and emails….it gets worse.

3) On the next count of probation violation, Stone is charged again with violating the plea agreement. This time, “Officer Nakesha Tucker states that the offender submitted a blog/review on September 9, 2016.”

Emailing, Blogging…..all of which surrounds the crime of taking her Mom to lunch.

4) On the final count of probation violation, Officer Tucker states that “the offender failed to report (to her probation officer) as directed since August 2, 2016.”

According to friend and neighbor Janet Pipes, at that point Barbara Stone was in Arizona, trying to rebuild her shattered life.

The Stone case was covered in an article in Miami New Times, which discussed multiple cases of guardians preying on and abusing their wards. The article prompted new legislation in Florida, which is generally considered to have been no more useful than a band-aid on brain cancer.

According to Rick Black, intake director for Americans Against Abusive Probate Guardianships (AAAPG), new laws have not slowed the pace of fraudulent guardianships across Florida in the least.

His perceptions are echoed by elder law specialists across the country. “We don’t need to change the laws; we need to enthusiastically and effectively apply the laws that we have,” said Sally Hurme, an elder law attorney in Washington, D.C.

Quoted in an article in Next Avenue, A. Frank Johns, a Greensboro, NC. attorney and a national leader in the field of elder law, said: “When you go out and try to look for the application of those changes, it’s nowhere to be found.”

Barbara Stone is not allowed to speak with her mother and reportedly has not seen her in over a year.

It should be noted that none of the documents obtained in pursuit of this report were obtained from the Miami-Dade court. The court’s press officer, Eunice Sigler, has refused to reply to or in any way honor the requests for information filed under the Florida Public Records Act. I suspect the penalties for Sigler’s violating the Florida Public Records Law and the public’s right to know will be negligible.

Eunice Sigler Public Relations Director Eleventh Judicial Circuit of Florida

After all, we must protect the public at all costs. Not only from daughters who want to feed their mothers but also from reporters who think that something might be rotten in Florida.

According to Rick Black, “The National Center for State Courts estimates there are 1.3 million adults under guardianship.” Black states that at this juncture …” the total assets under guardianship are $50 billion, nationwide.”

Miami-Dade County has recommended six months in jail for Barbara Stone, followed by reinstatement of the probation conditions. Her extradition hearing takes place on June 27, at 2: 30 in Pima County Superior Court, Judge Lee Ann Roads, presiding.

Top Image Caption: Miami-Dade State Attorney General Katherine Fernandez Rundle (D) and Barbara Stone (inset)

Editor’s Note, additional images, and files can be found here, here, here and here

To support Janet Phelan’s work please like share and if possible contribute here.

This article first appeared here at Photography is Not a Crime.

Janet Phelan is an investigative journalist whose articles have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The San Bernardino County Sentinel, The Santa Monica Daily Press, The Long Beach Press Telegram, Oui Magazine and other regional and national publications. Janet specializes in issues pertaining to legal corruption and addresses the heated subject of adult conservatorship, revealing shocking information about the relationships between courts and shady financial consultants. She also covers issues relating to international bioweapons treaties. Her poetry has been published in Gambit, Libera, Applezaba Review, Nausea One and other magazines. Her first book, The Hitler Poems, was published in 2005. She is also the author of a tell-all book EXILE, (also available as an ebook). She currently resides abroad.