Still Waiting...

In the summer of 2006, I consulted a professional document examiner about a fraudulent trust document I already knew private investigator Ed Hodges had forged my name on. The document examiner wrote a report stating my initials had been forged on the pages and a page on clearly different paper with my genuine signature on it had been added. (See "She Said", 9/16/09.) This document examiner has close ties to the FBI office in San Antonio.

The document expert gave me referrals to several attorneys she said were "trust lawyers" who could help me deal with the fraud. One of the recommended attorneys stalled and then refused to represent me. Another passed me on to a partner of theirs who was rude to me on the phone and made it clear their practice was actually criminal law. (I later learned that all of these recommended attorneys were actually criminal lawyers.)

The third of these lawyers was a woman who said her husband worked for the CIA. She said his name was David Clark, which I later learned is considered a generic spy name. She also mentioned being an avid horsewoman and owning horses, but she wouldn't say what kind. (She is the same lawyer discussed in "The French Connection" earlier.)

I decided to hire this last lawyer mainly on the basis of the recommendation from the document examiner. I signed a contract with her and paid her a retainer and a fee that was to be put in escrow. A day or so later, before I'd even had time to meet with her again after providing her with copies of my documentation to look over, Ed Hodges filed a lawsuit against me and my children claiming I owed him enormous sums of money for various "trust duties" like the ones shown in my 7/27/10 post entitled "Dating Problems".

The year that followed was one of constant stalling, repeated demands for money from me by various persons involved in the case, a "mediation" session that was more like attempted extortion, and numerous other odd and disturbing events. Eventually I decided I wanted a written summary of this attorney's work in her own words, so I asked her to provide this in a one-page format; the page she provided is shown here.

Two days later, on July 11th, 2007, my lawyer called and said she was faxing me some paperwork she'd just received from Ed Hodges' lawyer. At 4:01 PM she faxed me the paper shown here plus another with a crude map on it.

I started looking at these documents and quickly realized they involved a proposed zoning change on land very close to mine that I knew nothing about. I then looked at the map more carefully to try and figure out whose land was involved. The more I examined the map, the more convinced I became that the land to be rezoned was actually my own, despite the 200' statement on the notice.

I checked the date and time for the hearing and was shocked to discover that it was to start in an hour and that any protests needed to be filed in writing ahead of time. I called my lawyer back and asked her if the hearing was for my land. She said no, it was for land to the west of mine. I told her I was upset about being notified so late, and she claimed she'd only just received the notice herself from Hodges' lawyer--but I could see he's actually faxed it to her several hours earlier. I asked her why the notice had come from Hodges' lawyer instead of the city, and she claimed she didn't know.

By this time so many alarms were going off for me that I ran to my car and raced over to the city offices. The Director of Development Services tried to run past me as I entered, but I stopped him and insisted on speaking to him. He said he was "late for a meeting" and again tried to push past me, but I stood my ground in the doorway and demanded to know if it was my property to be rezoned. Like my attorney, he said no, it was for land west of mine. He was sweating profusely, clearly nervous (shaking), and wouldn't look me in the eye. I demanded he show me a better map.

At that point, he took me down a back hallway and showed me a larger and much more detailed wall map where I could clearly see it was indeed my own land that was up for rezoning. I asked him why he'd lied to me, to which he only replied, "If you want to file a protest, you'll have to give it to the secretary right now, because our office is closing." I then asked him why the city had never notified me of the hearing, but he only repeated his instruction about filing a protest, so I quickly scribbled the few lines shown along the bottom of the page and handed it to the secretary. While she was stamping this and making copies, I told the official I had a conflict with one of my children's activities and would be unable to attend the hearing. (Everyone in town knew I had a child involved in this activity.) I also told him that first thing the next morning, I'd be contacting the Texas OAG and the FBI. At the mention of the FBI, he grabbed his things and fled the building.

As soon as I returned home, I called my lawyer back. I was furious with her for lying to me and wanted an explanation, which of course she wouldn't give me. After consulting with my children, I fired her.

The next morning, I called the city offices and was told that, although my brief and hasty protest had been presented at the hearing, they had gone ahead and recommended my land be rezoned. I immediately prepared a more detailed protest that I faxed to the city. I then prepared a formal complaint plus documentation that I faxed to the Texas OAG with a copy to the city. (Of course I had no response from either.)

I immediately began searching for a new lawyer, and I spent the next few weeks almost non-stop on the phone trying to find one. I quickly discovered that the only ones who were willing to represent my children and me in the lawsuit would only do so if I first deeded over one-third to one-half of my zoned-commercial property to them first, which I would not do. When I realized I had a serious problem finding proper legal representation, I began contacting legal assistance organizations, also without success, as I've blogged about previously.

In the process of talking to so many lawyers (literally hundreds!), I noticed something odd: every time I showed this hearing notice to one of them, they always commented on the fact that the city was listed as the applicant on it--without my even mentioning it first. Even stranger, half of them told me the city's being the applicant for the zoning change wasn't legal, while the other half told me it was! The fact that they all seemed so interested in this one issue yet could not seem to agree on it intrigued me, so I started taking an informal poll of the responses I received. I also started pointing out to attorneys that I'd been given conflicting information about the issue and wanted to find out for certain whether it was legal for the city to be the applicant for a zoning change for land owned by someone else. I received the same response to this every time" "I'll look this up and get back to you."

Of course they never did get back to me, so I'm still waiting... for a definitive answer on whether or not it was legal for the city to be the applicant AND for an attorney to agree to represent us properly, both in the lawsuit and elsewhere.

At this point, you might want to go back and read "The Legal Situation" (6/23/10) again. You should also know that more recently this same lawyer was giving public elder law seminars involving trusts at Democratic Party functions and advertising herself as an "elder law specialist".

Tricks Of The Trade

As I've discussed before, early in 2005 I hired a former FBI agent and a former DEA agent who were working together as private investigators to look into serious problems I was having with a previous investigator I'd hired named Ed Hodges. The new investigators insisted I talk with a lawyer they worked with and spoke very highly of who was also on the Boerne, TX city council at the time. The former FBI agent even personally accompanied me to my first meeting with this attorney. It was at this meeting that I first realized Hodges had conned me. On the ex-FBI agent's advice, I immediately hired this Boerne attorney to handle the fraud for me.

At one point during this initial meeting, I also mentioned to this lawyer that I needed to have a new will drawn up. The lawyer said he could do this for me but it would have to wait until the fraud was dealt with because it was more urgent.

As detailed in "My Story" at the beginning of this blog, I became increasingly confused and frustrated when this lawyer kept stalling. (A sample email exchange of mine with him is posted at "They Said", 9/16/09.) I became especially concerned when one of my children and I photographed a car we believed belonged to Ed Hodges parked in front of my ex-husband's office during what was described to my other children as "a big meeting about real estate development in our neighborhood" and this lawyer still wouldn't do anything.

In August of 2005 I suddenly received a call from the Boerne attorney telling me he'd finally drawn up the new will I'd originally asked for. I was puzzled as to why he'd suddenly done this without my having asked again and even more puzzled when he insisted I make the long drive to his office right away to sign it, but he said he'd recently been less busy and had finally gotten around to drawing it up, so I headed down there. My oldest child, who was home from college, went with me.

When we got to the attorney's office, I was very surprised to discover he'd drawn up far more than just a will for me: there was also a power of attorney document, a guardianship document, a medical power of attorney document, a directive to physicians document, and more.

I was very confused by all the documents which had never been explained to me or discussed with me. I was also upset when I saw numerous references in the new will to the fraudulent trust Ed Hodges had altered and forged my initials on [Ex. 1], but the lawyer said these were necessary until the fraudulent trust issue was resolved legally. He suggested I go ahead and sign the documents and then if I later changed my mind about any of them, I could simply destroy the original to void it.

I hesitated for some time over what I should do and discussed the matter at length with my adult child. In the end, I did decide to go ahead and sign the documents.

After I got home and was able to study the documents a little more, I realized that one of them could be easily altered by someone by simply crossing items out [Ex. 2a]. I was seriously concerned about this and immediately destroyed that document. I also emailed the lawyer to let him know what I'd done and why [Ex. 2b]. His reply is also shown.

Shortly after this, I discovered my former father-in-law had been allowed to listen in on a confrontational meeting between myself, this lawyer, and the two ex-feds who recommended him. I fired all of them, and I immediately destroyed the originals of all the documents I'd signed and sent emails and handwritten letters to my children and several friends stating I'd voided all the documents.

I did, however, keep obvious copies of these documents (clearly marked as such). When I hired a professional document examiner to look at the fraudulent trust document in 2006 (see "She Said", 9/16/09), I also asked her to look at the copies of the Boerne legal documents.

The document examiner found numerous problems with these documents, some of which I'm posting here. Since I don't have any legal training or experience, I never realized that I was the affiant, not the lawyer and his secretary, who therefore knowingly signed some of the documents incorrectly [Exs. 3a and 3b]. Notice that these documents were also notarized this way [Ex 3b]. In another case, one page I initialed was swapped for an uninitialed page [Ex 4] when the secretary stepped out of the room briefly to copy the signed documents and bind them into folders--I know this because I checked all the pages twice and very carefully to make sure I hadn't missed any pages, and that's the only time the originals left my sight.

The document examiner recommended another attorney to me (see "She Said") whom I hired--and later also had to fire for conning me! When Ed Hodges stated in legal documents that he'd turned over documentation he claimed he had to my former Boerne attorney and the Boerne attorney would not give me a complete copy of my file, I filed a formal complaint against him with the State Bar of Texas that included copies of the documents he'd drawn up with the problems clearly marked. The attorney then provided an extremely incomplete copy of my file.

The State Bar of Texas refused to discipline this attorney in any way, so he's still practicing law with no complaints listed on his webpage. I'm posting these examples now in the hope they will prevent someone else from being victimized.

People Named George

In some of my previous posts I've written about a man whose first name is George. Now it's time for me to write about two people with the last name of George.

On 3/27/03, a woman named Clara Cortez George, 27, died at the Gillespie County jail in Fredericksburg. The official version of her death as reported in the newspapers at the time was that she had been arrested when she made a planned appearance at the county courthouse at 11:30 AM and was found dead in a jail cell at 12:45 PM with her blouse tied around her neck. Her death was ruled a suicide by hanging.

However, a local insider with ties to law enforcement told me Ms. George had actually been raped and strangled by a jailer. The person who told me this said the police chief didn't want any negative publicity and "ran the jailer out of town" instead of prosecuting him. I was (and still am) shocked to hear this--but not surprised, given many of the other things that go on within local law enforcement.

In February of 2007, I ran across another Ms. George. I'd driven down to San Antonio to meet with my lawyer at the time (whom I later had to fire when I discovered she'd misrepresented me). When I arrived at her office, my attorney asked me to wait in her conference room while she took an important phone call. While I was sitting there waiting, it was impossible not to notice a large number of legal documents that had been left on the conference table in plain sight, but I tried to ignore them because I knew they were probably confidential. However, when my attorney finally came in, she actually pointed them out to me and said they were from the case of a female client of hers whose last name was George. Rather than repeat what my lawyer told me about them, I'm posting an excerpt from a 2/15/07 email I sent to Diop Kamau (whom I also believed to be working for me at the time, although I learned differently later) in which I described what I'd been told in detail shortly after I was told it.

This incident bothered me right from the start for a number of important reasons that had nothing to do with the last name of this woman and the earlier fail victim being the same. For one thing, it was obvious my attorney wanted me to see the documents (by leaving them out and then seating me right next to them). In fact, I later realized that my lawyer may have finally come back into the room only after it became apparent to anyone who might have been watching from nearby that I was not going to examine the documents on my own. For another thing, it did not seem professional or even proper for my attorney to discuss someone else's case with me in such detail. The biggest red flag of all for me, though, was the fact that so many of the same people (lawyers, document expert, and judge), places (Boerne and Kerrville), and circumstances (fraudulently obtaining real estate, wills, and trusts) were involved in both my case and Ms. George's case. My discomfort at having been given all this information about someone else's case without being able to understand why was the reason I emailed Kamau about what had happened. I was hoping he'd be able to explain what was going on, but he didn't.

I do not know either of these women named George personally, and I have no idea whether they or their cases relate to each other. It would certainly be extremely interesting if they do turn out to be related--but it doesn't matter if they're not, since each deserves to be mentioned here in their own right.


Update: Clara Cortez George's sister, Maricela Cortez Rosa (44), died on April 29, 2010 (shortly after I posted this!) in Fredericksburg of unknown causes.



Update: Another sibling has died suddenly and too young.

I Was Told He Said

When the former Secret Service agent quit as Ed Hodges' expert witness, I received notice from Hodges' attorney that this expert was taking the agent's place. However, I never saw any sort of report or statement that was actually from this expert witness, so I have only the word of the attorney that this witness was also willing to testify under oath to things I knew for sure weren't true.

Very important note: NONE of the attorneys or document examiners connected with our case ever mentioned anywhere that the fraudulent trust document in question had been filed by the county clerk's office without being properly notarized.

She Said

Here's what a document examiner I hired (the only one to provide me with a written report) and the attorney she recommended told me.

Update, 3/16/2012: The attorney that wrote the above, Carmen Samaniego, is now running for public office in Bexar County.

They Said

Here's a sample of what a former FBI agent, a former DEA agent, and the lawyer they took me to were telling me. Later (after I fired them), I asked the former FBI document examiner they sent me to for a written report; this is what he told me.