Laura Martinez was living an idyllic life in an upscale San Antonio suburb with her common-law husband Charlie Thrash, 78, when, on March 6, 2019, Charlie was taken by police from their home and placed in an assisted living facility.
Charlie was declared to be incapacitated and placed under guardianship by unscrupulous individuals whose aim was to get rich by seizing and then selling off Charlie’s sizeable financial assets that totaled around $3 million.
Charlie had specified that he wanted Laura to be his guardian if he ever became sick; however, the guardianship was awarded to Mary Werner, the wife of Bob Werner,[1] the mayor of Shavano Park, the suburb in which Thrash lived, based upon a recommendation by Mr. Thrash’s estranged grand-niece.
Ms. Werner had financially supported the political campaign of Judge Oscar Kazen, who granted her the guardianship. Judge Kazen’s decision was shaped in part by false allegations that Ms. Martinez had abused Charlie and tried to illegally convert his assets.
Laura Martinez was on hand at the 12th Annual Whistleblower Summit in Washington, D.C., at the end of July.
The summit was established with the intent of celebrating whistleblowers who expose corruption in the public and private sectors and to help to provide them with moral and legal support.
One of the panels this year spotlighted the national epidemic of guardianship abuse by which older people or those who have suffered accidents or health problems are taken advantage of by people purporting to look out for their interests.
The norm when someone is declared incapacitated is for an attorney, or private citizen with some connection to the victim, to be appointed as the victim’s guardian, which gives him/her control over the person’s finances and medical care.
Many attorneys work in collaboration with judges who may be intent on rewarding financial donors to their political campaigns and discount the best interest of the victim or wishes of family members who care most about him/her.
Too often, the person declared to be incapacitated can actually function very well and should not have been placed under guardianship. In other cases, the person is victimized by members of their own family who know how to maneuver the legal system.
One of the speakers at the guardianship panel was Diane Dimond, who wrote the book We’re Here to Help: When Guardianship Goes Wrong.
Dimond recounted some of the horror stories from her book, including a case where a woman who had been placed under guardianship woke up from a temporary coma to discover that her home had been sold off and that she had almost no money left in her bank account.
Dimond told other stories where elderly people placed under guardianship were subjected to physical abuse and medical neglect, resulting in their premature death, or were isolated from their families in their declining years.
Dimond roots the national epidemic of guardianship abuse to the turn of the 20th century in north-central Oklahoma when oil was discovered in Osage Indian territory, and the media became flooded with articles about the Osage’s supposed luxurious lifestyles and excesses.
The white community was aghast that a people considered to be ethnically inferior had become wealthy and, in 1921, Congress passed a law requiring any full or half-blooded Osage member to be appointed a guardian until they could prove their own “competency.”[2]
Minors who were heirs to the land were also required to have guardians, even if the parents were still living. The appointed guardians were usually white attorneys and businessmen who were supposedly “protecting” the Osage from their own foolish spending.
There was little government oversight of this guardianship process and little recordkeeping of how guardians doled out monthly allowances and invested the rest of their ward’s wealth.
Corruption among guardians and outsiders hoping to get their hands on lucrative oil leases led to what the Osage called the “reign of terror.”[3] This reign culminated in the systematic murder of Osage in order to complete the theft of their land and wealth.[4]
One hundred years later, the victims of guardianship abuse include wealthy whites and even celebrities like Brittney Spears, who had much of her wealth taken from her by her father.
Courts Divorced From the Law
One of the cases that Dimond discussed in her book was that of Elaine Mickman, who was on hand at the Whistleblower Summit in Washington, D.C.
A suburban housewife from Philadelphia, Mickman has gone through a twenty year nightmare. She was left penniless after being stripped of her assets and savings, denied alimony payments, forced to pay extortionist legal fees, and treated like a criminal by the court system after her husband abandoned her and her five kids to live with a girlfriend in England.
Mickman suggests in her book, Court Gate: The Courts Divrced From the Law Without Liberty or Justice (2021), that the courts favored her husband, who had abused her, because he could afford fancy attorneys and experts who twisted the truth.
According to Mickman, her husband’s lawyers coordinated a backdoor deal with a judge that involved falsifying and tampering with the court’s computer system and resulted in a $550,000 kickback masqueraded as a credit to offset child support.
When Mickman filed fraud petitions, the court punished her as a whistleblower and slapped her with draconian fines. Mickman referred to the court system in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania as “common crooks and corruption” and wrote that “people in America today foolishly look to the courts to resolve legal matters when so many are denied justice.”[5]
According to Mickman, so many courts are “toxic environments and terroristic forums where a culture of corruption breeds like malignant cancer metastasizing throughout government. ‘Court system’ profiteers and other opportunists are ‘money hunters’ who ‘prey on vulnerable victims.’”
Bigots with Badges
Another panel at the Whistleblower Summit featured Matthew Fogg, 72, a former chief deputy U.S. marshal who was awarded $4 million in 1998 after winning a class action racial discrimination lawsuit against the U.S. Marshals Service.
Fogg alleged that the U.S. Marshals Service systematically discriminated against African-Americans by denying them promotion. After he became a whistleblower, Fogg said that he faced harassment and began to fear for his own life.
Deputy Marshal Stephen Zanowic, Jr., was called a “rat” for supporting Fogg and validating his charges of racism in the Marshals Service. Another whistleblower, William “Bill” Scott died in what Fogg considered to be a suspicious hit-and-run accident.
Fogg’s case was featured in a 1998 New York Post exposé on the U.S. Marshals Service entitled “Bigots with Badges.”
At the Whistleblower Summit, Fogg showed a video clip from an episode of America’s Most Wanted that featured him apprehending a dangerous fugitive named Michael Lucas of Baltimore, Maryland, who had threatened to kill him.
Lucas has since been released from prison and appeared with Fogg at the panel at the Whistleblower Summit. He said that he respected Fogg and his integrity as a law enforcement officer and supported his legal battles.
Also appearing on the panel was Chris Mancini, a Fort Lauderdale Florida-based attorney who spoke about the systemic racial discrimination in the criminal justice system in Florida, which he said is very much part of the U.S. South.
In one recent case, Mancini said he was happy to have helped a Black man escape phony attempted murder charges after Black Lives Matter organized a picket.
Unfortunately, this case was all too typical and the fight goes on.
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Werner is a taxation and probate attorney. Charlie Thrash owned two airplanes, a hangar at Boerne, Texas, airport, a condominium, multiple commercial properties used in his automotive business and at least ten collectible/vintage hot-rods, including a Shelby Mustang, and two vintage motorcycles. ↑
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Diane Dimond, We’re Here to Help: When Guardianship Goes Wrong (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2023), 162, 163. ↑
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Dimond, We’re Here to Help, 163. ↑
-
See David Grann, Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI (New York: Vintage Books, 2017). ↑
-
According to Mickman, media typically behave as “mouthpieces for the judiciary” and are “seldom a voice for the ‘litigant,’ in fact they usually censor the crimes that occur in family court.” ↑
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About the Author
Jeremy Kuzmarov holds a Ph.D. in American history from Brandeis University and has taught at numerous colleges across the United States. He is regularly sought out as an expert on U.S. history and politics for radio and TV programs and co-hosts a radio show on New York Public Radio and on Progressive Radio News Network called “Left on Left.” He is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine and is the author of five books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019), The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018), and Warmonger. How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the U.S. Trajectory From Bush II to Biden (Clarity Press, 2023). Besides these books, Kuzmarov has published hundreds of articles and contributed to numerous edited volumes, including one in the prestigious Oxford History of Counterinsurgency . He can be reached at jkuzmarov2@gmail.com and found on substack here.
Thanks Ron, I appreciate your comments!
You article reveals little-known information about offical abuses including murder of people who they oppress and exploit. This is your modus operendi time after time, and I love you for it.