"The first hearing in the case was held on Dec. 11 before Superior Court Judge Michael Levanas, who ruled against Paquette’s request to have Shlain suspended as Eunice’s trustee.
“I am not going to do anything…in terms of making any removal,” he said. “Mr. Shlain will continue to be the trustee.”
Eunice’s court appointed attorney, Mary Creutz, agreed with the ruling, stating: “I need some time with this case to see whether Mr. Shlain is as bad as he’s painted to be.”
On Dec. 31, Shlain, using two attorneys funded by Eunice’s money, filed an objection to appointing Alpert as Eunice’s conservator.
At another hearing on Feb. 11, 2010, Paquette again asked – practically begged – the judge to remove Shlain as Eunice’s trustee, saying that Shlain “took advantage of her and sold her house out from under her and all of her belongings before she was even dead…If selling this woman’s house from under her isn’t enough to convince this court to at least suspend (Shlain), then what does it take?”
Paquette told the court that Shlain was a “predator on the elderly,” and called him Eunice’s own personal Bernie Madoff.
Stewart Neuville, another of Shlain’s lawyers, assured the court that Eunice’s trust fund “is safe and secure,” and called Alpert an “interloper who seeks somehow to gain control of Eunice’s assets.”
“The corpus of the Trust is safe and secure,” Neuville told the court, “and is being managed competently by a professional certified public accountant.”
None of that turned out to be true, but once again, the judge demurred and let Shlain stay on as Eunice’s trustee and in total control of her money.
The judge scheduled another hearing for March, but bank records subpoenaed in the civil proceedings show that on March 3, Shlain withdrew $886, 040 from Eunice’s trust account and wired it to a woman named Natalya Vronsky at Bank Hapoalim in Tel Aviv. A few weeks later, he closed his accounting office on Wilshire Boulevard and vanished."
If it involves elder abuse, financial elder abuse crime certainly does pay ... in Los Angeles County.
No comments:
Post a Comment
All comments are reviewed before posting.