No army can operate without generals, officers and foot soldiers. It’s the foot soldiers who are thrown into battle and suffer the most injuries and fatalities.
My father, a Lt. Colonel who commanded a tank battalion in Europe in 1945, was massively wounded when a bazooka hit his tank in the German town of Kaiserslautern.
All his life we kids asked him questions about being an officer in the military and what the experience was like. He refused to answer those questions, always referring to the heroism of foot soldiers who paid the highest price in the war to defeat facism. His biggest love in life was the common soldier who fought on the front lines.
My reason for writing this: There are foot soldiers in the war for a return to Constitutional rights in HOA Amerika. They don’t have websites, they don’t get interviewed, they don’t write talked-about books. But their research into the ugly, systematic abuse of homeowners, along with their ongoing emails which inform us of abuses we’d never know about otherwise, are invaluable in our battle.
Cynthia.
Jim.
Brad.
Nila.
Jonathan.
And many others.
Our community is too small, because we’re able to identify most of our ranks by first names only. But it’s growing, I promise you it’s growing.
Kay Sturtz gets 30 days community service after two embezzling cases where she stole more than $35,000. In the first case a couple of years ago, she swiped $10,600 from her Homeowners Association in Washington State. The judged dropped the case after she paid back the missing money. But she apparently got that money by embezzling $26,000 from her employer, the Blue Sky Landscape Service.
Thirty five thousand bucks! Wow! That’s more than a thousand bucks a day. And she gets to luxuriate at home.
No, actually it was about 283 HOA dollars a day. But the treasurer of the Stratford Homeowners Association in a well-to-do suburb of Augusta, Georgia, is facing theft charges.
Laurie Wainwright-Vanover now stands accused of stealing more than a quarter million bucks from her Homeowners Association over a four year period. She was treasurer of her association and had access to the dues paid by all her neighbors.
Of course, she’s not guilty until proven so in a court of law. Unless she pleads guilty, innocent by reason of insanity or….better yet? How about this for a defense: Since we’re living in an era of redistribution of wealth, all she was doing was trying to help carry out national policy. Who knows? People who embezzle from their neighbors sometimes come up with some goofy excuses for doing so.
Nevada has some slimy creatures. But this one has finally been nailed by the U.S. Attorney. Las Vegas huckster Leon Benzer has at long last been indicted for leading the organized crime ring that bled untold tens of millions of dollars out of that state’s Homeowners Associations.
Benzer has claimed innocence all along. In fact, he’s now saying that he got personal approval for running his racket by the Nevada Attorney General. While that’s totally believable, the HOA scam was totally unbelievable. More than two dozen participants have already pleaded guilty to rigging HOA board elections so they could put phony straw men on the boards and divert millions of dollars to Benzer, a bunch of lawyers, a few police officials and a politician here and there.
Oh, and this is the case where forty percent of the first ten suspects accused ‘committed suicide,’ at least one of them in impossible circumstances. But that’s the Vegas way.
The real tragedy here is that the FBI may be winding down its investigation. But with all they’ve learned during this four year investigation, they could transplant this team of federal agents to any city in the country and they’d find just as much corruption. HOA scams are going on all over.
Where is Uncle Billy Bob? Sounds like he was hired to restore the Heritage Landing Condos in Saint Charles, Missouri but has headed off to….fishing trip? Guadalajara? Elsewhere? Residents are living in hotel rooms but the contractor is MIA. Who hires these losers, anyway?
Ten months ago, the Jahnke family and Scott Collins were told they would be back in their condos by the end of 2012 after a fire in July. Collins is reduced to tears because the restoration left his place in worse condition than pre-fire. And poor Debra Jahnke is so stressed out she’s on blood pressure medication and anxiety drugs. She says a new home could be built from the dirt up faster. And ten months in a hotel is, well, miserable.
Ahhh, but the big question is: Why the shoddy work? Who IS the contractor that is showing up on a sometime”ish” basis? And the biggest question of all is…”Where’s the insurance money?” “And the property manager?” Oh my! Imagine this, NOT AVAILABLE for comment on camera!
In emergencies, condo dwellers are left at the mercy of property managers who hire the cheapest labor and produce the shoddiest work. That means owners are zapped with future expensive repairs. And, of course there’s no “go to” source for answers.
