We are alive on this Earth because of the lowly honeybee. Without it, our crops couldn’t be pollinated, and much of today’s food production would virtually vanish.
So a legal case is developing in Tennessee over whether an HOA member could keep some honeybees. Even better, there are profound implications on whether HOAs are de facto governments, as most of us believe they are. Better people than I are blogging about this right now, including Arizona’s homeowners champion, George Staropoli. It’s an important read!
http://pvtgov.wordpress.com/2012/09/20/hoa-principalities-to-bee-or-not-to-bee-one-government-under-the-constitution/trackback/
That’s the official conclusion of investigators looking into the death of Nevada Lawyer David Amesbury. He used to run the ever-popular CourtHouse Restaurant. His wife was a former Clark County Prosecutor. Earlier he had pleaded guilty to criminal wrongdoing and taking a small part in a massive scheme to make a faked buy of homes inside of Las Vegas gated neighborhoods.
The scheme required the fake neighbors to become fake board association members to take fake votes to send fake construction remediation work to fake construction companies all overseen by Las Vegas attorney Nancy Quon, who it turns out was the queen of all fakes, herself. She faked a drug overdose, she faked a fire in her home supposedly to commit suicide. But she was pulled from the flames just in the nick of time. “Whew! that was close!” A bit later, Quon chose some better drugs and some bath water to do the trick.
Sure, Amesbury was a little embarrassed to get caught up in this mess, but he was about to get a huge break. A lighter sentence and maybe some traveling money to rat out some low level racketeers. You don’t commit suicide for that. you commit suicide because someone is scaring you so badly that you feel there’s no way out. That could be the prosecutors. Or it could be his low-life former business partners.
Of the first ten people invited to plead guilty in the Federal Grand Jury investigation, four of them committed suicide. Now think about this: four high ranking police officials and two rich attorneys pleaded guilty in exchange for their testimony against a couple of low-lifes? Is something just not registering in the minds of Las Vegas residents? Aren’t there a few too many “fakes” in this story? The basic plot line just doesn’t fit “Tthe 100 Monkey Test.”
In David Amesbury’s case, he’s found lying on his face behind the gates on one of those gilded neighborhoods, he’s beaten to a pulp, his pants are yanked down below his ankles. and his knees are broken backwards. Yet we’re to believe this brutalized 56 year old man had the strength to climb to the rafters in his brother’s barn and hang himself? it’s a good story but his family doesn’t buy it. They public may not be buying it, either.
Ward Lucas, author of Neighbors At War! The Creepy Case Against Your Homeowners Association
A former doctor is now facing a second murder charge after the death of a man he wounded Thursday night.
The second man, 69-year-old Marvin Fisher, died Sunday. He was a member of the HOA board of directors and a past president. The other victim who was killed instantly Thursday night was the current HOA president, David Merritt. The suspect, 51 year old Mahmoud Hindi had a longstanding dispute with the Homeowners Association. The HOA had repeatedly demanded he remove a fence and a driveway which were not built according to rules and regulations of the community.
Ward Lucas, author of Neighbors At War! The Creepy Case Against Your Homeowners Association
Homeowners usually get the raw end of the deal when they try to fight the “Bigs” in the HOA industry. Some Homeowners in California are trying to turn that trend around. An HOA in Riverside County has sued three former property managers for “fraud, conspiracy to defraud, breach of contract, and breach of fiduciary duty. They had employed the management companies for eight years.
Canyon Lake Association then sued its own law firm, Fiore, Racobs & Powers, accusing them of “fraud and malpractice.” They say a lengthy investigation found “no cash management, no separation of accounting duties, credit card abuse by employees, employee salary increases that were not approved by the board.”
The lawsuit further claims that three HOA managers “created and concealed a secret, systemic pattern of conversion and theft of (HOA) assets and funds…and made representations to the board that were not true and were a cover-up designed..to delay discovery of the cover-up.”
One final thought comes to mind here. We haven’t heard much from the federal investigators in Las Vegas. We hope the widespread corruption they found in the Vegas HOA industry hasn’t depressed them to the point that they want to ‘throw in the towel’. Actually, we hope the opposite is true. We hope they take a look around the country and discover that the legal scams in Las Vegas are as identical and numerous as the legal scams in Riverside County, and Modesto, and Weld County, Colorado, and Dallas, and Houston, and Miami, and North Carolina.
If you don’t think it’s happening in your own community, you are either naive or dumber than a box of rocks. When we signed those CC&Rs, we stepped into an entirely new form of government with no checks and no balances. We essentially told law firms and property managers, “It’s OK to steal from us.” And then we whine when they steal from us.
The Wyoming Supreme Court hammered a Gillette woman, who’ll probably be spending the rest of her life in prison.
60 year old Julie Ann Jacobsen embezzled more than $400,000 from her Homeowners Association. She was entrusted with the HOA’s books. She used a variety of sneaky ways to funnel all that money from her neighbors into her personal bank account. When the verdict was announced, though, Jacobsen wasn’t there to hear it. She was on the lam. She fled to Washington State and evadedlaw enforcement for about a year.
But most thieves are stupid, and Julie Ann Jacobsen was doubly so. Even if you have $400,000 in stolen money, sooner or later you’re going to make a mistake and pop up on some database or another. She did. And she was busted. She was hauled back to Wyoming to face the music.
She appealed her 36 to 60 year prison sentence to the Wyoming State Supreme Court. She asked the court to overturn the sentence.
The Supreme Court said….
“No.”
