There’s not much to do in Wellington, Colorado. It sits on the dusty plains of Eastern Colorado on the border with Wyoming, surrounded by corn and sugar beet fields. It’s an inordinately boring town that features a couple of local coyote packs, a small school, and an occasional June tornado that rips off some shingles and sometimes tips over an unwary cow. Sometimes a high school scandal erupts about which girl is going to be going away for little while to resume her high school education at another school or other time. Such high school diversions have caused titters and tutters among the local townsfolks for generations. It’s none of their business, of course, but in a small town such things are everyone’s business. Damn the nosy, but that’s about all the outrage that can really be raised.
Investigators of HOA corruption in Las Vegas have scored another bit hit. They have indicted a Bevery Hills man for felony embezzlement and theft. The indicment accuses Massoud Aaron Yashouafar of stealing more than a million dollars from the Paradise Spa Homeowners Association. Yashouafar was the treasurer of the HOA.
In the past two years, two fires have erupted in the complex in Las Vegas. Insurance companies gave Yashouafar up to a million dollars to repair the damage. But owners of units in the complex say they never received any insurance money, and to this day Paradise spa is marred by the two fires.
Millions of people move into Homeowner Associations, thinking they’re protecting the value of their home. They sign covenants promising to abide by a byzantine set of covenants that amount to a surrender of all Constitutional rights. They reason, “At least I’m protecting my investment.”
But in a massive number of Homeowner Associations, someone on the inside is embezzling staggering sums of money, all of which have to repaid by the homeowners. If the crook is caught, the judge generally orders restitution, but that’s just pro forma. It rarely happens. When homeowners are forced to make up for the stolen money, for all intents and purposes it’s a direct devaluation of every home in the neighborhood.
One of the saddest stories out of Washington this Christmas is that Congressmen are forbidden from wishing their constituents “Merry Christmas” if they’re using Congressional franking privileges. In fact, the newest rules accept “Have a happy new year,” but do not permit “Happy New Year!”
It seems the PC crowd doesn’t want tax dollars used for anything that even hints at any connection to religion. The First Amendment doesn’t mandate that life in America be absolutely secular, it simply says that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…” But 200 years of Supreme Court rulings have decided that the First Amendment doesn’t say what our common sense tells us it does.
I would bet dollars to donuts that not a single reader of this blog knows from this headline what I’m about to say!
Want to think about it for a second?
Remember, I have a large number of lawyers and law firms following this blog. Any guesses?
OK, here goes this intrepid reporter barefoot into the coals. But first, let’s inject a second hypothetical question.
In a pending court case in which not a single detail has been discussed or released, in a case where all a prospective attorney knows is that the potential client is pitted against a Homeowners Association, wouldn’t it be logical to assume that most lawyers would be willing to represent either side?
