Reader Fears Evil of Guardian Money Machine

The publication of Clara G. Fernandez's story in Key West The Newspaper has emboldened many of you to come forward with your stories! Blogs and Websites are springing up like mushrooms across this great land and the Stolen Lives are no longer a The Dirty Little Secret of just a chosen few.

We are cross posting each other stories back and forth and you might be able to silence some of us, but you will never be able to silence all of us !

Broward County,Florida USA

I cannot give my boss' name because he asked me not to. He also told me not to give the woman's name for whom he was the Guardian. I must respect his wishes.

Please do not give my name as I am merely a third party and do not want to cause problems for myself. I firmly believe that there could be danger in going against the "money machine" of the Guardianship courts, maybe even to the point of risking life and limb.

I will, however, give you the names of the judge and attorney who bilked the woman for most of her money. This took place in Broward County, Florida. Here goes:

In 2002, an old friend of my my boss' family, (herein referred to as the Ward), had to be declared incompetent and my boss literally saved her life. She locked herself in her condo and refused to eat or even pay the bills, and it turned out she literally became senile. She had fallen in the bathroom, couldn't get up and was found by the paramedics when my boss couldn't get her on the phone.

He quickly found a senior caregiver, who referred us to Attorney Stephanie Schneider and a legal Guardianship was set up with my boss being the Guardian. The Ward had about $500,000 in investments at Morgan Stanley plus her condo at the time. The court ordered all her funds to be moved to a special guardianship account at Wachovia and I took over the payment of her bills.

The Guardian we feel raped "Ward" excessively in attorneys fees, while my boss and I charged NOTHING and spent at least 10 times more hours. We hired private nurses around the clock, and the Ward was maintained at home, with brief periods of hospitalization over the years. If the money had stayed at Morgan Stanley, it would have been well invested and earning a nice sum, but once it was moved over to Wachovia, it began depleting at a greater rate because it wasn't being invested as well as at Morgan Stanley.

The court didn't care. Afterwards , the Gurdian sent us yet another bill for "services" of about $5k, and my boss hit the roof since he knew she was gouging the Ward and the money was running out. He fired Schneider and hired a young lawyer that I personally know from Miami-Dade County (I must leave his name out) and we went to court to get Schneider's bill reduced. First we went before a magistrate who nickeled and dimed the bill and managed to get about $500 taken off because the magistrate determined that Schneider had overbilled and double billed us for certain items. Meanwhile, once she saw we were going to court, Schneider billed us an additional $3k to defend herself against our claims, and she tried to get the magistrate to award us these fees at that hearing. Luckily the magistrate said that was a matter for the judge and she was only assigned to deal with the original bill.

Unluckily, we went before Dale Ross, and the minute we were in chambers we knew that he and Schneider had something going on. He wouldn't let me or our attorney get but a few words in, but let Schneider go on as long as she wanted. It didn't matter that we were pleading on behalf of a woman who was losing all her money and in danger of having to be turned over to the state. It didn't matter that I tried to appeal to what I thought might have been Schneider's "good" nature by begging her and the judge to have a heart for this poor woman. In the end, he awarded the attorney the full amount on top of the original bills.

It was a total scam and I'm convinced that the judge must have been getting a kickback or some other favor from the attorney because it appeared that this was already decided long before we even walked into that courtroom.

Meanwhile, my lawyer friend charged only about $3k to take over the guardianship and do twice as much work as Stephanie Schneider did. In February of this year, the Ward's money finally ran out and we put her on medicaid and moved her to a nursing home, where she died two weeks later.
This whole thing was an evil doing from the start.