Trial by website

Not everyone gets to sit in a front row seat at a really roundhouse fight between the several owners of a small business – a business scarcely worth fighting over.

Close to four years ago, that opportunity was presented to me via the news coming out of Liberty County, Texas. Two of the owners of a small home health business were said to be trying to keep the company from being stolen from them by a third owner of the business with whom they had evidently had quite a falling out. As to legal clients and business arguments, this one, to me, an observer and not an attorney or the like, was quite typical. When a business is not doing well, when the money runs low, multiple owners of a business tend to squabble and to do things to one another that they do not do in more halcyon days.

I learned that I was in error. This particular squabble was a lot more than just a row between several disagreeing partners. It had become bigtime crime – ugly stuff. It grew and grew, ultimately involving politicians, law enforcement officials, several different courts, state agencies and, indirectly, some agencies of the federal government, volunteer relief groups, and a host of individuals, most of whom had nothing at all to do with the original failing business.

Here we are nearly four years into this affair and it is still going strong. Today is a Friday. On Monday there is listed to be a criminal trial in one of the state district courts in which the guilt or the innocence of the participants is to be determined. Guilt? Innocence? About attempting the theft of an entire company from its other owners? No. It is to determine if there had been felony tampering with official documents.

Unlike many other aspects of daily life, either personal life or business life, businesses must operate by rules and regulations set by government. When a business is involved in provision of home healthcare services, those rules and regulations are strictly enforced. This is true as to day-to-day operations and also to cessation of operations through just plain stopping the business or by transferring the business to a new owner.

So, here was a small company that earned its money by providing nursing care to ill and injured homebound clients. For the most part the payments to the company were through billings to insurance companies and, maybe most of all, billings to government agencies and designees assigned to handle Medicare and Medicaid accounts. If a company wants to be paid from such sources, the company has to have the appropriate paperwork in place for payment approval. That paperwork is in the form of notarized documentation, the truth of which is sworn to by the business owner(s).

In the instance of this home health business, its transfer to those accused of attempting to steal it from the other owners, has been declared by other courts to be void because the would-be thieves lied to the government in the documents swearing to the business transfer. Further than that, they lied about the dissolving of the original business. That sort of lying under oath, as they are accused of doing, is called tampering with an official document – and that is a felony in Texas.

Now then, all during this long time of waiting for the felony trial to begin – almost four years – the accused thieves have been airing this whole affair on their Weblog, defending themselves one way or another and declaring courtroom victory after victory over their accusers. For example, when one of the thieves was dismissed from a civil lawsuit in one court because he was being tried in a different court, the blog trumpeted that dismissal as a great victory for themselves and for overall justice. They have posted one blog article after another attacking their adversary’s attorney as well as the businessmen-owners themselves and some of their employees and friends. They even filed a lawsuit against a court-appointed receiver whose job it is to round up whatever assets they may own to satisfy the first judgment against them (close to $600,000) for the fraud the accused had committed. Most of those blog articles have been downright nasty in tone, with people being called mean and scurrilous names as well as being the objects of lies and half-truths. As goofy as it may seem to be, they have attacked the district attorney, a Texas Ranger, various judges, website providers, and newspaper editors. (How’s that for stacking the odds in your own favor?)

We will see how things turn out in the forthcoming felony trial. Once it has been completed and the verdicts rendered by the jury and the judge, I will get back into this story and provide details for your study – "for your enjoyment" would be pushing things too far.

There have been other indictments topping off those of tampering with government documents. Here is the list of four counts of a subsequent indictment rendered against both of the defendants. It also has yet to be tried in court:

"Count 1 – Engaging in Organized Criminal Activity
Count 2 – Misapplication of Fiduciary Property
Count 3 – Engaging in Organized Criminal Activity
Count 4 – Theft Property"

If you would like to have a heads-up on what will follow, you can review the archived articles on a newsworthy website published by a pretty good reporter, Allen Youngblood. He is a fixture in the city of Liberty, Texas, central to this whole mess, and his website is known as i-dineout.com, sort of a strange name for a local news site. Once you are into his archives, beginning in Year 2007, use your browser’s edit function to "find" the instances of "Akins" and of "Shauberger." Do the same for 2008 on through 2010.

To see how the accused report on things having to do with their troubles, check out the current pages and the archive pages on LibertyDispatch.com. Don’t be too amazed at how gross some of that "reporting" may be. There is even some commentary there about their allegation that the local district attorney committed anal rape of a mentally retarded state convict during an interview in the attorney’s office. Were I to say that such accusations are wild and unusual, I would not be saying that about the LibertyDispatch Weblog. For that site, such things are pretty much par for the course.

Nothing quite like trials by website, right?