Behind the scenes of the Michigan Elder Abuse Task Force, Nessel’s firings of four Public Administrators on Friday, the Detroit not so Free Press, Listening Tours, Kojak, Strip Searches and corruption at the highest levels.
By Gretchen Rachel Hammond
On August 23, 2019, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel announced that she had fired three Oakland County Public Administrators, John Yun, Jennifer Carney and Thomas Brennan Fraser and one Macomb County Public Administrator Robert Kirk.
Ninety minutes later, I published a five-part, freelance series detailing an alleged massive abuse and exploitation ring operating out of a Detroit-area probate court. The subjects of Nessel’s proclamation were also central figures in my investigation alongside attorney Jon B. Munger (fired in 2017), Oakland County Probate Court Chief Judge Kathleen Ryan and her colleagues Linda Hallmark, Daniel A. O’Brien and Jennifer Callaghan.
The judges decided on a sample of 2,278 guardianship and conservatorship cases my team and I reviewed. Their alleged victims number in the high thousands of Michigan's most vulnerable senior and developmentally disabled citizens, each declared “legally incapacitated wards” and placed under a court-appointed guardianship and conservatorship.
With no due process, or medical evidence presented as to a ward’s incapacity, shocking judicial overreach led them to be stripped of each of their constitutional, statutory, civil and human rights. Almost immediately, they are forced from their homes and into long-term care facilities or unlicensed group facilities with subhuman living conditions.
Either way, guardianship is a life sentence which hardly anyone in this country knows or about which anyone has cared to educate themselves. While the rest of the country engages in hand-wringing over the treatment of undocumented immigrants not one civil rights group has raised a finger in protest about the rights that have been stripped from innocent, American citizens.
As a result, this activity has continued unchecked for at least three decades, with probate court audits covered up by Nessel and her predecessors, the Michigan Supreme Court and the State Court Administrator's Office.
Those Oakland and Washtenaw County families whose stories I had the honor of telling knew that Nessel’s Frday dictum was bullshit. They are all sharp as tacks anyway. So, it didn’t pass anyone’s notice that, despite the simplicity of the job, the Attorney General couldn’t even bring herself to say the word “fired.”
Instead, after careful “internal” deliberation, she decided “relieve these public administrators of their appointments.”
If you want to know exactly what Yun, Carney, and Fraser did to earn their brief,moment in the sun Friday, then you are quite welcome to click the links below:
Click here for part one
Click here for part two
Click here for part three
Click here for part four
Click here for part five.
These stories go to the heart of both Gretchen Whitmer and Dana Nessel’s 2018 campaigns for Michigan Governor and Attorney General.
There’s a reason for why this story is on my personal blog and not a mainstream outlet.
There’s a reason why I have boxes and flash drives full of evidence and no-one to whom to give them.
There’s a reason why this story is my last as a journalist.
The Free Press: That’s what it says on the cereal box
What I am about to relate is not an attempt to shame my fellow reporters, nor is it sour grapes as I was able to to find a form of resolution in that the story got told.
Sometimes, after a salacious bit of information is published, all the OpEd scribes line up to give their two penneth. Daily Kos readers don’t tend towards the troll, yet never couch brutal honesty in niceties.
It’s my first and last OpEd so it calls for some trial and error.
Journalists are theoretically also supposed to deal in whole truths. At least, that’s what it says on the profession’s cereal box.
Therefore, I cannot let this particular whole truth just vanish. There are lessons within it, for me most of all, but I hope also for those journalists who choose to stay on the ship, maybe of what not to do, even as the last few chords of Nearer My God to Thee play out in New York and Washington DC.
I was both an idealist and a born leftist in every sense of the definition.
So, I never took for granted the honor of telling someone’s story and elevating a voice; especially if they had suffered from injustice or been discarded by society. When my stories resulted in positive changes, to even a single life, then my salary and the resulting can of Spaghettios was earned.
On the other hand, what happened this year with the Detroit Free Press took the prize and was a gut-punch to what had been my rose-tinted view of the profession.
Even after I received their 2018 Letter of Intent to publish my investigation into the Oakland County Probate Court, I was cautious.
My concerns about a possible catch and kill situation didn’t come out of nowhere. In my national background research, I spoke to families in Washington and Oklahoma who said that reporters who had been committed to investigating guardianship issues, in those states, were suddenly told by their editors to stop.
But I was assured, by Free Press leadership, that in no way had the publication ever allowed outside pressure to interfere with an investigation. They had a history of superlative reporting which seemed to substantiate that.
So, I continued my work with the security that its results, pending rigorous fact-checking, had a home. But, I kept the name of the Free Press out of requests for interviews.
The unconventional meeting
That held true in my February 16, 2019 email asking for a face-to-face with Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel.
I was quite surprised when, almost immediately I heard back from her Communications Director Kelly Rossman-McKinney asking if my team and I would be willing to meet with a long list of Nessel staff members in order to overview our findings.
Nessel’s campaign speeches had traveled as far as Chicago. I couldn’t vote for her but, damn, was I ever inspired that a fellow member of the LGBT community had so passionately reached to rarely attained heights. Moreover, she had pledged to support the the downtrodden and, her meeting request looked like a desire to keep that campaign promise.
I checked with my editor at the Free Press who gave an enthusiastic green light. The meeting was set for March 12.
However, when I saw that the list of attendees included State Public Administrator Michael Moody, I pushed back and alerted Rossman-McKinney that he was a focus of the investigation.
Both Moody and his wife Laura’s tenures with the AG’s office pre-dated Nessel. For years, multiple families had gone to Michael with horror stories about his public administrators. They always left with no result.
Since Moody was good friends with a select few of the public administrators he appointed, he alerted them to the complaining families who then suffered staggering retaliation in a probate court.
Rather than sticking to the letter of Michigan statute or Michigan Court Rules, the Oakland County Judges make up their own rules as they go along.
So, prior to the meeting, my team and I reached a decision that if Moody was going to get involved, our best course of action was to provide the proof of our findings but protect the alleged victims and their families by:
A) Redacting the names and case numbers from documents.
B ) During the meeting, allow the AG’s staff to review, but not keep, the documents.
Along with my team, I invited three family members of Oakland County wards to send one representative each. Since they had never received a single response from their own attempts to shed light on what was happening at the probate court, I hoped to discern why, while giving them an opportunity to be heard.
After all, the families had already agreed to go on the record with their stories. Whether I received my answers from Nessel in the form of an official comment or not, the AG herself had ordered the meeting. So, nothing that was said there was going to come from anonymous sources I would need to protect with my life.
“Well let me say something to you, we do have the evidence.”
The afternoon was led by Assistant Attorney General Scott Teter.
True to form, it was a downright bizarre four hours during which our summary of findings was received with moments which ran the gamut between receptive and defensive. There were moments when, for example, I tried to raise the subject of Moody and Teter immediately shut me down.
As if I didn’t already know, he reminded me that public administrators who took roles as guardians and conservators were acting outside of their job descriptions and as private attorneys. Therefore, Moody had no jurisdiction over them.
Whether Moody had jurisdiction over them or not, even after public administrators like Munger had been fired by him in 2017, Munger still took and was taking deceased estate as well as guardianship and conservatorship cases at the Oakland County Probate Court.
He’s part of a case there right now. The litigants are Aretha Franklin’s family members. He is guardian of her eldest son, Clarence.
A public administrator was clearly just a title with no more consequences of it’s removal than telling the Duke of Edinburgh that he could no longer be a duke.
So, we started on the topic of the unlicensed group homes my team and I found across Oakland County in which conditions for the wards living there defied any kind of horrific description. To help, we passed around photographs that we had taken during our visits to them.
Teter gravely asked if I had shared the information with anyone.
I replied that I had shared our findings with the Detroit Area Anti-Corruption Task Force.
Teter looked me square in the face and asked me who they were.
“You don’t know?” I spluttered.
After all, less than a week after Nessel’s office asked to meet with me, the Detroit-area Task Force raided the Taylor, Michigan City Hall and the Attorney General herself released a note congratulating them.
“Oh them!” Teter replied, growing visibly impatient. “You can’t give that stuff to them. They will take months to do anything. We can do something right now. Why are you working with them?”
I patiently reiterated that the wards had been placed in these homes by public administrators and was about to say the name “Moody” again when Teter lost his temper and told me I was “twisting” his words.
As we moved on to Medicaid fraud allegedly committed by the public administrators, I was asked what bearing it had on the investigation.
At that point, I was struggling to keep a grip on my own temper. I felt like Adlai Stevenson staring down Ambassador Zorin. I didn't quote him at the time but there were more than a few moments I wanted to blurt out "Well let me tell you, with a trespass on credulity that excels your best, that we do have the evidence. We have it and it is clear and incontrovertible."
With no comment at all, Teter left around 4 pm, just before the families were going to tell him each of their stories. He left a few staff members behind to hear them, but the families were devastated.
Moody, himself, never showed up.
We left at 5 pm with no comment but quite a lot of answers.
By then, Teter was already in a meeting with Nessel deciding what to do next.
“Motion to terminate?” Not investigate?
By 8 pm, I received an email from Teter.
“I shared the information with the AG and she would like us to get involved more deeply in a couple of cases immediately,” he wrote. “You shared the chart of the home sales information with me and it included one sale that was over $100,000 below the market value. Can you give me more information on that file so we can pull the probate file?”
“Also, we are looking for the most egregious case that involved either the Guardian ad Litum ignoring the ward (who isn’t incapacitated),” he added. “Or one of the cases that had the DPOA that was ignored to see if we could file a motion to terminate. Can you supply one?”
I was taken aback.
“Motion to terminate?” Not investigate?
We had supplied Teter and his people with multiple cases demonstrating pattern and practice.
“It would, therefore, not serve our goals for publication at all to provide you with the requested documents at this time,” I concluded.
On the morning of March 21, I interviewed Senator Pete Lucido (R). An outspoken, genuine sort of bloke, he pushed back on the notion that nothing had been done about alleged probate corruption.
“The Attorney General has created an Elder Abuse Task Force,” he told me. “She invited me to be a join it on...”
He paused to check his dates.
“March 13,” he continued. The day after my team met with Teter.
“A high level review of elder care issues?”
I told Lucido that I had heard no mention of a Task Force at all. Teter had certainly not brought it up either at our meeting or any time afterwards. Lucido seemed equally surprised because, he said, there was supposed to be a press conference about it on March 25. How come I didn’t know?
After we hung up, I immediately sent an email to Rossman-McKinney with no response. Throughout the day, I tried to call the AG’s office and was repeatedly told that the entire communications team was “In a meeting.”
I called my editor at the Free Press. He said he’d received no announcement but would check with his colleagues on the government beat. I was fundamentally clear to him that, if Lucido was right about his dates, it was vital that I attend. The March 12 meeting had yielded no comment to any of my questions concerning what was allegedly happening in Oakland County and statewide nor had Nessel, herself, been present. This was a rare opportunity to press her on the issue in person and, given it’s name, my questions clearly fell smack in the middle of the Task Force’s wheel house.
Besides, when you are investigating alleged public corruption, you lose your belief in the coincidental. After all, Rossman-McKinney hadn’t risen to her position without the usual, required Machiavellian dexterity.
However, there’s always the unexpected. This time it was defined by a Republican senator’s big mouth. He is a man to whom I will be indebted for the rest of my life. I do hope he’s got his Geiger Counter on standby.
On the night of March 21, a South Michigan guardianship reform activist forwarded an email she had received from a reporter at a local paper. It included Nessel’s press conference announcement which noted that only credentialed members of the press who had RSVP’d to a Nessel communications team member would be allowed to attend.
I did so immediately with no response. While my press badge, issued by the Chicago Police Department, pissed off Kojak to no end and at least got me in the door with Teter, maybe it had no weight when it came to last minute pressers.
By the morning of Friday March 22, I was getting nervous. The press conference was Monday morning. I called some old friends still in the business in Chicago and they agreed to vouch for me if necessary. It would be a long shot. After all, they were out of state, But I never thought it would be. This was the Detroit Free Press. The paper that would never bow to a public official. At least, not in my rose-tinted world.
I emailed my editor again with no response. In fact, the entire day went by with radio silence from both the Free Press and Rossman-McKinney. Still, I kept the faith.
Finally, late in the evening, too late anyway for my editor friends in Chicago to RSVP on my behalf, I received a text from my editor at the Free Press.
“After speaking with AG [sic] office they assure me the task force has nothing to do with Oakland County issues,” he wrote. “It’s a high-level review of elder care issues. This is producing unnecessary drama and complications so at this point I’m asking you to skip efforts to attend. Monitor the livestream broadcast if you’re worried about integrity of the process, but this isn’t worth the back and forth with AG’s office.”
I was floored. “A high-level review of elder care issues? Just what in the blue fuck was that supposed to mean? Besides, there were Attorney General appointees allegedly engaged in unimaginable elder abuse and that wasn't “high level” enough?
“You lied to me,” I wrote back. “You strung me along for eight months. You told me you would never back down to anyone. And then you did. Because it ‘isn’t worth it.’”
“I don’t imagine any appeals to your conscience or journalist integrity are worth it, “ I added. “But I will tell you this: I am going to publish. Not with you and not with a publication that falls under the AG’s sphere of influence. They asked you to jump and, instead of backing me, you did.”
Never had I heard of a news organization siding with a public official over a journalist, freelance or not. I immediately pulled the project from the Free Press and scrambled to find a self-publish website while continuing to gather research.
"We have no specific instances of wrongdoing."
On the morning of March 25, I paused to watch Nessel’s presser on Facebook.
Meanwhile, a small contingent of family members set out for Lansing to stand outside her offices and plead their case to any passing journalists. Only the Detroit News was at all interested. But then, these families could not get moveon.org to tweet a single word about them and, despite the complete eradication of their loved one’s civil rights, the Detroit office of the ACLU told them to stick it.
The AARP didn’t want to know either. It probably explains why they joined the Michigan Guardianship Association and a host of like-minded pro-guardianship organizations and the omnipresent Probate Judges Association as Task Force members.
Indeed, outside Catallo and myself, no one ever wanted to talk to these families. Moody, you know about. The families got the same response from Oakland County Prosecutor Jessica Cooper, the Michigan Attorney Grievance and Judicial Tenure Commissions, state and local police and the Detroit office of the FBI.
Every single time, they were told to "get an attorney” but hardly anyone dared to represent wards or families fighting Public Administrators and court-appointed guardians. One attorney who did described sanctions and threats of Michigan Attorney Grievance Commission complaints from both the PAs and the judges.
I felt more disappointment than surprise when one of the principle topics of Nessel's presser was guardianship in Michigan's probate courts; the focal point of my investigation.
The reforms that Nessel, alongside Michigan Supreme Court Justices Richard Bernstein and Megan Cavanaugh, proposed that morning all stemmed from issues I had brought up in the meeting with Teter as well as Catallo’s reporting and ones which were clearly laid out in an updated 2019 federal Qui Tam lawsuit brought by Ann Arbor attorney Bradley Geller. Prior to the Task Force presser, Nessel moved to dismiss Geller’s lawsuit while I repeatedly emailed my team’s findings to Michigan Supreme Court Director of Communications John Nevin with no response.
That morning, Nevin told a reporter who did get up the gumption to ask about the probate courts, "we have no specific instances of wrongdoing."
Nessel claimed that the Task Force was working in concert with the Supreme Court Justices. Yet she, somehow, forgot to mention to them the evidence my team and I brought to her staff and years of complaints to her office, and that of her predecessor, by wards and their families.
Not only that, but from 2003-to-2008, the MSC was provided audits of probate courts, in at least six counties. All of them showed shocking financial malfeasance. All of them were actively quashed from the public.
But that wasn’t on the “high level” review’s agenda. From the outset, Nessel ran with the often used talking point that the majority of the abuse of America’s seniors occurs at the hands of family members or friends.
In order to make her point, only one member of the public was invited to attend. His name was Dennis Burgio and he had a heartbreaking story to tell about how he had been cleaned out of his 401k by a friend and former insurance agent;the same numbers I was seeing stripped from Oakland County wards by their public administrators, guardians.
The journalists in attendance were, justifiably, appalled and, in the end, Burgio ended up getting far more ink than Nessel. As for the morning being a "high level review of elder care issues," either Rossman-McKinney lied to my editor or he lied to me.
What is fundamentally clear is that neither the Free Press nor Nessel wanted me there asking anything specific.
Still, as Rossman-McKinney’s stock climbed ever higher, the Elder Abuse Task Force set out to boldly go where two other Task Forces had never gone before. Nessel, Bernstein and Cavanaugh attended “Listening Sessions” across Michigan during which seniors and their families could tell their stories, within three-minute reason. Hundreds did and the majority of the time, their stories focused on Michigan’s probate courts.
Yet, for the months which followed, Nessel refused to say the words “public administrator” and “investigation” in the same sentence.
Far from it, at Listening Tours, she told the audience that if she found a public administrator was up to no good, she would have no compunction in firing that person.Of course not. It’s the easiest job in the world for Nessel; like telling Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York that she can’t be a Duchess because all those weight watcher’s commercials were a bridge too far.
Fenced In
While I was still working Oakland County, Catallo was doing sterling work in neighboring Macomb. In May, 2019, she paid a visit to an elderly couple, Bob and Barb. Under the guardianship of Macomb County Public Administrator Robert Kirk and his wife Cathy, they were literally fenced inside their own home.
The Kirks were donors to Macomb County Probate Judge Kathryn George’s re-election campaign. Since taking the bench in 2003, George had somehow survived numerous scandals and, like most Michigan probate court judges, knew on which side her bread was buttered. With the help of Democrat activist and State Court Administrator Milton Mack, Jr., she decided to stick around the Macomb County bench, if only when she felt like it.
The Kirks formed a professional guardianship company and gave it the name “Caring Hearts”— a more palatable title but no less vicious than their Macomb County predecesssor, ADDMS Guardianship Services.
Just like Caring Hearts, ADDMS was founded by attorneys who had donated to George’s 2003 campaign. Two years later, ADDMS was also found to be up to it’s ears in all kinds of alleged malfeasance (of course, no one was ever prosecuted) and it was also a company to which George handed over rewards in the form of docket-fulls of wards.
History had repeated itself.
When Catallo was shooting the story, the Kirk’s attorney, Sterling Heights Mayor and rabid Democrat Michael Taylor showed up to do a bit of schilling for his clients.
Turned out Taylor’s favorite hobby after Catallo’s story broke was taking to social media and yammering about both it and her as, ironically, being nothing more but “fake news.”
I was already looking into Mack’s background when Catallo broke Bob and Barb’s story. Mack was a Wayne County Probate Court Chief Judge when, again, two attorneys operating out of his court, John Chase, Jr. and Melvin Jefferson Jr, allegedly worked with Wayne County Judge Freddie Burton, Jr. to pilfer the estate of no less than Rosa Parks.
Mack’s defense of Michigan probate judges and the guardianship system itself has been so unyielding that in more direct attorney circles, he has since become known as “Mack the Shield.”
On the other hand, Steven G. Cohen, the attorney who brought the lawsuit against Chase and Jefferson, ended up on the wrong side of the Michigan Attorney Grievance Commission for his trouble. They wanted his license. He fought back and ended up with a reprimand.
“Guys like John Chase and Alan May have been running roughshod for so long that they’ve utterly lost their principles,” he told me. “I truly believe that they don’t see what they’re doing as being corrupt. They’ve been breaking the rules with impunity for so long that they don’t see a problem with it.”
What should have been a problem, what is a problem is the fact that Oakland County Chief Judge Kathleen Ryan’s brother James Ryan Jr.'s company Public Affairs Associates (PAA) has longstanding ties to Democrat Governor Gretchen Whitmer and was among the top donors for her inauguration committee.
Gretchen Rachel Hammond is an award-winning freelance investigative journalist based out of Chicago. Her work has won or been nominated for four successive Chicago Press Club awards, been recognized by the National Association of Lesbian and Gay Journalists (NLGJA), and covered topics such as criminal justice, abuse at ICE detention facilities, and alleged discrimination on the part of the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services leading to the unnecessary separation of children from their parents.
