Lynched By Court Order

HOW TO STEAL MILLIONS OF DOLLARS

BY TURNING

PUBLIC COURTROOMS INTO A PRIVATE PLAYGROUND



Author: Mac Koch-Lebel


In Essex County, Massachusetts, a group of lawyers supported by several
state and federal judges, after having stolen over $800,000 using
invalid court orders, is now ready to liquidate and distribute among
themselves the rest of the estate of 87-year-old Mary Jane Chalupowski,
still worth about $1,500,000.

When a Lawsuit is a Crime


Except for the affected few, almost no one in this country would ever
believe that each year, millions of dollars change hands (are stolen to
be exact) in staged litigation schemes devised with the sole purpose of
generating fraudulent bills for alleged attorney’s fees.

In the
process of such schemes, various unsuspecting, law-obeying citizens are
being pulled into a vortex of unnecessary litigation, disguised as
legitimate court proceedings.

The result is financial and
emotional devastation, comparable only to lynching, if we think of
lynching not as the sudden outburst of irrational group hatred, but as
the “cool, calculating deliberation of intelligent people,” as defined
by Ida Wells-Barnett in 1900.

With violence and corruption
widely accepted as an essential part of the American lifestyle and
culture, this new, refined version of common robbery goes largely
unpunished, as did lynching for decades.

The instances of
formal prosecution of predatory lawyers who use staged litigation
schemes to make their living are few and far in between.

In
early 2003, the attorney general of California, alerted by politicians,
filed a civil lawsuit against a group of shakedown lawyers who had been
harassing local small businesses by fabricating abusive lawsuits with a
sole purpose of ruining the businesses while generating extortionate
attorney’s fees.

In October 2003, three years after more than
60 lawyers and county employees were arrested on charges of bilking
Florida’s Miami-Dade County out of millions of dollars through
fraudulent personal injury lawsuits, the County filed a civil
racketeering (RICO) lawsuit against the perpetrators found guilty in
the criminal proceedings, in order to recoup over $15 million in losses
suffered by the County as a result of the massive public corruption
schemes.

The headline-making cases involving staged
litigation schemes in which their perpetrators go after assets
belonging to businesses or local governments are rare. More typical
victims of staged litigation schemes never make it to the media
limelight, simply because there is nothing sensational about them.


They are unsophisticated, middle-class working people, who, through
effort and everyday prudence, have managed to accumulate some wealth,
but have no power or connections; hence they are unlikely to put up the
costly and risky fight necessary to stop, let alone expose, the schemes.


The typical victims, vulnerable for one reason or another, targeted by
the perpetrators of the staged litigation schemes, are being forced
into overwhelming, confusing court proceedings through various tricks,
false accusations, or through turning simple courts actions into
complicated legal ordeals.

Why would anybody intentionally fabricate complicated legal proceedings, and why would the courts allow it to happen?


The reason is simple: money. Less than 10% of all practicing lawyers
have an actual job with a guaranteed paycheck showing up at the end of
every week or month.

The vast majority of lawyers are
“self-employed” which means that they are, in fact, unemployed until
they find a client willing to give them money in exchange for some
legal services, the extent of which may range from defending a traffic
ticket to handling commercial deals worth millions, if not billions, of
dollars.

Judges understand the lawyers’ predicament. After
all, by and large, they all used to make their living by standing in
front of the bench before getting behind the bench, where they are
guaranteed to get a paycheck sent by the state or federal government
for the rest of their lives.

“Judges can be counted on to
rule in favor of anything that protects and empowers lawyers,” says the
New York federal appeals court Judge Dennis G. Jacobs, quoted by Adam
Liptak in his August 27, 2007, New York Times sidebar article “With the
Bench Cozied up to the Bar, the Lawyers Can’t Lose.”

They
surely can’t. No matter how “cozied up” the Bar and the Bench are, the
law enforcement authorities, even if notified about specific serious
improprieties, are usually reluctant to upset the status quo.


After all, prosecutorial jobs are not tenured, and some day, the
lawyers who are now prosecutors will depend for their livelihood on the
Bar-Bench alliance, deemed both “serious and secret” by Judge Denis
Jacobs in his unusually frank assertion published by The New York
Times.

Judge Jacobs, most likely, is one of the good people
of the system. To be sure, there are lots of them - smart, honest,
hardworking lawyers, judges, court clerks - the ones who respect law
and uphold integrity of legal profession. They function mostly within
the normal paradigm of practice of law, according to which law and the
rules of the court do matter, and parties with their lawyers are on two
distinct sides of a dispute.

The trouble is that within the
same legal system there exists, and spreads like a disease, the
abnormal paradigm of practice of law, according to which anything goes;
laws are broken, the rules of the court are bent and twisted, and the
lines of demarcation are blurred and secretly crossed.

The
temptation is great. To err is human. Cynics smile sarcastically. Good
and evil are intertwined to the point of no distinction, and holding on
to the normal paradigm is a heroic effort, which will not pay the
bills, or worse, will get one in trouble. The ‘cozying up’ becomes a
matter of professional survival. After all, whoever does it usually
gets away with it.

In isolated cases, judges who cozy up too
much with the Bar wind up behind bars. But this happens once in a blue
moon. According to the Law.com website, only thirteen federal judges
have been impeached during the last two hundred years.

The
judicial “poster boys” like Walter Nixon (a Chief Judge of the U.S.
District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi, impeached and
removed from the bench in 1989 for fixing a case for a friend and lying
to the FBI) or Gerald Garson (a probate court judge in Brooklyn, New
York, sentenced to 3-10 years in state prison in May 2007 for fixing
cases) represent only the tip of a massive iceberg of improprieties
committed at every level of the judicial pyramid.

In most
instances the authorities, when informed about some unusually close
judges-lawyers ties, invariably happened to suffer from sudden bouts of
incurable willful blindness caused by the terrifying awareness that any
inquiry could expose more dirt than they would be willing to swallow.

*


This is exactly what is going on in the aforementioned notorious
Massachusetts case known to, and misinterpreted by, every lawyer,
judge, court clerk, paralegal, and policeman in Essex County and
beyond. The case is a classic example of the staged litigation scheme
brought to the extreme. It is not a “complicated family dispute,” as
the perpetrators of the scheme like to label it. Although the Essex
County group clearly crossed the line of simple corruption and entered
the realm of purely criminal activities, the local, state, and federal
law enforcement authorities, fully aware of the criminal conduct,
refuse to intervene and laboriously conceal multi-layered conflicts of
interests.








The Scheme


The basis for the Essex County staged litigation scheme was laid down,
quite inconspicuously, over 14 years ago. Between October 1993 and
January 1996, Attorney Joseph P. Corona of Salem, Massachusetts, used
Donna Chalupowski (an unemployed nurse suffering from a paranoid
personality disorder compounded by substance abuse) as his dupe
plaintiff in five frivolous lawsuits and numerous restraining orders
brought against every member of her immediate family: her mother Mary
Jane Chalupowski, her sister Judith Chalupowski-Venuto, and her
brother, Chester Chalupowski.

After losing, voluntarily
dismissing or abandoning all five lawsuits by late 1996, Joseph Corona
took a four-year break, and in December 2000, started his game all over
again by filing a second batch of frivolous cases.

Three out of
the four new actions were duplicates of the claims brought earlier and
disposed of on their merits back in 1996, and as such, were barred both
by the statute of limitations and the doctrine of res judicata, a legal
doctrine prohibiting re-litigation of matters previously adjudicated.


When the court dismissed the three cases barred by res judicata, in
December 2001, the game seemed to be over until the moneymaking
opportunity botched by Joseph Corona was spotted by two smarter and
more influential players.

In the early 2002, taking advantage
of the fact that Attorney Corona decided to pursue a frivolous appeal
of the proper dismissals of his frivolous cases, the two new players,
Attorney Sharon D. Meyers of Salem, and Judge Janis M. Berry of the
Massachusetts Appeals Court, devised an elaborate scheme disguised as
legitimate court proceedings and aimed at defrauding the Chalupowski
family from all their assets worth over $2,000,000.

The scheme
was played out within the venue of two courts, the Essex Probate Court
in Salem and the Appeals Court in Boston. While Judge Berry instituted
parallel Single Justice appellate proceedings by issuing orders on a
matter that was not in front of her (thus, it was outside of her
jurisdiction), Attorney Meyers kept litigating at the Probate Court
level the cases dismissed in December 2001, as if they had not been
dismissed.

The Probate Court Prong

After the Probate
Court dismissed the three cases, and after Corona filed his notices of
appeal in December 2001, the Probate Court lost jurisdiction over the
matters dismissed and pending on appeal.

Since the only
pending case was too simple to lend itself to any manipulation, Meyers
and Corona came up with a clever way to complicate it. They did it by
filing with the Probate Court their various pleadings under four docket
numbers: one belonging to the case still pending before the Probate
Court and three belonging to the cases dismissed in December 2001, and
pending on appeal.

The Probate Court Clerks, always eager to
accommodate the attorneys, would make copies of all filings and would
put them haphazardly into one, two, three, or all four bulging files
overflowing with papers.

The chaos and confusion created in
this way was impenetrable for any one, especially a non-lawyer, trying
to figure out what exactly was going on in the “notorious” Chalupowski
matter.



The confusion and illegality of the
situation did not bother the Chief Justice of the Essex Probate Court,
John C. Stevens, III, even when Chester Chalupowski (carrying the main
burden of the litigation brought by his sister Donna against him, his
mother, and his sister Judith) repeatedly pointed out that the court
was handling matters pending on appeal, thus outside of jurisdiction of
the trial court.

Judge Stevens, unwilling to acknowledge the
lack of jurisdiction issue, but apparently tired of the case which he
dubbed the “tar baby,” in November 2003, quite suddenly dumped the four
bulging files overflowing with papers pertaining to the “Chalupowski
matter” into the willing and hefty arms of Judge Peter C. DiGangi, a
personal friend and political protégé of Congressman John F. Tierney.


In 2005, Congressman Tierney, a Democrat representing the 6th District
of Massachusetts, nominated Judge DiGangi for the Angels in Adoption
Award (presented during a Washington, D.C. gala dinner attended by
President Bush) for Judge DiGangi’s “outstanding contribution to the
welfare of children in the United States foster care system and orphans
around the world.”

While it is not entirely clear exactly
what Judge DiGangi did for the “orphans around the world,” a
not-so-angelic picture of Judge DiGangi’s stout persona emerges from
the pages of the book written by Kevin Thompson, a Massachusetts father
lynched financially and emotionally in the process of a child-custody
case handled by Judge DiGangi.

In his 300-page treatise
“Exposing the Corruption of the Massachusetts Family Courts,” Thompson
describes Judge DiGangi as “a dangerous combination of arrogance,
ignorance and incompetence,” “a bully”, and “a disgrace to our system
of justice.”

Upon learning about Thompson’s publication,
Judge DiGangi promptly issued an order banning the distribution of the
book. The audacious, though illegal, move was quite in line with the
reputation of Judge DiGangi, who in the lingo of the local legal
community is endearingly called “the Terminator.”

The
nickname duly earned because of Judge DiGangi’s tendency to swiftly
terminate (with not much regard for the law or the rules of the court)
lingering probate court cases. Upon such terminations, large sums of
money flow from the unsuspecting litigants (usually numb from pain and
confusion) into the hands of ever-so-grateful attorneys, for both
sides, of course. After all, “with the Bench cozied up with the Bar,
the lawyers can’t lose.”

In the spirit of this principle,
upon his arrival into the case, Judge DiGangi was going to make sure
that the lawyers, who so laboriously had been concocting the
“complicated” Chalupowski litigation, would not lose their opportunity
to cash in on their efforts.

Therefore, the scheme flourished
for a while under the watchful eye of Judge DiGangi, who quickly
ascertained that in November 2003, the stunt was not quite ready for
termination. At this point of the game, it was not entirely clear
exactly how much money was available for the heist and later
distribution.

The whole hustle was about two Chalupowski
family trusts: one holding real estate (two residential buildings, a
four-family and a three-family located at 26 and 30 Andrew Street in
Salem); and the other one holding about $170,000, professionally
managed by Fidelity Investments.

Since Chester Chalupowski was
the trustee of both trusts, the strategy originally implemented by
Attorney Joseph Corona, and since the late 2001, perfected by Attorney
Sharon Meyers, was simple: discredit Chester and isolate him from the
rest of the family, i.e., his mother and his sister Judith.


The first stage (defamation and vilification) was easily accomplished
by bringing false allegations that Chester stole funds from both
trusts. The fact that the false claims were in direct conflict with the
certified bank records produced by Chester and filed with the court did
not really matter, as long as the false allegations were neatly typed
on legal stationery, signed by a lawyer, and presented for the court’s
consideration.

The second stage of the scheme (isolation) was
accomplished by replacing the independent voices of Mary Jane and
Judith with those of their “guardians ad litem” appointed by Judge
Stevens.

Attorney Meyers secured her position in the game once she was appointed a guardian ad litem for Judith in October 2001.


In June 2003, Judge Stevens appointed Attorney John D. Welch (a timid,
middle-aged underachiever of Newburyport, Massachusetts) as “guardian
ad litem for Mary Jane Chalupowski.

There was no legal or
factual basis for any of the appointments, but inserting the lawyers in
place of Judith and Mary Jane was crucial for shifting the balance of
the game from “Donna against the rest of the family,” to: “the women of
the family” against Chester, “the bad guy.”

In this way, the
schemers could use not one, but three puppet plaintiffs, whose possible
interference with the scheme could be easily controlled.

They
did not have to worry about Donna, the schemers’ most reliable
mouthpiece, who delighted in spreading the absurd claims that her
brother and his wife “stole hundreds of thousands of dollars from the
family trusts.”

Also, it has been fairly easy to discredit and
muffle the voice of the quiet octogenarian, Mary Jane Chalupowski. Her
daughter, Judith, however, in the late 2003, was becoming a problem,
due to her open alliance with her brother Chester and his wife,
Margaret.

The problem was quickly addressed by digging up an
outstanding arrest warrant issued in a frivolous criminal case brought
against Judith by her sister Donna in November 2001. On November 14,
2003, Judith was arrested when she showed up for one of the Probate
Court hearings.

The old warrant came in handy, but Judith’s
three-day incarceration in Framingham was too short to meet the
schemers’ needs. Therefore, they quickly enlisted help of the Chief
Justice of the Salem District Court, Robert A. Cornetta who (despite
the fact that the criminal charges had been dropped for lack of
evidence) ordered Judith to be involuntarily committed under Chapter
123, section 15, of the Massachusetts General Laws, which regulates
procedures for evaluating defendants’ mental competence to stand trial
in criminal cases.

Obviously, once the criminal charges were
dropped, there was no legal basis for Judith’s “evaluation” pursuant to
Chapter 123, section 15. Nevertheless, Judith spent three months
incarcerated (and medicated against her will) at the State Mental
Hospital in Tewksbury, so that her “guardian ad litem,” Attorney Sharon
D. Meyers, could freely use Judith’s name in order to advance the
scheme and to generate tens of thousands of dollars in alleged
“attorney’s fees” for herself by bringing various unwarranted claims
against Judith’s brother, Chester without Judith’s knowledge or
authorization.

Putting Judith in Tewksbury might have seemed
like an easy stunt due to her reputation of being a local oddball.
Judith (once a class salutatorian, respected math teacher, and happily
married mother of two) suffers from serious depression that she
developed in the process of extremely traumatic divorce proceedings
(handled by the way by Judge Stevens), as a result of which she has
been permanently separated from her children. The divorce drama started
in 1992, shortly after her sister Donna obtained a restraining order
against Judith’s husband, Frank Venuto. Donna’s interference in
Judith’s personal life triggered marital conflict and aggravated
Judith’s health problems, which she has been battling ever since.


Judith’s vulnerability, combined with her mother’s advanced age, made
the Chalupowski family a perfect target of the staged litigation scheme.


The only obstacle, Chester (a successful businessman, avid athlete, and
talented musician – classical and flamenco guitarist) was by the early
2002, effectively defamed, vilified, and isolated from the rest of the
family. He was targeted by the schemers for yet another reason: he
happened to have some money of his own.

With the family funds
tied up in real estate and the two trusts, the game was hardly worth
playing. That is, until the schemers discovered that Chester and his
wife (an accomplished physician with Harvard credentials) had over half
a million dollars invested with several financial institutions.


The feeding frenzy erupted in March 2004, shortly after Attorney Meyers
obtained Chester’s bank records by providing the banks with subpoenas
containing falsified information.

Having ascertained how much
money was up for grabs, the lawyers quickly adjusted the range of their
false accusations, and the price tag for their services, to match
exactly the amount of money present in the accounts belonging to
Chester and his wife.

To accomplish their goal, they provided
the courts with elaborate “calculations” indicating that Chester and
his wife “stole” about $400,000 from the two trusts. It may seem
incredible, but the fact that there never was $400,000 to be stolen in
the first place, did not really matter to the courts.



The Heist


By May 2004, the time must have seemed ripe for the termination of the
“tar baby” Chalupowski litigation. So, on May 24, 2004, Judge DiGangi
(arrogantly oblivious to the fact that he lacked subject matter
jurisdiction over the matters pending on appeal) actually held a
“trial” on the three cases dismissed in December 2001, and in May 2004,
still pending before the Appeals Court, therefore outside of
jurisdiction of the Probate Court.

When, before the May 2004
“trial,” Chester made repeated attempts to bring to the court’s
attention the issue of lack of jurisdiction, as well as the fact that
nothing was stolen from either of the trusts, the irritated schemers
quickly found a way to put him in his place by putting him in the
Middleton prison for three days on an arrest warrant procured in a
premeditated civil contempt action. After spending the weekend of May
14, 2004, in jail, Chester (brought to the Salem Probate Court
handcuffed and shackled) was released on Monday morning, but not before
his wife wrote a check for $1,500 to the “Judge of Probate Court,”
which was later personally cashed by Judge John C. Stevens, III.



*


The Massachusetts Appeals Court, notified by Chester of the fact that
the Essex Probate Court was handling cases pending on appeal, was of no
help either. The Appeals Court judges, obviously unwilling to expose
Judge Berry’s active participation in the “tar baby” matter, pretended
that they simply did not understand what Chester was saying when he
asked for the Appeals Court’s emergency intervention to stop the Essex
Probate Court from trying cases pending at the same time on appeal.


On August 17, 2004, Judge DiGangi signed a 26-page “judgment”
ostentatiously put together by the resourceful team of lawyers (which
apart from Attorneys Corona, Meyers and Welch, included Chester’s own
lawyer, James R. Tewhey).

According to the “judgment” signed
by Judge DiGangi, Chester stole about $400,000 from the two trusts,
committed a variety of other repugnant acts, and was liable for over
$200,000 in attorneys’ fees.

Attorneys Meyers and Welch
presented elaborate billing statements, which they filed with the
Probate Court in June 2004, and amended in September 2004. Joseph
Corona did not produce billing statements of any kind. Instead he
attached to his “motion for attorney’s fees” copies of several
promissory notes signed by Donna Chalupowski for the total amount of
$95,000.

As in any such a scheme, somebody had to hold and distribute the stolen goods in a legal-looking way.


Apparently unable to come to an agreement as to which one of them
should be the “court appointed receiver” or the new trustee of the two
Chalupowski family trusts, the group agreed in May 2004, to recruit one
more player. The new player had to be able to play his part under an
ironclad pretense of legality. Attorney Anthony (“Tony”) Metaxas, a
partner in the prestigious law firm of Metaxas, Norman and Pidgeon, a
local gray eminence of sorts, and Judge DiGangi’s golfing buddy, seemed
like the perfect choice.

He was. Armed with the invalid August
17, 2004, judgment, on August 31, 2004, Attorneys Meyers and Metaxas
appeared before Judge DiGangi and promptly obtained his signature on
their “proposed order” authorizing them to seize Chester’s assets, “in
the aggregate amount not exceeding $630,000.”

The fact that
the August 17, 2004, judgment was a nullity (since it was issued while
the Essex Probate Court did not have jurisdiction to handle the matters
pending on appeal) was of no interest to the banks, which released the
funds within minutes after receiving a fax from Attorney Metaxas. After
all, why would one question Tony Metaxas of Mataxas, Norman and
Pidgeon, LLC?

In this simple way, by the stroke of Judge
DiGangi’s pen, Mr. Metaxas came into control of all the lifesavings
belonging to Chester and his wife, Margaret, for which they both had
worked for over 30 years. This is not to mention the $170,000 of the
family trust’s assets, labored over for by three generations of the
Chalupowski family, and up until the date of the heist, wisely invested
in stocks and professionally managed by Fidelity Investments.


Within days after coming into control of the accounts, Metaxas
liquidated all the stocks at huge loss, put the money into a checking
account in a local bank, and shortly thereafter started distributing
the funds by writing checks to all the players, without any
accountability.

The day before Thanksgiving 2004, the
finalists of the scheme hit the jackpot when the three top prizes were
awarded in the form of checks signed by Tony Metaxas.

The grand
prize of $78,606.98 went to Attorney Sharon Meyers. Joseph Corona took
the second place with the check for $42,250. John D. Welch got $37,050
for his short yet important involvement in the scheme. Corona was angry
that the newcomer, Welch, who had been in the scheme merely a year, got
almost as much money as he, who had been playing the game since 1993,
only to have his demanded amount of $95,000 slashed in half by Judge
DiGangi, who, apparently, never really liked Corona. At this point,
Corona did not care any more about Judge DiGangi’s affections, because
after receiving the check, he promptly retired.

Joseph Corona
should not have complained. In November 2004, he was paid over forty
thousand dollars for filing five frivolous lawsuits eleven years
earlier (all of which he lost in 1996), and for re-filing them in
December 2000 (all of which he lost again in December 2001), and for
filing his frivolous appeal of the proper dismissal of his frivolous
and repetitive cases, and for constantly lying to the court. The fact
that Corona was able to pull such a stunt would be rather funny if it
were not illegal.

In order to create the appearance of
legality for the distribution of the rest of the assets stolen from
Chester and his wife, Attorney Metaxas created a virtual “payroll” of
over a dozen paid positions, which included, for example, a receiver
(Metaxas), a trustee of the realty trust (Metaxas), a trustee of the
family trust (Metaxas), a trustee’s lawyer (Carlotta Patten), Mary
Jane’s guardian ad litem (Welch), Mary Jane’s court appointed attorney
(Welch), a lawyer representing Welch before he was appointed Mary
Jane’s attorney (Margaret Barmack), Mary Jane’s guardian (Daniel
Northrup), a guardian’s attorney (Welch), guardian’s associates
(several individuals employed by Northrup, a “professional” guardian,
including Northrup’s wife, Deborah), and last but nor least, a number
of doctors (e.g. Samir Patel, Kevin Yeh) who were asked to find Mary
Jane Chalupowski in need of various services offered by the above
listed individuals.

According to Hilary Clinton, it takes a
village to raise a child. Apparently, it also takes “a village” to
steal an estate.

The Appeals Court Prong

While working
for over two years on sustaining and culminating the Probate Court
prong of the scheme, Attorney Meyers, a pro in multitasking, did not
neglect the parallel prong of the scheme graciously instituted by Judge
Janis M. Berry as a Single Justice of the Appeals Court, back in
February 2002.

On February 4, 2002, by circumventing proper
appellate procedure, Attorneys Meyers and Corona obtained from Judge
Berry a personal favor in a form of a stay of certain orders issued by
the Salem District Court in a related matter. Since there was no appeal
from the Salem District Court orders before Judge Berry, she acted
outside of her jurisdiction when she issued the stay, which, therefore,
was void as a matter of law.

In order to camouflage the fatal
flaw of invalidity of her February 4, 2002, order of stay, Judge Berry
issued another stay on August 6, 2002, this time in Corona’s frivolous
appeal of the proper dismissal of his frivolous Probate Court cases.


There were at least two serious problems with the second stay issued by
Judge Berry. First, in August 2002, Corona’s appeal was not perfected
since Corona, after filing his notices of appeal in December 2001, did
nothing to perfect his appeal. Second, a stay can only be issued in
cases where the party seeking the stay has a chance to win the appeal
on the merits. Since Corona was appealing the dismissal of cases that
were barred by the doctrine of res judicata, there was no probability
of winning the appeal. Therefore, the stay could not have been issued.
That is, if Judge Berry had followed the normal paradigm of practice of
law, under which law and the rules of the court do matter. However,
since Corona, Meyers, and Judge Berry seemed to be favoring the
abnormal paradigm, they ignored law and the rules of the court as they
pleased.

Attorney Meyers had another problem to solve. Corona
was appealing the dismissal of the cases brought on behalf of Donna
against Mary Jane, Judith, and Chester. So, technically, Meyers, acting
(legitimately or not) on Judith’s behalf, should have been on the same
side as Chester, opposing the appeal. But this was the last thing she
wanted to do. To get on the same side as Corona at the appeal level,
Meyers fabricated a pleading, dated it January 14, 2002, and in June
2002, filed it with the Appeals Court claiming that it was a copy of a
pleading coming from the Probate Court file. It was a fraud, a fraud on
the court to be exact, but it worked. Who would ever question Attorney
Meyers? And from then on, it looked as if Donna and Judith were on the
same side of the appeal.

Around that time, Mary Jane’s name
mysteriously jumped the docket page from Chester’s side to Donna’s side
(courtesy of the Appeals Court clerks), and this shrewd maneuver
completed at the Appeals Court level, shifted the strategic balance
from “Donna against the rest of the family” to “the women of the family
against Chester, the bad guy.”



To be clear,
when the cases were dismissed in December 2001, the defendants, Mary
Jane, Judith, and Chester won. One could ask why would the winning
parties (Judith and Mary Jane) join the loser (Donna) in appealing
their victory. The reason is simple. The lawyers, who were using Judith
and Mary Jane as puppet plaintiffs, needed to make money. Also, the
absurdity of the situation had additional value important to the
schemers. It created more chaos and confusion, making it difficult to
see what exactly was going on in the “complicated Chalupowski matter.”


Chester did what he could to clarify the situation. On December 4,
2002, he filed his motion for reconsideration of Judge Berry’s August
2002 order. Judge Berry promptly denied the motion and Chester filed
his notice of appeal. His appeal was processed and docketed by the
Appeals Court on February 5, 2002.

After Corona filed his
notices of appeal in December 2001, he did nothing to perfect the
appeal; therefore, the Probate Court clerks, according to the rules of
the court, should have dismissed the appeal. They did not.


Thus, on December 2, 2002, Chester filed with the Probate Court his
motion to dismiss Corona’s appeal. On December 9, 2002, Chester’s
motion was heard and denied by Judge Stevens, and Corona was given more
time to perfect his appeal, the Probate Court assembled the record, and
Corona’s appeal was docketed by the Appeals Court on February 17, 2003.


In this way, two weeks after Chester’s legitimate appeal was docketed,
it was joined by its illegitimate ‘twin brother,’ i.e. Corona’s appeal.


The Appeals Court was not in a hurry to address the
inconvenient truth contained in Chester’s appeal, so both appeals sat
dormant for well over a year. This delay gave Attorney Meyers an
opportunity to capitalize on both orders of stay issued by Judge Berry.
The fact that one of the orders was void and the other one was
erroneous as a matter of law did not really matter. In the skillful
hands of Attorney Meyers, even invalid or erroneous orders could be
turned into a lucrative “billing opportunity.”

Hence, on
December 30, 2003, Attorney Meyers, having secured Judith’s illegal
incarceration in Tewksbury (courtesy of Judge Cornetta of the Salem
District Court), filed with the Appeals Court, without Judith’s
knowledge and approval, a contempt action against Chester.

The
hearing on Meyers’ contempt action, strategically postponed several
times, was held by Judge Berry on June 10 and 11, 2004, i.e. shortly
after the Probate Court “tried” the cases dismissed in December 2001,
and pending on appeal.

Several witnesses were summonsed to
testify, including Attorney John D. Welch and Chester. Welch gave his
sworn testimony as to Mary Jane’s mindset in October 2002. Mr. Welch
failed to mention, however, that he did not meet Mary Jane until
October 2003. Technically, Welch committed a perjury, but, all in all,
he proved to be a good witness for the purposes of the scheme.


Chester, on the other hand, according to his attorney, James R. Tewhey,
would not make a good witness. Therefore Tewhey advised Chester that he
should invoke the Fifth Amendment protection against
self-incrimination, in order to avoid testifying. To alleviate
Chester’s doubts as to the strange strategy, Tewhey assured him that
invoking the Fifth could not be used against him. Tewhey failed to
mention that this is true only in the context of criminal proceedings.
In civil cases, the person invoking the Fifth does not enjoy the same
protection.

Altogether, the contempt action masterminded by
Attorney Meyers was a success, especially since at the end of the first
day of the hearings, Chester inadvertently created an opportunity,
capitalizing on which Tewhey and Meyers could not resist. Leaving the
courtroom, Chester said aloud to Meyers that she would not get away
with what she was doing. Meyers responded with a sarcastic smile.


When half-an-hour later Chester and his wife were getting into their
car a block away from the courthouse, two Appeals Court security guards
ran up to Chester, handcuffed him and brought him back to the court.


Not sure what to do with their ‘catch’ after 5:00 PM, the two guards,
after making some frantic phone calls, walked Chester, handcuffed,
through the streets of downtown Boston to the nearby City of Boston
Police Station, where they dropped him off and left. The Chief of the
Station, summoned for the occasion from his way home, ordered Chester
released, and said to him, “Sir, I hope you understand that the Boston
Police did not arrest you.”

Attorney Meyers, meanwhile, was hurriedly filling out a complaint form in which she made false statements about the incident.


Attorney Meyers did not pursue her claim filed with the Boston Police.
There was no need. By then Chester’s credibility was tarnished enough.
There was no question that a guy who was arrested twice, spent a
weekend in the Middleton prison, and took the “Fifth,” must be guilty
of something.

Judge Berry took the contempt matter “under
advisement” and would not be heard from for over 18 months, until
November 2005.

*

In the summer of 2004, everything
seemed to be under control. The two prongs of the scheme were
successfully wrapped up, and a final decision was issued in the Probate
Court matter stating clearly that Chester stole $400,000 from two
trusts, and was to pay almost quarter of a million dollars to the
attorneys who “worked hard” to catch him.

The only problem was
that, first, nothing was stolen from either of the two trusts, and,
second, the cases allegedly culminated in May by Judge DiGangi’s
elaborate 26-page-long decision, were still pending before the Appeals
Court when the decision was issued by Judge DiGangi on August 17, 2004.


It would be an embarrassment, one with serious legal and
disciplinary consequences, if the true nature of the two-pronged scheme
were exposed. Therefore, the three-judge panel of the Appeals Court
(Gelinas, Smith, and Trainor) who were considering the two appeals
decided to “play possum.”

The facts and law of the two
appeals were simple. Corona’s appeal was frivolous. The dismissals he
was appealing were proper because the claims brought by him in December
2000 were decided on their merits in 1996, and, as such, were barred by
the statute of limitations and the doctrine of res judicata. Chester’s
appeal of the two orders of stay issued by Judge Berry was legitimate.
Judge Berry did not have jurisdiction to issue the February 4, 2002,
stay and the stay issued on August 6, 2002, was erroneous as a matter
of law.

The three judges did not want to admit the obvious. So
they simply said in their Rule 1:28 unpublished Memorandum dated August
20, 2002, “the case presents a Gordian Knot of procedural and
substantial confusion which we, on the record before us, are unable to
unravel […]”

Having invented the “Gordian Knot” excuse, the
three judges remanded the cases barred by res judicata to the Probate
Court, to be handled for the fourth time, and affirmed Judge Berry’s
decisions. The Probate Court ignored the order of remand, even though
Chester filed his request for trial assignment, as required by the
court rules.

Attorney Meyers turned the panel’s decision into
one more moneymaking opportunity, proving one more time that “with the
Bench cozied up with the Bar, the lawyers can’t lose.”

On
September 17, 2004, Chester filed his application for further appellate
review of the panel’s unpublished Rule 1:28 decision with the Supreme
Judicial Court of Massachusetts. Further review was denied.

The Third Prong


While the two prongs of the main scheme were carefully cultivated at
the Essex Probate Court and the Appeals Court Single Justice level, a
seemingly separate stream of events was quietly developing in a
seemingly unrelated case brought against Chester and his wife,
Margaret, by the Board of Trustees of the Tuck Point Condominium Trust
in Beverly, a picturesque waterfront condominium complex where Chester
and Margaret own their one-bedroom unit overlooking the Beverly Harbor.




In early March 2003, for no apparent reason, the Tuck Point Trustees
decided to claim that Chester and Margaret owed $1,718 in unpaid condo
fees.

The fact that they did not owe a dime in condo fees (in
fact, the Tuck Point Trust owed them over $3,000 in overcharges) did
not really matter in the context of Massachusetts General Laws, Chapter
183, Section 6C, according to which, a condo owner accused of being in
arrears, in order to be able to dispute the allegations, first has to
pay whatever is demanded.

Chester and Margaret did not know
this law, but by the summer of 2003, after spending some time at
several law libraries, they figured it out. On August 10, 2003, they
did provide, under protest, the Tuck Point Trust with their check for
$1,718. Despite this payment, the Tuck Point Trustees kept pursuing
their false claim for over a year, until July 2004, when they got a
judgment (from the Salem District Court Judge Robert Cornetta, by the
way) for $19,180.48. When Chester and Margaret tried to dispute the
legality of the charges, the attorneys for the Tuck Point Trust
scheduled a foreclosure sale of their unit for September 9, 2004.


Still unaware of the August 31, 2004 order of attachment obtained by
Metaxas and Meyers from Judge DiGangi, Chester and Margaret managed to
get a cashier’s check for $19,180.48, only hours before all their
accounts were closed, and Fed-ex it to the lawyer for the Tuck Point
Trust, just in time to stop the foreclosure.

If this were a
script for a movie, the sequence of events and the interrelation of the
three prongs would be rejected as too coincidental to be believable. It
took some time for Chester and Margaret to discover the connection.
Faced with the accusations of unpaid condo fees, at first they believed
that the false claim was made in retaliation for their outspoken
attitude about the serious chemical contamination of the Tuck Point
site, going back to the beginning of the 20th century. The problem was
never properly addressed either by the developers (who in the early
1980s set out to make money by building residential dwellings on the
top of a toxic dumpsite), or by the revolving sets of the Tuck Point
Board of Trustees, led in the early 2000s by a Mr. Bruce Patten,
President of the Peabody Power and Light Corporation, whose employee,
Richard Warren, happened to land a contract for $400,000 to clean up
the Tuck Point site, and who, although paid in full, never did the job.


Chester, always vocal about the financial mysteries
surrounding the environmental cleanup, the lead petitioner in the
grassroots environmental initiative, and the co-author of a revealing
article published at the website of the American Homeowners Resource
Center (AHRC), was a target of various retaliatory actions (nasty
letters, unjustified fines, dead skunks under his car).


Therefore, the false claim of unpaid condo fees seemed like one more,
although the most cruel and costly, way of forcing him to stop his
environmental crusade. While the very filing of the false claim of
unpaid condo fees could have been seen as a purely retaliatory action,
the timing of the final blow was too well coordinated with the main
blitzkrieg operation to be coincidental. But how would the Tuck Point
Trustees even know about the attachment of Chester’s personal assets
obtained by Mr. Metaxas?

Chester and Margaret struggled to
find the connection between the main scheme and the collateral attack.
Then, in the early October 2004, they received a letter from Anthony
Metaxas, signed by his Associate, Attorney Carlotta Patten, the
daughter-in-law of Bruce Patten, their Tuck Point adversary.












Looking for Redress outside of Courts


Long before his money was stolen, Chester repeatedly had tried to alert
various law enforcement authorities, as well as other overseeing
entities, about the ongoing scheme.

In September 1996, Corona,
having lost the first batch of his frivolous cases, demanded from
Chester $15,000, “cash, not negotiable, within a week” in exchange for
leaving Chester and his family alone. Otherwise, Corona threatened to
make Chester’s life a “living hell.”

Chester did not give
Corona the money. Instead he reported the extortion attempt to the
Salem Police and to the Massachusetts Bar. The Salem Police and the Bar
ignored the complaints despite the fact that Mary Jane’s lawyer,
Attorney Jayne Davidson, provided her own statement about her encounter
with Joseph Corona who in August 1995, appeared, unannounced, at her
office in Nahant, and offered to stop pursuing the first batch of his
frivolous cases if she gave him $10,000, cash. When Jayne told Corona
that she would report his conduct to the Bar, Corona advised her that
if she did that, he would be the last person she ever reported.


Having received no ransom either from Chester or from Attorney
Davidson, Corona made good on his threat to make Chester’s life a
“living hell” and in December 2000, started the game all over again by
re-filing his frivolous cases.

Having grown impatient that his
new scheme was not producing any tangible results (i.e. money), in June
2003, Corona informed Chester that he would be willing to withdraw from
the litigation in exchange for $50,000, cash, non-negotiable.


Chester did not give Corona the $50,000. Instead in July 2003, he
reported the third extortion attempt to the Office of Attorney General
for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

The Intake Officer,
State Trooper Marion Fletcher, after reviewing the record, promptly
arranged for Chester and his wife to meet with Assistant Attorney
General John Grossman and Sergeant William Christiansen at the Boston
AG office, as well as with Special Agent Larry Travaglia at the FBI
Office in Lowell.

Messers Grossman and Christiansen listened
politely, promised to look into the matter, and nine months later, in
April 2004, sent a one-sentence letter informing Chester that the
Criminal Bureau of the AG Office could be “of no further assistance.”
When in November 2004, Chester informed AAG Grossmann that, while his
office was “of no further assistance,” the schemers had finalized the
scheme and had stolen $800,000, AAG Grossman chose to leave Chester’s
missive unanswered.

Special Agent Larry Travaglia (sporting
Robert DeNiro’s haircut and demeanor), after making it clear during the
July 15, 2003 meeting that he was busy chasing drug dealers, gun
slingers, and various other criminals more dangerous than Joseph Corona
and his influential colleagues, asked to be kept informed in case
“something more serious” happened.

When, in September 2004,
Chester informed Agent Travaglia that something more serious (like the
theft of the $800,000) had happened, Agent Travaglia left an angry
message on Chester’s answering machine complete with a warning, “don’t
call me anymore.”

Special Agent Travaglia’s professional
priorities seemed to be at odds with those outlined by federal judge
Mark L. Wolf, who in February 2004, in “an unusually frank discussions
with reporters” of The Boston Globe, criticized the U.S. District
Attorney Michael Sullivan for spending too much time on drug and gun
cases that belong in state courts, instead of focusing on federal
public corruption and white-collar crimes committed by “bigger and
morally more culpable people.”

Attorney Sullivan had an
opportunity to avoid Judge Wolf’s criticism by focusing on crimes
committed by bigger and morally more culpable people, when Chester
Chalupowski reported the ongoing Essex Probate Court scheme to the
Public Corruption and Special Prosecutions Unit of the U.S. District
Attorney’s Office in February 2003.

The Unit avoided the issue
for almost two years, until the Head of the Unit, Attorney Stephen
Huggard, assigned the matter to two FBI Agents, Kevin Constantine and
Peter Ericson, who on December 20, 2004, spent three hours talking to
Chester and his wife, and reviewing the court files, at the couple’s
residence in Beverly.

When Chester called Attorney Huggard’s
Office, after getting no feedback during the following two months, he
was advised that Attorney Huggard had been on sick leave for a while
and eventually left his position altogether to pursue a career in the
private sector.

Left with no follow-up to his somewhat
promising December 20, 2004, encounter with the two FBI Agents, Chester
placed a polite inquiry directly with the Attorney Sullivan’s Office in
March 2005. Cautious not to appear impolite, Chester waited patiently
for a response until, on April 14, 2005, he realized that the response
would not be forthcoming.

On April 14, 2005, the Shubert
Theater in Boston hosted the Federalist Society, which, in
collaboration with the Commonwealth Shakespeare Company, presented Law
and Order in Verona, a stage reading of Romeo and Juliet followed by a
panel discussion on crime and punishment in the Commonwealth of
Massachusetts.

The otherwise unremarkable artistic event was
newsworthy due to the fact that the roles of Shakespeare’s characters
were played by various representatives of the local legal and political
establishment. In addition to Kerry Healy, then Lieutenant Governor,
and Martha Coakley, the current Attorney General of Massachusetts, the
cast included Michael Sullivan, U.S. District Attorney, as well as
several federal and state judges, Janis M. Berry, among them.


When leaving the theater, Chester and his wife noticed Attorney
Sullivan and Judge Berry engaged in an overly friendly chat, they then
realized that Attorney Sullivan was unlikely to make Chester’s
complaint about the Essex County scheme his investigative priority.
Needless to say, Attorney Sullivan never responded to Chester’s letter
dated April 28, 2005.

*

While the representatives of the
Essex County law enforcement authorities did not make it to the
prestigious cast of the Shakespeare’s drama, they did play an important
role in making sure that the scheme would not get exposed.

When
in September and December 2004, Chester and Margaret reported the
three-pronged staged litigation scheme disguised as legitimate court
proceedings to the Essex County District Attorney’s Office, they did
not know that, if the Essex DA Office were to intervene, it could mean
that the Assistant District Attorney, Michael Patten, would have to
prosecute his own wife, Carlotta Patten, and her boss, Anthony Metaxas.
(How awkward.)

In addition, if the Essex DA Office were to
intervene, the DA, Jonathan Blodgett, would have to prosecute his
former employer, Bruce Patten, who had given him two jobs: one as a
legal counsel for the Peabody Power and Light Corporation, and another
one as a legal counsel for the Tuck Point Condominium Board of
Trustees, when Attorney Blodgett (before getting his salaried position
as the Essex County DA) was still a struggling lawyer trying to make a
living in private practice.

In the context of the peculiar
‘Patten connection,’ it might be entirely irrelevant that Jonathan
Blodgett’s father worked at the golf course frequented by two avid
players, Peter DiGangi and Anthony Metaxas.

Instead of
disclosing the multi-layered conflict of interests, the representatives
of the Essex DA Office pretended for several months that they were
investigating the matter.

In June 2005, Assistant District
Attorney Gregory Friedholm invited Chester and his wife, Margaret, to
his office, and while two other DA Officers, John Dawley and Jack
Dullea, also present in the room, were busy looking at the floor,
Attorney Friedholm stuttered awkwardly that since, there was “judicial
oversight” over all of the court proceedings, the Essex County DA could
not get involved.

When asked for a letter documenting the Essex DA’s position on the matter, Attorney Friedholm refused.

*


In comparison with the offices of the local, state and federal district
attorneys, other entities charged with overseeing the performance of
the Massachusetts courts and their officers, were much more efficient
in producing written excuses as to why they would not intervene.


In October 2004, Chester managed to submit his well-documented
complaint through the reluctantly unlocked, unmarked, and only slightly
ajar, door of the office of Sean M. Dunphy, the Chief Administrative
Justice of the Massachusetts Probate and Family Courts, inconspicuously
located at Two Center Plaza in Boston, Suite 210.

Eight months
later, on May 3, 2005, Chief Justice Dunphy sent Chester a quite
friendly letter explaining in detail that, in late 2004, he, Chief
Justice Dunphy, was not quite well and had to take medical leave, which
was why he could not respond earlier, and that he, Chief Justice
Dunphy, did not understand what Chester wanted from him.

It
may be a coincidence, but the belated response from Chief Justice
Dunphy came shortly after Chester and his wife filed four complaints
against four judges involved in the scheme with the Massachusetts
Commission on Judicial Conduct (CJC), on April 25, 2005. Six months
later, on October 24, 2005, the CJC sent Chester and his wife four nice
letters in which the CJC Chairman, Robert J. Guttentag, informed them
politely that the CJC had decided to dismiss all four complaints for
lack of “evidence of judicial misconduct.”

While it is not
quite clear what kind of strings the four judges had to pull to make
Mr. Guttentag come to his conclusion, much more transparent is the
connection between the Essex County schemers and the Boston Bar of
Overseers.

When in 2003 and 2004, Chester submitted to BBO his
complaints against Meyers, Welch, and finally, on October 4, 2005,
against 13 lawyers (all of whom received money coming from Chester’s
assets) he did not know that the State Bar Counsel, Daniel Crane, knew
well, and had an ongoing professional relationship with Attorney Sharon
D. Meyers. Needless to say, the BBO never responded to Chester’s
complaint.













Looking for Redress in State Courts

Suing the Puppeteer


On September 20, 2003, after enduring ten years of “living hell,”
Chester filed his Superior Court action against Joseph Corona, but he
did not know that his newly acquired attorney, Isaac Peres of Boston,
was lying to him.

Attorney Peres was very convincing when he
insisted that “the only and the best way” to get Corona was to bring
the claim of violation of Chapter 93A of the General Laws of
Massachusetts. While convincing his client, Attorney Isaac Peres failed
to mention, however, that the law is clear that a claim of Chapter 93A
violation cannot be brought against an adversary’s lawyer.

On
December 18, 2003, Judge Howard Whitehead (after correctly diagnosing
the case as one brought against an attorney who had used a dupe
plaintiff to satisfy his own interests) dismissed the Chapter 93A
count, but preserved the count of intentional infliction of emotional
distress, which Peres reluctantly included in the complaint only
because Chester was adamant that Chapter 93A count was not enough.


Having had lost one of the two counts of the complaint, Attorney Peres
became especially uninterested in pursuing the case after Chester’s
wife, Margaret, was attacked in a dark parking lot in Beverly on
February 6, 2004, by an armed and masked individual, who made it clear
that he was delivering a message on behalf of “Joe.” Coincidently, the
assault took place shortly after Attorney Peres tried to schedule
Corona’s deposition.

Aware that Corona had a documented
history of violent behavior (according to the court records, in 1985,
Corona armed with a knife publicly accosted local publisher, Damon
Lyons), Isaac Peres became somewhat apprehensive when he learned that,
in October 2003, Corona’s officemate, Attorney Charles Rancourt, made
the front page in the Salem News after he shot a 5-inch hole in his leg
with a .357 Magnum pistol, a part of his extensive gun collection
consisting of 47 weapons, including 9 mm semiautomatics and submachine
guns. According to the Salem News, Beverly Police were notified by the
ATF in March 2003, that Charles Rancourt was about to take delivery of
31 weapons, even though his gun permits were suspended.


Corona, also an avid gun collector, must have had his permits in order
because he stunned the judge during one of the Superior Court hearings
by politely inquiring whether he could bring a gun to his deposition to
be taken by Chester and Margaret.


In late June 2004,
Attorney Peres, a happily married father of three, quite suddenly filed
his motion to withdraw from the case. The motion was promptly allowed
over Chester’s opposition by Judge Diane Kottmeyer, who felt really
sorry for poor Isaac Peres for having gotten himself involved in that
notorious Chalupowski litigation. Chester has been handling the case
pro se ever since.

During the court hearings in the case,
Corona has been always very eager to properly display an air of
indignation over the fact that he, a respected retired attorney, has
been sued by Chester Chalupowski, the crazy pro se litigant, who,
according to Judge DiGangi’s “findings,” is an “adjudicated embezzler,”
having stolen hundreds of thousands of dollars from his mother’s trusts.


The Superior Court judges have always listened politely when Corona
calls Chester the “adjudicated embezzler.” After all Corona is a
lawyer, and he can readily substantiate his words by slamming his
dog-eared copy of Judge DiGangi’s August 17, 2004, judgment against the
counsel table or by waving it in front of the bench.

When
Chester tries to address the lies, he is always reminded that whatever
Corona said is not the subject matter of the specific hearing, and that
there is no need to contradict Corona’s statements because the judge is
not listening to them anyway.

When Chester insists on putting
his objections on record, a Security Guard gets up from his chair, puts
his hand on the handcuffs dangling from his belt, and looks at the
judge for instructions. The intimidation tactics always work. Chester,
mindful of his Middleton experience, gives up, and Corona’s lies stay
on the record unopposed.

What the judges do not see is that
after each such hearing, Corona makes a point of giving Chester and
Margaret his trademark “evil eye” meaning “catch me if you can.”


Meanwhile, Isaac Peres, the lawyer who cowardly abandoned his client
after botching the case, is eternally grateful for Judge Kottmeyer’s
decision that allowed him to get out of this “Chalupowski mess.”



Suing the Puppet


While Isaac Peres was becoming less and less diligent in handling the
case against Joseph Corona, Chester was advised by one of the many
lawyers he talked with, that it was a mistake not to include the
‘puppet’ plaintiff, his sister Donna, as a co-defendant in the case
against the ‘puppeteer.’

In order to correct the mistake, and
to present to the court the complete picture of the scheme, Chester and
Margaret filed their 27-page, 15-count complaint against Donna
Chalupowski with the Superior Court in Salem on May 8, 2004, with the
intention to consolidate it with the case against Joseph Corona for the
sake of judicial economy.

They were surprised to see that Donna
filed pro se a timely answer to the complaint, neatly typed in a quite
professional manner.

Determined to shed some light on the
scheme through documenting the puppet-puppeteer alliance, Chester and
Margaret promptly scheduled depositions of the defendant, Donna
Chalupowski, as well as several witnesses, including Joseph Corona,
John D. Welch, and Sharon D. Meyers.

When Joseph Corona and
Donna Chalupowski ignored the subpoenas, Chester and Margaret asked the
court for an order compelling their attendance. The request was
granted, and in late October and early November 2004, both depositions
took place, albeit not without difficulties (Donna was repeatedly
yelling at the stenographer and Corona refused to answer 80% of the
questions). This forced the plaintiffs to suspend both depositions at
some point.

Still, the transcripts of both depositions taken in
late 2004 clearly show that Judge Whitehead correctly diagnosed the
case against Corona as one brought against an attorney-puppeteer using
a puppet plaintiff to satisfy the puppeteer’s own interests. Also, it
was clear from the deposition of Donna Chalupowski that she did not
mind being used as a puppet plaintiff, as long as she could prove to
the world that her brother and his wife had stolen “hundreds of
thousands of dollars” from the two trusts.

When Attorneys
John Welch and Sharon Meyers received their subpoenas for the
depositions, they turned for help to Tony Metaxas. Tony, always
reliable, came to their rescue and promptly filed a motion to intervene
using the invalid judgment issued by Judge DiGangi as a basis for his
standing. Metaxas explained to the court that Meyers and Welch, both
very busy attorneys, should not be “harassed” by the pro se litigants,
who must be crazy to even think about deposing lawyers.

Tony’s
intervention obviously worked. Not only did Meyers and Welch not have
to be bothered with coming to the depositions, all the proceedings in
the case were stayed until further notice. It took Chester and Margaret
over a year to re-open the discovery in the case.

When Judge
Whitehead concluded during one of the hearings in November 2005 that
Donna Chalupowski, still acting pro se in the case, should be evaluated
by a court appointed psychologist, the schemers panicked that the truth
about their chief puppet plaintiff might come out, and within days they
recruited Attorney Joseph Collins to act as Donna’s new lawyer.


Attorney Collins, an ex-Marine with a strong instinct to follow orders
but no litigation experience, eagerly jumped right into Joseph Corona’s
shoes as soon as Attorney Metaxas invited him to provide his billing
statements directly to the Law Office of Metaxas, Norman & Pidgeon,
LLC.

Eager to prove his usefulness to the scheme, Attorney
Collins painstakingly produced an elaborate motion for summary judgment
using the invalid order issued by Judge Digangi as a basis for his
claim that the case against Donna should be dismissed because Judge
DiGangi took care of the problem by issuing his August 17, 2004 order.
Obviously, Attorney Collins forgot to mention that Judge DiGangi’s
order was void as a matter of law, and as such could not constitute a
basis for any subsequent action.

Judge David Lowy (who took
over the case from Judge Whitehead around the time Mr. Metaxas
expressed his desire to intervene) went the extra mile to appear
thoughtful and impartial during a court hearing on Collins’ motion,
which happened to be attended by a young reporter from the
Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly, pursuing an ambitious journalistic
endeavor called “shadowing judges.”

Judge Lowy did not mind
the media “shadow” in his courtroom. After all, the Boston media gave
his wife, Virginia Buckingham, a safe harbor job after she left her
prior employer, Massport, amidst a 9/11 related scandal involving
security violations which allowed the terrorists to walk freely through
Logan Airport.

Presumably, Judge Lowy could enlist some
editorial help from his wife, the writer, but it took him over a month
to come up with his 20-page decision, in which Judge Lowy, duly
persuaded by the existence of Judge DiGangi’s August 17, 2004 judgment,
chopped off twelve of the fifteen counts originally contained in the
complaint.

The radical operation, so eagerly performed by Judge
Lowy, left the case severely detruncated but not dead, contrary to the
perception of the MLW reporter, who got the story backwards when his
newspaper published it. Chester and Margaret had to write a letter to
clarify the mistake, but they never received any response from the MLW
editor.

All in all, Attorney Collins did his best to fill
Joseph Corona’s shoes, until he had to abandon his strategically
important outpost when he got a salaried position with the Essex County
DA Office in Salem in late 2006.

The ex-Marine with no
litigation experience was promptly replaced by Attorney John Morris,
with even less professional experience, but equal commitment to the
cause (the scheme, that is to say).

Attorney Morris, not a
Marine by any measure, found the convenience of sending his billing
statements directly to Mr. Metaxas attractive enough to ignore the fact
that the judgment pursuant to which Metaxas was giving him Chester’s
money was invalid as a matter of law.

Suing the Grey Eminence


Attorney Anthony Metaxas, having come into control of over $800,000 as
a result of the successful culmination of the Probate Court scheme, did
not even bother to provide any accounting as to how much money he
actually received, and what exactly he did with it.

Neither did
he bother to pay any bills, despite the fact that, by the summer of
2004, he was already controlling all the estate’s money, including Mary
Jane’s social security and pension. In August 2004, Chester had to
spend over $5,000 of his own money (which at that point he still had)
to pay his mother’s and the realty trust property’s bills.


Since asking the Probate Court to do the right thing and to remove Mr.
Metaxas from his illegally occupied position as the trustee of the
Chalupowski trusts was pointless, Chester and Margaret, after carefully
considering their options, turned to the Superior Court for assistance.
By then, their experience with the Superior Court led them to believe
that within that forum, at least, law and the rules of the court did
matter, and as long as they obeyed the rules, they could actually be
heard.

On November 12, 2004, Chester and Margaret filed with
the Essex Superior Court their 12-page, 5-count petition to remove
Anthony Metaxas from his purported position of the trustee of the two
trusts.

Their Superior Court case against Anthony Metaxas was
short-lived, however. The moment the plaintiffs tried to start their
discovery and sent the deposition subpoenas to the defendant, Metaxas,
and to the witness, Attorney Sharon Meyers, a stay of proceedings was
issued by Judge Richard Welch, III (Attorney John D. Welch’s second
cousin) who concluded that the matter would be “better addressed” by
the Probate Court.

Three months later the case was quietly
dismissed by the court without a hearing, and without any notice to the
plaintiffs.

Suing own Lawyers

The staged litigation
schemes would never work if their perpetrators were not able to secure
at least some compliance or the cooperation of the opposing counsel.


It is not as difficult as one may think. After all, lawyers on both
sides have to pay their bills, and sometimes siding with the opposition
instead of zealously representing one’s own client, may be a better
option, for the lawyer, that is to say, not for the client.


Of the ten lawyers engaged by Chester throughout the litigation to
represent his, his mother’s, and his wife’s interests, at least four
left a well-documented trail of helping the opposition, through their
negligence, incompetence, or outright betrayal and fraud.

What
can a person betrayed by his lawyer do? Bring a legal malpractice
action. The paradox is that one needs a lawyer to sue a lawyer. And
this is where the legal malpractice business gets tricky.

When
Chester and Mary Jane Chalupowski hired Attorney Karl F. Stammen of
Boston in the summer of 1998 to bring a legal malpractice action
against Attorney Robert Holloway, (Chester’s first counsel, who between
1993 and 1995 did nothing to stop Corona from cultivating the first
batch of five frivolous cases), they did not know that Attorney
Stammen’s poor performance would warrant another legal malpractice
action against Attorney Stammen himself.

But Chester would need
yet another lawyer to bring a legal malpractice action against Karl
Stammen who, apart from botching the legal malpractice action against
Holloway, was instrumental in allowing the scheme to thrive at the
Probate and Appeals Court level. But what if the third lawyer would
fail to do his job?

The only way to break the chain was to bring a legal malpractice action without using a lawyer, i.e. pro se.


This is exactly what Chester and his wife, Margaret, did in order to
hold their three lawyers (Stammen, Peres, and Tewhey) accountable for
their negligence, incompetence, and ultimate betrayal.

Legal
malpractice actions, by definition, are difficult to win. Bringing them
pro se is almost unheard of, and, obviously, vehemently discouraged by
the legal community.

In addition, in the case of the legal
malpractice cases brought against the participants of the staged
litigation scheme, everybody who facilitated the scheme (from court
clerks to judges) would have vested interest in helping the defendants
to thwart any of the plaintiffs’ efforts that could expose the essence
of the scheme.

Faced with obvious liability and gigantic
damages, the three defendants, in order to avoid addressing the merits
of the cases, resorted to procedural tricks and outright lies. It is
remarkable that the three separate cases filed against Attorneys
Stammen, Peres, and Tewhey follow a surprisingly similar pattern.


The first thing Karl Stammen did after being served the complaint in
January 2005, was to ask the court to prevent Chester’s wife, Margaret,
from being a co-plaintiff in the case. In a way, Stammen’s tactics
worked. His motion was heard by Judge Fahey in June 2005, and has been
“under advisement” ever since.

When Isaac Peres was served
the complaint filed in December 2006, the first thing he did was also
to ask the court to prevent Margaret from being a co-plaintiff in the
case. However, Peres did not buy any time applying Stammen’s method
because his motion was promptly denied. So, unwilling to address the
merits of the complaint, to which he does not have any defense
(considering the clarity of the Chapter 93A law) he asked the court to
dismiss the case, claiming that the plaintiffs failed to respond to his
discovery request, which was not true.

When James Tewhey
learned about the complaint shortly after it was filed, he was hiding
for four days from the Essex County Sheriff, the server of the summons
and complaint, in an effort to beat the deadline for service, and
hoping that Chester and Margaret did not know about the protective
measures a plaintiff can take when a defendant is evading the service.


It appears that Tewhey, a former Dean at MIT turned lawyer, has never
been a model of professional integrity. In 1993, the MIT community
celebrated Tewhey’s sudden departure from academia, amidst a notorious
sex scandal, by erecting a sarcastic tombstone in front of the Student
Center in Cambridge.

If any of the lawyers, defendants in the
four legal malpractice cases, had done the job they were hired and paid
to do, the scheme would have never been developed, or it would have
been exposed and stopped long ago; the malpractice cases would have
been unnecessary.

If Robert Holloway had done his job instead
of playing cards with Corona, Corona’s stunt would have been stopped
before it started in 1993.

If Karl Stammen had done his job in
1998, the Corona-Holloway alliance would have been exposed, and Corona
would never have been able to start his game all over again by
re-filing his frivolous cases in December 2000, since they were
disposed of in 1996.

If Isaac Peres and James Tewhey had done
their job in 2003, the scheme would have been exposed. Consequently,
all their money-hungry colleagues would have had to put a tombstone on
their cherished scheme, and the 2004 heist with the $630,000 jackpot
would have never happened.

But this was where the problem
lay. The $630,000 (not including other funds) would not have been
available for distribution. And how would all the lawyers have paid
their bills without getting Chester’s money?

What Joseph
Corona and his dupe plaintiff, Donna Chalupowski, started in 1993 is a
virtual enterprise, a cascade of moneymaking opportunities for over two
dozen lawyers.

Between 1993 and 2004, Mary Jane, Chester and
Margaret Chalupowski had to recruit 10 lawyers to defend themselves
against Corona’s actions. At least four of these lawyers left a
documented trail of wrongdoings.

In addition, since 1993, at
least 16 lawyers have joined Corona’s side of the enterprise. This
brings the number of lawyers making money in the vexatious litigation
to 26. The “village” of the beneficiaries of the scheme also includes
at least a dozen various other ancillary players; psychologists,
doctors, social workers, stenographers, paralegals, process servers,
etc.

All of these people have been paid as a result of the
scheme. The payouts range from $200 pittances to the $80,000 jackpot
hit by Attorney Sharon Meyers in November 2004 (which does not include
over $30,000 “awarded” to her since then).

So, where did all
this money come from? Nothing is coming from the two trusts, since
there are no liquid assets in the realty trust, and the family trust
(which in early 2004, held about $170,000) allows only income
distribution, and only to Mary Jane.

Since Metaxas liquidated
the stocks managed by Fidelity Investments (while providing no
accounting whatsoever), it appears that the trust’s assets, if they
still exist, do not produce any income.

Some small part of the
money received by the main players and other actors was paid out from
Mary Jane’s personal income. The overwhelming majority of the money
used since 2004 by Anthony Metaxas are Chester’s and Margaret’s
lifesavings, stolen from them in September 2004.




At the same time, the estate is losing at least $10,000 a month in
unrealized rental income. The two buildings held in the realty trust
consist of a total of seven residential units. Mary Jane occupies one
unit. The remaining six units are either occupied rent-free (in
violation of the trust’s provisions) or held hostage by Judith, Donna,
and Donna’s live-in companions.

Chester, as trustee of the
realty trust, struggled for years to address the problem, and in
January 2002, obtained a writ of execution from the Salem District
Court allowing for the eviction of the freeloading group.


This is when Judge Berry came to the rescue and issued her February
2002 stay, preventing the evictions. Since then, the trust has lost at
least $720,000 in unrealized rental income, which would have been
generated if Chester had been allowed to manage the property. This
$720,000 loss is a direct consequence of Judge Berry’s actions taken
outside her jurisdiction.

The exponential effect of financial
devastation is unbearable. Once their money was stolen, Chester and
Margaret lost all their investment opportunities. Also, since over
$300,000 of the funds taken by Metaxas came from a refinancing of two
properties owned by Chester and his wife individually, they are now
left with over $7,000 a month in mortgage payments on the money
currently enjoyed by Attorneys Metaxas, Meyers, Corona, Welch and
others.

During one of the recent court hearings, the Superior
Court Judge Patrick Riley expressed his concern that the malpractice
cases brought by Chester and Margaret take a lot of court’s time and
money.

Maybe the court should bill Mr. Corona and the other 26
lawyers, as well as the three judges who allowed the enterprise to
thrive.

Chester and Margaret are just trying to recover what
was stolen from them. The First Amendment to the United States
Constitution gives them the right to bring their grievances to the
courts, including those belonging to the federal judicial system.

Looking for Redress in Federal Courts


In general, “bill the judge” is not an option. No matter how wrong, ill
willed, and corrupt a judge is, it is pointless to sue a judge, because
judges enjoy absolute immunity from civil lawsuits, arising from their
judicial function.

However, absolute judicial immunity is not
quite absolute. Although the cloak of judicial immunity for centuries
has shielded judges from claims pertaining to actions they have taken
in discharging their official duties, a judge is not immune from
liability for actions, though judicial in nature, taken in complete
absence of jurisdiction.

When Judge Berry issued a stay of the
Salem District Court matter in February 2002, which was not before her,
she acted in complete absence of all jurisdiction.

When Judges
Stevens and DiGangi kept handling the cases which were dismissed and
pending on appeal, they also acted in complete absence of all
jurisdiction.

These are exactly the circumstances in which
the law allows citizens to “bill the judges” and their employers, the
states, for damages caused by them. This can be done under Title 42,
Sections 1983, 1985, and 1988 of the United States Code, as long as the
deprivation of constitutional rights was committed “under color of
law,” by a state actor, like a judge, for example, or any other state
employee or governmental official. To establish a governmental
official’s personal liability under 42 U.S.C. section 1983, it is
enough to show that the official, acting under color of state law,
caused the deprivation of some specific federal right.



Suing the Judges


Equipped with the powerful federal law, Chester and Margaret filed on
June 8, 2004, with the United States District Court, District of
Massachusetts their Title 42, 1983 claim against Judge Berry.


Two days after Judge Berry was formally served the verified complaint,
the case was dismissed by Judge George A. O’Toole, Jr., who allowed
Judge Berry’s motion to dismiss filed with the court on her behalf by
the Attorney General of Massachusetts, Thomas F. Reilly, but never
served on the plaintiffs. The motion was never served on the
plaintiffs, despite the fact that it contained a certificate of service
signed by Attorney Juliana deHaan Rice on behalf of Attorney General,
Thomas F. Reilly.

Chester and Margaret appealed the strange and
informal dismissal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.
In their meticulously researched brief, they presented their argument
as to why Judge Berry was not entitled to enjoy protection from
liability under the doctrine of judicial immunity. They also documented
the puzzling chronology of the U.S. District Court proceedings, as well
as the fact that authorities relied upon in Judge Berry’s motion to
dismiss did not have any bearing on the case against her.

After
asking twice for an extension of time, the Office of the Attorney
General filed a non-conforming brief on May 10, 2005, and was allowed
by the Court to correct the errors and re-file the brief.

In
the corrected brief, Attorney General Thomas F. Reilly acting on behalf
of Judge Berry, misrepresented facts and advanced misleading arguments.


In their reply brief, Chester and Margaret listed 15 instances
of material misrepresentations made in the brief filed on Judge Berry’s
behalf.

Despite the fact that each such misrepresentation
constitutes a separate instance of fraud on the court, on September 27,
2005, the three-judge panel (Boudin, Selya and Howard) of the United
States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit affirmed the U.S.
District Court’s decision of dismissal. Chester and Margaret filed
their timely petition for a hearing before the full Court of Appeals.
Their petition was denied on October 28, 2005.

Since the law
and the rules of the court do not seem to apply to Judge Berry, she
could rest assured that she could get away with anything.

So
could Judges Stevens and DiGangi, cases against whom were filed on
January 5, 2005. After following the same familiar routine (dismissal
based on defendants’ misrepresentations, appeal, and affirmation of the
dismissal) the cases were disposed of and conveniently labeled as some
more of “those” cases filed by “those” crazy pro se litigants, who do
not have anything better to do except to bother federal courts with
their imaginary grievances.

Despite the fact that all the
plaintiffs’ pleadings filed in both cases stated valid federal claims
and met all legal and procedural standards, and despite the fact that
the defendants were not entitled to enjoy the protection of judicial
immunity, the federal judges promptly dismissed the cases.


Judge Nathaniel M. Gorton dismissed the case against Judge Stevens on
June 13, 2005. The dismissal was upheld by the three-judge panel of the
Court of Appeals (Boudin, Stahl, and Lynch) on December 13, 2005.


Judge Richard G. Stearns dismissed the case against Judge DiGangi on
March 14, 2005. The dismissal was affirmed by the three-judge panel of
the Court of Appeals (Seyla, Lynch and Lipez), also on December 13,
2005.

In both cases, the plaintiffs’ petition for a hearing before the full Court of Appeals was denied.



Suing Miss Meyers


The law is clear that even in cases where judges could legitimately
claim judicial immunity, other players who willingly align themselves
with the state actors and reach a “meeting of the minds” with them in
order to accomplish some ulterior purpose, can be held liable under
U.S.C. 42, section 1983, while having no right to claim any kind of
immunity whatsoever.

This legal concept was the basis for the
federal action filed by Chester and Margaret Chalupowski against
Attorney Sharon D. Meyers on June 1, 2005. The case was assigned to
Judge Morris E. Lasker, said to be an extremely fair and strict jurist.


Attorney Meyers, apparently, did not like Judge Lasker that much,
because, quite suddenly and without any notice to the plaintiffs, the
case was moved to the docket of Judge George A. O’Toole, who promptly
dismissed it on August 11, 2005. It is possible that Judge O’Toole,
after fixing the problem for Judge Berry, had a vested interest in the
quiet dismissal of the related case against Attorney Meyers. For
example, what if the plaintiffs decided, God forbid, to call Judge
Berry to testify, which the law allowed them to do.

The case
followed the familiar routine: dismissal based on the defendant’s
misrepresentations, appeal, and affirmation of the dismissal by the
three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.


To justify the desired result, the three judges (Lynch, Lipez and
Howard) misinterpreted the nature of the plaintiffs’ claim in their
half-page decision dated June 16, 2006.

Chester and Margaret’s petition for a hearing before the full Court of Appeals was denied.


When their fourth federal case was dismissed in violation of the
applicable law, Chester and Margaret, by then quite versed with the
federal procedure, submitted 40 copies of their petition for a writ of
certiorari to the Supreme Court of the United States. Their petition
was docketed with the Supreme Court of the United States on February 7,
2007.

Considering the odds of getting a case before the
Supreme Court, which takes about 80 cases a year out of the thousands
submitted and docketed, Chester and Margaret were not surprised that
their petition was not among the chosen ones.

After all, why
would the Supreme Court of the United States wish to hear about some
embarrassingly notorious Massachusetts case involving nine federal
judges protecting three state judges, who have been fostering a staged
litigation scheme which is benefiting over two dozens lawyers?











Fending Off Ongoing Attacks


While all the authorities and all the courts keep “playing possum,” the
resourceful group of lawyers keeps coming up with various satellite
enterprises in order to justify more payouts in purported “attorneys’
fees,” as well as other “costs” and “reimbursements.”

The
effect of the ongoing attacks is three-fold. First and foremost, every
single gesture, letter, phone call, meeting, court hearing, etc., is a
billing opportunity for at least two lawyers (it takes at least two to
communicate, after all). Second, measures need to be undertaken in
order to justify and sustain the smooth flow of money from Mr. Metaxas
to all of the compliant players. Also, it is essential to keep steady
the level of stress and uncertainty in the psychological war against
Chester and Margaret - the only people, who, if not restrained, may
cause problems for the schemers.

The result of this cool,
calculating deliberation of intelligent people is a protracted
emotional and financial devastation, comparable only to lynching. The
entire Chalupowski family is suffering, except for Donna, who, still
unemployed, not only appears to be enjoying her role in the scheme, but
is also financially rewarded.

In or around January 2005,
Anthony Metaxas gave Donna several thousand dollars coming from
Chester’s and Margaret’s assets. He also sends her checks on a weekly
basis, purportedly to cover Mary Jane’s expenses. Nobody knows,
however, how the money is actually spent.

Other fringe benefits
received by Donna include a quiet dismissal of a large number of
criminal complaints pending against her at the Salem District Court as
a result of her violent, irrational, and antisocial behavior, duly
documented in the local police files for at least 20 years, and ranging
from resisting arrest to assault and battery on her 86-year old mother.
Last but not least is the ongoing help she has been provided in
sustaining her yearly ritual of renewing the restraining orders, which
are strategically important in the scheme.

The 209A Tool


Already in the summer of 2004, Attorney John D. Welch undertook steps
to make sure that, out of a dozen or so restraining orders obtained
throughout the years by Donna Chalupowski against almost every member
of her family, two are maintained and renewed regularly, since they
play a strategic role in the scheme.

As early as in 1990,
Donna discovered that obtaining a restraining order against a
completely innocent individual is an easy, quick, and cost-effective
way of turning someone’s life into a living hell. When Joseph Corona
came into the picture in 1993, he quickly incorporated the tool into
the overall strategy of his main vexatious actions. Therefore, Donna’s
restraining order against Chester has been carefully sustained
throughout the years (mostly under the watchful eye of the Chief
Justice of the Salem District Court, Robert Cornetta), which makes it
one of the longest restraining orders in the history of Chapter 209A of
the General Laws of Massachusetts.

There was a very tangible
tactical aspect of using the tool in the scheme. Since Donna lives in
one of the realty trust buildings, Chester, the trustee, was prevented
from entering the premises of the trust, and this created an ongoing
opportunity to blame him for not doing a good job as a trustee. He was
forced to perform his duties through various agents, including his
wife, Margaret. When Donna realized that the arrangement gave Margaret
an opportunity to develop a close, caring relationship with Mary Jane,
she immediately asked the Salem District Court to “modify” the
restraining order to include Margaret as a defendant, which the
District Court gladly did, despite the fact that there was no legal or
factual basis for such modification.

In October 2004,
Attorney John D. Welch took the “modification” to the extreme and asked
the District Court to transfer the 209A matter to the Probate Court.
Judge Stevens welcomed the matter on the Essex Probate Court docket
and, with no legal or factual basis to do so, promptly issued a
restraining order against Chester and Margaret, preventing them from
entering the trust’s premises and visiting Mary Jane.

At the
same time, the Salem District Court, as if unwilling to lose the
business, has kept issuing its own restraining orders in the matter.
Since the terms of the two orders (the Probate Court’s and the District
Court’s) differ slightly, Chester and Margaret, (mindful of the fact
that the violation of a restraining order is a criminal offence), have
not entered the premises of the trust since October 2004.

Why
should they? Mary Jane, after all, is taken care of by a dozen people,
all of whom charge her for every word about her exchanged with anybody.
The bill is being paid from the funds stolen from her son and his wife.
Isn’t it a perfect arrangement?

Miss Meyers Wants More Money


Having pocketed almost $80,000, in November 2004, Attorney Sharon D.
Meyers all but abandoned her purported “ward,” Judith
Chalupowski-Venuto, until June 2006, when she found out that Chester
was appealing Judge Berry’s order in the contempt matter heard by her
in June 2004.

Judge Berry kept a low profile throughout the
entire time when the federal courts were handling the case brought
against her by Chester and Margaret. However, within days after the
U.S. Court of Appeals affirmed the dismissal of the case against her,
Judge Berry decided to take care of unfinished business, and on
November 10, 2005, issued her ruling in the contempt matter brought by
Attorney Meyers in December 2003. Judge Berry found Chester in contempt
of her August 6, 2002, order (which she did not have a legal basis to
issue), explained at length how “telling” it was that Chester took the
Fifth, and ordered him to pay Attorney Meyers over $15,000 for her
efforts.

Attorney Meyers wanted the money badly. Hence, when
she found out that Chester was appealing Judge Berry’s decision and
filed his brief on March 13, 2006, presenting a very comprehensive
picture of the entire scheme to the Appeals Court, Attorney Meyers
panicked and filed with the court a motion to strike Chester’s brief,
which she found “offending.” Well, when the truth is offending, do not
blame the bearer of the truth.

A motion to strike is an old
trick often used by parties who have nothing to say on the merits of
the dispute. Why should Attorney Meyers be bothered with addressing the
merits of Chester’s brief, when she can file a “motion to strike” and
be done. Chester opposed the motion to strike and asked the court to
prevent Attorney Meyers from interfering in the appeal, in which the
only party who had standing to oppose his appeal was his sister Judith.
Judith did not have any interest in opposing the appeal since she had
nothing to gain by it. The $15,000 awarded by Judge Berry was for
Attorney Meyers, not for Judith, who for three months had been
medicated against her will in a state mental hospital, so that Attorney
Meyers could make fifteen grand.

On February 27, 2007, a
three-judge panel of the Appeals Court (Lenk, Cowin and Graham) issued
their unpublished Rule 1:28 order, affirming Judge Berry’s decision,
which meant that they agreed there was nothing wrong with putting
people in mental hospitals so that lawyers, who were not even hired by
them, could pay their bills.

Well, the three judges did not
need to address this issue because they conveniently granted the motion
to strike the “offending portions of the appellant’s brief,” and said
that the rest of the brief was too “vague” to figure it out. What’s so
“vague” about fraud, lack of subject matter jurisdiction, and erroneous
as a matter of law ?

In addition, Attorney Meyers was invited
by the court to submit her motion for some more “attorney’s fees,”
which she promptly did. When Chester opposed her motion, she asked the
court to “strike” his opposition. The court gladly complied, and in
this simple way, Attorney Meyers made another $6,500 in her clever
stunt implemented by putting Judith Chalupowski-Venuto into the mental
hospital for three months, which brought Meyers’ total jackpot to over
$100,000. Not bad.

Chester, still believing that the truth
should prevail, filed his Application for Further Appellate Review of
the matter with the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. The
further appellate review was denied.




The Grey Eminence Wants More Money


In August 2005, Attorney Metaxas, apparently running out of the readily
available cash, came up with a simple idea as to how to get hold of the
money still “tied up” in the two trusts, and filed a brand new case
against Mary Jane Chalupowski and her three children with the Essex
Probate and Family Court, in which he asked the court for a permission
to dissolve both trusts and to distribute the assets.

After all, there were a lot of various bills still “outstanding.”


First of all, Attorney Corona wanted the other half of “his” $95,000,
since in November 2004, Judge DiGangi, for some reason, slashed in half
the amount demanded by Corona and reflected by the promissory notes
signed by Donna.

Then, Attorney Meyers was still waiting for
her $22,000 awarded her by Judge Berry and the three-judge panel of the
Appeals Court.

The guardian, Daniel Northrup and his crew (wife
and other associates), who received more than $75,000, never properly
accounted for, from Metaxas (supposedly to cover Mary Jane’s expenses)
were also running out of cash by the summer of 2005.

Then,
there were a number of newcomers, e.g. Joseph Corona’s successors,
Joseph Collins and John Morris, and Marc Middleton, a fellow
telemarketer whom Judith met at one of her attempts at employment, and
whom she (abandoned by Sharon Meyers) hired on the spot the moment she
learned that he was a lawyer, struggling to make a living in a somewhat
related, albeit less lucrative, profession.

While the
“village” of vultures feeding off the Chalupowski case has been
growing, the treasure keeper, Anthony Metaxas, has not forgotten about
himself and came up with a round figure for his “trustee compensation,”
despite the fact that the two trusts which he has been allegedly
managing have been producing no income whatsoever.

Metaxas
has been very busy writing checks to various individuals, including
himself and other members of his law firm, (e.g. Attorney Carlotta
Patten); therefore he calculated that his time devoted to the matter
was worth about $70,000, not including other “fees” and “costs”
incurred while dealing with various problems created mostly by Chester
Chalupowski and his wife, Margaret, who were unwilling to accept the
fact that the game was over (for them). But for the lawyers, the game
was still in full swing, if they played it right, as long as they could
squeeze some more sizeable checks out of Chester’s and Margaret’s
lifesavings and Mary Jane’s $1,400 monthly Social Security and GE
pension checks.

Chester and Margaret, indeed, were not
willing to accept the ongoing parasitic relationship between their
money and a growing group of lawyers, and on September 15, 2005,
Chester filed his motion to dismiss Metaxas’ complaint on the grounds
that Metaxas lacked standing to bring any actions in his purported
capacity as a trustee of the Chalupowski trusts since he was using
court orders which were void as a matter of law in order to justify his
standing.

After Judge DiGangi eagerly denied Chester’s motion
to dismiss, Chester and Margaret filed a number of pleadings, including
a counterclaim, Chester’s answer to Metaxas’ complaint, and Margaret’s
motion to intervene, all of which were dismissed (in violation of court
rules) by Judge DiGangi, who over and over again has been finding it
amusing that Chester and Margaret insist that law and the rules of the
court should matter in the Essex Probate Court.

Not discouraged
by Judge DiGangi’s ridicule, Chester and Margaret filed all necessary
notices of appeal to preserve their rights, just in case, at some
point, law and the rules of the court would matter in some other
courts.

True to his reputation as an effective “terminator,”
Judge DiGangi ordered a trial on Metaxas’ petition for dissolution of
the Chalupowski trusts for late March 2006, while various, yet to be
addressed, matters were still pending.

By filing the brand new
case, Metaxas pulled an interesting stunt, which was, in fact, a
classic example of lawsuit “laundering,” or that of secondary staged
litigation within the original staged litigation scheme.


While the Probate Court did not have jurisdiction to handle the matters
still pending on appeal in May 2004, when Metaxas got his precious, yet
illegal, appointment, the Probate Court, technically, now did have
jurisdiction to handle the new case filed by Metaxas.


Obviously, there was still one problem: Metaxas did not have standing
to bring the new case, since he was deriving his right to sue from the
court orders which were invalid as a matter of law.

Hoping that
a higher court would be smart enough to notice the trick, Chester and
Margaret asked the Appeals Court to issue an injunction preventing
Metaxas from using invalid court orders to justify his standing and
preventing the Essex Probate Court from acting on Metaxas’ petition for
dissolution of the trusts.

When the Single Justice of the
Appeals Court, Andre A. Gelinas (one of the three judges who invented
the ‘Gordian Knot’ excuse in 2004) denied their request, Chester and
Margaret turned to the Single Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court.
The Single Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court, Francis X. Spina,
also promptly denied the request without a hearing. (Why spoil the fun?
After all a group of lawyers was waiting for “their” money.)


The Supreme Judicial Court Single Justice’s denial came, however, with
a standard note about the SJC Rule 2:21, which gives a 7-day window of
opportunity to reserve the right to present the issue to the full panel
(seven judges) of the SJC.

After jumping through all the
procedural hoops, meeting all the deadlines, and paying various fees,
Chester and Margaret filed 9 copies of their Rule 2:21 Memorandum with
the Supreme Judicial Court on April 18, 2006.

Their 166-page
Memorandum contained, among various exhibits, an audio CD copy of the
January 27, 2004, Probate Court hearing during which Judge DiGangi,
while handling the dismissed cases, after exchanging some jovial jokes
with Messers Welch and Tewhey says, “So tell me guys, which case is a
fair game here?”

Six months after filing their 2:21 Memorandum,
Chester and Margaret were notified on October 3, 2006, that their SJC
appeal was allowed to proceed. Therefore, on November 10, 2006, they
filed seven copies of their 20-page brief and a 320-page appendix with
the Supreme Judicial Court.

The appellate efforts undertaken by
Chester and Margaret were irritating Metaxas and all other players, who
seemed to be unsure whether finalizing the second heist while the
appeal was still pending before the SJC, was a good idea.


Nevertheless, the Essex Probate Court, having grown impatient, set a
date for the trial on Metaxas’ petition for February 14, 2007.


When Chester and Margaret asked the SJC to stay the Probate Court
proceedings, the SJC did not rule on their motion, but referred the
issue to the full panel and scheduled the oral argument for March 9,
2007.

Despite the fact that, technically, there was no order of
stay, once the news about the SJC’s intention to hear the appeal
reached the Essex Probate Court on the morning of February 14, 2007,
quite coincidently, the power went out in the courthouse, and “due to
the circumstances beyond the court’s control” the trial on Metaxas’
petition was cancelled until further notice.

The issue
presented by Chester and Margaret for the consideration of the highest
court of Massachusetts on March 9, 2007, was simple: the orders and
judgments issued by the Essex Probate Court between 2002 and 2004 are
void as a matter of law, since they were issued by the court acting
outside of its jurisdiction. A void judgment is a complete nullity,
which can furnish no basis for any subsequent action, and can be
attacked anytime, anywhere, by anybody, either directly or indirectly.
The matter does not have to go through the regular appellate process
because when a judgment is void, there is nothing to appeal.


Mindful that the appellate avenue they were allowed to take is reserved
for only extraordinary circumstances, Chester and Margaret carefully
stated their points to make sure that the issue of lack of subject
matter jurisdiction and void judgments was correctly presented and
supported by citing all appropriate authorities.




The highest court of Massachusetts pondered what to do for a month, and
on April 11, 2007, issued its 3-page decision, which can be summarized
in three words, “let’s play possum.”

To avoid addressing the
issue of lack of subject matter jurisdiction presented in the appeal,
the SJC used a simple linguistic trick and said that the appellants,
Chester and Margaret Chalupowski, complained about some “improper”
orders and judgments issued by the Essex Probate Court. The SJC chose
not to acknowledge that the central point of the appellants’ argument
was the issue of “void,” or “invalid” judgments.

The difference
is not in semantics, but in law. An “improper” order is a valid order,
which can be appealed. A “void” order is a nullity, which does not need
to be appealed, because there is nothing to appeal. The SJC did not
want to address the issue of “void” judgments, so it called them
“improper.” Clever? Not quite. It is too obvious that the SJC was
simply covering the scheme to protect the judges and the lawyers
involved in it.



It is undisputable that
the SJC was in a quandary. If the highest court of Massachusetts ruled
that it was OK for the Essex Probate Court to handle cases which were
dismissed and pending on appeal, such a conclusion, apart from being
legally wrong, would mean that henceforward, any trial court in
Massachusetts could keep re-trying cases until the party favored by the
court got the desired result. If this were the case, there would not be
any need for the courts at the appellate level, or the entire appellate
procedure for that matter. In fact, the Appeals Court could be shut
down and turned into, say, a library.

On the other hand, if the
SJC acknowledged the fact that the judgments issued by Judge Digangi
were void as a matter of law, the Judge would be in trouble as a
trespasser of law, and all the individuals who have been paid as a
result of his orders would have to return the money and face serious
disciplinary consequences. This is not to mention the resulting
scandal, which would be impossible to contain. The SJC, obviously,
could not allow this to happen, proving one more time that, “with the
Bench cozied up to the Bar, the lawyers can’t lose.”

This maxim
appears true in Massachusetts, even if the lawyers commit outright
criminal acts and violate the rules of professional conduct as they
please.

*

After the SJC issued its April 11, 2007,
opinion, the schemers, who had been sort of nervous until then, could
breathe a little easier and more freely continue what they had been
doing all along, which was producing more and more elaborate “billing
statements” and various pleadings specifically designed to justify the
exorbitant, albeit unearned, sums of money they demanded.


What ensued was a virtual mud slinging competition. The one who can
write the most bad things about Chester and Margaret gets the most of
their money.

While Attorneys Metaxas, Meyers and Welch indulged
in coming up with various, quite original, insulting accusations, and
produced absurd calculations for “costs” and “interest” which did not
even add up, the rookie members of the group (Collins, Morris and
Middleton) resorted largely to the copycat method, i.e. they simply
have been copying the most juicy pieces of the creative writing
produced by their older colleagues and packing them into their own
voluminous pleadings.

When the documents are called “proposed
orders,” or “motions for attorney’s fees,” Judge DiGangi’s Secretary
puts a rubber stamp on them, and Judge DiGangi himself signs the paper
after circling the word “allowed.”

It is not entirely clear whether Judge DiGangi even reads any of the papers put in front of him before signing them.


It is almost impossible to resist the impression that the lawyers
involved in the Chalupowski matter got used to treating the money
belonging to Mary Jane, Chester and Margaret Chalupowski, and now
controlled by Attorney Metaxas, as an ATM to which Judge DiGangi has
the PIN.

The always-menacing correspondence from the lawyers
and the courts comes in small and large envelopes of assorted colors,
any day of the week, and in waves reflecting the fluctuation of
determination and doubts of the lawyers who want the money badly.


They never miss a beat. The practice did not even slow down when, on
July 17, 2006, Chester suffered serious spinal injury.

Chester,
the classical guitarist, was fixing the roof of one of his rental
properties, because, with all his money stolen, he could not afford to
hire a contractor to do the work. Having just read one of the hate
letters from the lawyers, he was preoccupied and disoriented. He missed
the step and fell 30 feet, through the bulkhead and on the cement
steps. He miraculously survived, and can still move his limbs only
because two titanium rods, each a foot long, inserted during an
emergency 8-hour surgery, keep his spine from collapsing.

On
July 24, 2006, when Chester, not breathing on his own, was still
attached to the respirator and monitors at the ICU at Brigham and
Women’s Hospital in Boston, his sister Donna went to the Salem District
Court to perform (in front of Judge Cornetta, by the way) her annual
routine by which she always renews her frivolous restraining order
against her brother and his wife. The restraining order was extended
for another year.



One would expect that hardship
and disability would invoke some measure of normal human compassion.
But this is not how it works in staged litigation schemes, where being
disabled means the victim is more vulnerable and easier to attack.


Chester and Margaret learned this “rule,” not only through their own
experience, but also when they met (through the networking with other
victims of similar staged litigation schemes), Daniel Iagatta, a
43-year-old firefighter, who since 2002, has been a wheelchair-bound
quadriplegic. On April 3, 2007, he was evicted from his
disability-adjusted childhood home, pursuant to an order issued by
Judge Beverly Weinger Boorstein of the Middlesex Probate Court, who
ordered Iagatta’s home sold to satisfy outstanding bills for attorneys’
fees incurred in the course of divorce proceedings by Daniel and his
ex-wife, who, by the way, had a restraining order against her
quadriplegic ex-husband.

The lawyers making money in the
Iagatta case do not need to worry. Judge Boorstein was within her
jurisdiction when she ordered the quadriplegic to be dragged out from
his home, crying for help and begging for mercy, while his treasured
belongings were trashed and stepped on.

In the summer of
2006, just around the time when her son was struggling to learn to walk
again, Mary Jane Chalupowski came close to Daniel Iagatta’s fate,
because the City of Salem was ready to take her property for
non-payment of the real estate taxes.

Mr. Metaxas, too busy
writing checks to the lawyers, simply forgot to pay the real estate
taxes, mortgage, insurance, and various other bills, for over a year.
(Well, he is a busy and prominent lawyer. What can we say?)

On
August 6, 2006, Margaret, concerned that the disturbing news would
affect Chester’s recovery, went to the Salem City Hall, and, without
telling her husband, paid Mary Jane’s $5,000 tax bill out of her own
pocket.

Still Believing in Law and Justice

Learning Law


Having the “core” members of the Chalupowski family under control, or
effectively suppressed and broken down, the schemers never really
considered Chester’s wife, Margaret, to be a threat of any kind.


First of all, she, a foreigner, a quintessential, inconspicuous Harvard
nerd with an Eastern European accent, seemed to be too withdrawn and
bookish to pose any problem for the well-connected “sharks” and “hired
guns,” as Joseph Corona and his colleagues like to call themselves.


They did not know, however, that due to the versatility of her medical
education, Margaret, like all physicians trained to absorb and process
unlimited amounts of information within limited periods of time, would
be able to use her professional instinct to spot and define
abnormalities, while quietly observing the legal drama she had become a
part of over the years.

Physicians, once they recognize and
classify abnormalities, are ready to treat and, if possible, cure them.
This is exactly what Margaret set out to do, once she noticed the
countless examples of the abnormal paradigm of the practice of law,
spreading like a disease within the otherwise healthy and robust body
of the American legal system which, (according to what she learned
years before in high school in her native Poland) was one of the best
systems of justice in the world.



The only thing
she was lacking at that point was a formal education in American law.
In order to remedy this disadvantage, in the summer of 2005, Margaret
put her medical career on hold and entered Law School.

The
unanticipated twist in her career proved to be more rewarding than she
expected. While fervently absorbing the voluminous first-year law
school material, she suddenly understood the reason for Chester’s
ongoing fascination with the RICO statute.

Chester, by no
means a bookworm, has developed a keen understanding of various
specific aspects of law by searching the Internet. Betrayed and
abandoned by his lawyers, Chester kept looking for a legal tool which
could be effectively applied to stop the scheme and to hold the people
responsible accountable for their actions.

The more time he
spent reading about RICO and talking with RICO experts (e.g. Robert
Blakley, Jeff Grell), the more he was convinced that he had found the
necessary tool.

RICO

The Racketeer Influenced and
Corrupt Organizations (RICO) statute is the single most powerful law
that can be used by the government (criminal RICO) or private citizens
(civil RICO) against perpetrators of white-collar crimes. When the
statute was passed in 1970, it was intended to address organized
crime’s infiltration of legitimate businesses. Over the years the
interpretation of the RICO statute evolved, and its current version
covers a broad array of specific forms of criminal activity that reach
far beyond traditional “organized crime.”

In a typical case, a
RICO defendant is charged with using a legitimate business as the
vehicle for illegal activity. Since this is exactly what goes on in any
staged litigation scheme, all a prosecutor or a civil plaintiff needs
to do to make out a RICO claim against perpetrators of such a scheme is
to show that all required elements of the claim are present. The
elements include these: repeated acts (a RICO pattern), constituting
specific crimes (predicate acts), committed in specific ways by an
identifiable group of people (a RICO enterprise).

After doing
some research and talking to some more RICO experts (whose advice was
sound, but prices unattainable), Chester and Margaret put together a
70-page complaint invoking both the RICO statute and Title 42, section
1983 of the U.S. Code and filed it with the United States District
Court for the District of Massachusetts, on January 4, 2007. The
complaint, which met all the statutory requirements of a well-plead
RICO claim, named 16 defendants, all of whom either received funds from
Chester and Margaret’s assets or actively participated in the illegal
distribution of these funds.

Since, at that point, the
defendants in the federal action were getting ready to finalize their
second heist at the state court level, Chester and Margaret asked the
federal court to stay the proceedings in the Essex Probate Court.


In general, federal courts will not interfere with state court
proceedings, but Chester’s and Margaret’s making their request for a
stay, relied on the law that allows for such a stay as long as the
federal claim is brought under Title 42, section 1983.

They
were glad to hear that Judge Douglas Woodlock, to whose docket the case
was assigned, recognized their argument as valid and issued an order
giving the defendants a chance to respond to the motion for a stay.


What seemed to be a promising start became somewhat confusing when,
three days later, Chester and Margaret were notified that Judge
Woodlock was no longer handling the case, which was reassigned to Judge
William Young, who promptly dismissed the case after a short hearing
scheduled within hours after the reassignment, on January 8, 2007.


The sudden and quite informal dismissal of the RICO case came in handy,
since the participants of the scheme could use it in various creative
ways, mostly to prove that Chester and his wife are troublemakers who
have to be punished for their refusal to accept the rules of the game
according to which lawyers always win.

(Mis)trial by Jury


The dismissal of the RICO complaint was brought up, as a strategic
crutch, in every single subsequent court hearing on any related matter.


It proved to be especially useful during a jury trial in the Superior
Court case against Donna Chalupowski, held in May 2007 before Judge
Kathe Tuttman.

Judge Tuttman, a former ADA in Essex County,
freshly appointed to the bench by Governor Mitt Romney in 2006,
‘inherited’ the “tar baby” Chalupowski v. Chalupowski case from Judges
Howard Whitehead and David Lowy, and, to her dismay, was stuck with it
for over three weeks.

Judge Tuttman used her time effectively
and turned the priceless opportunity to expose the scheme in front of a
jury into a carefully designed cover-up, which started with her
allowance of 12 out of 15 motions for protective orders brought by the
lawyers called to testify by Chester and Margaret. (After all, there
was an urgent need to cover up the cover-up so gracefully executed in
2005 by the Office of Jonathan Blodgett, to whose campaign Judge
Tuttman together with her husband, Alan, a criminal defense attorney,
made a generous contribution.)

Therefore, Judge Tutmann did
not allow any objections when Attorneys Corona and Metaxas (both
defendants in the RICO case) indulged in quoting over and over again
Judge DiGangi’s void judgment during their sworn testimony.

She
also listened politely when Donna’s Attorney, John Morris (another
defendant in the RICO case), was waving in front of the jury a copy of
the federal complaint, together with a copy of Judge DiGangi’s void
judgment (equally dog-eared and soiled as the one used by Joseph
Corona).

Attorney Morris made his point loud and clear that he
was appalled by the fact that he was sued by “these people,” the pro se
litigants telling their “sob stories,” the “adjudicated embezzlers,”
who put his client through the “torture” of protracted litigation, and
now were suing her for no reason. The jury was impressed and easily
convinced that a lawyer yelling so loud at the pro se plaintiffs must
be right.

While Chester and Margaret were struggling to follow
all the court rules, and to present all their evidence (90% of which,
including financial and medical experts’ testimony, was promptly
excluded by Judge Tuttman), Donna could sit back, relax, and enjoy the
show.

Every morning, Donna arrived at court with her
“entourage,” consisting of Attorney Morris and his two officemates,
Attorneys Kevin Foley and Mary Frances Milburn. Donna’s team of “fans”
also included her high school friend Judy Brennan (the Head Clerk at
Salem Superior Court), Attorney Carlotta Patten (who left Anthony
Mataxas’ Law Firm once she was offered a salaried position at the
Clerks’ Office at the Salem Superior Court), and Attorney Joseph
Collins, who could afford to spend long hours watching the trial (even
after he was informed that he would not be called to testify), because
he holds a salaried position with the Essex DA Office, and his
tax-payer-funded paycheck comes every week no matter how he spends his
time.

While Brennan, Patten and Collins were showing up just
for “moral support,” Attorneys Foley and Milburn were ‘stationed’ in
the courtroom for good, because they were entrusted with the important
task of coaching Donna, which they diligently did all the time, even
during her testimony, when they were communicating with her by various
hand signals and face expressions.

Judge Tuttman did not see
any of the communications (forbidden by law) because she was feverishly
writing in a large notebook whenever the communications between Donna
and her “coaches” were going on. At the same time, Attorney Morris was
repeatedly using his loud voice to object to 90% of questions posed by
the plaintiffs to the witnesses called by them.

The jury,
visibly impressed by Mr. Morris’ dramatic performance, took only 15
minutes to deliberate and found in favor of the defendant. Attorney
Morris gave Chester and Margaret one more “evil eye” (which he must
have learned from Joseph Corona) while Donna was getting hugs and
kisses from her fans and coaches, all perspiring from the excitement,
and the trial was over.

Chester and Margaret packed all their
exhibits (which they were not allowed to introduce into evidence) and
invited their expert witnesses (who were not allowed to testify) for
lunch.

In their mid-trial and post-verdict motions, Chester and
Margaret listed 15 reasons why the Judge should declare a mistrial.
Judge Tuttman denied the motion. The notice of appeal filed in June
2007, as of this writing, is yet to be acted upon.

On
November 24, 2007, Judge Tuttman made the front page of the Boston
Herald, when former Governor and presidential candidate Mitt Romney
called for her resignation after a violent convict, Daniel Tavares,
freed by Judge Tuttman in July 2007 from a Massachusetts prison, killed
a newlywed couple in Washington state, three months after his release.
According to Romney’s spokesman, Judge Tuttman’s ignoring warnings
about Tavares’ sociopathic tendencies represented an inexplicable lapse
in judgment and was inexcusable.

It appears that the Tavares case is not the first time that Judge Tuttman had a lapse in judgment.


Maybe Judge Tuttman would have a better understanding of Mr. Tavares’
mindset, if she gave herself (and the jury) a chance to hear what the
medical experts, ready to testify in the Chalupowski matter, had to
say.

Second Blitzkrieg

With the RICO case and the
Superior Court trial taken care of, there was nothing stopping the
schemers from finalizing the scheme.

They took a break over the
summer (after all, they all had worked hard to make their living and
deserved some vacation) and in early September 2007, the events of the
“Second Blitzkrieg” started rolling.

The new wave of the hate
letters came shortly after Judge DiGangi gave the lawyers the go ahead
by issuing his “temporary order,” by which he invited the parties to
“supply findings of fact, conclusions of law, and proposed judgment
pertaining to the division of the estate of the ward within 14 days.”
The non-capitalized word “ward” denotes 87-year-old Mary Jane
Chalupowski, still of sound mind and spirit, to the dismay of the
money-hungry group of lawyers and other beneficiaries of the scheme.


Normally, it is the job of a judge to formulate “findings of fact,
conclusions of law, and judgments.” In Essex Probate Court, however,
the work is customarily done by the lawyers, if they are to get what
they want.

Although the “temporary order” was dated September
10, 2007, (in Judge DiGangi’s own handwriting), Chester and Margaret
were not surprised that they did not receive it until September 18,
2007. This is the Essex Probate Court’s well-established practice to
give the lawyers some ‘headway’ before the pro se parties have a chance
to react to the notices issued by the court.

Encouraged by
Judge DiGangi’s invitation, the lawyers quickly resumed sending their
hate letters, disguised as “motions for attorneys fees” and “proposed
orders.”

To preserve their rights, and to gently remind the
Court that the “distribution” of Mary Jane Chalupowski’s assets
currently desired by the lawyers, was based on a void judgment issued
by Judge DiGangi in 2004, Chester and Margaret filed their Rule
60(b)(4) motion asking the Court to acknowledge and affirm the simple
fact that the void judgment was void.

Judge DiGangi found the
request amusing, circled the word “denied” on the rubber stamp placed
on the first page of the motion, then personally signed and dated the
denial October 15, 2007.

On November 5, 2007, Judge DiGangi
signed a “further judgment and rationale” granting almost all of the
wishes expressed by the lawyers in various pleadings filed by them
earlier and ordered the estate of Mary Jane Chalupowski to be put on
the market “forthwith.”

It may be a pure coincidence, but on
November 2, 2007, the Law Office of Marcus, Errico, Emmer and Brooks
representing the Board of Trustees of the Tuck Point Condominium Trust
notified Chester and Margaret that, since they owed $30,000 in “unpaid
condo fees,” the Law Firm of Marcus, Errico, Emmer and Brooks scheduled
a foreclosure sale of their home at Tuck Point for November 28, 2007.


As it was the case during the ‘first blitzkrieg’ in 2004, the fact that
Chester and Margaret do not owe a dime in “unpaid condominium common
expenses,” does not really matter now as well. The Tuck Point lawyers
have a judgment from the Salem District Court signed by Judge Robert
Cornetta, stating clearly that Chester and Margaret did not pay their
fees.

On November 15, 2007, the Beverly Citizen, published a
Legal Notice announcing the public action of Chester’s and Margaret’s
home, scheduled for Wednesday November 28, 2007 at 10:00 AM.


Now, everybody who reads the Beverly Citizen can see that Chester and
Margaret Chalupowski, apart from stealing “hundreds of thousands of
dollars” from the Chalupowski family trusts, do not pay their bills. By
the way, the cost of the ad is tacked onto the “other costs and fees”
incurred by the Tuck Point Trustees in pursuing their false claim.


Nobody reading the newspaper knows that the entire amount of $30,000,
claimed as a statutory lien against the unit owned by Chester and
Margaret, is not “unpaid condo fees,” but “attorneys’ fees” allegedly
generated by the Law Office of Marcus, Errico, Emmer, and Brooks, and
disguised as a claim of “unpaid condo fees” brought against Chester and
Margaret by the Tuck Point Trustees.

The readers of the local
newspapers, who may be, in good faith, contemplating getting a good
deal at the Tuck Point foreclosure sale, do not know that the “sale” is
part of an elaborate merger of two seemingly independent staged
litigation schemes masterminded through cool, calculating deliberation
of intelligent people who are just trying to make their living by
committing white-collar crimes and ruining other people’s lives in the
process.

Coordination, precision, and timing are the key
elements of a successful dual staged litigation scheme. The proficiency
with which the South Shore law firm of Marcus, Errico, Emmer and
Brooks, PC can execute the ‘lynching by court order’ is amazing and can
only by compared to that devised by the North Shore law firm of
Metaxas, Norman and Pidgeon, LLC.

They are cool, calculated
and deliberate. They efficiently use puppet plaintiffs, some of whom
genuinely believe that “their” lawyers work for them, and help them
“recover” “their” money. The problem is that the puppet plaintiffs do
not even care to find out whether what “their” lawyers are doing is
ethical or even legal.

The Tuck Point puppet plaintiffs do not
care that the Law Firm of Marcus, Errico, Emmer and Brooks is
well-known in New England and beyond for making their money by abusing
the provisions of Chapter 183, section 6C of the General Laws of
Massachusetts.

If this were a script for a movie, the
sequence of events, and the interrelation between the two streams of
events (one fostered by Judge DiGangi of the Essex Probate Court, and
the other one sponsored by Judge Cornetta of the Salem District Court)
would be rejected as too coincidental to be believable.

Under
the RICO statute, however, the interrelation, which would be considered
too coincidental for a movie, constitutes the essence of a successful
RICO complaint against white-collar criminals.

Law enforcement
authorities describe organized crime as “a continuing and
self-perpetuating criminal conspiracy, having an organized structure,
fed by fear and corruption, and motivated by greed.”

In some
instances the white-collar criminals are seen as a new, refined,
version of a lynch mob. A “high-tech” lynch mob, the kind described by
the U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in his recently
published memoir, My Grandfather’s Son, which, in addition to the story
of his growing up, contains a detailed account of the atrocities
experienced by him in the process of the Congressional hearings during
his confirmation as Supreme Court Justice.

Justice Thomas says, “the mob I faced carried no ropes or guns … its weapons were smooth-tongued lies …”

Justice Thomas is not alone.

*


On November 5, 2007, in the midst of the second blitzkrieg, Chester and
Margaret learned that Judge William Young of the United States District
Court for the District of Massachusetts reconsidered his January 8,
2007, decision, overturned his own dismissal of their RICO case, and
allowed the case to proceed.

On November 15, 2007, the Boston
Office of the U.S. Marshal started serving the RICO complaint on the
sixteen defendants. The message transmitted shortly thereafter to
several media outlets reads: “Civil RICO Suit Names Thirteen Lawyers
and Three Judges Involved in Staged Litigation Scheme .”

* * *

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