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<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Calibri><span style='font-size:11.0pt;
font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'>Fascinating but grim.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
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font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
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face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'><br>
<a
href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/09/how-the-elderly-lose-their-rights"><font
color=purple><span style='color:purple'>https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/09/how-the-elderly-lose-their-rights</span></font></a><o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
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<h1 style='margin-bottom:6.0pt'><b><font size=6 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:28.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>How the Elderly Lose
Their Rights</span></font></b><o:p></o:p></h1>
<h2 style='margin-top:0in;-webkit-hyphens: manual;color:rgba(27, 27, 27, 0.65098);
max-width: 100%'><b><font size=6 face=Georgia><span style='font-size:21.5pt;
font-family:"Georgia","serif";font-weight:normal'>Guardians can sell the assets
and control the lives of senior citizens without their consent—and reap a
profit from it.</span></font></b><o:p></o:p></h2>
<div style='margin-bottom:17.4pt;-webkit-hyphens: manual;max-width: 100%'>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'><a
href="x-msg://8/contributors/rachel-aviv" title="Rachel Aviv"><font
color="#416ed2"><span style='color:#416ED2'>Rachel Aviv</span></font></a></span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
</div>
<div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>For years, Rudy North
woke up at 9<span class=apple-converted-space> </span><em><i><font
face=Georgia><span style='font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>A</span></font></i></em>.<em><i><font
face=Georgia><span style='font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>M</span></font></i></em>.
and read the Las Vegas<span class=apple-converted-space> </span><em><i><font
face=Georgia><span style='font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>Review-Journal</span></font></i></em><span
class=apple-converted-space> </span>while eating a piece of toast. Then he
read a novel—he liked James Patterson and Clive Cussler—or, if he was feeling
more ambitious, Freud. On scraps of paper and legal notepads, he jotted down
thoughts sparked by his reading. “Deep below the rational part of our brain is
an underground ocean where strange things swim,” he wrote on one notepad. On another,
“Life: the longer it cooks, the better it tastes.”</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>Rennie, his wife of
fifty-seven years, was slower to rise. She was recovering from lymphoma and
suffered from neuropathy so severe that her legs felt like sausages. Each
morning, she spent nearly an hour in the bathroom applying makeup and lotions,
the same brands she’d used for forty years. She always emerged wearing
pale-pink lipstick. Rudy, who was prone to grandiosity, liked to refer to her
as “my amour.”</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>On the Friday before
Labor Day, 2013, the Norths had just finished their toast when a nurse, who
visited five times a week to help Rennie bathe and dress, came to their house,
in Sun City Aliante, an “active adult” community in Las Vegas. They had moved
there in 2005, when Rudy, a retired consultant for broadcasters, was
sixty-eight and Rennie was sixty-six. They took pride in their view of the golf
course, though neither of them played golf.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>Rudy chatted with the
nurse in the kitchen for twenty minutes, joking about marriage and laundry,
until there was a knock at the door. A stocky woman with shiny black hair
introduced herself as April Parks, the owner of the company A Private
Professional Guardian. She was accompanied by three colleagues, who didn’t give
their names. Parks told the Norths that she had an order from the Clark County
Family Court to “remove” them from their home. She would be taking them to an
assisted-living facility. “Go and gather your things,” she said.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>Rennie began crying.
“This is my home,” she said.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>One of Parks’s
colleagues said that if the Norths didn’t comply he would call the police. Rudy
remembers thinking, You’re going to put my wife and me in jail for this? But he
felt too confused to argue.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>Parks drove a Pontiac
G-6 convertible with a license plate that read “<em><i><font face=Georgia><span
style='font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>CRTGRDN</span></font></i></em>,” for
“court guardian.” In the past twelve years, she had been a guardian for some
four hundred wards of the court. Owing to age or disability, they had been
deemed incompetent, a legal term that describes those who are unable to make
reasoned choices about their lives or their property. As their guardian, Parks
had the authority to manage their assets, and to choose where they lived, whom
they associated with, and what medical treatment they received. They lost
nearly all their civil rights.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>Without realizing it,
the Norths had become temporary wards of the court. Parks had filed an
emergency ex-parte petition, which provides an exception to the rule that both
parties must be notified of any argument before a judge. She had alleged that
the Norths posed a “substantial risk for mismanagement of medications,
financial loss and physical harm.” She submitted a brief letter from a
physician’s assistant, whom Rennie had seen once, stating that “the patient’s
husband can no longer effectively take care of the patient at home as his
dementia is progressing.” She also submitted a letter from one of Rudy’s
doctors, who described him as “confused and agitated.”</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>Rudy and Rennie had not
undergone any cognitive assessments. They had never received a diagnosis of
dementia. In addition to Freud, Rudy was working his way through Nietzsche and
Plato. Rennie read romance novels.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>Parks told the Norths
that if they didn’t come willingly an ambulance would take them to the
facility, a place she described as a “respite.” Still crying, Rennie put
cosmetics and some clothes into a suitcase. She packed so quickly that she
forgot her cell phone and Rudy’s hearing aid. After thirty-five minutes,
Parks’s assistant led the Norths to her car. When a neighbor asked what was
happening, Rudy told him, “We’ll just be gone for a little bit.” He was too
proud to draw attention to their predicament. “Just think of it as a
mini-vacation,” he told Rennie.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
</div>
<div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>After the Norths left,
Parks walked through the house with Cindy Breck, the owner of Caring Transitions,
a company that relocates seniors and sells their belongings at estate sales.
Breck and Parks had a routine. “We open drawers,” Parks said at a deposition.
“We look in closets. We pull out boxes, anything that would store—that would
keep paperwork, would keep valuables.” She took a pocket watch, birth
certificates, insurance policies, and several collectible coins.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>The Norths’ daughter,
Julie Belshe, came to visit later that afternoon. A fifty-three-year-old mother
of three sons, she and her husband run a small business designing and
constructing pools. She lived ten miles away and visited her parents nearly
every day, often taking them to her youngest son’s football games. She was her
parents’ only living child; her brother and sister had died.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>She knocked on the front
door several times and then tried to push the door open, but it was locked. She
was surprised to see the kitchen window closed; her parents always left it
slightly open. She drove to the Sun City Aliante clubhouse, where her parents
sometimes drank coffee. When she couldn’t find them there, she thought that
perhaps they had gone on an errand together—the farthest they usually drove was
to Costco. But, when she returned to the house, it was still empty.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>That weekend, she called
her parents several times. She also called two hospitals to see if they had
been in an accident. She called their landlord, too, and he agreed to visit the
house. He reported that there were no signs of them. She told her husband, “I
think someone kidnapped my parents.”</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>On the Tuesday after
Labor Day, she drove to the house again and found a note taped to the door: “In
case of emergency, contact guardian April Parks.” Belshe dialled the number.
Parks, who had a brisk, girlish way of speaking, told Belshe that her parents
had been taken to Lakeview Terrace, an assisted-living facility in Boulder
City, nine miles from the Arizona border. She assured Belshe that the staff
there would take care of all their needs.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>“You can’t just walk
into somebody’s home and take them!” Belshe told her.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>Parks responded calmly,
“It’s legal. It’s legal.”</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
</div>
<div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>Guardianship derives
from the state’s<span class=apple-converted-space> </span><em><i><font
face=Georgia><span style='font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>parens patriae</span></font></i></em><span
class=apple-converted-space> </span>power, its duty to act as a parent for
those considered too vulnerable to care for themselves. “The King shall have
the custody of the lands of natural fools, taking the profits of them without
waste or destruction, and shall find them their necessaries,” reads the English
statute<span class=apple-converted-space> </span><em><i><font
face=Georgia><span style='font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>De Prerogative Regis</span></font></i></em>,
from 1324. The law was imported to the colonies—guardianship is still
controlled by state, not federal, law—and has remained largely intact for the
past eight hundred years. It establishes a relationship between ward and
guardian that is rooted in trust.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>In the United States, a
million and a half adults are under the care of guardians, either family
members or professionals, who control some two hundred and seventy-three
billion dollars in assets, according to an auditor for the guardianship fraud
program in Palm Beach County. Little is known about the outcome of these
arrangements, because states do not keep complete figures on guardianship
cases—statutes vary widely—and, in most jurisdictions, the court records are
sealed. A Government Accountability report from 2010 said, “We could not locate
a single Web site, federal agency, state or local entity, or any other
organization that compiles comprehensive information on this issue.” A study
published this year by the American Bar Association found that “an unknown
number of adults languish under guardianship” when they no longer need it, or
never did. The authors wrote that “guardianship is generally “permanent,
leaving no way out—‘until death do us part.’ ”</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>When the Norths were
removed from their home, they joined nearly nine thousand adult wards in the
Las Vegas Valley. In the past twenty years, the city has promoted itself as a
retirement paradise. Attracted by the state’s low taxes and a dry, sunny
climate, elderly people leave their families behind to resettle in newly
constructed senior communities. “The whole town sparkled, pulling older people
in with the prospect of the American Dream at a reasonable price,” a former
real-estate agent named Terry Williams told me. Roughly thirty per cent of the
people who move to Las Vegas are senior citizens, and the number of Nevadans
older than eighty-five has risen by nearly eighty per cent in the past decade.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>In Nevada, as in many
states, anyone can become a guardian by taking a course, as long as he or she
has not been convicted of a felony or recently declared bankruptcy. Elizabeth
Brickfield, a Las Vegas lawyer who has worked in guardianship law for twenty
years, said that about fifteen years ago, as the state’s elderly population
swelled, “all these private guardians started arriving, and the docket
exploded. The court became a factory.”</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>Pamela Teaster, the
director of the Center for Gerontology at Virginia Tech and one of the few
scholars in the country who study guardianship, told me that, though most
guardians assume their duties for good reasons, the guardianship system is “a
morass, a total mess.” She said, “It is unconscionable that we don’t have any
data, when you think about the vast power given to a guardian. It is one of
society’s most drastic interventions.”</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
</div>
<div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>After talking to Parks,
Belshe drove forty miles to Lakeview Terrace, a complex of stucco buildings
designed to look like a hacienda. She found her parents in a small room with a
kitchenette and a window overlooking the parking lot. Rennie was in a
wheelchair beside the bed, and Rudy was curled up on a love seat in the fetal
position. There was no phone in the room. Medical-alert buttons were strung
around their necks. “They were like two lost children,” Belshe said.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>She asked her parents
who Parks was and where she could find the court order, but, she said, “they
were overwhelmed and humiliated, and they didn’t know what was going on.” They
had no idea how or why Parks had targeted them as wards. Belshe was struck by
their passive acceptance. “It was like they had Stockholm syndrome or
something,” she told me.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>Belshe acknowledged that
her parents needed a few hours of help each day, but she had never questioned
their ability to live alone. “They always kept their house really nice and
clean, like a museum,” she said. Although Rudy’s medical records showed that he
occasionally had “staring spells,” all his medical-progress notes from 2013
described him as alert and oriented. He did most of the couple’s cooking and
shopping, because Rennie, though lucid, was in so much pain that she rarely
left the house. Belshe sometimes worried that her father inadvertently
encouraged her mother to be docile: “She’s a very smart woman, though she
sometimes acts like she’s not. I have to tell her, ‘That’s not cute,
Mom.’ ”</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>When Belshe called Parks
to ask for the court order, Parks told her that she was part of the “sandwich
generation,” and that it would be too overwhelming for her to continue to care
for her children and her parents at the same time. Parks billed her wards’
estates for each hour that she spent on their case; the court placed no limits
on guardians’ fees, as long as they appeared “reasonable.” Later, when Belshe
called again to express her anger, Parks charged the Norths twenty-four dollars
for the eight-minute conversation. “I could not understand what the purpose of
the call was other than she wanted me to know they had rights,” Parks wrote in
a detailed invoice. “I terminated the phone call as she was very hostile and
angry.”</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
</div>
<div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>A month after removing
the Norths from their house, Parks petitioned to make the guardianship
permanent. She was represented by an attorney who was paid four hundred dollars
an hour by the Norths’ estate. A hearing was held at Clark County Family Court.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>The Clark County
guardianship commissioner, a lawyer named Jon Norheim, has presided over nearly
all the guardianship cases in the county since 2005. He works under the
supervision of a judge, but his orders have the weight of a formal ruling.
Norheim awarded a guardianship to Parks, on average, nearly once a week. She
had up to a hundred wards at a time. “I love April Parks,” he said at one
hearing, describing her and two other professional guardians, who frequently
appeared in his courtroom, as “wonderful, good-hearted, social-worker types.”</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>Norheim’s court
perpetuated a cold, unsentimental view of family relations: the ingredients for
a good life seemed to have little to do with one’s children and siblings. He
often dismissed the objections of relatives, telling them that his only concern
was the best interest of the wards, which he seemed to view in a social vacuum.
When siblings fought over who would be guardian, Norheim typically ordered a
neutral professional to assume control, even when this isolated the wards from
their families.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>Rudy had assured Belshe
that he would protest the guardianship, but, like most wards in the country,
Rudy and Rennie were not represented by counsel. As Rudy stood before the
commissioner, he convinced himself that guardianship offered him and Rennie a
lifetime of care without being a burden to anyone they loved. He told Norheim,
“The issue really is her longevity—what suits her.” Belshe, who sat in the
courtroom, said, “I was shaking my head. No, no, no—don’t do that!” Rennie was
silent.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>Norheim ordered that the
Norths become permanent wards of the court. “Chances are, I’ll probably never
see you folks again; you’ll work everything out,” he said, laughing. “I very
rarely see people after the initial time in court.” The hearing lasted ten
minutes.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
</div>
<div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>The following month,
Even Tide Life Transitions, a company that Parks often hired, sold most of the
Norths’ belongings. “The general condition of this inventory is good,” an
appraiser wrote. Two lithographs by Renoir were priced at thirty-eight hundred
dollars, and a glass cocktail table (“Client states that it is a Brancusi design”)
was twelve hundred and fifty dollars. The Norths also had several pastel
drawings by their son, Randy, who died in a motorcycle accident at the age of
thirty-two, as well as Kachina dolls, a Bose radio, a Dyson vacuum cleaner, a
Peruvian tapestry, a motion-step exerciser, a LeRoy Neiman sketch of a bar in
Dublin, and two dozen pairs of Clarke shoes. According to Parks’s calculations,
the Norths had roughly fifty thousand dollars. Parks transferred their savings,
held at the Bank of America, to an account in her name.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>Rennie repeatedly asked
for her son’s drawings, and for the family photographs on her refrigerator.
Rudy pined for his car, a midnight-blue 2010 Chrysler, which came to symbolize
the life he had lost. He missed the routine interactions that driving had
allowed him. “Everybody at the pharmacy was my buddy,” he said. Now he and
Rennie felt like exiles. Rudy said, “They kept telling me, ‘Oh, you don’t have
to worry: your car is fine, and this and that.’ ” A month later, he said,
“they finally told me, ‘Actually, we sold your car.’ I said, ‘What in the hell
did you sell it for?’ ” It was bought for less than eight thousand
dollars, a price that Rudy considered insulting.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>Rudy lingered in the
dining room after eating breakfast each morning, chatting with other residents
of Lakeview Terrace. He soon discovered that ten other wards of April Parks
lived there. His next-door neighbor, Adolfo Gonzalez, a short, bald
seventy-one-year-old who had worked as a maître d’ at the MGM Grand Las Vegas,
had become Parks’s ward at a hearing that lasted a minute and thirty-one
seconds.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>Gonzalez, who had
roughly three hundred and fifty thousand dollars in assets, urged Rudy not to
accept the nurse’s medications. “If you take the pills, they’ll make sure you
don’t make it to court,” he said. Gonzalez had been prescribed the
antipsychotic medications Risperdal and Depakote, which he hid in the side of
his mouth without swallowing. He wanted to remain vigilant. He often spoke of a
Salvador Dali painting that had been lost when Parks took over his life. Once,
she charged him two hundred and ten dollars for a visit in which, according to
her invoice, he expressed that “he feels like a prisoner.”</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>Rudy was so distressed
by his conversations with Gonzalez that he asked to see a psychologist. “I
thought maybe he’d give me some sort of objective learning as to what I was
going through,” he said. “I wanted to ask basic questions, like What the hell
is going on?” Rudy didn’t find the session illuminating, but he felt a little boost
to his self-esteem when the psychologist asked that he return for a second
appointment. “I guess he found me terribly charming,” he told me.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>Rudy liked to fantasize
about an alternative life as a psychoanalyst, and he tried to befriend the
wards who seemed especially hopeless. “Loneliness is a physical pain that hurts
all over,” he wrote in his notebook. He bought a pharmaceutical encyclopedia
and advised the other wards about medications they’d been prescribed. He also
ran for president of the residents, promising that under his leadership the
kitchen would no longer advertise canned food as homemade. (He lost—he’s not
sure if anyone besides Rennie voted for him—but he did win a seat on the
residents’ council.)</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>He was particularly
concerned about a ward of Parks’s named Marlene Homer, a seventy-year-old woman
who had been a professor. “Now she was almost hiding behind the pillars,” Rudy
said. “She was so obsequious. She was, like, ‘Run me over. Run me over.’ ”
She’d become a ward in 2012, after Parks told the court, “She has admitted to
strange thoughts, depression, and doing things she can’t explain.” On a
certificate submitted to the court, an internist had checked a box indicating
that Homer was “unable to attend the guardianship court hearing because______,”
but he didn’t fill in a reason.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>The Norths could guess
which residents were Parks’s wards by the way they were dressed. Gonzalez wore
the same shirt to dinner nearly every day. “Forgive me,” he told the others at
his table. When a friend tried to take him shopping, Parks prevented the
excursion because she didn’t know the friend. Rennie had also tried to get more
clothes. “I reminded ward that she has plenty of clothing in her closet,” Parks
wrote. “I let her know that they are on a tight budget.” The Norths’ estate was
charged a hundred and eighty dollars for the conversation.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>Another resident,
Barbara Neely, a fifty-five-year-old with schizophrenia, repeatedly asked Parks
to buy her outfits for job interviews. She was applying for a position with the
Department of Education. After Neely’s third week at Lakeview Terrace, Parks’s
assistant sent Parks a text. “Can you see Barbara Neely anytime this week?” she
wrote. “She has questions on the guardianship and how she can get out of it.”
Parks responded, “I can and she can’t.” Neely had been in the process of
selling her house, for a hundred and sixty-eight thousand dollars, when Parks
became her guardian and took charge of the sale.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>The rationale for the
guardianship of Norbert Wilkening, who lived on the bottom floor of the
facility, in the memory-care ward, for people with dementia (“the snake pit,”
Rudy called it), was also murky. Parks’s office manager, who advertised himself
as a “Qualified Dementia Care Specialist”—a credential acquired through video
training sessions—had given Wilkening a “Mini-Mental State Examination,” a list
of eleven questions and tasks, including naming as many animals as possible in
a minute. Wilkening had failed. His daughter, Amy, told me, “I didn’t see
anything that was happening to him other than a regular getting-older process,
but when I was informed by all these people that he had all these problems I
was, like, Well, maybe I’m just in denial. I’m not a professional.” She said
that Parks was “so highly touted. By herself, by the social workers, by the
judge, by everyone that knew her.”</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>At a hearing, when Amy
complained to Norheim that Parks didn’t have time for her father, he replied,
“Yeah, she’s an industry at this point.”</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
</div>
<div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>As Belshe spoke to more
wards and their families, she began to realize that Lakeview Terrace was not
the only place where wards were lodged, and that Parks was not the only
guardian removing people from their homes for what appeared to be superficial
reasons. Hundreds of cases followed the same pattern. It had become routine for
guardians in Clark County to petition for temporary guardianship on an ex-parte
basis. They told the court that they had to intervene immediately because the
ward faced a medical emergency that was only vaguely described: he or she was
demented or disoriented, and at risk of exploitation or abuse. The guardians
attached a brief physician’s certificate that contained minimal details and
often stated that the ward was too incapacitated to attend a court hearing.
Debra Bookout, an attorney at the Legal Aid Center of Southern Nevada, told me,
“When a hospital or rehab facility needs to free up a bed, or when the patient
is not paying his bills, some doctors get sloppy, and they will sign anything.”
A recent study conducted by Hunter College found that a quarter of guardianship
petitions in New York were brought by nursing homes and hospitals, sometimes as
a means of collecting on overdue bills.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>It often took several
days for relatives to realize what had happened. When they tried to contest the
guardianship or become guardians themselves, they were dismissed as unsuitable,
and disparaged in court records as being neglectful, or as drug addicts,
gamblers, and exploiters. (Belshe was described by Parks as a “reported addict”
who “has no contact with the proposed ward,” an allegation that Belshe didn’t
see until it was too late to challenge.) Family who lived out of state were
disqualified from serving as guardians, because the law prohibited the
appointment of anyone who didn’t live in Nevada.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>Once the court approved
the guardianship, the wards were often removed from their homes, which were
eventually sold. Terry Williams, whose father’s estate was taken over by
strangers even though he’d named her the executor of his will, has spent years
combing through guardianship, probate, and real-estate records in Clark County.
“I kept researching, because I was so fascinated that these people could
literally take over the lives and assets of people under color of law, in less
than ten minutes, and nobody was asking questions,” she told me. “These people
spent their lives accumulating wealth and, in a blink of an eye, it was someone
else’s.”</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>Williams has reviewed
hundreds of cases involving Jared Shafer, who is considered the godfather of
guardians in Nevada. In the records room of the courthouse, she was afraid to
say Shafer’s name out loud. In the course of his thirty-five-year career,
Shafer has assumed control of more than three thousand wards and estates and
trained a generation of guardians. In 1979, he became the county’s public
administrator, handling the estates of people who had no relatives in Nevada,
as well as the public guardian, serving wards when no family members or private
guardians were available. In 2003, he left government and founded his own
private guardianship and fiduciary business; he transferred the number of his
government-issued phone to himself.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>Williams took records
from Shafer’s and other guardians’ cases to the Las Vegas police department
several times. She tried to explain, she said, that “this is a racketeering
operation that is fee-based. There’s no brown paper bag handed off in an alley.
The payoff is the right to bill the estate.” The department repeatedly told her
that it was a civil issue, and refused to take a report. In 2006, she submitted
a typed statement, listing twenty-three statutes that she thought had been
violated, but an officer wrote in the top right corner, “<em><i><font
face=Georgia><span style='font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>NOT A POLICE MATTER</span></font></i></em>.”
Adam Woodrum, an estate lawyer in Las Vegas, told me that he’s worked with
several wards and their families who have brought their complaints to the
police. “They can’t even get their foot in the door,” he said.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>Acting as her own
attorney, Williams filed a racketeering suit in federal court against Shafer
and the lawyers who represented him. At a hearing before the United States
District Court of Central California in 2009, she told the judge, “They are
trumping up ways and means to deem people incompetent and take their assets.”
The case was dismissed. “The scheme is ingenious,” she told me. “How do you
come up with a crime that literally none of the victims can articulate without
sounding like they’re nuts? The same insane allegations keep surfacing from
people who don’t know each other.”</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>In 2002, in a petition
to the Clark County District Court, a fifty-seven-year-old man complained that
his mother had lost her constitutional rights because her kitchen was
understocked and a few bills hadn’t been paid. The house they shared was then
placed on the market. The son wrote, “If the only showing necessary to sell the
home right out from under someone is that their ‘estate’ would benefit, then no
house in Clark County is safe, nor any homeowner.” Under the guise of
benevolent paternalism, guardians seemed to be creating a kind of capitalist dystopia:
people’s quality of life was being destroyed in order to maximize their capital.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>When Concetta Mormon, a
wealthy woman who owned a Montessori school, became Shafer’s ward because she
had aphasia, Shafer sold the school midyear, even though students were
enrolled. At a hearing after the sale, Mormon’s daughter, Victoria Cloutier,
constantly spoke out of turn. The judge, Robert Lueck, ordered that she be
handcuffed and placed in a holding cell while the hearing continued. Two hours
later, when Cloutier was allowed to return for the conclusion, the judge told
her that she had thirty days in which to vacate her mother’s house. If she
didn’t leave, she would be evicted and her belongings would be taken to
Goodwill.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>The opinions of wards
were also disregarded. In 2010, Guadalupe Olvera, a ninety-year-old veteran of
the Second World War, repeatedly asked that his daughter and not Shafer be
appointed his guardian. “The ward is not to go to court,” Shafer instructed his
assistants. When Olvera was finally permitted to attend a hearing, nearly a
year after becoming a ward, he expressed his desire to live with his daughter
in California, rather than under Shafer’s care. “Why is everybody against
that?” he asked Norheim. “I don’t need that man.” Although Nevada’s
guardianship law requires that courts favor relatives over professionals,
Norheim continued the guardianship, saying, “The priority ship sailed.”</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>When Olvera’s daughter
eventually defied the court’s orders and took her father to live at her seaside
home in Northern California, Norheim’s supervisor, Judge Charles Hoskin, issued
an arrest warrant for her “immediate arrest and incarceration” without bail.
The warrant was for contempt of court, but Norheim said at least five times
from the bench that she had “kidnapped” Olvera. At a hearing, Norheim
acknowledged that he wasn’t able to send an officer across state lines to
arrest the daughter. Shafer said, “Maybe I can.”</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>Shafer held so much sway
in the courtroom that, in 2013, when an attorney complained that the bank
account of a ward named Kristina Berger had “no money left and no records to
explain where it went,” Shafer told Norheim, “Close the courtroom.” Norheim
immediately complied. A dozen people in attendance were forced to leave.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
</div>
<div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>One of Shafer’s former bookkeepers,
Lisa Clifton, who was hired in 2012, told me that Shafer used to brag about his
political connections, saying, “I wrote the laws.” In 1995, he persuaded the
Nevada Senate Committee on Government Affairs to write a bill that allowed the
county to receive interest on money that the public guardian invested. “This is
what I want you to put in the statute, and I will tell you that you will get a
rousing hand from a couple of judges who practice our probate,” he said. At
another hearing, he asked the committee to write an amendment permitting public
guardians to take control of people’s property in five days, without a court
order. “This bill is not ‘Big Brother’ if you trust the person who is doing the
job,” he said. (After a senator expressed concern that the law allowed
“intervention into somebody’s life without establishing some sort of reason why
you are doing it,” the committee declined to recommend it.)</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>Clifton observed that
Shafer almost always took a cynical view of family members: they were never
motivated by love or duty, only by avarice. “ ‘They just want the
money’—that was his answer to everything,” she told me. “And I’m thinking to
myself, Well, when family members die they pass it down to their children.
Isn’t that just the normal progression of things?”</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>After a few months on
the job, Clifton was asked to work as a guardian, substituting for an absent
employee, though she had never been trained. Her first assignment was to
supervise a visit with a man named Alvin Passer, who was dying in the
memory-care unit of a nursing home. His partner of eight years, Olive Manoli,
was permitted a brief visit to say goodbye. Her visits had been restricted by
Shafer—his lawyer told the court that Passer became “agitated and sexually
aggressive” in her presence—and she hadn’t seen Passer in months. In a futile
attempt to persuade the court to allow her to be with him, Manoli had submitted
a collection of love letters, as well as notes from ten people describing her
desire to care for Passer for the rest of his life. “I was absolutely
appalled,” Clifton said. “She was this very sweet lady, and I said, ‘Go in
there and spend as much time with him as you want.’ Tears were rolling down her
cheeks.”</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>The family seemed to
have suffered a form of court-sanctioned gaslighting. Passer’s daughter, Joyce,
a psychiatric nurse who specialized in geriatrics, had been abruptly removed as
her father’s co-guardian, because she appeared “unwilling or (more likely)
unable to conduct herself rationally in the Ward’s best interests,” according
to motions filed by one of Shafer’s attorneys.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>She and Manoli had
begged Norheim not to appoint Shafer as guardian. “Sir, he’s abusive,” their
lawyer said in court.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>“He’s as good as we got,
and I trust him completely,” Norheim responded.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>Joyce Passer was so
confused by the situation that, she said, “I thought I was crazy.” Then she
received a call from a blocked number. It was Terry Williams, who did not
reveal her identity. She had put together a list of a half-dozen family members
who she felt were “ready to receive some kind of verbal support.” She told
Passer, “Look, you are not nuts. This is real. Everything you are thinking is
true. This has been going on for years.”</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
</div>
<div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>During Rennie North’s
first year at Lakeview Terrace, she gained sixty pounds. Parks had switched the
Norths’ insurance, for reasons she never explained, and Rennie began seeing new
doctors, who prescribed Valium, Prozac, the sedative Temazepam, Oxycodone, and
Fentanyl. The doses steadily increased. Rudy, who had hip pain, was prescribed
Oxycodone and Valium. When he sat down to read, the sentences floated past his
eyes or appeared in duplicate. “Ward seemed very tired and his eyes were
glassy,” Parks wrote in an invoice.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>Belshe found it
increasingly hard to communicate with her parents, who napped for much of the
day. “They were being overmedicated to the point where they weren’t really
there,” she said. The Norths’ grandsons, who used to see them every week,
rarely visited. “It was degrading for them to see us so degraded,” Rudy said.
Parks noticed that Rennie was acting helpless, and urged her to “try harder to
be more motivated and not be so dependent on others.” Rudy and Rennie began
going to Sunday church services at the facility, even though they were Jewish.
Rudy was heartened by what he heard in the pastor’s message: “Don’t give up.
God will help you get out of here.” He began telling people, “We are living the
life of Job.”</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>At the end of 2014,
Lakeview Terrace hired a new director, Julie Liebo, who resisted Parks’s orders
that medical information about wards be kept from their families. Liebo told
me, “The families were devastated that they couldn’t know if the residents were
in surgery or hear anything about their health. They didn’t understand why
they’d been taken out of the picture. They’d ask, ‘Can you just tell me if
she’s alive?’ ” Liebo tried to comply with the rules, because she didn’t
want to violate medical-privacy laws; as guardian, Parks was entitled to choose
what was disclosed. Once, though, Liebo took pity on the sister of an
eighty-year-old ward named Dorothy Smith, who was mourning a dog that Parks had
given away, and told her that Smith was stable. Liebo said that Parks, who was
by then the secretary of the Nevada Guardianship Association, called her immediately.
“She threatened my license and said she could have me arrested,” Liebo told me.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>After Liebo arrived,
Parks began removing wards from Lakeview Terrace with less than a day’s notice.
A woman named Linda Phillips, who had dementia, was told that she was going to
the beauty salon. She never returned. Marlene Homer, the ward whose ailments
were depression and “strange thoughts,” was taken away in a van, screaming.
Liebo had asked the state ombudsman to come to the facility and stop the
removals, but nothing could be done. “We stood there completely helpless,”
Liebo said. “We had no idea where they were going.” Liebo said that other wards
asked her if they would be next.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>Liebo alerted the
compliance officer for the Clark County Family Court that Parks was removing
residents “without any concern for them and their choice to stay here.” She
also reported her complaints to the police, the Department of Health Services,
the Bureau of Health Care, and Nevada Adult Protective Services. She said each
agency told her that it didn’t have the authority or the jurisdiction to
intervene.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
</div>
<div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>At the beginning of
2015, Parks told the Norths that they would be leaving Lakeview Terrace.
“Finances are low and the move is out of our control,” Parks wrote. It was all
arranged so quickly that, Rudy said, “we didn’t have time to say goodbye to
people we’d been eating with for seventeen months.” Parks arranged for Caring
Transitions to move them to the Wentworth, a less expensive assisted-living
facility. Liebo said that, the night before the move, Rudy began “shouting
about the Holocaust, that this was like being in Nazi Germany.” Liebo didn’t
think the reference was entirely misguided. “He reverted to a point where he
had no rights as a human being,” she said. “He was no longer the caregiver, the
man, the husband—all of the things that gave his life meaning.” Liebo also
didn’t understand why Belshe had been marginalized. “She seemed like she had a
great relationship with her parents,” she said.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>Belshe showed up at 9<span
class=apple-converted-space> </span><em><i><font face=Georgia><span
style='font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>A</span></font></i></em>.<em><i><font
face=Georgia><span style='font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>M</span></font></i></em>.
to help her parents with the move, but when she arrived Parks’s assistant,
Heidi Kramer, told her that her parents had already left. Belshe “emotionally
crashed,” as Liebo put it. She yelled that her parents didn’t even wake up
until nine or later—what was the rush? In an invoice, Kramer wrote that Belshe
“began to yell and scream, her behavior was out of control, she was taking
pictures and yelling, ‘April Parks is a thief.’ ” Kramer called the
police. Liebo remembers that an officer “looked at Julie Belshe and told her
she had no rights, and she didn’t.”</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>Belshe cried as she
drove to the Wentworth, in Las Vegas. When she arrived, Parks was there, and
refused to let her see her parents. Parks wrote, “I told her that she was too
distraught to see her parents, and that she needed to leave.” Belshe wouldn’t,
so Parks asked the receptionist to call the police. When the police arrived,
Belshe told them, “I just want to hug my parents and make sure they’re O.K.” An
officer handed her a citation for trespassing, saying that if she returned to
the facility she would be arrested.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>Parks wrote that the
Norths were “very happy with the new room and thanked us several times,” but
Rudy remembers feeling as if he had “ended up in the sewer.” Their room was
smaller than the one at Lakeview Terrace, and the residents at the Wentworth
seemed older and sicker. “There were people sitting in their chairs,
half-asleep,” Rudy said. “Their tongues hung out.”</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>Rennie spent nearly all
her time in her wheelchair or in bed, her eyes half-closed. Her face had become
bloated. One night, she was so agitated that the nurses gave her Haldol, a drug
commonly used to treat schizophrenia. When Rudy asked her questions, Rennie
said “What?” in a soft, remote voice.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
</div>
<div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>Shortly after her
parents’ move, Belshe called an editor of the Vegas<span
class=apple-converted-space> </span><em><i><font face=Georgia><span
style='font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>Voice</span></font></i></em>, a newspaper
distributed to all the mailboxes in senior communities in Las Vegas. In recent
months, the paper had published three columns warning readers about Clark
County guardians, writing that they “have been lining their pockets at the
expense of unwitting seniors for a very long time.”</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>At Belshe’s urging, the
paper’s political editor, Rana Goodman, visited the Norths, and published an
article in the<span class=apple-converted-space> </span><em><i><font
face=Georgia><span style='font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>Voice</span></font></i></em>,
describing Rudy as “the most articulate, soft spoken person I have met in a
very long time.” She called Clark County’s guardianship system a “(legal) elder
abuse racket” and urged readers to sign a petition demanding that the Nevada
legislature reform the laws. More than three thousand people signed.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>Two months later, the<span
class=apple-converted-space> </span><em><i><font face=Georgia><span
style='font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>Review-Journal</span></font></i></em><span
class=apple-converted-space> </span>ran an investigation, titled<span
class=apple-converted-space> </span><a
href="https://www.reviewjournal.com/local/local-las-vegas/clark-countys-private-guardians-may-protect-or-just-steal-and-abuse/"
target="_blank"><font color="#416ed2"><span style='color:#416ED2'>“Clark
County’s Private Guardians May Protect—Or Just Steal and Abuse,”</span></font></a><span
class=apple-converted-space> </span>which described complaints against
Shafer going back to the early eighties, when two of his employees were
arrested for stealing from the estates of dead people.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>In May, 2015, a month
after the article appeared, when the Norths went to court to discuss their
finances local journalists were in the courtroom and Norheim seemed chastened.
“I have grave concerns about this case,” he said. He noted that Parks had sold
the Norths’ belongings without proper approval from his court. Parks had been
doing this routinely for years, and, according to her, the court had always
accepted her accounting and her fees. Her lawyer, Aileen Cohen, said,
“Everything was done for the wards’ benefit, to support the wards.”</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>Norheim announced that
he was suspending Parks as the Norths’ guardian—the first time she had been
removed from a case for misconduct.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>“This is important,”
Rudy, who was wearing a double-breasted suit, said in court. “This is hope. I
am coming here and I have hope.” He quoted the Bible, Thomas Jefferson, and
Euripides, until Belshe finally touched his elbow and said, “Just sit down,
Dad.”</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>When Rudy apologized for
being “overzealous,” Norheim told him, “This is your life. This is your
liberty. You have every right to be here. You have every right to be involved
in this project.”</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>After the hearing, Parks
texted her husband, “I am finished.”</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
</div>
<div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>Last March, Parks and
her lawyer, along with her office manager and her husband, were indicted for
perjury and theft, among other charges. The indictment was narrowly focussed on
their double billings and their sloppy accounting, but, in a detailed summary
of the investigation, Jaclyn O’Malley, who led the probe for the Nevada
Attorney General’s Office, made passing references to the “collusion of
hospital social workers and medical staff” who profited from their connection
to Parks. At Parks’s grand-jury trial, her assistant testified that she and
Parks went to hospitals and attorneys’ offices for the purpose of “building
relationships to generate more client leads.” Parks secured a contract with six
medical facilities whose staff agreed to refer patients to her—an arrangement
that benefitted the facilities, since Parks controlled the decisions of a large
pool of their potential consumers. Parks often gave doctors blank certificates
and told them exactly what to write in order for their patients to become her
wards.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>Parks and other private
guardians appeared to gravitate toward patients who had considerable assets.
O’Malley described a 2010 case in which Parks, after receiving a tip from a
social worker, began “cold-calling” rehabilitation centers, searching for a
seventy-nine-year-old woman, Patricia Smoak, who had nearly seven hundred thousand
dollars and no children. Parks finally found her, but Smoak’s physician
wouldn’t sign a certificate of incapacity. “The doctor is not playing ball,”
Parks wrote to her lawyer. She quickly found a different doctor to sign the
certificate, and Norheim approved the guardianship. (Both Parks and Norheim
declined to speak with me.)</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>Steve Miller, a former
member of the Las Vegas City Council, said he assumed that Shafer would be the
next indictment after Parks, who is scheduled to go to trial next spring. “All
of the disreputable guardians were taking clues from the Shafer example,” he
said. But, as the months passed, “I started to think that this has run its
course locally. Only federal intervention is going to give us peace of mind.”</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>Richard Black, who,
after his father-in-law was placed into guardianship, became the director of a
grassroots national organization, Americans Against Abusive Probate
Guardianship, said that he considered the Parks indictment “irrefutably
shallow. It sent a strong message of: We’re not going to go after the real
leaders of this, only the easy people, the ones who were arrogant and stupid
enough to get caught.” He works with victims in dozens of what he calls “hot
spots,” places where guardianship abuse is prevalent, often because they
attract retirees: Palm Beach, Sarasota, Naples, Albuquerque, San Antonio. He
said that the problems in Clark County are not unusual. “The only thing that is
unique is that Clark County is one of the few jurisdictions that doesn’t seal
its records, so we can see what is going on.”</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>Approximately ten per
cent of people older than sixty-five are thought to be victims of “elder
abuse”—a construct that has yet to enter public consciousness, as child abuse
has—but such cases are seldom prosecuted. People who are frail or dying don’t
make good witnesses—a fact that Shafer once emphasized at a 1990 U.S.
congressional hearing on crimes against the elderly, in which he appeared as an
expert at preventing exploitation. “Seniors do not like to testify,” he said,
adding that they were either incapable or “mesmerized by the person ripping
them off.” He said, “The exploitation of seniors is becoming a real cottage
industry right now. This is a good business. Seniors are unable to fend for
themselves.”</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>In the past two years,
Nevada has worked to reform its guardianship system through a commission,
appointed by the Nevada Supreme Court, to study failures in oversight. In 2018,
the Nevada legislature will enact a new law that entitles all wards to be
represented by lawyers in court. But the state seems reluctant to reckon with
the roots of the problem, as well as with its legacy: a generation of ill and
elderly people who were deprived of their autonomy, and also of their families,
in the final years of their lives. Last spring, a man bought a storage unit in
Henderson, Nevada, and discovered twenty-seven urns—the remains of Clark County
wards who had never been buried.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>In the wake of Parks’s
indictment, no judges have lost their jobs. Norheim was transferred from
guardianship court to dependency court, where he now oversees cases involving
abused and neglected children. Shafer is still listed in the Clark County court
system as a trustee and as an administrator in several open cases. He did not
respond to multiple e-mails and messages left with his bookkeeper, who answered
his office phone but would not say whether he was still in practice. He did
appear at one of the public meetings for the commission appointed to analyze
flaws in the guardianship system. “What started all of this was me,” he said.
Then he criticized local media coverage of the issue and said that a television
reporter, whom he’d talked to briefly, didn’t know the facts. “The system
works,” Shafer went on. “It’s not the guardians you have to be aware of, it’s more
family members.” He wore a blue polo shirt, untucked, and his head was shaved.
He looked aged, his arms dotted with sun spots, but he spoke confidently and
casually. “The only person you folks should be thinking about when you change
things is the ward. It’s their money, it’s their life, it’s their time. The
family members don’t count.”</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
</div>
<div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>Belshe is resigned to
the fact that she will be supporting her parents for the rest of their lives.
Parks spent all the Norths’ money on fees—the hourly wages for her, her
assistants, her lawyers, and the various contractors she hired—as well as on
their monthly bills, which doubled under her guardianship. Belshe guesses that
Parks—or whichever doctor or social worker referred her to the Norths—had
assumed that her parents were wealthier than they actually were. Rudy often
talked vaguely about deals he had once made in China. “He exaggerates, so he
won’t feel emasculated,” Belshe said. “He wasn’t such a big businessman, but he
was a great dad.”</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>The Norths now live in
what used to be Belshe’s home office; it has a window onto the living room
which Belshe has covered with a tarp. Although the room is tiny, the Norths can
fit most of their remaining belongings into it: a small lamp with teardrop
crystals, a deflated love seat, and two paintings by their son. Belshe rescued
the art work, in 2013, after Caring Transitions placed the Norths’ belongings
in trash bags at the edge of their driveway. “My brother’s paintings were
folded and smelled,” she said.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>The Norths’ bed takes up
most of the room, and operates as their little planet. They rarely stray far
from it. They lie in bed playing cards or sit against the headboard, reading or
watching TV. Rudy’s notebooks are increasingly focussed on mortality—“Death may
be pleasurable”—and money. “Money monsters do well in this society,” he wrote.
“All great fortunes began with a crime.” He creates lists of all the
possessions he has lost, some of which he may be imagining: over time, Rennie’s
wardrobe has become increasingly elaborate and refined, as have their sets of
China. He alternates between feeling that his belongings are nothing—a
distraction from the pursuit of meaning—and everything. “It’s an erasure,” he
said. “They erase you from the face of the earth.” He told me a few times that
he was a distant cousin of Leon Trotsky, “intellect of the revolution,” as he
called him, and I wondered whether his newfound pride was connected to his
conflicted feelings about the value of material objects.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>A few months after the
Norths were freed, Rudy talked on the phone with Adolfo Gonzalez, his neighbor
from Lakeview Terrace, who, after a doctor found him competent, had also been
discharged. He now lived in a house near the airport, and had been reunited
with several of his pets. The two men congratulated each other. “We survived!”
Rudy said. “We never thought we’d see each other on the other side.” Three
other wards from Lakeview Terrace had died.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>Rennie has lost nearly
all the weight she gained at Lakeview Terrace, mostly because Belshe and her husband
won’t let her lounge in her wheelchair or eat starchy foods. Now she uses a
walker, which she makes self-deprecating jokes about. “This is fun—I can teach
you!” she told me.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>In July, Rennie slipped
in the bathroom and spent a night in the hospital. Belshe didn’t want anyone to
know about her mother’s fall, because, she said, “this is the kind of thing
that gets you into guardianship.” She told me, “I feel like these people are
just waiting in the bushes.”</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>Two days after the fall,
Rennie was feeling better—she’d had thirteen stitches—but she was still
agitated by a dream she had in the hospital. She wasn’t even sure if she’d been
asleep; she remembers talking, and her eyes were open.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>“You were
loopedy-doopy,” Scott Belshe, Julie’s husband, told her. They were sitting on
the couch in their living room.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>“It was real,” Rennie
said.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>“You dreamed it,” Scott
told her.</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>“Maybe I was
hallucinating,” she said. “I don’t know—I was scared.” She said that strangers
were making decisions about her fate. She felt as if she were frozen: she
couldn’t influence what was happening. “I didn’t know what to do,” she told
Scott. “I think I yelled for help.<span class=apple-converted-space> </span><em><i><font
face=Georgia><span style='font-family:"Georgia","serif"'>Help me.</span></font></i></em>”
The worst part, she said, was that she couldn’t find her family. “Honest to
God, I thought you guys left me all alone.” </span></font><font size=4><span
style='font-size:14.5pt'>♦</span></font><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:18.0pt'><i><font size=4 face=Georgia><span
style='font-size:14.5pt;font-family:"Georgia","serif";font-style:italic'>This
article appears in the print edition of the October 9, 2017, issue, with the
headline “The Takeover.”</span></font></i><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</blockquote>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:
12.0pt'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
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