Fraud on the Court Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Preface

  On Terminology

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Epilogue

  Copyright © 2012 by Universal Technical Systems

  All rights are reserved. No part of this publication may be used, transmitted or reproduced without written permission from the author.

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  We wish to dedicate this book to the following individuals, who made this story possible:

  To Josette P. Marquess, MSW Coordinator, Florida Adoption Reunion Registry Florida Department of Children and Families - An unusual individual who went to great lengths to do the right thing.

  To Mallory E. Horne, a very prominent Florida politician who stood beside me throughout this emotional and legal journey and wasn't afraid to receive an adverse ruling from the courts. I enjoyed the ride and I will miss you.

  To Virginia Snyder, private investigator extraordinaire, who tells things as they really are and who has inspired me to pursue my quest for truth.

  To Judge Robert P. Cates of Alachua County who made that quantum leap forward to unseal my closed adoption record.

  To my missing baby sister, Carol Jean, whom I have never met. One day I hope to solve that mystery as well.

  And finally to my mother, Winnie Faye, whom I will never forget despite the brief time that I spent with her.

  ~Mike

  -AND-

  For my family, who gave every spare moment toward making sure I was free to complete this work. And for Larry and Denise, the birth parents of my own adopted children. I hope that from your vantage points in heaven you can see what incredible young men they have all become.

  ~Jessica

  PREFACE

  “What a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.”

  I have been a prime example of this truism for just about all of my life, something I began to realize at the age of 11. My story involves one of the most well-documented adoption fraud cases that existed in Florida in the early 1950’s. There are so many more stories, though, than just mine.

  In today’s terms the practice of baby selling is known as “human trafficking”. In those days known as the Baby Scoop Era, young single women who found themselves pregnant were routinely coerced into giving up their children and frequently encouraged to use fictitious names in doing so. Even when the adoptions were completed legally, the practice of sealing up the records and the original birth certificate was standard. No one, not the doctors, baby brokers, adoptive parents or even state legislators, considered that the baby being sold would not remain an infant, that the child would become an adult with a primal desire to know his or her biological origins.

  In my own long quest for the truth, it was in 1995 that a series of unusual events began which involved several prominent individuals in the Florida adoption and legal/judicial circles. These events enabled my twisted story to fully rear its ugly head and to eventually be cut off at the neck. My adoption was reversed, and a sort of justice was granted.

  Some of the Florida courts were compromised upon a close examination of their past decisions and their dignity was clearly at stake, but we all should be held accountable for what we do, regardless of our elected positions. I am grateful for that accountability, and it is true in my case that “the truth shall set you free.” In my quest to find my identity I was able to achieve that extraordinary freedom that comes with mental closure. I felt that this book should have been written then, at the time of the final ruling, but I just wasn’t ready for it and the timing in the universe wasn’t there. Instead, in 1999 I created a web site at www.adoption-fraud.com depicting the facts of my case with the hope that I would be helping others who were dealing with similar circumstances.

  Over the last ten years I have received thousands of emails from adoptees and birth mothers informing me of their difficult plights in wanting to find one another. I was only able to really help a small few of them. But I learned that I was not alone in my experience of a primal need to know who I am biologically and where I fit into the human genealogical tree. It is my belief, as well as that of many others in the adoption triad, that it is not a natural thing for a child to be separated from the first mother. That bond, hidden though it may be, was never meant to be severed for a lifetime. This does not mean that real and enduring bonds of family cannot be made with adoptive parents. It simply means that we cannot erase the first family as if it never existed. We may seal up the paper records in a file deep in the bowels of the court, but all the secrecy in the world cannot sever the bonds at the human level.

  I used to think that being consumed by the questions of my identity and origins made me an inferior person, even as a child. Questions kept popping into my head. “Do I have other siblings who look like me?” “Is my birth mother still thinking of me?” and “Why did she give me up?” I could only hold those questions inside of me for many years, with no hope of ever finding out. My adoptive parents would never entertain my need for information and the adoptive mother in particular was unusually cruel when faced with the reality of an adopted child’s normal curiousity about his “other” family.

  This cruelty alone might have provided the emotional steam necessary to drive my investigation for the truth. But there were other forces behind the investigation (besides my own tenacity) that I cannot explain. In other words, the story of my life is so incredible that the casual observer may be overwhelmed by the unlikely sequence of events and the remarkable coincidences that kept things rolling. And yes, truth is stranger than fiction and it always will be.

  It took the involvement of powerful individuals within the State of Florida to fully expose the fraudulence of my case and to make the groundbreaking legal decisions possible. I am grateful to have met Mallory Horne, a well known and highly connected lawyer who was once the Florida Speaker of the House and President of the Florida Senate. If he didn’t have a story to tell of his own involving a fraudulent federal investigation that nearly destroyed his career, he probably wouldn’t have taken my case. He did take it though, after much persuasion, and we became close friends for the next 10 years until his death in April 2009.

  Also of critical importance in my investigation was a wonderful woman named Josette Marquess. Ms. Marquess headed up the adoption reunion registry in Tallahassee and was responsible for revealing non identifying facts to anyone requesting information related to their closed adoption records. She provided me with a five page letter in 1995 detailing some of the extraordinary events surrounding my adoption. In December 1998, I eventually received my 108 page closed adoption record after I filed a pro-se petition to unseal, based on a claim of “Fraud on the Court”, using that original five page letter as my sole supporting evidence.

  And it was Virginia Snyder, a private investigator in Delray Beach Florida, who inspired me to file that motion to unseal and told me that I was holding the smoking gun. If you ever saw the TV series Murder, She Wrote, then you may have a good picture of Virginia. The chronicles in that show mirrored many of her real-life cases. “Gumshoe Granny” (as she is affectionately known) has made many television appearances throughout the years, including on the David Letterman Show. She is still alive today and is 92 years young.

  Aside from my own case, I have noticed that the adoption reform movement has gained momentum over the years in a quest to recognize the rights of adoptees nationwide. After all, adoption affects 1 out of every 4 Americans. That is a percentage of the populatio
n too large to ignore. For many adoptees, the sealing of our original birth certificates and our adoption files could be called our own “Roswell Cover Up,” perpetuated at the hands of the officials that are, or were, in power.

  Our stance is that every person has a right to know their origins, and that knowing or not knowing can have an everlasting impact on a person’s life. The laws surrounding closed adoptions are a dysfunctional part of America’s infrastructure that tear away at the very fabric of a free and democratic society. The courts and legislators need to be better educated, by real members of the adoption triad and not powerful and corrupt special interest lobbyists, so that the modern notion of permanently closed adoptions—and the frequent human trafficking that results—will one day be a tragedy of the past.

  TERMINOLOGY

  There is much discussion within the adoption community as to the most appropriate terminology to use when referring to the parents who have given life to a child, but are not the parents who are raising that child.

  The same debate also surrounds the terminology used to describe the transfer of a child’s care from one set of legal parents to another.

  Throughout this book we use the term “birth mother” to refer to the mother of origin, and the term “relinquishment” to describe the act of giving a child to someone else to raise in an adoptive environment.

  These terms do not necessarily reflect the views of the authors on the matter. They are simply the most widely recognizable terms in use at this time, and we wish to reach as broad an audience as possible with the message of our book.

  We encourage all interested readers to look up more on the nature of this debate by performing a simple internet search or by visiting some of the many forums dedicated to adoption issues.

  Language is a powerful tool for framing our perception of ourselves and our world. While the issue of adoption language is far from settled, we support ongoing honest and open discussion that will lead to a better understanding for all involved.

  Prologue

  This is what I have pieced together of the black market baby ring that, once upon a time, transferred me from my birth mother’s care and into the home of Alex and Adela Chalek, with less fuss and procedure than what it now takes to adopt a pet from the local animal shelter.

  In the 1950s, in Jacksonville FL, lived one Charles and Lenora Fielding of 143 Talullah Avenue. Charles was a local police captain, had been on the force for some 30 years, and was as well known (and connected) as a man of his station naturally would be. His wife Lenora, a heavy-set, blustery and determined southern lady with serious business acumen, ran a successful home-based business as a black market baby dealer.

  She acquired babies from women in “unfortunate circumstances”, she assigned them a fair market price, and subsequently sold them to a waiting set of joyous new parents. The way she explained it was that she was performing a good deed for all concerned. Young unwed mothers were aided in giving their babies a “better life,” childless couples found their happily-ever-afters, and the babies received loving, stable care that was above and beyond anything they might have expected in a single parent home. Most of the time it was assumed that the children would grow up never knowing the difference. One closed adoption; three happy, satisfied parties; and one humble little southern woman making it all come together.

  This is the rosy picture of “closed” adoption that has taken root in the American psyche. It’s a picture that birth mothers cling to when making the difficult decision to relinquish. It’s a picture that helps adoptive parents breathe easy at night while their new infant sleeps close by. But in reality, the modern closed adoption process is a social aberration that has come under serious fire from many of its “beneficiaries.”

  The closed-adoption system also provided an opportunity for black market baby sellers to flourish in the United States and Canada during the mid 1900’s. Blind spots and inefficiencies in the legal process, repressive social pressures on women, and an insatiable market demand all led to thousands of adoptions that were never legally documented or finalized. These factors are directly responsible for how I came to grow up in a woefully unfit home that I was destined to escape--physically at the age of sixteen, and legally at the age of forty-seven—when I sat before a judge in Florida and demanded justice from a system that had previously failed me at every step.

  Chapter 1

  I was born in 1952 in Jacksonville Florida, and at eight days old I went home with my new father, Alex Chalek, just after his illegally hired baby broker had passed over a sum of $200 to the attending physician at St. Luke’s Hospital to cover my hospital stay.

  Alex, or Al as he was mostly known, flashed a proud grin at Dr. R. A. Schnauss, an ophthalmologist of all things, and informed the good doctor that my name was Michael: Michael Edward Chalek, to be precise. Al accepted the obligatory congratulations and then bundled me off into the waiting car. Once at home, I was consigned to the care of his wife Adela, who fussed and made over me just as any first-time mother might. When it was clear within the first weeks at home that I had a bit of a virus coming on, she called a neighbor for advice and comfort. Together, the Chaleks and I embarked on the long journey of getting to know one another and of adapting to life as a family. Everything seemed picturesque.

  For two-and-a-half years I was apparently quite the little prince of the castle. I grew strong and healthy and, most of all, insatiably curious about the world around me. I loved to watch how things worked, and take them apart if possible (a common ailment of young boys). I was a small child who ate little and thought much. I knew nothing of adoption, or of my parents’ ongoing attempts to have a child of their own.

  On the day that my younger brother, Glenn, came home from the hospital, I was too young still to develop any permanent memory of the event. So what came on was a gradual understanding that I had changed somehow upon becoming a big brother. I was no longer as lovable, intelligent, capable or good as I had previously been. Unwilling to accept this in myself, I spent the next fourteen years hell bent on self-improvement.

  The proof of my miserable failure wasn’t evident in my school grades, which were excellent, or in my athletic abilities, where I starred on the track team, or even in my civic involvements, when I earned my Eagle Scout badge at the age of thirteen.

  No, the proof was in my mother’s eyes, and in her voice, and in the ever present switch that counted my failures out upon my skin. Once when I was four years old, she couldn’t get a switch in her hands fast enough. So she beat me with the vacuum hose instead since she was busy cleaning house at the time of my infraction.

  “Boots,” Al would say, calling her by her nick-name. “Boots, I can’t figure what that boy has done to rile you up. You sure don’t go after Glenn that way.”

  Adela would raise an eyebrow, send me off to my room, and hustle Glenn off to her own bed, where he slept by her side until he was nearly a teenager.

  Now since Al was a traveling salesman and gone on the road more than he was home, it might have been the case that my miserable relationship with my mother would have been vastly improved by a simple change in my father’s career. But even when Al was home, his remarks on her treatment of me were motivated by mild curiosity rather than outrage. Not once did he intervene on my behalf. He watched as she beat me, or, if it suited him better, he took himself and his thoughts to another room.

  Lying in my bed at night, I could hear the adults rambling through the house during the frequent dinner parties my parents held. Sometimes I would scoot to the door and press my ear to it, listening to the threads of conversation which carried through. Adela, during those times, shone in full and glorious beauty. Because she was beautiful, when Al was home and company was over and the world was good to her. She curled her hair, put on makeup and she dialed on the laughter and charm until every man in the room wished she were his.

  Often the men would pass by my door, leaving the women in the kitchen or living room, and it was on one of these
occasions that Al casually admitted the truth of my mother’s feelings toward me and his own detachment to the matter. I don’t know how the conversation began, nor where it ended, but I heard these few words loud and clear:

  “God, no, Boots can’t stand the boy. She’s after him every second of the day,” he said with a laugh.

  A few deep chuckles and a couple of footsteps and the men were gone. I sat on the floor for a long while after, but my ear was no longer pressed against the door. My heart was breaking, but I refused to shed a single tear. Finally I crawled back into bed and covered my head with the pillow, shutting out any other random comments that might try to invade the bedroom which was my only sanctuary.

  When the parties ended, Al would once again hit the road with his briefcase and his salesman’s smile. Boots would take off the makeup and the pretty clothes, while the house descended into drudgery and silence and loneliness, at least for as long as I could manage to stay out of my mother’s sight.

  Glenn, who might have been a companion for me, became instead a minefield of potential infractions. When he was very young, it was generally unfortunate happenstance that would cause Adela’s anger to rain down upon me, such as the fact of me being in the same room as Glenn when he began crying. But as we grew older, Glenn developed a delight in running and tattling so that he could watch our mother chase after me with the willow switch. When the beatings were over he would follow her out of the room, leaving me alone in my angry and resentful confusion. It became my habit to hide from Glenn and Adela both by retreating to my bedroom for the majority of the day.