North Country Gazette

A Guardianship Wolf In Sheep’s Clothing

Posted on Sunday, 29 of November , 2009 at 7:51 pm

COMMENTARY

© By June Maxam

All Rights Reserved

The Congressman claims that he’s an advocate for the elderly.

In actuality, he’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing and a hypocrite of the worst degree.

Florida Congressman Gus Bilirakis of Palm Harbor doesn’t talk about his role as the probate attorney who worked in a concert with a predatory guardian that created a nightmare for Pasco County senior Adele Fletcher, almost bilking her out of $1 million and perhaps preying on other Florida elders until they got caught.

And then there’s the disabled. If it weren’t for him, his political persuasions and other associations such as with a fellow attorney who hears voices and thinks he can will airplanes to crash, it’s likely disabled Terri Schindler Schiavo would be alive today.

Ten years ago last month, under the co-sponsorship of Gus Bilirakis, formerly representing District 48 in the Florida House of Representatives, the Florida Legislature passed legislation making feeding tubes artificial life support.

The bill also included a definition of “persistent vegetative state” as a permanent and irreversible condition of unconsciousness in which there is the absence of voluntary action or cognitive behavior of any kind and an inability to communicate or interact purposefully with the environment.

Michael Schiavo of Clearwater and his attorney, George Felos of Dunedin, Fla., needed that legislation in order to get the court order they wanted to take the life of Schiavo’s brain injured wife after Schiavo, her guardian, won several million dollars in a medical malpractice suit. 

Schiavo and Felos filed their petition to end’s Terri’s life in May 1998 after it was first tried a year earlier to remove her feeding tube without the knowledge of her parents. 

And Gus Bilirakis, long involved with a predatory guardian and who was also serving on the board of directors of the Hospice of Florida Suncoast when Felos was chairman, seemed to be just who Felos wanted to push the bill through the legislature three months before the trial was to begin on Michael Schiavo’s petition to kill his wife by dehydration and starvation by not only removing her feeding tube but all natural food and water despite it being contrary to Florida Statutes.

Bilirakis, a Republican, was elected in 2007 to represent the 9^th Congressional District which includes parts of Hillsborough, Pasco and Pinellas Counties, after his father, Michael Bilirakis, announced his retirement.  Senior citizens make up almost 25% of the 9^th Congressional District which is centered around Clearwater where Schiavo resides. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQ5GrH5aPMg

Before being elected to Congress, Gus Bilirakis had been a member of the Florida House since 1998 and helped engineer the death of Terri Schiavo and other disabled individuals.

Prior to becoming a Florida legislator, Bilirakis’ law practice in the Tampa Bay area, called the Bilirakis Law Group, specialized in probate and estate planning.

Bilirakis sought political office after his former associate, professional guardian Fran Lang. was convicted of bilking over four dozen elders in Pinellas and Pasco Counties after the court had appointed her as their guardian and she used her power of attorney status to transfer the money of her wards into her personal bank account.

Guardianship is the process by which a court finds a person’s ability to make decisions so impaired because of mental and/or physical disabilities, that the right to make decisions is legally granted to another party. That party, known as a guardian, becomes the surrogate decision-maker in personal and/or financial matters for the incapacitated person, known as a “ward.”

Guardianship is an area where fraud and opportunists lurk, especially in the Sixth Judicial Circuit of Pinellas and Pasco Counties in Florida.

Prosecutors from the state attorney’s office of Bernie McCabe said they could prove that Lang had stolen about $65,000 from about four dozen elderly wards for whom she was guardian over a two-year period ending in June 1998, including the time she was working with Bilirakis. 

Prosecutors thought she had taken even more.

Lang had been prosecuted for fraud in 1996 but adjudication was withheld.  She was arrested again in 2000 for multiple acts of fraud occurring between Nov. 1, 1996 and June 3, 1998.  Lang pleaded guilty to scheming to defraud guardianships and was sentenced in March 2001 to 200 days in jail, served through a work release program outside jail walls, and 15 years of probation.

It’s likely Bilirakis’ political roots and associations kept him from being arrested along with Lang and disbarred, that and the state attorney of Pinellas/Pasco Counties, Bernie McCabe.

In an arrogant and most hypocritical manner, Bilirakis, whose Congressional term expires in 2010, is now cosponsoring HR 1783 in Congress, the Elder Justice Act which would amend the Social Security Act by ensuring public-private infrastructure and to resolve to prevent, detect, treat, intervene in and prosecute elder abuse, neglect and exploitation, and for other purposes.

U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-Greenport, NY) has initiated a new campaign designed to protect the elderly across the nation from people like Gus Bilirakis and his former associate who submitted false filings to the court to have 80-year-old Adele Fletcher declared incompetent and then locked away, essentially held captive in an assisted living facility operated by a convicted sex offender.

Although Fletcher was an active, healthy and competent senior citizen, owning her own condo and car, walking her dog daily and going out to lunch regularly with her friends, Bilirakis and Lang submitted false filings to the Sixth Judicial Circuit, declaring her incompetent and placing Lang in control of her $1 million after they told the court under penalties of perjury that Fletcher was indigent and had no assets.

Adele Fletcher, who lived in Holiday, Fla., had received an inheritance in the form of rights to one half of the income from a trust that court records valued at $945,000. She had tax questions.  Her stock broker arranged for her to meet with Bilirakis in February, 1997, and his client, professional guardian Fran Lang and Peggy Davis, a nurse.

Once they found out how much money Fletcher had, Lang and Bilirakis conned the 80-year-old woman into a pre-need agreement which in essence said that if she ever became unable to handle her own affairs, that Lang would become her guardian.

Less than two months later, Lang, represented by Bilirakis, filed a petition with the Sixth Circuit Court, seeking to have Adele Fletcher declared incompetent, placing Lang in control of her money.  http://www.adeleremembered.info/ 

Bilirakis falsely claimed, under penalties of perjury, that he had “investigated” and found his and Lang’s declarations to the court about Fletcher’s alleged indigency to be true.  He claimed he and Lang wouldn’t be paid until it was determined that Adele Fletcher was no longer indigent.

But after the court awarded guardianship to Lang and she had control of Fletcher’s money, two weeks later they filed yet another petition with the court, declaring that Fletcher had sufficient assets to pay each of them for their services and the court costs.  And Lang had total control of the woman’s assets.

By that time, the court had suspended the senior citizen’s driver’s license and impounded her car. Lang and Bilirakis petitioned for permission to sell Fletcher’s car for the money but the court blocked that move.  Lang took the woman’s dog, against the law and without court order, placed the woman in the assisted living facility against her will, without a court order and medicated her to try and keep her quiet.

And she and Bilirakis would have gotten away with it all if Adele’s friend and neighbor Chris Zervas hadn’t intervened.

Why wasn’t Bilirakis arrested for perjury?  Why wasn’t he arrested along with Lang?  Why wasn’t he prosecuted by the state attorney’s office of Bernie McCabe? Why weren’t any charges brought against him by the Florida Bar?  Why is he still licensed to practice law?  Why is he a Congressman, co-sponsoring legislation designed to protect elders from people like himself and his former associate?

One out of five older Americans fall victim to fraud, according to the Federal Trade Commission. In New York State, approximately half a million seniors have fallen victim to consumer fraud, losing approximately $180 million.

Senator Gillibrand has launched her plan to crack down on financial fraud against seniors, and empower more seniors with the knowledge and resources they need to protect their savings. Her new campaign will include increased penalties for people who prey on the elderly.

Gillibrand’s plan, the Senior Investor Protection Act, would increase penalties for fraud, crack down on scams, close loopholes to protect Social Security and Veterans’ benefits from debt collectors as well as raise awareness to end mail, telemarketing and internet fraud.

In Fletcher’s case, after she had been removed from her home and placed in the assisted living facility in November, 1997, six months later, she wrote a note asking to go home.  Zervas and other friends of Adele hired an attorney, petitioning the court for her release.

The Pasco County Clerk of the Court began an audit of Lang’s guardianship files shortly thereafter in April, 1998,  and in May 1998, ironically about the same time that Michael Schiavo and Bilirakis’s hospice associate Felos were petitioning to end the life of Terri Schiavo, the court appointed an attorney to represent Adele Fletcher.

The attorney asked the court to return Fletcher to her home, advising the court that Lang was getting ready to sell Fletcher’s condo as well as her car but on May 18, 1998, Bilirakis told the court that Fletcher didn’t have enough assets to support herself living at home. Bilirakis also told the court that his client Lang had made the decision to put Fletcher in the facility, claiming that Fletcher wouldn’t allow Lang to assess her needs and wouldn’t cooperate with private aides.

Her attorney demanded that Fletcher be returned home by July 17, 1998 and she was, on July 13. By the end of July, the court ruled against Lang in her assertion that she didn’t need the court’s permission to remove Fletcher from her home.

A court-ordered investigation found that Fletcher was competent and the court found that she had been wrongfully removed from her home, that there was no basis for Lang and Bilirakis concluding that Fletcher was a danger to herself and that Adele Fletcher had been held against her will at the facility where Lang had placed her.

On Aug. 24, 1998, Bilirakis’ client Fran Lang resigned as Adele Fletcher’s guardian.

The facility, Jasmine Hills, was closed after it was learned that it was being operated by a convicted sex offender.

A year later, on Aug. 23, 1999, the court threatened to hold Lang in contempt for failure to file documents related to the Fletcher guardianship.  Bilirakis had filed a motion in June 1999 to withdraw as Lang’s attorney and was permitted to do so on Aug. 17, 1999.

By this time, as a member of the Florida House of Representatives, he had already co-sponsored the legislation that would set the stage to end Terri Schiavo’s life.

As the audit of Lang’s guardianship files was underway, according to a letter to the court, Lang placed herself under psychiatric care on July 1, 1999, saying it was due to depression and anxiety caused by legal and criminal investigations into her guardianships.

On Oct. 24, 2000, Bilirakis’ former client, Fran Lang, was arrested for felony scheming to defraud. It was alleged that at least 11 and perhaps as many as 72 of Lang’s wards had been defrauded by Lang.

As Lang was finally being held accountable for her guardianship fraud, Bilirakis had laid the groundwork for the death of Terri Schiavo in yet another suspect case of guardianship fraud. http://www.northcountrygazette.org/2009/03/01/root_of_evil/

Terri Schiavo, who sustained brain damage in mysterious circumstances in her apartment in February 1990, with only her husband present, was not on a respirator or any life support machines. She was not in a coma. She received nutrition and hydration through a feeding tube three times a day.

When injured at age 26, she had left no living will or advance directives. Although Michael Schiavo, her estranged husband and guardian maintains that she had expressed to him in unwitnessed conversations that she would not have wanted to be kept alive artificially, her parents disputed that and said Terri would never have wished to die by having all nutrition and hydration withheld from her.

From 1993 until 2001, George Felos had served as a member of the Hospice of Florida Suncoast which owned Woodside House Hospice in Pinellas Park where Terri Schiavo was to be held for five years after he and Schiavo moved her there without a court order in April 2000.  He hadn’t disclosed to the court or to Terri’s parents his affiliation with the hospice and the fact that he had been chairman of the board from 1996 to 1998 at the same time that Bilirakis was a board member or at the time he relocated Terri to the hospice in April 2000.

On April 6, 1999, while Bilirakis was still representing Lang, the bill to declare a feeding tube as artificial life support was introduced in the Florida Legislature by the Florida Elder Affairs and Long Term Care Committee, co-sponsored by Bilirakis.

At the time back in the mid-80s when Schiavo claimed that his wife had told him, albeit without a witness and in what should have been inadmissible hearsay, that she would want to be on “machines” or on “life support”, a feeding tube was not deemed artificial life support or even medical treatment, something that Felos needed to rectify before the case headed to trial. 

The world is supposed to believe that Michael Schiavo has a bad memory about crucial events and dates but his memory was recharged in January 2000 when he testified that his wife wanted to die by dehydration……..that she said in 1985 that she didn’t want to be kept alive by artificial means when at that time a feeding tube wasn’t deemed artificial life support.

How can any sensible person believe that Michael Schiavo was telling the truth when he related his tale of “Terri’s Wish” at the January, 2000 trial although he hadn’t remember her so-called wish to die made 15 years earlier until after Felos had explained to him what standard and threshold he would have to meet in order to get court permission to kill his wife.

Michael Schiavo’s claim that Terri Schindler Schiavo would want to die of dehydration by removing her feeding tube was simply beyond the realm of credibility, especially after he repeatedly and countlessly had stated that he had a bad memory.

Schiavo had no evidence so he and Felos had to concoct some, hence only a few months before the January 2000 trial and with a new definition of artificial life support, Schiavo’s bad memory was suddenly jarred and he “remembered” Terri’s directive 16 years previous. The only thing was, no one else could substantiate his hearsay.

When Schiavo’s attorney, Felos, wrote a letter to Terri’s parents, Bob and Mary Schindler in August, 1997, informing them of Michael’s plan to kill Terri, Florida law at the time was not enough to allow Judge George Greer to order the removal of Terri’s feeding tube under Terri’s circumstances so the law had to be changed, according to the Felos plan.

At the time that Felos sought to amend the state law with House Bill 2131 to change the legal definition of life prolonging procedures to add “including artificially provided sustenance and hydration which sustains, restores or supplants a spontaneous vital function”, he was no longer hospice chairman.  However, during the time that the revisions were being formulated, he was still on the board of the Hospice of Florida Suncoast. 

Even though the bill was eventually passed on Oct. 1, 1999, with its subsequent revisions, it should not have been retroactively applied to the Schiavo case as that matter was already in the courts.  It should have only applied to cases initiated after October, 1999.

Apparently Felos didn’t tell the court that the hospice of which he was chairman of the board was being investigated for Medicare fraud, involving cases where persons who were not dying where wrongly classified as being terminally ill and were being illegally billed to Medicare as such.

Hospice is a federally funded program designed for terminally ill and those whose death is eminent. Terri was in Woodside Hospice illegally for five years under Medicaid payments, for free, courtesy of Felos who, along with Schiavo, transferred Terri to the Woodside Hospice from the Palm Gardens Nursing Home, literally in the middle of the night, without notice to the court, without court order and without the proper admission papers, improperly certifying that she was terminal.

Felos combined and conspired with Michael Schiavo to arrange for Terri’s “free” stay at Hospice Woodside as part of an “exit protocol” designed to advance Felos’ self-perceived messianic mission of “helping” incapacitated people to die by categorizing them as “terminal,” warehousing them, and depriving them of therapy and rehabilitation services.

The Hospice of Florida Suncoast is the subject of a collection action totaling $14.8 million by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services as the result of a federal audit in 1995 which determined in a report issued in 1996. when Felos was board chairman and Bilirakis was a board member,  that the hospice under CEO Mary Labyak had been admitting ineligible people to the hospice and unlawfully billing the federal government for their care under Medicare.

More than a decade later, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is still trying to recover $14.8 million from Hospice of Florida Suncoast paid to them as a result of fraudulent claims made for Medicare reimbursement for patients not terminally ill—-such as Terri Schindler-Schiavo—and therefore not eligible for hospice care. http://www.hhs.gov/of/organization/oarcp/outstandingbalances2009.html

In the case of Terri Schindler-Schiavo, not only was she not terminally ill, but the proper certification was never filed as only one doctor, her personal physician, Dr. Victor Gambone, signed the certificate.

Terri remained at the hospice for five years, from April, 2000 until her death March 31. 2005.

Not only was Terri Schiavo never properly certified as required by law for entry into hospice but a review of the records and circumstances indicates that there may have been many egregious violations of federal Hospice Law as well as state and federal Medicaid and Medicare regulations by Hospice of Florida Suncoast under the leadership of Labyak and Felos. Regulations require that the hospice would have had to recertify every six months that Terri Schiavo was terminally ill in order to be eligible for Medicare.

By moving her to a facility where Felos was chairman of the board, all of Terri’s caregivers including her doctors and the hospice medical director were presumably under the total control of Felos and his client—-but it appears that Felos, Bilirakis and other board members knew, or should have known, that the proper certification had not been completed and that Terri was not eligible for hospice care

In fact, according to the hospice law, Terri Schiavo should have been cared for in her home—-or that of her parents, Mary and Robert Schindler Sr., who battled for nearly 10 years to take her home. http://www.northcountrygazette.org/articles/081906DeathMarket.html

The Office of Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services conducted an audit of the Hospice of Florida Suncoast Inc. during 1995 and the tenure of both Felos and Bilirakis as board members. The objective of the hospice audit was to evaluate hospice eligibility determinations for beneficiaries that remains in hospice care more than 120 days.  The Office of Inspector General also determined the amount of payments made to the hospice for those Medicare beneficiaries that did not meet the Medicare reimbursement requirements. http://oig.hhs.gov:80/oas/reports/region4/49502111.htm

Federal auditors had been cracking down on hospices like Florida Suncoast that seek Medicare payments for treating the “terminally ill” when the patients aren’t on the brink of death—such as Terri Schiavo.

The review included medical evaluation of Suncoast eligibility.  It was determined that 176 patients were not eligible for hospice care and 118 were unable to conclusively determine their terminal illness.

The final audit report issued in August 1996 determined that Suncoast had received improper Medicare payments totaling $8.9 million for 176 ineligible beneficiaries.

The Schiavo case was a shell game.  It wasn’t about Terri Schindler Schiavo or what her wishes really were.  It was about the Social Security system, Medicaid and Medicare.

The Schiavo case was a public relations effort for euthanasia and assisted suicide, trying to make it acceptable and more palatable to terminate the disabled, elderly and vulnerable if it becomes too costly to keep them alive.

With the Bilirakis track record on guardianship fraud, elder exploitation, Medicare fraud and the disabled, is this the kind of person that America wants or needs in Congress to make decisions such as in health care reform or “elder protection plans” that will impact us all for the rest of our lives and the lives of our families?  Should he be in a position of public trust? 

Voters will answer the question in 2010. 11-29-09

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Copyright 2009 by June Maxam. This article may not be reprinted or reproduced in its entirety without the express written permission of The North Country Gazette.  The link and a paragraph or two may be used.

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Category: Courts, Crime, Disabled, Elder Care, Family, Florida, Government, Health, Opinion, Politics, Schiavo

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