BOSTON − In an emotional speech before the Massachusetts Board of Bar Overseers (BBO), Attorney Lisa Siegel Belanger gave as good as she got. Using her allotted 15 minutes she called out the actions of BBO member Attorney Marsha Kazarosian and the law firm Burns & Levinson for their “fabrication” and exaggeration of charges against her as “retaliation” for her exposure of their “racketeering ring which has preyed on seniors,” including her father, Marvin H. Siegel. The BBO seeks to strip Belanger of her license to practice for two years.
Belanger noted in her speech that despite five years of her filing complaints to the BBO against Attorney Kazarosian, the BBO refused to conduct any investigation against the powerful political figure (and Mass. Gov. Charlie Baker’s high-profile appointee). She also noted that both Kazarosian and BBO Chair Jeffrey R. Martin were absent from the hearing, and that she was again stripped of the opportunity to question her accusers. She pointed out that Martin serves as partner in the firm Burns and Levenson, a firm also at the center of Belanger’s complaint. (Yes, Belanger took on some of the most connected lawyers in Massachusetts.)
With no relief from the courts for years (fighting against those she documented as preying upon seniors), Belanger finally went public. Her case as well as the systemic draining of millions from her now deceased father’s accounts have been chronicled in a series of articles in The Boston Broadside. Belanger noted that while no actions were taken against Kazarosian, and no charges were ever taken against her, everything changed when her family’s plight became public. READ MORE HERE
“They killed him,” Marvin Siegel’s daughter Lisa Siegel Belanger wrote in a text. She followed up to explain that six years of round-the-clock captivity in his own home and in various medical facilities, together with forced drugging and morphine, lack of proper care and the ability for his family to interact with him and help with decisions, accelerated her father’s death.
As we previously reported in this paper through a multi-part series of articles, including a personal account by Lisa, six years ago her father was taken from his Boxford, Mass. home via ambulance at the direction of a visiting nurse, and was shortly thereafter placed in a psychiatric facility, forced on drugs, and then, while in the facility, signed over control of his estate to what Lisa detailed as predatory lawyers. That list of “predators” is long, and despite many trips to court to fight them, the lawyers continued to prevail.
Yes, Sometimes It IS All About the Money
At the time of his taking, Mr. Siegel’s known assets exceeded $6 million. During the past six years, attorneys drew off more than $4 million in what they termed as caring for the senior. A large chunk of that money was spent on round-the-clock home health care. But the numbers included more, much more.
Indeed, a review of the finances showed certain attorneys drawing tens of thousands of dollars and more, quarterly from the estate, with some racking up more than $200,000 in billing, and at attorney rates over a wide range, including some at more than $450 per hour.
For their fees they answered e-mails from one another, paid Mr. Siegel’s bills, ensured that he had his trash removed, the utilities bills paid, grass mowed, repairs made, and all the normal things to keep a household going.
With the signing over of his estate, Mr. Siegel lost all control and was appointed a guardian and other lawyers who managed his affairs. He was force-drugged without his knowledge to keep him complacent, and he began a long, slow decline, according to multiple court documents and written and oral testimony and writings by some of his family members. More
90-Year Old Marvin Siegel Remains Under 24/7 House Guard as High-Profile Lawyers Drain Millions from His Estate
by Broadside Staff
The Boston Broadside has previously detailed in a four-part series the systematic draining of the estate of 90-year-old Boxford resident Marvin Siegel by Governor Charlie Baker’s 2016 appointee, Attorney Marsha V. Kazarosian, and other lawyers.
During the past seven years, millions have been drained from the retiree’s estimated $9 million estate. He’s expected to be tapped out within a year.
Where has the money gone? To lawyers, lawyers, lawyers, elder service providers, and the like. Heck, the lawyers even charge one another to talk to each other and to send e-mails to one another, and then bill the estate. They also spend money on the daily care of Marvin, including their posted 24/7/365 “guards,” as Marvin’s daughter Lisa Siegel Belanger refers to his round-the-clock paid “caregivers,” whom she has detailed keep the senior isolated in his Boxford home. Lisa has also detailed how these “so-called medical providers have denied her dad his basic dignity: he can’t even use a cell phone to talk to his grandchildren!”
Join Marti Oakley with Luanne Fleming and Robin Austin as we host Atty. Lisa Belanger from Massachusetts..
Lisa has just organized The People’s Center for Law & Justice and is working to end the probate/guardian system that is operating across the country. Lisa’s organization will also work to counter bogus legislation which is actually intended to worsen the problems with professional, for-profit guardians and the ensuing plundering of estates.
We will also discuss the difference between public and private guardians…is there actually a difference?
A recent bill in Massachusetts offered by the former AG of Mass., would have given immunity to virtually every person involved in these guardianship scams. Even those the former AG identified as having committed “ordinary negligence” would have been immune from prosecution under this bill. Subsequent letters to the former AG aking him to define just exactly what ordinary negligence is, have gone unanswered.
Self-policing violates a basic principle of law. It will not work in a culture that does not tolerate “whistle blowers”. Honest lawyers seem unable to defend themselves against dishonest members of their profession. Lawyers control most of the government. In order to have a true democracy lawyers need to be accountable to “We the people”. David Arnold
The Constitution of the United States begins with “We the people of the United States,…”
Abraham Lincoln said “Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth.”
The United States of America is the best country in the world. The goal of many people in the rest of the world is to live in the United States. I always felt safe living in the United States of America because it is a democracy. The purpose of democracy is to prevent abuse by government.
I never worried about abuse of the power by government until 2012. Someone I loved very dearly was subjected to abuse by a professional guardian appointed by the Probate Court. I was also subjected to abuse. In practice, there was no recourse to the power of the guardian. There were no checks and balances. There was no accountability.
People who have been victims of abuse by court appointed guardians say this is not supposed to happen in a democracy like the United States. This kind of thing only happens in third world dictatorships. But it does happen. I know. I was a victim.
I kept asking myself how this could happen in a democracy. That question would not go away. It remained unanswered for 4 years. In 2016 the answer finally came to me out of the blue. The Probate Court is not a democratic institution. It is a dictatorship (see the December, 2017 issue #45 of Boston Broadside, page 3).
Unfortunately, that is not the end of the trail. There is an underlying problem that makes it very difficult to fix the problems with guardianship.
The French philosopher Montesquieu who advocated the idea of three branches of government also pointed out that the personnel of the three branches should not coincide. If the same people or entity control all the branches of government this negates the checks and balances.
The problem is not hidden. We all have the information needed to understand what is wrong. However, it took me a long time to see the truth that was lying in plain sight. Consider the following:
The Judicial Branch is controlled entirely by lawyers.
The Legislature, both state and federal, appears to be about 60 percent lawyers.
The Office of the District Attorney which is under the Executive branch is controlled by lawyers.
A disproportionate number of governors and presidents are lawyers.
From the Boston Broadside’s 4-part series, ISOLATE, MEDICATE, LIQUIDATE: HOW TO FLEECE A SENIOR, subscribers and readers may be aware of my family’s personal 5-year and continuing travesty of justice inflicted by public officials of the Massachusetts Probate & Family Court. For those who are not, my family’s personal pursuit of justice involves the unlawful and literal seizure of my elderly father and his estate by the Commonwealth.
My article, entitled “Message to Citizens: Wake Up!” as published in the October 2017 edition of the Boston Broadside, alerts citizens that my family’s travesty is not an isolated incident but rather is a poster-child for what is happening to other families on a daily basis within the Massachusetts Probate & Family Courts.
In no uncertain terms, what has happened to my family is business as usual in the Massachusetts Probate & Family Courts and that all families are targets—it runs the full gambit from the poor to the wealthy.
The focus of this article is to alert citizens that all Massachusetts families need to be fearsome of Governor Charlie Baker’s outright disregard of known, established lawlessness by long-time public officials and his blatantly direct influence in having attorneys whom he has full knowledge of not just having acted lawlessly but actually having committed and continuing to commit elder exploitation through the Probate & Family Court system. More
“When Probate Court Attorneys and Judges Lawlessly and Maliciously Dissever a Fellow Attorney from His Family, Despite Long-time, Executed Advanced Planning Instruments, Best Believe Private Citizens Are Easy Pickings”
For more than five years, my sister, Devora, and I have been vigilantly pursuing and defending our family’s right—and all other citizens’ rights—to be free from tyranny by our local government. Since 2011, without any legitimate or valid basis whatsoever, Massachusetts public officials involved with the Probate & Family Court began their trampling of our family’s rights to due process and to protection of the integrity of the family unit guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.
After years of my personally going to various counties of the Massachusetts Probate & Court system, viewing and obtaining public court records of inordinate other families litigating guardianships and conservatorships, beyond a doubt, this is happening EVERY SINGLE DAY in Massachusetts—which documentation is all publicly accessible and filed in the Massachusetts Federal District Court under the civil action of Belanger, et al. v. BNY Mellon, et al (Docket no. 1:15-cv-10198-ADB).
Moreover, this happens to private citizens regardless of how much money they have—rich or poor. The only prerequisite is that the victim receives some form of governmental benefit. The bread and butter of this probate court industrial complex is Medicaid/Medicare fraud.
Atty. Marsha Kazarosian
For some reason, Auditor Suzanne Bump does not wish to conduct an audit of court appointed guardians and conservators. The filed court documentation overwhelmingly shows that Massachusetts citizens are ALL for the taking by these probate court predators, being cloaked under the color of law and protected by AG Healey.
Just like the non-stop, talk radio ads that claim to “protect your money and family from the probate court” if you hire them to prepare written instruments that the probate court supposedly has to abide by, our father, Marvin Siegel, a retired attorney having practiced law in Downtown Boston for over 50 years, spent large sums of money hiring prominent, expert attorneys to prepare such written instruments. He did so believing that his family would never have to be subjected to dealing with the probate courts. Especially as an attorney, our father executed a Durable Power of Attorney particularly designed to keep him from never having to suffer public humiliation by being judicially declared incompetent. More
The PPJ Gazette 