The Real Colorado

BOYCOTT GOOGLE

2011-12-30T06:47:00.000-08:00

I earlier wrote about the manipulation of my Google presence ("Googling 'Alison Maynard'"). When my name is googled, the same two malicious AbovetheLaw.com posts come up, over and over, along with numerous bad addresses. This blog (which has my name all over it) does not come up until page 17. I've revised the earlier post to reflect that two days after I posted it, I googled my name, and on the first page appeared an image of that very post ("Googling 'Alison Maynard'") with a colored rectangle around the bit about "pimply women," and a big arrow pointing to one woman's photo. After I revised my post to make it clear I did not mean any particular woman, the image with the colored rectangle and arrow immediately disappeared from the google results.

***Update Jan. 21, 2012: I have just googled "The Real Colorado"--AND THIS BLOG DOES NOT COME UP AT ALL. I WENT THROUGH ALL 35 PAGES OF RESULTS!***

When I wrote the blog post about John Gleason and his string of second mortgages, the name that Google gave it in the search bar was "Gleason's Greasin'." This was not the name I originally gave that post, although I later adopted it. I've also seen the title in the address bar change for other posts--in real time, while I am working on the post--and wondered. I have actually SUED Law Week for defamation for what came up when my name was googled in 2009: the results said "DISCIPLINE!" in red capital letters, with a link to the latest OARC complaint against me, which Law Week had published. That's gone now, too. But I printed it out.

Not a single one of my blog posts about "Brownstein, Hyatt" comes up in google, nor any of Stew Webb's, and I went through all 37 pages. I found only one article in the slightest bit negative about this firm, by Tim Carney with the Washington Examiner. The rest is just breathless slavish praise (although lots of redundant address information comes up for them, too.) Finally, I googled "Greg Hobbs," and none of my blog posts about HIM come up, either. I went to the end, page 27.

This indicates manipulation of the results within Google itself.

Google has connections with the CIA. It is also a "lobbying client" of the Brownstein, Hyatt law firm. Norm Brownstein is a former CIA counsel deeply involved with organized crime. See the remarkable book by Pete Brewton, The Mafia, CIA & George Bush.

When, by the way, did computers start being sold with Google search bars built into the operating system? This looks like anticompetitive activity. There are other search engines out there. Remember altavista?

I am starting my own grassroots campaign to boycott Google, and raise awareness. The impression everyone has is that computerized "bots" and web crawlers give you the search results on Google, and it's entirely neutral. This is not the case: there are human trolls directing what comes up, dripping snot on their keyboards as they ruin your life--and they have ruined mine--and then taking a fat paycheck from the banksters.

***Update, Jan. 19, 2012: Alex Jones is complaining about Google's censorship, too:
http://www.infowars.com/google-is-already-using-sopa-like-censorship/

Assassination Techniques of the CIA and KGB

2011-12-23T05:40:00.000-08:00

In his book Target Patton: The Plot to Assassinate General George S. Patton (Regnery Publishing Inc.: 2008), Robert K. Wilcox sets forth the evidence that General Patton was assassinated, the first step (the auto accident) probably having been staged by an OSS agent named Douglas Bazata on the orders of American General William "Wild Bill" Donovan (who was likely a British agent). (The second step was Patton's sudden death in the hospital two weeks later, when he was on the verge of being discharged.) Bazata--working for the OSS (later called the CIA)--has revealed his involvement in numerous assassinations, of Americans as well as foreign nationals.

At p. 209 Wilcox documents methods by which both the CIA and KGB assassinate political opponents. I quote from his book, below, as support for my "Log of Accidental Deaths," the implication being, of course, that arranging accidents and heart attacks is what the spooks do if they want to get rid of someone, and happens far more commonly than we suspect. Wilcox's footnotes are at the bottom.

"[A scenario such as introducing a harmful substance from a window into Patton's hospital room] is not far fetched in the clandestine world following World War II. Exploding cigars, poison needle umbrellas, even radioactive coffee have been publicly shown to have been weapons in the Cold War arsenals of the CIA and KGB.[11] World war II was an incubator for such grisly exotica, including biochemical assassination weapons. They were used surreptitiously by both sides. By the start of the Cold War, the Russians operated a "Special Bureau" with a lab for "undetectable means of exterminating human beings." [12] For instance, Soviet agents used an "atomizer" containing a bio-poison "which leaves no wound or other evidence of the cause of death.[13] "Natural killers" were created that could induce heart attack, "cerebral apoplexy," and other medical maladies leaving little or no trace.[14] For assassination, according to a formerly classified CIA study, "the contrived accident is the most effective technique. When successfully executed, it causes little excitement and is only casually investigated." [15] In a hospital, "drugs can be very effective," the study continues, "if the assassin is trained as a doctor or a nurse and the subject is under medical care. [It] is an easy and rare method. An overdose of morphine administered as a sedative will cause death without disturbance and is difficult to detect." Bazata told the Spotlight that a form of "refined cyanide" can "cause or appear to cause" embolism.

"[There follows a discussion of the Soviets' use of traffic accidents and hospitals as methods of murder. On pp. 222-23, Wilcox discusses the death of Ukrainian nationalist Stepan Bandera, who:]

"...had been found dying outside the entrance to his apartment in Munich, Germany, in 1959. After autopsy, the death had been officially ruled the result of a natural heart attack. Little publicity was given to the death. But in a well-publicized trial in 1961, Stashinsky [a defected Soviet assassin] had testified he had been ordered by the KGB to assassinate Bandera, proof of Soviet assassination ams and methods that the outside world could not ignore. Stashinsky had killed Bandera with a specially designed gun that sprayed gaseous hydrogen cyanide in Bandera's face. The cyanide, a massive artery and vein constrictor, had induced heart failure. He had used the same "spray" gun two years earlier, Stashinsky confessed, to assassinate another Ukrainian leader, Lev Rebet--also thought to have been a natural death--and been told then that the weapon had been used successfully many times prior.

"On Patton?"

Notes:

11. Judyth Sassoon, "Biochemical Assassination Weapons," Encyclopedia of Intelligence, Gale Group, 2004. (http://www.espionageinfo.com/Ba-Bl/Biochemical-Assassination-Weapons.html.)

12. John Barron, KGB: The Secret Work of Soviet Secret Agents (Bantam Books, 1974), 419.

13. CIA memorandum entitled "Soviet Use of Assassination and Kidnapping," prepared in February 1964 for the President's Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy and declassified in 1971; obtained at the UCLA Library.

14. Richard Camellion, Assassination: Theory and Practice (Paladin Press, 1977), 139.

Life Among the Sociopaths, Part II

2011-12-16T06:09:00.000-08:00

This post is to provide links to my documents which establish violations of the Canons of Judicial Conduct by Gregory J. Hobbs, Jr., appointed to the Colorado Supreme Court by former Gov. Roy Romer in 1996. I will be adding to the documents in the near future.

I have grieved Greg twice (and see exhibits here and here) for his misconduct, but the Commission on Judicial Discipline has turned a blind eye. In fact, the letter I've linked to, from the Commission's director William Campbell, does not indicate the Commission was even provided my complaint when I renewed it in 2011, and I learned later, by email, that it was not. This, although the Commission informed me, in 2008, that I should renew my grievance if I believed Hobbs had engaged in this type of misconduct again. It at least interviewed him, and gave him a warning, in 2008. Campbell's letter contains other misrepresentations which I will dispose of when I upload the other documents.

The 2008 grievance linked to here establishes that in every appeal of mine Hobbs has ever sat on, he has met with my opponents ex parte (even in one case with my own CLIENT) to talk to them about the case. I showed, in the Animas-La Plata cases, that he had accepted gifts and money from my opponents, advocated publicly for the very project we were challenging in his court, and sat on boards and commissions with our opponents (one of which exists to fund development projects). I produced stunning evidence, the like of which one never normally gets, because how do you know what your judge is doing when he is not on the bench?

Greg was previously a water lawyer who represented development interests. He has remained rabidly committed to these interests since his appointment to the bench and has consistently and stubbornly refused to remain sequestered as a judge must. It is clear he believes the Canons of Judicial Conduct do not apply to him. He lashes out with extraordinary vindictiveness against anyone who stands in the way of his buddies the development attorneys. I am Exhibit 1: my trying to obtain the recusal of Hobbs in the Animas-La Plata diligence case (where he did NOT recuse, contrary to what Campbell's letter says), and then filing this grievance against him, has led to the ruination of my career as a lawyer. I have endured five nonstop years of harassing and groundless disciplinary proceedings.

I note that the Commission has a rule that all grievances against judges are confidential. This provision was also put into the Colorado Constitution (Art. VI, Sec. 23(3)(g)). (I don't know the year, since I do not presently have access to the Session Laws.) I am deliberately not respecting these proscriptions, since on their face they violate my rights under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Googling "Alison Maynard"

2011-12-09T05:59:00.000-08:00

I googled my own name last night and all that comes up are the two defamatory screeds posted about me in 2007 on AbovetheLaw.com by the cockroach David Lat. They come up over and over for the first five pages. (I did not look beyond that.) THIS BLOG does not even come up!

Also coming up are photos of unattractive women, different ones since 2007, at one point a whole slew of pimply women supposedly named Alison Maynard inviting you to join them on Facebook, one knocking back a martini. A lot of money is being poured into keeping this false picture of me in the forefront, and pushing my blog down. This would explain why I do not get much traffic on this site. People are being prohibited from finding out about it. I feel sorry for two other female attorneys, in the UK and Australia, who are named "Alison Maynard." They're being harmed by this smear campaign, too.

Several listings also come up for a business address I haven't had for 11 years, and addresses I have never had, including one in Quantico, VA (where they transformed my P.O. box number into a zip code). Even without the ridicule, the false contact information was enough to destroy my law practice. Together they most definitely did.

In 2002, when I ran for Colorado Attorney General--my opponent was Ken Salazar--I had a stellar web presence. Here's one of the things still online (which also does not come up when "Alison Maynard" is googled.) Some newspaper articles about my career are here; here's my issues statement from 2002--which sets forth a few of the reasons Mr. Salazar was unfit--and here's my resume. I have handled a great deal of litigation in the public interest--which means, in Colorado, fighting the corrupt governmental officials who were installed by the Mizel/Brownstein developer cabal. I do mean "installed," because they also control elections. And I do mean Ken Salazar, as one of several of their stooges. So, I did get some favorable press before 2002, mostly from local newspapers. Many of those newspapers have since been bought up by William Dean Singleton, who is "good friends with Larry Mizel" (see "The Dysfunctional Denver Post"). Many of my cases involve speculative water development; read about Animas-La Plata (ALP) and AWDI.

It was in one of my two ALP Supreme Court cases, the diligence case, that I backdated my brief by four days, and then VOLUNTARILY REPORTED TO THE COURT what I had done shortly afterwards. This is the subject of Lat's screeds.

My ALP opponents gleefully communicated my admission to him and he put it on the web, where it still is five years later. He never bothered to post the brief I wrote, in which I laid out fraud after fraud of my opponents in ALP, including judges, for 40 years. People need to read this brief, which I will shortly post, as well as my brief in the companion ALP reserved-rights case, to appreciate the connection between the frauds committed by these powerful people, and what has rained down on me since I exposed them. Neither of the ALP cases resulted in a decision by the Colorado Supreme Court. They were both wrongfully buried, without an opinion; and I became the target of unending disciplinary proceedings, groundless charges of mental incapacity, and huge monetary sanctions slapped on me summarily by courts, the latest of which--imposed without any due process whatsoever--is $100,000. I have been stripped of everything I own, as well as my ability to earn a living.

I continue to be ridiculed on the web. Enough already! I have paid my debt to society--far more than I ever owed (which was nothing).

For what it's worth, here's my explanation for what I did. I was suddenly given the same short deadline in my two ALP appeals, by the Colorado Supreme Court, both on pain of dismissal. I could not possibly meet it in both cases. Behind these orders was a conflicted justice named Greg Hobbs, who had publicly advocated for the very water project we were challenging in his court (ALP), as well as met secretly with our opponents. In 2008 I sent out press releases entitled "Vote 'No!' on Hobbs" when he was up for retention, documenting his conflicts--I also grieved him--and the disciplinary vendetta against me redoubled in intensity and fury.

Wouldn't you think it was time Lat shelved his stupid article, laid off the "search engine optimization," and canned his stupid website? What does it take for a cockroach to realize there are no crumbs left in the kitchen?

***Update, Dec. 28, 2011: I googled my name not long after I had posted this article. On the first page of results appeared an image of this very article, and the reference to "pimply women" had a green border around it with an arrow pointing to one of the pictures. This is proof positive that some troll, whom I envision as a hunchback with a single eye in the middle of his forehead, is monitoring my posts and manipulating the search engines to do me maximum harm. Maybe he is within Google itself.

I revised the text of this post, and just checked back: the image of the blog post--with the colored border and arrow--is no longer there! I wish I'd taken a picture.

***UPDATE Jan. 21, 2012: I just googled "The Real Colorado"--and THIS BLOG DOES NOT COME UP AT ALL!!! I WENT THROUGH ALL 35 PAGES OF RESULTS!***

Fear and Loathing in the Tenth Circuit

2011-08-21T05:59:00.000-07:00

I really must document some of the shenanigans being pulled by the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, where I filed a petition for extraordinary relief on May 6, 2011. "Extraordinary relief" means a writ of mandamus or prohibition. This is case 11-1207.

On August 3, 2011, I mailed a "Motion for Writ of Prohibition and Mandamus"(attached to which is this Exhibit A, our motion to recuse Judge John Kane) to the 10th Circuit, because the Court had ignored my petition, and PACER--the public access electronic filing system--has never shown my motion has been filed. Because I had sent it by regular mail, it could not be traced. Thus, I remailed the motion on August 14 and paid for delivery confirmation this time. The court has now admitted it received it each time. But it refuses to file it in the case!

The motion has never been docketed in case 11-1207. Instead, the court clerk opened a new case on August 5, 11-1363, and put my motion into THAT case. She then demanded a second $450 docket fee on threat of dismissal. I didn't pay--and she dismissed it. I filed an objection to what was going on in case 11-1207, which was referred to the "panel on the merits" on Sept. 6. It is now Oct. 28 and there has been no disposition of my objection, let alone my motion or petition.

This is too bizarre for words. And it's not a complete account of the runaround we've received, not by a long shot. We were initially required to file the petition not even with the Tenth Circuit, but with the district court. Judge Kane held it up, because we had asked for leave to proceed in forma pauperis. This is case 11-1207. It is, of course, Judge Kane's orders we are appealing in the 10th Circuit, yet here he was prohibiting the appeal from going forward. This is his specialty: holding plaintiffs hostage so they never get their trial. As I revealed in our motion to recuse Judge Kane in the district court, I was an intern for him while a student in law school and drafted opinions actually disposing of cases, which he signed without change, so part of the picture with Kane is laziness. Another part is strong personal loyalty to the power elite, several of whom happen to be defendants in our case.

Kane ultimately found that neither my co-plaintiff Jerry Lewis nor I qualified as paupers, for different reasons. Never mind that both of us have been stripped of our homes, all our savings, and our livelihoods by the Defendants. I finally paid the $455 docket fee out of exasperation, out of the $3,000 I had left to my name, or our appeal would have been dismissed.

What our petition for writ of mandamus is challenging is the nonrandom transfer of the case to Kane, who is best buds with the Defendants. The chief judge, Wiley Daniel, took our case out of the computerized random assignment process to "transfer" it to Kane, who came on like a bull in a china shop and immediately struck our complaints and all motions, which had been on file for two years. The rogue judge then directed the toady magistrate, Michael Hegarty, to trump something up to get rid of us, and Hegarty has recently done that. Never mind that he had no jurisdiction, since our appeal in the Tenth Circuit was pending. But they don't care about the law. This is the court. They're above that, see.

When our petition was transmitted by the district court to the Court of Appeals on May 10, the clerk--or SOMEONE at the district court, maybe Kane again--buried it at the bottom of 101 pages of extraneous paper. Eighty-eight pages of crap were put on top of our 13-page petition before the whole thing was docketed as "civil complaint." Only the 13 pages at the bottom are our petition.

And then, it is not even available on PACER via the docket which comes up first. You must PAY to access the "full docket" before you can even see a link for this 101-page thing they have labeled "civil complaint." So I have linked to it on this blog, where people can find it without paying and without plowing through 101 pages of impertinent paper.

The foregoing is, of course, just the tip of the criminal iceberg known as the judicial system. Because an administrative runaround--being charged a second docket fee to get a motion considered in your case--is something the public can readily understand, I have given a blow-by-blow of one of those runarounds here; but laypeople need to know this happens all the time, in general turning on interpretation of much more technical rules, however. This gets the Court where it wants to go, which is to aid the banking/developer/insurance cabal. Always. And gets it there in the way which will be least understandable to the public (and often even to lawyers). I have a website in progress where I have detailed more of this for several cases in which matters of great public importance were ground to bits in this maw, almost always resulting in the transfer of public resources to developers. I hope people will take the time to work through it.

What else can we do but publicize the takeover and subversion of our institutions? The takeover of the courts is most terrifying and evil, since they are the most powerful. I am afraid to even return to Colorado--afraid the next judge I appear before will trump something up and throw me in jail, like they did Richard Fine.

Life Among the Sociopaths,* Part I

2011-06-08T13:25:00.000-07:00

(*with apologies to Shirley Jackson.)

In February 1989, I was hired as an Assistant Attorney General in the Water Unit, in the Colorado Department of Law. Although a newbie, I was assigned to represent three state agencies opposing the huge application of American Water Development, Inc. ("AWDI") for water rights from the aquifers of the San Luis Valley.

The federal government had filed a motion to preempt state law in the Closed Basin Project, and was supported by the opposers, local well owners represented by David Robbins and John Carlson. Although we were all technically on the same side--opposing AWDI--this motion was not adverse to AWDI. It was adverse to the State, specifically my client the State Engineer. I realized, later, that Robbins and Carlson were trying to forestall any rule the State Engineer might develop which would require their clients to deepen their wells. The water court had told the State Engineer, Jeris Danielson, in a previous case (AZT) that he must consider imposing such a rule.

The Closed Basin project wells are very shallow. If these wells could be insulated, as a matter of federal law, from state rules requiring them to be deepened, the opposers' own shallow wells surrounding the project would also be protected "as a matter of topographical fact," as attorney John Carlson put it.

I got permission to file a brief late, and got the feds' motion dismissed on the basis that there was no conflict between the federal and state laws, so the issue of pre-emption could not be reached. I received warm praise from Colorado Attorney General Duane Woodard.

I then set up a friendly meeting with David Robbins to discuss the AWDI case with him. Robbins had, at that point, spent three years doing nothing but discovery (generating fees, in other words). He indicated that he had been unhappy to "just be served with a piece of paper" (my brief). I asked if he had considered filing a motion for summary judgment to dispose of AWDI's claim for tributary groundwater, based on speculation. A judge in Water Division 4 had recently dismissed the application of another private entity for water rights (NECO) as speculative, because it had no contracts to provide water service anywhere. The same was true of AWDI.

Robbins's face got flushed. He backed me up against a wall in his office, yelling threats against Jeri Danielson and shaking his finger in my face. I pushed him away and said, "You are not to make threats against my client," and left.

Right around that time there was a bill pending to abolish the 100-year-old office of State Engineer. That failed. I suspect Robbins was behind it, but do not know for sure.

Robbins began meeting with my clients and supervisors behind my back. I learned about one meeting he set up with Bill McDonald, the director of the Colorado Water Conservation Board, to discuss AWDI. I wrote Robbins a letter telling him he could not meet with my client without my consent, and that I planned to be present. When I arrived, however, the receptionist told me they had "rescheduled" for another location, not saying where. Robbins also, along with attorney Bill Paddock, set up a meeting with the Division Engineer for Water Division 3, Steve Vandiver, to "prepare him for his deposition" to be taken by AWDI. Vandiver was, again, my client. When I objected, I was begrudgingly told I could attend! Robbins then invited Vandiver to a Superbowl party at his home in Park Hill in January 1990. He did not invite me. I learned Robbins had had discussions about the case with the director of the Division of Wildlife, Perry Olson, also my client.

One meeting, at which the State Engineer's modeler DeWayne Schroeder made a presentation to the opposers and their attorneys of his hydrological model in the San Luis Valley, turned into a feeding frenzy. Robbins and Paddock and their clients were yelling at Jeris and Schroeder, with me ineffectually trying to mediate. Sometime after my meeting with Robbins in his office, I accidentally saw a phone message on my supervisor Lois Witte's desk that Robbins had set up a meeting to discuss AWDI with Attorney General Duane Woodard. I was the attorney on the case, and didn't know about it. I showed up (with my co-worker Wendy Weiss), and Robbins seemed taken aback. He never mentioned AWDI, but babbled to Duane about the Arkansas River litigation. At yet another meeting, which Wendy also attended, we were sitting around a small table with the other attorneys, and John Carlson came at me shouting threats, and pounding his fist on the table, I don't remember why now.

The meetings Robbins had with my clients were, of course, a violation of the Rules of Professional Conduct, but I never filed a grievance--I knew nothing about the process and had no yardstick for knowing when one actually did that.

But I should have, because what this was was the beginning of a big campaign against me personally, for innocently suggesting something which would have ended the case--and stopped Robbins's meter running. I was prohibited from filing this motion myself: Woodard privately instructed me not to file any motions in the case--just to "let the sleeping giant lie." He blasted Jeris Danielson, the client of our office, and told me how Danielson had alienated Roy Romer, Chips Barry, etc. I was astounded, since his instruction that I not exercise my independent judgment in the case was unethical, and he was telling me to ignore and even subvert the needs of our client.

I became aware that meetings were being held about AWDI among Lois Witte, the deputy attorney general for the Natural Resources section; Attorney General Woodard; Chips Barry, the director of the Dept. of Natural Resources; legislators from the San Luis Valley; David Robbins; and possibly Gov. Romer. I, the attorney on the case, was not invited to any of these meetings. I realized with growing discomfort that they must be talking about ME. A new First Assistant was appointed, Linda White, who was assigned to "supervise" me in AWDI, although I had won on everything I'd done in the case. I began to be summoned into Lois's office and reamed by her, for no reason. She would abuse and berate me behind closed doors, saying there were "complaints" that I was "causing problems in the case." I asked her what was being said and what she meant, and she would not tell me. She began summoning me away peremptorily from meetings with clients and research in the library, simply to harass me in her office.

I had worked as a geophysicist before going to law school, and was a physics major at Cornell. Thus, I had gotten a lot of positive attention from the powerful males who were our clients, the heads of state agencies. Once Linda--who had no experience in groundwater--came on the case, however, I started being left out of the loop, as she asserted herself. I believed (and still do) that she and Lois were both afflicted by jealousy. As self-centered as it sounds, I think professional jealousy is a uniquely female pathology, a conditioned response to a threat posed by other females, although I have been able to find nothing about it in the psychological literature.

In a nutshell, I was removed from the case by Linda and Lois, and ultimately fired from my job, without ever any notice of what had been said about me, or any opportunity to respond. I had an almost 100% "win" record in my trials. I believed then that it was solely Linda and Lois doing this, but in latter years have realized I did not reach all the way back to the root cause. That was David Robbins, who sent me down this road I could never get off of. I "caused problems in the case" by recognizing that summary judgment was available. I did not know I was not supposed to actually be functioning as an attorney.

After I was fired I filed a lawsuit against the Attorney General's people. The events with Robbins are not emphasized, and he was not a defendant, because I did not put two and two together at that time. But in April 2006, when I saw Robbins at the first of the Animas-La Plata trials in Durango, he came over to shake my hand and gave me a searching, apologetic look. I knew then that he was at the bottom of my travails at the Attorney General's office.

Robbins's malicious interference with my life and prospects did not end with AWDI. There is more, although each time I did not recognize that it was he pulling the strings.

After leaving the AG's office, I tried to make it on my own. In late 1992, I was drafted by the Law Fund of the Rockies to take a pro bono case against the Colorado Water Conservation Board over its carving off 5 cfs of the publicly owned 12 cfs instream flow (ISF) in Snowmass Creek, so the Aspen Skiing Company could make snow.

I was very proud of the briefing I did in this case. The issue of ISF protection became a political hot button. I learned, in around January 1993, that the Colorado Water Congress had even held a "debate" about the case--but I, the lead attorney for the plaintiff (Aspen Wilderness Workshop), was not invited. Instead, David Robbins--who was not even in the case--was invited to represent "the environmental viewpoint." I have no idea if the arguments I made in my brief were even mentioned!

I finally got a job as city attorney for Craig, Colorado, and started on March 1, 1993. I was permitted to keep my own practice on the side, so kept the Snowmass Creek case. However, bad stuff started happening to me in Craig. I was charged with contempt by a county court judge, based on a real estate deal I had closed on behalf of the city, although I violated no court order. Jim Lochhead, a private water lawyer, come in as conflicts counsel to represent the City of Craig. The City had been dismissed from the underlying case, but Lochhead acted as if it were still a defendant and kept billing, making it appear to my employer that I was the reason for his bills. The contempt charge was ultimately dismissed. Then, I heard from the mayor that a member of the CWCB had asked him what his city attorney (me) was doing suing the Colorado Water Conservation Board. And then my contract with the city was not renewed. I moved back to Denver.

I have deduced since then that Lochhead purposely kept me twisting in the wind to please Gov. Romer, so I could not litigate the ISF case effectively. And, indeed, I withdrew after filing an appeal. Lochhead was himself a member of the Colorado Water Conservation Board and greatly influenced the vote to carve up the ISF, telling the other members that the Ski Company's water right was senior to the ISF--which was false (since the Company's right was not decreed for snowmaking). In April 1994, Lochhead was then appointed by Romer to be director of the Department of Natural Resources, obviously a reward for furthering the interests of Romer's cronies. See Romer's 1991-93 campaign contribution records, showing numerous contributions by persons associated with the Aspen Skiing Company, as well as other skiing interests.

Also, the next three persons Romer appointed to the Colorado Supreme Court had all been involved either in the Snowmass Creek case (on the developers' side), or with me personally, and I believe that is why they were selected: Nancy Rice (the district court judge not only on the Snowmass Creek case, but on my suit against the AG's office), Rebecca Kourlis, and Greg Hobbs. Hobbs had written an amicus brief when the case was in the Colorado Supreme Court opposing the existence of any fiduciary responsibility of the CWCB for ISFs. Kourlis had been the district court judge in Craig, and attended my hearing in the contempt proceeding.

So putting pressure on my employer, in order to get rid of me for being effective in litigation, is one of the dirty tricks the water lawyers in Colorado--at least those who have been associated with Roy Romer--use to get rid of their opponents. Everything in Colorado is for the developers, and if you oppose them, you pay. I have paid with my career and reputation, serious enough, but others may have paid with their lives. (See the large number of water-associated people on my "Log of Accidental Deaths".)

Moving to the Hobbs side of things: in December 1992, Larry MacDonnell, the director of the Natural Resources Law Program at the CU Law School, held a big powwow among environmental attorneys to draft an agenda after Bill Clinton's election. I was at that time involved with an environmental attorney named Bruce Driver, who was close friends with Larry. Bruce told me Larry had said that both David Robbins and Greg Hobbs (then a water lawyer who also represented developers) had learned about this conclave and were angry they were not invited, so they were pushing a bill in the legislature to de-fund the CU Law School! In 2008, I called Larry to see if he would sign an affidavit about this incident, and he declined, saying, "I couldn't really prove it." This incident reveals the close relationship between Hobbs and Robbins, the dirty tricks they concoct and play together, and their narcissism. If you don't genuflect before these two guys as the best and the brightest in the water bar, you pay, buddy.

Part II of "Life Among the Sociopaths" will continue with Greg Hobbs, now a Colorado Supreme Court justice, and the bogus and retaliatory disciplinary proceedings I believe have been visited upon me at his direction, for the offense of being a good attorney--and particularly for fingering his buddies for fraud.

Lewis Ames Memorabilia

2011-04-27T08:43:00.000-07:00

I have pasted below a photo of my fourth grade class at Lewis Ames Elementary in Littleton, Colorado (it would now be in Centennial), just for the fun of it, from 1964.

The tall blond girl smack in the middle is Marcia Smith, who is now Marcia Krieger and a judge on the United States District Court for the District of Colorado! (Her dad was a judge, too.) I am the girl with glasses and braids sitting two kids down, to her left.

In front of her to her left, the boy sitting who is not holding the sign is Mark Paschall. He was county treasurer for Jefferson County a few years ago.

I moved away from Colorado in 1966, but came back as an adult in 1979 and have been here ever since! I'd sure like to hear from other classmates, if they're around.

The Strange Case of Sam Hamilton

2011-04-25T08:59:00.000-07:00

Samuel Hamilton was the director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for all of six months. He died on a skiing trip to Keystone, Colorado, February 20, 2010, at age 54. The coroner's statement says his death was "consistent with a heart attack." His death certainly sounds like a heart attack, but that doesn't mean it was natural. Hamilton did not have heart disease. He was in good shape. Two photos and the coroner's report (with personal information redacted) are here. Hamilton's boss was the Secretary of Interior, Ken Salazar, a native Coloradan.

Hamilton appeared to be a sincere conservationist, and had begun several major policy shifts as director of FWS. I question his death, first because it happened in Summit County, Colorado, a cesspool. There is no enforcement of the law there, at least as against wealthy wrongdoers. (Of course, if you're not wealthy, you can expect to "arrive on vacation and leave on probation"!) Second, Hamilton was replaced by a man named Rowan Gould, who had directed the federal government's response to the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska. A little over one month after Gould stepped in to replace Hamilton the huge British Petroleum oil well gusher happened in the Gulf.

There is evidence that this gusher, like many other huge disasters we've experienced, was caused intentionally by insiders engineering a stockplay, or looking for government contracts. Goldman Sachs sold 40% of its BP stock two weeks before the explosion, making $250,000,000. Ken Salazar has been right there in the middle not only of the oil gusher, but the Summitville Mine in Colorado and the Columbine school shootings. Goldman Sachs poured a lot of dough into Ken Salazar's campaigns, and Salazar's willingness to enable, cover up, and erase liability for catastrophes to further moneymaking schemes would explain the bankers' investment in him. Anyway, Gould is moved into another job a few months later.

No autopsy was done of Sam Hamilton--inconsistent with the coroner's policy of doing autopsies routinely for persons under age 55. In fact, the coroner was out of town: a deputy was on duty, a Dillon police officer whose reputation for honesty in the community is not good. No witnesses other than the Interior employees Hamilton was traveling with were interviewed, because, the coroner told me, the death occurred on Keystone's private property and Keystone "won't even give [her] the records." So, get that: immunity from a death investigation because you're a ski resort.

The report says the funeral home in Denver, Horan & McConaty, had to make a special trip up to Keystone, about 100 miles away, to pick up the body. Horan & McConaty originally told the coroner it would be up the next day, Sunday, Feb. 21. However, they called back about two hours later and reversed themselves, saying they would, instead, be up that evening. The body was thus removed from the custody of law enforcement and embalmed in short order, making more chemical tests impossible. There had been a toxicology test done which came up negative, but such tests are done routinely only for obvious substances such as meth, opiates, and alcohol.

Salazar's assistant called the coroner the afternoon of the death to make sure the coroner issued her own press release before the Dept. of Interior did. Even more unusual, Ken Salazar called the coroner personally twice that evening to expedite return of the body. That is obviously why Horan & McConaty changed its plan and came up right away: it got a call from Ken Salazar.

I was told by an employee that John Horan took the message. The employee said he would ask Mr. Horan to call me, but Horan did not call. I then, quite by accident, learned that Brian McConaty, one of the mortuary families, is a member of the Catholic Lawyers' Guild.

Ken Salazar is a Catholic lawyer, too, and was awarded the St. Thomas More award in 2003. I have suggested the Church may be giving this award to lawyers for putting their obligations to the Church above their obligation to uphold the law. Whether or not I'm right about that (or that principle is even relevant here), it's clear that Ken Salazar knows the mortuary owner personally, and the mortuary changed its plan at Salazar's request to expedite embalming of Sam Hamilton's body.

Sam Hamilton's sudden death right before the oil well explosion to me is reminiscent of the sudden killing of Massoud in Afghanistan right before 9/11. Both are people I believe would have stories to tell on the U.S. government, real knowledge and reason to be suspicious if they were then to see the disaster take place. If the government itself planned the disaster, they would be wise to it, and the plan would logically include getting rid of these people beforehand.

History of the Romer Ranch

2011-04-13T19:49:00.000-07:00

On March 31, 2011, the Denver Post did a big piece on Chris Romer, who is running for Denver mayor. Chris is the son of Roy, who was Colorado governor from Jan. 1987- Jan. 99; state treasurer, state ag commissioner, and a state legislator before that.

I don't know much about Chris--but I do know quite a bit about his dad, and think I need to round out the saintly picture the Post painted of Roy as a "state legislator who ran for the U.S. Senate in 1966 as a dove against the Vietnam War" and "civil rights activist."

What Roy really was (maybe still is) is a real estate developer. He did several subdivisions in Jefferson County in the 1960's and 70's, along with his partner Harley Hamilton, as Harley confirmed at p. 31 of his deposition in 1998.

(I am pretty sure he worked in Park County, too, although Harley says he didn't.) I've seen Romer's signature on the plat for Burland Estates and been told Romer did the Safeway shopping center in Conifer. Romer's financial disclosures showed (Appendix B) that "Evergreen Meadows Land Co." owned 1,400 acres in Gunnison County, so that must have been his company.

Romer's primary focus was to grease the skids for real estate developers, as well as to "liberate" chunks of public property for them, through his appointees on various boards which control state property. One board which controls a huge amount of public land and water rights is the State Board of Land Commissioners, charged, by the Colorado Constitution, with managing the approximately 3 million acres of state trust lands left from the original grant of 4.5 million acres the United States made to Colorado on statehood. The bulk of these are "school lands"--for the support of the common schools.

After Romer became governor, things changed dramatically at the Land Board. He replaced long-time employees with cronies, including a man named John Brejcha who came in as "deputy director," whereupon state trust lands began flying out the door to developers for pennies on the dollar. Brejcha's primary "qualification" was working at three branch offices of Empire Savings & Loan in the 1980's (one of which he managed). See Brejcha's deposition, pp. 10-11.

Empire was one of the biggest criminal savings and loan fiascos ever prosecuted by the federal government. Thus, John Brejcha came out of the S&L cabal which took over this state in the late 1980's, and he is the "point man" for dispositions of state lands to developers. I have several times caught Brejcha lying to his own board about the value of state lands, to make the low-balled price the developer has offered seem like a good deal.

Because of public outcry over these deals by the mid-1990's, Roy Romer--the source of the problem--pointed to the requirement in the Colorado Constitution that the Land Board maximize revenue when it disposed of state trust lands. He said we needed to remove this requirement to give "flexibility" to the Land Board to manage these lands for their environmental values, and stumped for an amendment in 1996, Amendment 16.

When Amendment 16 was proposed, a reporter for the Rocky Mountain News, Dan Luzadder, noted that tens of thousands of dollars were being given to this supposed environmental measure by big corporate leaseholders.

Here are the campaign contribution reports. Crested Butte Mountain Resorts (CBMR) gave $10,000; Vail Resorts gave $25,000; East-West Partners gave $10,000; Union Pacific (Anschutz's company) gave $15,000; Coors gave $5,000 (and also gave $1,000 to Romer in 1994); and Daniel Ritchie gave $1,000 (and another $1,000 to Romer in 1994). Roy Romer got a lot of favorable press for his own selflessness in taking out a $20,000 "personal loan" from Key Bank to put towards the measure.

Two years later (1998), in discovery in one of my cases against the Land Board, I got this document, which shows that, after the amendment passed, CBMR, Union Pacific, Ritchie, and "Coors Energy" became the proud new owners of state trust lands. . CBMR got 5,061.6 acres valued at $4,375,000. Coors' piece, in Weld County, was 640 acres valued at $101,250.00 (which I assume included mineral rights, but don't know). Union Pacific got 91.82 acres valued at $660,000.00. Ritchie got 8,7973.14 acres in Grand County for $205,000, or $22/acre. A Douglas Stratton, presumably related to Mike Stratton--a consultant for Romer and real estate developer--got 480 acres valued at $69,300.00. John Salazar got 82.57 acres for $5,162. ($62.50/acre).

The most important new owner was Roy Romer himself. After the amendment passed, he stepped down from office and acquired, in the name of his family trust, a valuable piece of state trust land in Park County of 320 acres, for under-market value. Chris Romer hyped it as a great deal for the public. It was a three-way transaction: Roy talked the owner of an inholding in Roxborough Park (in Douglas County) named Treece into selling it to State Parks, for which he got huge kudos; paid the money over to Treece himself; and then took the piece of land he wanted in Park County, which was obviously unrelated, and came from the State Land Board, not Parks. So the Roxborough acquisition was simply cover for his own self-dealing. Brought to you by the guy who went around giving out awards for "Smart Growth," who liked to be known as the "Education Governor." You gotta hand it to him for this masterful sleight-of-hand. He also got 155 acres of BLM land in 1997.

Thus, Romer put his ranch together largely out of public lands. In fact, Romer had been the lessee of the state trust land throughout his years in public office, and his father before him. Here are the SLB docs for the land swap, and old leases; and here's an article about the land swap. His financial disclosures show the SLB lease on Attachment B.

That he had leased it didn't give him any more right to acquire it than anyone else, though, although once Amendment 16 passed he was free of the worry that someone else might outbid him. The more important point is that he should have divested himself of the lease as soon as he took on the mantle of public office. But only ethical people do that kind of thing.

I tried to find out from Key Bank who paid the loan back. As my notes show, I could never get anyone to speak to me. This means there was a $20,000 campaign contribution by an unidentified donor, in violation of law.

So you are probably wondering why I didn't report these fraudulent transactions, particularly the Romer acquisition, to law enforcement. Of course I did, but they didn't do anything. I had a two-hour meeting with two FBI agents, along with attorneys for the Colorado School District Association and Colorado Education Association, in 2000. The FBI agents handed the matter off to a new guy, requiring me to make the same presentation all over again (unbillable, of course); but he wasn't interested, anyway. I had a two-hour meeting with Tom Haney, an investigator with the Denver DA's office, and never heard anything back. Here's my letter to him.

About two years later, I happened to see Denver DA Bill Ritter having lunch at Maggione's, and jogged him on it. He got a faraway look in his eyes, stroked his chin, and said, "Oh, yes, I heard about that." Of course he had no intention of prosecuting Roy Romer, being on his way up by grace of the same network. Lastly, after the transaction closed, I contacted the governor's office, now Bill Owens, a Republican. Whoever I talked to said, yeah, we flagged that when it came across the governor's desk, but he decided to let it go through.

Police State II

2011-03-19T08:37:00.000-07:00

A couple I met last night said that twice recently, on the H light-rail line in Denver, burly men have been going down the train demanding people produce a photo ID to them.

They are not RTD. They are Homeland Security.

Although RTD has a right to see your ticket, no one has a right to just demand a photo ID without probable cause. My recommendation to anyone who is asked to do so is: ask the cop for HIS (or her) photo ID. Tell the cop that he is conducting a warrantless search, which is unconstitutional.

We must begin standing up to the police state and not submit to the loss and abrogation of our constitutional rights like sheep.

There are instances where I am not going to argue about the warrantless search, such as before getting on an airplane, or, probably, going into a court. Anywhere else, I am.

***The latest (Sept. 23, 2011): FEMA and Homeland Security have been conducting drills to bus students and teachers to Mile High Stadium for "processing." Given that Denver was the site of the Columbine school massacre--which must have been government-sponsored, given the FBI and CIA agents standing around "observing" while the killing was going on inside; the involvement, according to many witnesses, of many other shooters; and the complete non-investigation and cover-up which followed, involving slimeball Ken Salazar--and the imminent economic collapse, we are on the verge of seeing mass slaughter of citizens by rogue elements in our own government. Denver is a hub.

"Drills," my ass.

The Police State of Colorado

2011-03-10T06:05:00.000-08:00

I went in person to renew my driver's license on March 4, 2011 (at 14th and Chambers, in Aurora). I was surprised to see a complete metal detector set-up, with three cops standing by, which I had to pass through to enter the building. While I expect these in courthouses now, I did not expect them in the driver's license bureau.

I was fingerprinted (one finger on an electronic pad), and asked for my social security number, as well as contact info for two people who know me, for emergency purposes.

I was then asked to take my glasses off for the photo--and, when I expressed surprise, because I always wear them, the photographer told me that it was really an "eye scan for identification purposes."

I was again surprised to see them punch a hole in my old license and give me not a replacement license, but a piece of paper saying I'm awaiting my new license, which will be mailed in 30 days. I was required to sign my name on an electronic signature device, which printed out on the same paper. I was told by a friend later that it takes 30 days to issue the new license because they are going to put a microchip in it.

None of these requirements--save a vision test, which I also took--has anything to do with the ability to operate a motor vehicle safely. I don't think the DMV is even authorized to ask for this information. The regs for driver's licenses say that the fingerprint is required, as well as rather minimal information about the driver (name, date of birth, gender, and residence address). If you go in in person, you take the vision test; and you must provide identification. It appears I could have avoided both, as well as the photograph, if I had just renewed online, which I now see I could have done! And they would not have my signature electronically recorded, either. I believe they intend to use this information to run a criminal check--and obviously they can use it in future for any other kind of check they want to run.

I find nothing in the statutes or regulations authorizing an "eye scan for identification purposes" or putting a microchip in the license, let alone collecting the SSN, emergency contact info, and electronic signature, and requiring everyone to pass through metal detectors. I emailed the Dept. of Revenue, asking where the authorization was for these things and whether they could even do an eye scan for identification, or were actually putting microchips in the licenses, and they said, "Ask the governor!"

Say what?? Is there an executive order out there to that effect? I have emailed the governor twice and not received a response.

I drove home from that driver's license bureau and passed through I don't know how many cameras at intersections. Aurora is putting spy cams up everywhere.

I am more disturbed than I can say by the police state Colorado has become. I can't believe I just put all that personal information into the government's database like a dumb bunny, and that I was misled by the DMV officials to believe I had to provide it to renew my license.

The Government's Assassin?

2011-03-07T09:32:00.000-08:00

Serial murderer Scott Lee Kimball has finally been put away, but given that his killing spree was enabled by the FBI, in concert with present Colorado Attorney General John Suthers (who was then U.S. Attorney for Colorado), it behooves us to look more closely at the nature of the murders he committed.

The outrageous conduct of FBI agent Carle Schlaff, Kimball's handler after Suthers and the FBI released him from prison to function as an "informant" in December 2002, shows that the FBI was complicit in the murders. I have hypothesized that the people Kimball killed--almost all young women who were involved with drugs, and possibly selling their bodies for sex--may have been witnesses who could implicate certain powerful people in criminal activity, so needed to be silenced.

The key stories about Kimball, including the perverse and sadistic behavior of Schlaff, have been published in the little Cherry Creek Chronicle.
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Denver Post columnist Vincent Carroll argued, before Suthers's re-election in 2010, that Suthers could not have known of Kimball's proclivity for murder, since all the murders happened in 2003 or later, after the deal which released him. This, although, by Dec. 2002, Kimball had four prior felony convictions and had escaped from a Montana prison.

Before his release he also had claimed to have knowledge about the murder of Assistant U.S. Attorney Thomas Wales in Seattle, in 2001. Kimball could have committed that murder himself: turns out he was in Seattle when Wales was shot and killed through the basement window of his home, while sitting at his computer. Wikipedia says, in its entry on Tom Wales, that the FBI has dragged its feet in investigating this killing, and that Wales's boss, the U.S. Attorney for that district, may have been dismissed for arguing for a greater resource allocation to investigate the murder. Thomas Wales had been an outspoken advocate of gun control. But I think the more important factor is that he "specialized in the investigation and prosecution of fraud in banking and business." Somebody didn't want him doing that.

If Kimball murdered Wales, the conclusion that he has been a paid assassin working for the government is inescapable. But even if he didn't, that the FBI isn't interested in investigating Wales's murder can only be because they already know who did it, and it was either somebody they simply can't prosecute--e.g., the Fat Cat Banksters--or they participated in it themselves. My guess is both.

The similarities between this case and that of Whitey Bulger, another mob "informant" for a crooked FBI handler, are striking. See the movie Deception. This is the same scenario. The "informant-handler" label is a euphemism for what is really going on, which is an FBI agent who uses his official powers and contacts to further the interests of organized crime. It is the FBI agent giving the Mafia information, not the other way around.

I want to know how Scott Kimball ended up in Colorado, when he had been in prison in Alaska. In Colorado, John Suthers, as U.S. Attorney, was the key guy who then made the decision to release him. Scott Kimball is also considered a suspect in the murder of Peggy Hettrick. There, an innocent kid, Tim Masters--only 14--was fingered as the murderer without a shred of physical evidence, and put away for over 10 years by prosecutors who suppressed exculpatory evidence, Jolene Blair and Terence Gilmore. Blair and Gilmore were subsequently elevated to judgeships. When news broke of their misconduct in the Masters case in 2007, John Gleason of the Office of Attorney Regulation Counsel gave them a slap on the wrist. It was up to determined citizens, who organized under the name Judicial Justice in Larimer County, to defeat Blair and Gilmore in their retention election in November 2010.

Back to John Suthers: he also influenced Gov. Ritter to pardon killer Jennifer Reali in 2010 when Ritter left office. Some murderers is just good folks, eh, Mr. Suthers? Reali's defense was that her boyfriend convinced her that killing his ailing wife would be the moral act of a good Christian.

Suthers must share Reali's views on justifiable murder. (Catholic ex-missionary Bill Ritter may, too.) Suthers characterizes himself as Roman Catholic,and went to Notre Dame. I strongly suspect he is a member of Opus Dei. I have always wondered about his stepping from the post of U.S. Attorney to Colorado Attorney General in 2004 taking about a 50% pay cut. Someone moved him around like a pawn on a chessboard, and he's just fine with it, never mind the $50 grand per yr. While one could say it's the banksters controlling these movements, one of these banks, Bank of America, is the Pope's bank.

As a sidenote about John Suthers, in around 2005, as Colorado Attorney General, he made a trip to Saudi Arabia. A Saudi couple, man and wife, had just been convicted of a number of crimes in Arapahoe County district court, involving their enslavement of, and the man's repeated sexual assaults on, an Indonesian woman. Suthers apparently went to apologize to the Saudis for the functioning of our criminal justice system--for our quaint idea that Indonesian women have a right not to be enslaved and raped.

All of the foregoing supports my thesis that Colorado is Murder, Inc. Whenever big crimes need to be committed, or covered up, the murderers get it into Colorado. Cover-ups are what the public officials--including especially the judges--specialize in here. And one explanation for this conduct is that they put their loyalty to a "higher master" above the oath they took to uphold the Constitution and the laws. It's really the only plausible excuse a religious person would have for violating that oath.

Gleason's Greasin'

2011-02-20T13:16:00.000-08:00

[This is a continuation of my posts "John Gleason: Lawyer Impersonator?" of Sept. 4, 2010, and "John Gleason and Me" of Feb. 8, 2010.]

A propos of articles on the web about the Masonic control of Denver--and the world (e.g., google "DIA conspiracy")--it turns out that John Gleason, the head of the Office of Attorney Regulation Counsel, probably is a Mason.

Last year, I contacted the only employer Gleason ever had as a lawyer prior to OARC, Robert Bartholic, who said that a man named John V. Egan, III, worked for him at the same time as Gleason did, and that Egan and Gleason are good friends. Bartholic indicated both had been deputy sheriffs and then became attorneys.

Egan is now the Grand Poobah of all Masonic lodges in Colorado. Here's the link--big picture of him wearing his regalia, right on the home page:

http://www.coloradofreemasons.org/

Bartholic is a prominent Freemason and Big Kahuna himself, as is Stephen Munsinger, a judge in Jefferson County (who was bad news in a case I had against Beneficial Finance Co.). Their names are on the list at: http://www.blackhawk11.org/Attachments/ColoradoMasonicDirectory2010.pdf The Denver Public Library has membership lists for the Masonic lodges in the Denver area from the 50's and 60's, and two Bartholics, including Robert and his father Clarence, held several high positions throughout this period. There is a plaque to Clarence at the D.U. Law School.

Although I haven't seen John Gleason's name on these lists, these associations (including loans to Gleason from Bartholic detailed below) indicate that he is a Mason, too, so it appears more and more certain that he was planted at OARC to protect the criminal banking cabal in its subversion of our judicial system. I've pointed out that he did not possess the minimum requirements for the OARC job when he applied, and probably does not have an undergraduate degree. See my post of 9/4/10. As for Egan, he was listed in the Colorado Legal Directory in 2008, but is apparently running a sprinkler company.

Freemasonry and the big banking interests have been closely intertwined for several hundred years; and they are working together to achieve the New World Order. See En Route to Global Occupation by Gary Kah and The Crimes of a President by Joel Bainerman, both written in 1992. The banking interests I'm talking about include the Rothschild family and the Rockefellers, Goldman Sachs, other banks in Europe. Although, at the lower levels, Masons believe they are doing community service, as Kah points out they are also taking oaths to keep the operations of the organization secret. The lower ones do not know what the higher ones are up to. The highest-degree Masons choose who is permitted to progress to their inner circle. There are examples in Kah's book of persons who have been high-level Masons and defected, then turned up dead. Masons worship Satan, as well (which is Kah's problem with Freemasonry, as a devout Christian); but Christians are often allied with Freemasonry, he says because the Freemasons deceive them and say they are working to unify the world for Jesus Christ. The way they control government is by surrounding leaders with a network of co-opted advisers. Masons never do anything under the name of Freemasonry. There are thousands of Masons in governments all over the world.

When I was quizzing Bartholic on the phone last year about why Gleason left his employ to go to work at OARC, he piped up, "I thought he just applied for the job and got it!" That hadn't been exactly responsive to the question I asked and seemed to indicate...that he had different knowledge.

Bartholic's relationship with Gleason goes way beyond simply being his employer, because five and seven years after Gleason left his employ, Bartholic and his wife Esther gave him two mortgages on his home at 700 E. Northridge Rd., of $12,000 and $10,000, which were paid off not that long after they were recorded. Gleason worked for Bartholic 1986-87. The fact he got these mortgages years later indicates a personal relationship, making even weaker Gleason's statement that he had "several years' experience in private practice with a law firm in Denver" before being taken on at OARC sometime after September 1987. There was only his association with Bartholic, who told me he "didn't have that much" for Gleason to do and did no litigation.

The property records in Douglas County reveal other interesting mortages Gleason has taken, as well, which I detail below. (A link to an online vault where these documents are stored is at the bottom of this post.) What they show, in a nutshell, is that several big loans have been taken out against Gleason's home which are then paid off in full a few months later. If someone else besides Gleason paid off these loans, only the bank (and the parties themselves) would know, because that information does not appear of record. Payoff of a borrower's loans by a third party would mean the borrower pocketed the cash; and the question we must ask is, what did he do to deserve it?

The company making several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of loans I regard as most questionable, Englewood Mortgage Company, is discussed at the end.

Update 11/20/11: I have discovered a 2010 article flagging the exact same type of activity--multiple conveyances, by a judge and deputy district attorney--in San Bernardino County, CA, as suspicious. That reporter, Janet Phelan, clearly regards such a pattern as evidence of payoffs, just as I do. My guess is it is widespread. Go here.

Here's the skinny on Gleason:

John S. and Karrie M. Gleason closed on their first home at 700 E. Northridge Rd. in Highlands Ranch on Oct. 28, 1987. [Reception #8734702; doc (8)]. My first question is: the ad for the position he got at OARC appeared in the Sept. 1987 issue of The Colorado Lawyer. So did he qualify for this loan based on someone's private assurance he was going to get that job? The Gleasons paid $124,000 for the home, and had a deed of trust (from MVC Financial Corporation, apparently an arm of Mission Viejo) of $118,600 against it. (Doc. 9) [I have usually copied only the first couple pages of deeds of trust, since they are usually very long, mostly boilerplate.]

While they owned that home, as mentioned the Gleasons recorded two second mortgages for the benefit of Gleason's former employer Robert Bartholic and his wife Esther Bartholic. These were for $12,000, recorded 7/17/92 and released 12/8/92--five months later (so somehow Gleason came up with $12,000 to pay him back) (docs. 10 and 11)--and $10,000, recorded 4/6/94, and released 6/7/96. (Docs. 12 and 13). They sold that house on June 25, 1996. Thus, it appears they paid Bartholic back in full for the second loan before they had the proceeds from the sale.

On Feb. 3, 1994, over six years after they bought the house, they then took out a deed of trust (DOT) from North American Mortgage Co. of $114,000, (Doc. 14) which paid off the original mortgage with MVC Financial Corp. (Doc. 14-A). That was at some point transferred to GE Capital Mortgage Services, Inc., but when it was released on 9/25/96, the release recites that the evidence of debt had been misplaced. (Doc. 15) So, no telling what was actually paid to release the lien. And although they sold the home on June 25, 1996, this mortgage was not released until three months later. This is strange. Did the encumbrance remain against the house, which now belonged to other people?   Finally, still respecting the Northridge Rd. home, on May 11, 1995, the Gleasons took out a deed of trust (recorded 5/23/95) for $10,000 from Norwest. (Doc. 16) The Bartholic loan (Doc. 12) was subordinated to the Norwest DOT via an agreement which does not appear in the index, but I came across in the records by accident. (Doc. 12-A). The Norwest DOT was released Sept. 4, 1996, almost three months after they sold the home. (Doc. 17)

On Sept. 25, 1996, the Gleasons closed on their second house in Highlands Ranch, at 2235 E. Thistle Ridge Cir., paying $220,000. (Doc. 18) The same date, they recorded a $176,000 mortgage from Norwest. (Doc. 19) This DOT was released Jan. 18, 1997, less than four months later (Doc. 20).

On Dec. 16, 1996, they had obtained another mortgage, from Englewood Mortgage Company, for $181,500 (reception #9672609) (Doc. 21). This was three months after they’d closed on their home, and apparently paid off the $176,000 Norwest mortgage (Doc. 19). People don’t usually go through all the hassle and expense of a closing only to turn around and refinance three months later (and banks don’t usually let them, in my experience).

This $181,500 deed of trust was assigned to the Bank of Oklahoma. It was released on June 12, 2001–but notarized and recorded over two years later, on August 8, 2003. (#2003119465) (Doc. 22).

On June 13, 2001, another deed of trust for the benefit of Englewood Mortgage Company was recorded against the Thistle Ridge Circle home, for $195,000. (Reception #2001053294) (Doc. 23). This was assigned to Washington Mutual, and released Feb. 12, 2003, recorded April 9, 2003, so paid off in 16 months. (Doc. 24).

On January 27, 2003, another DOT, a 30-year mortgage for $200,000, was recorded for the benefit of Englewood Mortgage Company, referring to a promissory note signed Dec. 31, 2002. (Reception #2003010743.) (Doc. 25). This was assigned to Provident Funding Assoc. LP on Dec. 31, 2002 (Doc. 26), and released Jan. 10, 2005. (Reception #2005002832.) (Doc. 27)

A 30-year deed of trust from National City Mortgage for $203,000 dated Dec. 21, 2004, was recorded on Jan. 11, 2005 (Reception #2005003853) (Doc. 28). This was released August 19, 2005, seven months later (reception #2005078080) (Doc. 29).

A 30-year deed of trust from J.P. Morgan Chase was recorded August 11, 2005, in the amount of $211,000 (reception #2005075620) (Doc. 30). So between Jan. 11 and August 11, 2005, the Gleasons refinanced twice (if these were refinancings); and between June 13, 2001, and August 11, 2005, four times.

In fact, as of April 8, 2003, there were $576,500 in loans recorded against this house, bought for $220,000 in 1996. As of Jan. 12, 2005, there were only $203,000 in loans recorded against it, meaning $373,500 had been paid off. Would a public official have $373,500 lying around to do something like this?

On Oct. 25, 2010, recorded 11/3/10, the Gleasons then received a 15-year deed of trust from “Quicken Loans” in Michigan, in the amount of $207,000. The J.P. Morgan Chase deed of trust (Doc. 30) was released Nov. 8, 2010 (Doc. 32).

Mission Viejo--the developer of Highlands Ranch (where both of the Gleasons' homes are)--is or was the client of the Brownstein, Hyatt, Farber, Schreck law firm, which I have referred to for years as a "mobbed-up law firm," backed up by Pete Brewton's expose of the S&L crooks, including Norm Brownstein and his "clients" Larry Mizel/MDC Holdings, Ken Good, Bill Walters, John Dick, that lot. (See Brewton's 1992 book, The Mafia, CIA, and George Bush. Ken Good--for whom Brownstein set up more than 100 trusts--has, by the way, been linked to Mohamed Atta; see Welcome to Terrorland by Daniel Hopsicker.)

Englewood Mortgage Company is a trade name for EMC Holdings, the registered agent for which is an entity called Marsico Enterprises. These entities involve an investment banker named Tom Marsico.

The "organizer" for EMC Holdings as of filings made in 7/16/01--the relevant time for the mortgages to Gleason--was an attorney at Brownstein Hyatt named M. Jeanne Nelson. Also, the organizer for Marsico Enterprises was Edward N. Barad, another Brownstein attorney. Thus, Gleason is connected with Brownstein through Englewood Mortgage Company, as well as through Mission Viejo.

Review the documents at:   http://www.box.net/shared/uynn2s7bz4

Nuclear War--in Denver?

2011-02-17T09:42:00.000-08:00

A correspondent in Colorado Springs is troubled by the "enormous increase in helicopter activity" there. I hike several times a week on the west side of Denver and it seems military helicopters are always flying over now, headed east along I-70.

Secret plans for the military to acquire 10,000 square miles of land in Southeastern Colorado have just been unearthed.

The latest catalog for Grainger industrial supply--a company which does not sell directly to the public--shows body armor, military-style helmets, body bags, and caskets for sale. The person who told me about it said he has worked in manufacturing all his life and never seen this before. He has found out that an entity in South Dakota placed an order for 50,000 body bags.

On, Sept. 23, 2011, there was a Homeland Security/FEMA drill involving busing of students to Mile High Stadium for "processing." The latest (Sept. 27, 2011) is that it involved shooting up a school, as well as a shopping mall.

I think something big may be up, and it will not be good for us.

I--and many reputable scholars--believe 9/11 was an inside job, and that 9/11 was simply practice for the Big One, which is going to be nuclear war, probably accompanied by bioweapons. I have wondered whether it will start with an American city--as a pretext for retaliating against Iran, for example--and, recently, whether that city will be Denver. There are lots of military and government installations in this area, and Lockheed-Martin is not only a military contractor, it is the biggest contractor of any kind with the federal government.

I have been noticing the past couple years that the courts and law enforcement have been getting new buildings which I consider fortresses, some of which--for sure the "Justice Center" jail/courthouse complex downtown--have tunnels linking them. Of course, almost all buildings in Denver have basements. Last September I learned to my surprise that the FBI had just moved to a brand new building in Stapleton. This, although, the vacancy rate in federal office buildings is over 30%. It was wasteful. There is also neverending construction going on in front of the Byron Johnson federal office building on Stout Street, next to the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Then, in January, the regional director of the FBI, James Davis--who only arrived in 2008--stepped over to become new Governor John Hickenlooper's director of public safety. John Suthers made a similar move, from being U.S. Attorney to Colorado Attorney General, a few years ago, taking a 50% pay cut.

And here's the really stunning information, which is about Denver International Airport. There is a Masonic plaque in the airport, saying it was built by the "New World Airport Commission," with a Masonic symbol on it. The names listed include not only Wellington Webb, who was mayor, but Martin-Marietta. DIA is not a military installation. At least, it wasn't supposed to be.

There are these scary murals all through the airport. I've walked by and thought, wow, what does that mean and why is it in the airport? These murals show an apocalypse. They have images such as a huge Nazi stormtrooper wearing a gas mask, swinging an Arab scimitar and spearing the dove of peace. There are dead children lying in caskets, and a little boy holding a dead squirrel with tears running down his cheeks, a huge fire in the woods behind him. What I've read about Freemasonry says that the masons have planned, for centuries, for a "New World Order," after an apocalypse by which they reduce the population to about 2 billion. There will be two distinct classes afterwards, the elites, who control all the resources, and the servants--the rest of us. If a person doesn't like his status, they don't let him get food. The dollar bill has a masonic sign on it, since many of the founders of the country were Freemasons. That is the pyramid with the eye in the top part, which is separated from the rest. Supposedly, when the New World Order comes into being, the top piece will rejoin the bottom. George H.W. Bush and Wellington Webb are masons.

While all this may seem crazy and extreme, like a science fiction movie or "The Da Vinci Code," there are, in fact, crazy and extreme people out there who are capable of planning such an event, and can't get enough war. I think a likely scenario would be that the U.S. government itself orders the nuclear attack, but makes it look like it came from Iran, in order to have a pretext to wipe out the Middle East once and for all. The key dates I am worried about are Hitler's birthday--April 20--as well as the date the Mayan calendar ends, Dec. 21, 2012, which is interpreted by some as a prophecy that the world will end, too. In fact, there is gossip that the guy who did the scariest murals at DIA, Leo Tanguma, is Mayan.

Other things about DIA are that it was constructed in the shape of a swastika and is rumored to have 85 square miles of underground facilities on eight levels, including an 80-mile-long tunnel to NORAD in Colorado Springs. Workers have said that multi-story buildings have been built and then BURIED, with the excuse that they were "put in the wrong place." There are videos online showing segments of big concrete "pipes" which have a square cross-section about 12 feet across sitting aboveground, so it must be intended that vehicles will be driven through them. These videos then show basement corridors shaped like these segments. On the ceilings are lines with valves. My former client Gerald Lewis, who worked for Public Service Company for 35 years, said he'd been told by a PSCo employee during DIA's construction that they had buried "miles and miles" of gas lines, and then were told those had been put in the wrong place. They did not remove them. Gerald told me this without knowing that the same stories are reported on the web about the electrical lines and the buildings.

The airport cost almost $5 billion, when it was budgeted for $1.8 billion. For the opening ceremonies, Wellington Webb invited all his mason buddies out there--very weird. I am sure there was never any "New World Airport Commission," although there is a 2007 Westword article that attempts to put the rumors to bed, by quoting Charles Ansbacher--the conductor of the Colorado Springs Symphony!--who says he was on it! (He was married to billionaire heiress/Clinton-appointed-ambassador Swanee Hunt, by the way.) And then Ansbacher died.

And of course there is the fiberglass sculpture of the terrifying blue horse with glowing red eyes which killed its creator. Sculptor Luis Jiminez got the contract in 1992 and 14 years later still didn't have it done. Funny coincidence: he was one of George W. Bush's favorite artists. Maybe not so funny. Wonder if W. told Luis to do something he didn't want to do, like secrete a little anthrax bomb inside, so Luis dragged his feet. And then died in an "accident." The sculpture was completed in fairly short order after his death; and then more weird things: it was sent to an engineering firm called Kreysler in Sacramento for "repairs," which more than doubled the contract price, to $650,000. Jiminez was paid only $300,000.

In particular, look at videos which show the murals at DIA. Here's an interesting interpretation.

I ignore the Christian/Satanic stuff, but it really shouldn't be ignored--and especially, the New World Order stuff shouldn't be ignored--because the people who are doing these things to us are, in fact, working intentionally to make these prophecies come true and install themselves as the global ruling class.

Whether or not DIA has underground facilities (which I assumed are where the elites will go to escape the blast! but maybe they are gas chambers, instead) I can't tell you, but I do know that Columbine took place on April 20, as did the bombing of the Murrah building in Oklahoma City, and there are substantial indications that both of these "disasters" had government involvement, as well. Obama, according to Webster Tarpley, was recruited by Zbigniew Brzezinski while a student at Columbia, and Brzezinski wants to go to war with China and Russia and is a member of the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations. Scholar Michel Chossudovsky has a video on YouTube showing the preparations currently being made for World War III, which he says will be against China and Russia. (Next to it is an ad for Grainger industrial supply!)

Gary Kah, in "En Route to Global Occupation," talks about the alliance of the powerful Rothschild banking family with Freemasonry since the 1700's. They, and other powerful banking interests (the Rockefellers, Goldman Sachs, several European banks), have been working towards a unified world government for a long time. The Trilateral Commission and Council on Foreign Relations are offshoots of this alliance, as are several powerful foundations. He says the Freemasons never do anything under their own name, but under the names of these other organizations.

So, Dear Reader: if you're in Denver, take a day with your friends in the mountains on April 20. And do it on Dec. 21, 2012, too. I think going west is better than east, due to the prevailing winds. Or spend the day in the basement, if you have access to one! They say that, if you survive the blast, the worst hazard--one you can protect yourself from pretty well if you are in a basement--is the radioactive fallout. There was an article about this in The New York Times recently--that "duck and cover" isn't as stupid as it sounds. And why was there an article about this, unless they know something the rest of us don't? All of these disasters have their little tongue-in-cheek aspects to them, like it's all a big joke known only to the initiated, such as "911" being the number you call when you have an emergency. Movies like the Terminator series and Minority Report look more and more like a true picture of our future. I'll bet the Army really does have all those futuristic weapons we assume are science fiction. It wants Colorado to become one big desert patrolled by huge robots armed with automatic weapons and chemical lasers that vaporize anything that moves. Does the Army need 10,000 square miles to practice this kind of killing? Was it responsible for the thousands of blackbirds dropping dead out of the sky in Arkansas a few months ago, I wonder?

OK. I've said my piece. Now google "DIA conspiracy," but start with the video I've linked to here before you read the 2007 Westword article. And then go to "9/11 Synthetic Terror" by Webster Tarpley and Kah's book.

The Dysfunctional Denver Post

2011-01-22T11:38:00.000-08:00

I've been complaining about this sorry excuse for a newspaper since at least 1984. My best friend and her then-husband, a high-powered attorney in D.C., visited. He turned the pages of both our Denver newspapers, puzzled, and said, "Is soft news all you get here?"

Yes, Jim, soft news is all we get, and it's gotten worse. There's been a total news blackout in Denver since William Dean Singleton took over as publisher of the Denver Post in the 1990's. Instead of news, we get mattress and dental implant ads, celebrity gossip, obituaries, doggie news, and four pages of comics, with NINE puzzles.

Singleton's still in charge at "Media News Group," which now owns virtually every paper along the Front Range in Colorado. It has just acquired the last of the independent newspapers, in Loveland and Longmont. I am very sorry to see this. These papers were instrumental in arousing public consciousness of Blair and Gilmore (two prosecutors elevated to judgeships in apparent reward for framing an innocent guy for murder; see this related post). Blair and Gilmore were booted in a judicial retention election in November 2010, one of the few times that device has worked in Colorado; and it worked because the press was actually reporting on citizen anger and mobilization. That doesn't happen in Denver.

Singleton is the toady of Larry Mizel and the mobbed-up Brownstein, Hyatt, Farber, Schreck law firm. (See the 1992 book by Houston Post reporter Pete Brewton, The Mafia, CIA, & George Bush.) I have suspected that Singleton's newspaper acquisitions were funded by Mizel, the chair of MDC Holdings. Mizel and his cronies orchestrated the savings & loan debacle. This is where they got their seed money to begin buying all the public officials in Colorado--and believe me, they own all of them who matter. (Nationally, too.) Silverado S&L, with Neil Bush on the board, cost taxpayers a billion dollars on its own. That money flowed out the door to Mizel, Ken Good, Bill Walters, and other high-flying developers, as uncollateralized "loans" which were never paid back. Two executives at Mizel's company were once indicted for illegal campaign contributions, and one was convicted of a misdemeanor, but the big fish--Mizel (who's actually only about 5 feet tall)--is never touched.

Pete Brewton (see above) did a series of articles linking the savings & loan crooks to the CIA, the Mafia, and powerful figures in both major parties (including the Bushes). Most of his articles never saw the light of day: William Dean Singleton bought the Houston Post and that was the end of that. Brewton says in his book that Singleton told him he is "good friends" with Larry Mizel--they were introduced by Michael Milken. Brewton also says this:

"...William Dean Singleton and his partners, who owned the Dallas Times-Herald and the Denver Post, had purchased the Houston Post. Singleton, who was the protege of Houston banker and former Washington Star owner Joe Albritton, is a junk-bond and borrowing patron with a milquetoast personality (except when it comes to cutting staff) and unimpressive intellect who appeared to be fronting for someone else. ..."

Like the Houston Post, two of the other newspapers Singleton bought up had been doing S&L exposes, which were then suppressed. One was the Denver Post and the other the San Jose Mercury News. I never understood, as a business decision, why these particular newspapers were acquired. Now I believe it was to nip in the bud investigations these papers were doing of the S&L/junk bond rackets Singleton's sponsors are involved in. In fact, the largest shareholder of the firm which presently owns the Denver Post, MediaNews, is a hedge fund. There can be no question that real news is suppressed whenever it might adversely impact the profitmaking plans of the banksters. (One of the recent past directors of this hedge fund is Jon Huntsman, reputed to be a Rothschild puppet.)

Now that Singleton's bought up the Loveland/Longmont newspapers, it's apparent the agenda extends to protecting the mob plants in the judiciary. No more judges will be ousted in Northern Colorado, you can count on it. Did I mention Singleton is the chair of the Associated Press? He has argued in favor of media consolidation before Congress, and he is sure making it happen, boy.

I despise the Denver Post in part as a former Green Party candidate for Colorado Attorney General, in 2002, where this "newspaper" suppressed almost all mention of my candidacy. No reporter attended any press conference I ever gave, and one of the Post's editors, Rebecca Cantwell, rewrote an article its legal reporter Howard Pankratz had written about the AG candidates before the election. She took out all the compliments and substantive information about me. Pankratz called me the morning his story ran, angry, and said, "I want to read to you what I actually wrote." It began, "Maynard is smart as a whip," then detailing my educational background, experience, and what I stood for. All that was edited out by Cantwell, to swing the race to Ken Salazar, another toady of the Mizel/Brownstein crowd.

In 2004, as the chair of the state Green Party, I picked up our presidential candidate David Cobb at the airport. Our publicity person had been unable to get an interview of him with either the Post or the Rocky Mountain News. They would not return her calls. She finally made contact with someone at the Rocky, who said, uh, sorry, we're going to be in meetings that day. The morning David was to arrive, in a panic to find something to do with him, I called several newspapers and radio stations in Northern Colorado. To my delight I instantly set up interviews with about five, including the Longmont Times-Call and Loveland Herald, even the conservative Greeley Tribune. All these media outlets were excited to interview a presidential candidate! But the Denver Post was having none of it. And the Rocky was no better. (I believe that the guy in charge of the News, John Temple, was put there to preside over its demise, too, so the Post would be all that's left.)

Now the Longmont Times-Call and Loveland Herald have been absorbed by the same outfit.

I wish I could think of some solution to this. These fuckers control everything.

For Those Who Would Comment (and Cannot)

2010-10-04T12:03:00.001-07:00

I've been told by someone that he was unable to post a comment on this blog. Without speculating why that is the case, I invite anyone who wants to post and is unable to to email me directly, at:

alisonmaynard50@yahoo.com

or

dinophile@gmail.com

I'll post your comments, myself!

Ken Salazar Unwrapped: Part I

2010-10-02T09:57:00.001-07:00

A new acquaintance recently raved to me about Ken Salazar, not realizing I have not only litigated against him (or the Attorney General's office he was running) in several cases, but that I ran against him for Colorado Attorney General in 2002. (I was the Green Party candidate.)

He referred me to Salazar's profile on the Washington Post's website for proof of how experienced and knowledgeable he is, how selflessly he has defended the public interest. That's at:

http://www.whorunsgov.com/Profiles/Ken_Salazar

Because I have knowledge which pretty well punctures this inflated resume I decided to start sharing what I know. I will refute the Washington Post's profile point by point.

Note that this blog is a work in progress. What's here is only about 5% of what will be here. And because I can't upload documents, I will be moving this material to a website in the near future.

Under the tab "Current Position: Secretary of Interior (since January 2009):

This tab starts with, "Obama's Interior secretary offers more than ten years of private-sector legal experience in water and environmental issues ..."

I have never found any evidence that Ken Salazar ever litigated a case as an attorney, and I've done searches on Westlaw. (Once he became Colorado Attorney General, however--in January 1999--his name appears automatically in every case the 130 attorneys in the Attorney General's office were involved in.)

Ken has revealed that he actually does not know that much about Colorado water law. He has said wrong things, such as that instream flows "injure" senior water rights. He has bragged about how he "defended Colorado's water" even while boosting the Animas-La Plata Project, which gave almost all of Colorado's unallocated portion of the Colorado River away to two Ute Indian tribes (and for the water from which no use has ever been shown). He opposed legislation which would have created private instream flow rights and opposed bypass flows being required as a condition of special use permits by the U.S. Forest Service.

As to his "private legal experience," he was a partner for about four years, in between stints in government, with the firm Parcel, Mauro, Hultin & Spaanstra, which represented mining interests before the Mined Land Reclamation Board, an agency in the Department of Natural Resources, while Ken headed that department. Ken has removed all references to this firm from his official bios. I discovered his affiliation with PMHS on my own, in 2002. It's a stunning connection, because PMHS represented Robert Friedland, the Summitville polluter, as well as Friedland's shell companies (Galactic Resources and Summitville Consolidated Mining Corp.) and other mining interests. That means these interests were Ken Salazar's clients, too. Summitville is still the biggest environmental mining disaster which has ever occurred in the nation--and there is substantial evidence it was intentional--a stock play benefiting political officials connected with S & L mobsters. I will be writing more about this in future.

The law firm, PMHS, was obviously deathly scared of being prosecuted for its role in these environmental crimes. It was instrumental in putting its former partner Ken Salazar into office as Colorado Attorney General in 1998, therefore--a large number of its partners gave $500 or $1,000 contributions to his campaign. The firm then dissolved right before the election and Salazar used his official powers as Attorney General to settle the State of Colorado's claims against his former client Friedland, sticking almost the entire $235 million tab for the clean-up of this environmental catastrophe with the American taxpayer. Salazar met personally, in secret, with Robert Friedland in San Francisco, accompanied by the former mining company attorney he had anointed as Solicitor General, Alan Gilbert (whom he has now brought into Interior), to work out this settlement. Friedland was represented at this meeting by Bill Clinton's buddy Jim Lyons. The four of them met at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in San Francisco in June 2000.

Friedland was required to pay $27 million in this settlement, which Salazar bragged about far and wide as a "victory" for the State. In fact, Friedland never paid the $27 million, or even one thin dime, because the Colorado Supreme Court in 2005 changed Colorado insurance law to relieve him of that liability. It held Friedland's insurer was liable for the $27 million. The author of this opinion was none other than Greg Hobbs, whose misconduct as a Supreme Court justice I have written about elsewhere, and who (I am convinced) has been the one pushing the series of groundless and harassing disciplinary proceedings I have had to defend against for the last four years, as payback. That's the kind of guy he is. Hobbs was appointed to the bench by former Gov. Roy Romer, who--there is strong evidence--may have profited personally from the Summitville mining fiasco, as did Bill Clinton.

I have written about Salazar's conflict in working out a deal to resolve the State of Colorado's claims against his former client Friedland, and the machinations of PMHS to get rid of any possibility of prosecution in other quarters, and tried to make Summitville an issue when I ran for AG in 2002. I got absolutely no press about it (and Sierra Club and the Colorado Environmental Coalition endorsed Salazar, as the "environmental candidate.") I posit that Summitville--like the Gulf oil well disaster in 2010, and like 9/11; the breach of the levees which destroyed New Orleans in 2004; and several other disasters--was caused intentionally, so powerful insiders could make a bunch of money. Similarly, I maintain that Ken Salazar not only knew what was coming with the BP spill, he put all the pieces in place beforehand--just as he did in Summitville, as the student of Roy Romer--not only exempting the perpetrators from regulations and laws--including a meaningful bond which would have protected the public--from inspections; and from construction standards, but doing everything he could to limit the liability the polluter would bear, and pass the costs to innocent persons, particularly taxpayers.

As for the other "private-sector legal experience" Ken Salazar had, I have recently learned that he worked for the firm of Sherman & Howard for several years as his first job out of law school. He doesn't mention this on his resume, either. I do wonder about his employment at these fancy law firms, because there is no indication Ken Salazar made good grades. When he ran for the Democratic Senatorial nomination against Mike Miles in 2004, for instance, every teacher and professor Miles had ever had, his whole life long, spoke out about what a brilliant student Miles had been. There have never been any testimonials from Ken Salazar's teachers. Salazar attended the University of Michigan law school, which had a quota system for minority students (later challenged in a U.S. Supreme Court case while Salazar was Colorado AG. Salazar filed an amicus brief supporting the University of Michigan's program, on behalf of the State of Colorado, without revealing the likely fact that he was a beneficiary of that program himself.)

Salazar's willingness to be controlled by the powerful interests, and susceptibility to flattery, led to the law firm Brownstein, Hyatt, Farber, Schreck adopting him as its favorite son. It ran Ken Salazar's campaigns for Attorney General in 2002, as well as the Senate in 2004. I mean, it ran them. So its attorneys got their salaries to perform functions in the campaigns which one would think should be filled by volunteers. There was never any financial disclosure about the value of the services provided by this law firm to these campaigns, however.

A partner in this firm, Steve Farber, is responsible for bringing the Democratic National Convention to Denver in 2008, where Obama received the nomination of his party (anointment, really). My take is that Obama repaid the favor by letting Farber fill the top slots in Interior, since they are all Coloradans. Naturally, he picked Ken Salazar, who has spent his life in public office doing favors for this law firm and its developer clients, to be Secretary. Farber picked his former law partner Tom Strickland (who was, conveniently, U.S. Attorney when the Summitville case was in court, more insurance that there would be no prosecutions) as the Deputy Interior Secretary, and picked the managing partner of Holland & Hart--and formerly Shell Oil's water attorney--Anne Castle as Assistant Secretary of Interior for Water and Science. And now Alan Gilbert is also, once again, at Salazar's side.

***
The Washington Post tab continues "...and several decades of work in government, where he focused on land-use, water, and natural-resources issues."

Ken did nothing but flack for real estate developers in the official positions he held in Colorado--and always, always was using his powers to do favors for the Brownstein, Hyatt, Farber law firm and its clients. Steve Farber even bragged, when Salazar was a Senator, about calling Ken up on his cellphone to discuss stuff. How many people have a U.S. senator's cellphone number?

The litigation I did against the governmental entities headed by Salazar, including the Colorado Department of Natural Resources (State Board of Land Commissioners and Colorado Water Conservation Board) and the Colorado Attorney General's office--all of it--involved huge frauds committed by these state agencies, which just lay down and let the developers and polluters run roughshod over the public interest. State trust lands flew out the door for pennies on the dollar--including a valuable piece to Salazar's mentor former governor Roy Romer personally--on Salazar's watch. Salazar never did anything about these frauds; he may not even have aware of what was going on on his watch. He was simply keeping the seat warm as AG, picking up constant raves from the Denver Post for doing nothing. The Post's publisher Dean Singleton is himself a plant of Larry Mizel's, Brownstein's client and friend.. (See my blog post on Jan. 22, 2011.) So everything in Colorado was set up to accomplish a massive transfer of state resources to selected private pockets, with an AG who either was not astute enough to recognize what was going on--and that he had power to stop it--or did not care.

Because this particular comment in the Washington Post's profile is not very specific, I'll put specifics relating to the foregoing charges in other sections.

***
This tab further says, "Salazar served from 2005 to 2009 as a Democratic senator from Colorado." That's because the Brownstein firm ran his campaigns and the Denver Post plugged him nonstop. And that's also because there was no enforcement of our weak campaign finance laws in this State then; and now, the laws themselves are toothless. It's also because Democratic operatives, paid by developers, are stuffing ballot boxes--I have litigated against these operatives, known as Reiter & Associates, and got an admission that Rick Reiter was working for Salazar on his AG re-election campaign in 2002--something which was never disclosed on his committee's financial reports. I uncovered many other irregularities in Salazar's AG campaigns, and tried to get investigations, and failed, because, at that time, the law required the complainant first to file a case with an administrative law judge and get a favorable decision! So prosecution was put on the shoulders of citizens, at their expense. Even if they won before the ALJ criminal prosecution was discretionary with the DA or the AG. Now, there are no criminal penalties, at all, for campaign finance violations. They were removed via an initiative drafted by a very naive Common Cause in 2002, an organization which must be taking its cues from the same Democratic (read: development) interests who are co-opting elections. So, know this: there is nothing standing in the way of the wholesale buying of state and local elections in this state. There are NO investigations, NO prosecutions, and NO criminal penalties attached to the violation of the campaign finance laws in Colorado. So don't attach too much cachet to the fact that Salazar won these elections.

As for the 2004 Senate race, there is evidence that Salazar stole the primary, when he ran against Mike Miles for the Democratic nomination. I heard that there was again ballot-box stuffing, but have been unable to confirm it. I do know that polls taken right before the election showed Miles well ahead, but then Salazar ended up winning by a big margin. Typically, in an election in which Rick Reiter is involved, the favored candidate or issue wins by an unbelievable split, like 75% to 25% (reminiscent of the Soviet Union), to make sure the losing party goes away with his tail between his legs and never runs for office again. The Reiter activities in two elections he stole in the Town of Castle Rock, which I litigated, are detailed in a video a voting rights activist made of me talking about them, which is online at: http://www.denveropenmedia.org/project/mail-ballots-and-dirty-tricks-citizens-versus-monied-interests-a-colorado-town/show/mail-bal

As for the Denver Post, this rag is owned--well, heck, NOW it's owned 80% by the Bank of America!--but back then it was still owned by William Dean Singleton, who is still around and running it, as well as acquiring other newspapers around the country. Former Houston Chronicle reporter Pete Brewton (who worked for Singleton in Houston, and was stymied by him in Brewton's investigations of the savings & loan crisis) wrote a book in 1992, "The Mafia, CIA, and George Bush," where he says that Singleton and Larry Mizel, the co-director of a homebuilding company called MDC Holdings, are "good friends--they were introduced by Michael Milken." Mizel and MDC are "clients" of the Brownstein law firm. They were all deeply involved in the savings & loan debacle and junk bond frauds in the 1980's. Every analyst I've ever read of the S&L debacle has concluded it was orchestrated by organized crime. Billions flowed out the doors of these institutions the moment they were deregulated, in uncollateralized loans which were never paid back.

A big component of the frauds was Silverado S&L here in Colorado, with which Mizel (MDC Holdings) did $300 million worth of business. (Neil Bush was, of course, a director of Silverado and voted loans for his partner in Bush's oil company, real estate developer Bill Walters, without disclosing his conflict.) Brownstein was counsel for MDC/Mizel, and deeply involved with Bill Walters, Ken Good, Marvin Davis, Charles Keating, Michael Milken, and other S&L defrauders. My theory is that the S&L defrauders used the money they got to cement their power. Not only have they made lots of illegal campaign contributions, they have put their plants into influential appointive positions in state, local, and federal government, where they are protected by the personnel system; and, in particular, in the judicial system.

These people are the mob--they are organized crime, and they run Colorado, as well as the nation and, shortly, the world. We get these neverending plugs of Ken Salazar in the Denver Post because they are all part of the same network.

On Winking Judges

2010-10-01T08:48:00.000-07:00

I was the Craig City Attorney in 1993-94. In Sept. 1993, a crazy county court judge sent the sheriff to my office to arrest me for contempt for closing a real estate contract the City had every right to close. I was under no court order not to close it, although there was a private party, a stranger to the contract, who had sought a TRO to stop it.

So I spent four months being hauled through contempt proceedings in Craig and Steamboat Springs. The City hired Larry Pozner to defend me. (I chose him as my attorney, even though I'd had Larry for Criminal Procedure at DU Law School and thought he was often unprepared for class. He had a high profile, though.)

Larry kept promising me he was going to take depositions, do all this stuff, and he did not do anything at all (yet at the end sent a bill to the city for $12,000). The date of my trial came and I was worried sick, because my attorney had not done anything to prepare. It was in Steamboat before Judge Richard Doucette. The night before, Larry told me that the judge who'd cited me, Mary Lynne James, was willing to drop the contempt charge in exchange for an apology. While Doucette was memorializing this agreement in open court, however, something strange occurred. The judge made a statement to Larry indicating he knew Pozner's personal plans, accompanied by a wink, which absolutely shocked me--I can't believe I have forgotten exactly what he said now, only that I was flabbergasted, because it indicated communication had taken place between them, when Larry had told me he had never done anything before Judge Doucette and did not know him.

We took a break in the proceedings, and I believed I was getting off in exchange for an apology, except that Larry made me sit down on a bench outside the judge's chambers, while he went in to talk to the judge. I protested--I wanted to come, too, and had the right to do so, as the real party in interest--and he would not let me. The prosecutor was also not present.

When Larry came out, he said the judge had agreed to dismiss the contempt charge, but would be referring the matter to the Office of Attorney Regulation Counsel for discipline. I did not want to take this deal, then. It was different from what I had agreed to. Larry got angry with me and MADE me take it. Because he was not prepared to go to trial, I had no choice but to give in.

Larry had come to town wearing a long black coat, as well as carrying a black purse. I remember the purse, because he wryly commented that Craig was not the sort of place where a man should be carrying a purse. I have thought about that purse in the past year and suddenly realized that there may have been cash in it with which Larry paid off the judge. Doucette was the judge who screwed Marvin Heemyer, by the way, the guy who then armored a bulldozer and destroyed buildings in the Town of Granby before killing himself.

The matter in Craig was referred to OARC, as I've said, and it resulted in a Letter of Admonition, which I did not appeal. The LoA was, at that time, the lowest level of discipline, and confidential, such that I was entitled to say I had never received any discipline. Today, the LoA does not exist as a form of discipline--an attorney is referred to diversion, instead, and all record of the "offense" expunged. However, it existed in 1994, and so April McMurrey (nee Seekamp), the snotnosed prosecutor--OARC's version of Javert--has presented it to the hearing board in an envelope every time as an aggravating factor in the string of groundless disciplinary cases she has prosecuted against me since 2006.

Anyway, what I've realized from this (as well as when Judge David Lass winked at Victor Boog when he was on the stand in the Spring Creek Ranch matter, as I have detailed elsewhere) is that when your judge winks at an attorney, either yours or your opponent's, pay attention. This nonverbal communication reveals, as unambiguously as an express verbal admission, that a secret understanding exists. In particular, it may mean the judge has been bribed.

Sunny

Billy Lucero's Inquisition

2010-09-04T10:28:00.000-07:00

The "presiding disciplinary judge" now in Colorado is a man named William Lucero. Before getting that job he worked at the U.S. Department of Justice on the Summitville case. Of course, there were no prosecutions of any of the criminals involved in Summitville, the biggest environmental disaster from mining ever, in the United States. The disaster was intentionally engineered, in concert with corrupt Colorado Democratic officials, as an apparent stockplay (benefiting Bill Clinton, among others).

To reward him for doing nothing, the Powers-That-Be gave Lucero his present position, Presiding Disciplinary Judge within the Colorado attorney regulatory system. He was also, in 2007, given the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Catholic Lawyers' Guild and St. Thomas More Society, in something called the Red Mass, where the archdiocese rewards lawyers who are apparently doing work the Church likes.

Thus, as I interpret this, because Lucero rules "the right way," the Church has told him he's going to heaven.

He runs a kangaroo court because that's what the Fat Cats want. The point of the attorney regulatory system is not to protect the public, but to ruin lawyers who challenge the corruption. Lucero mischaracterizes evidence and distorts legal holdings in furtherance of this goal. He has interfered with his clerk's preparation of the record to ensure materials I needed to win my case on appeal, and designated, were not transmitted; interrupted my witnesses on the stand to prohibit them from finishing their statements; and issued groundless "protective orders," to keep evidence favorable to me from getting in the record. He has even massaged transcripts, to neutralize testimony which might embarrass any of the important people he toadies to, before the reporter certifies them. And he routinely enshrines in orders false statements made by the prosecutors, although knowing they are fabrications, to make it look like there's something there to support the sanction they have asked for. It's OK when it's the prosecutors lying, see. It's all in the service of God.

Why is the Catholic Church giving awards to lawyers, anyway? Could there be a plan to elevate Catholic lawyers to public office precisely because they know they will always take direction from the Church in preference to any competing rule of conduct, such as those insignificant little human-made principles like due process and the First Amendment? Indeed, Thomas More was sanctified because he put his duty to the pope over his duty to the king.

Six of the nine U.S. Supreme Court justices are Catholic: Alito, Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, Sotomayor, and Kennedy. (The other three are Jewish. Wikipedia has an article about the cooperation between the Italian and Jewish Mafia.) There are too many Catholic judges to count in Colorado, as well as on the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado; and all of them I consider to be owned outright by the development interests--particularly the mobbed-up Brownstein, Farber law firm and Larry Mizel. They include now-retired John McMullen of the Denver District Court; Mary Mullarkey, until October 2010 the chief justice of the Colorado Supreme Court, who got the St. Thomas More award in 1999; Greg Hobbs, the water developers' representative on the Colorado Supreme Court (who I am convinced is driving the retaliatory disciplinary proceedings against me); and presumably the many judges or magistrates on the U.S. District Court who have Hispanic, Irish, or Italian last names. Listed members of the Catholic Lawyers Guild are Judge John Kane, who got the St. Thomas More award in 1983 and was irregularly "transferred" onto my case in federal court; creepy Colorado Attorney General John Suthers (see the Mar. 7 entry on that link), who attended Notre Dame and got the "Lifetime Achievement Award" in 2005; Ken Salazar, who got the St. Thomas More award in 2003; and former governor Bill Ritter, who got the St. Thomas More award in 2000. Attorney James Lyons got the award in 1998. (See my post "Ken Salazar Unwrapped" about most of these people's participation in covering up, and likely profiting from, Summitville--and that's just one of their many fraudulent--and murderous-- undertakings.) The address given for the Catholic Lawyers' Guild and St. Thomas More Society is the Denver DA's office and the Denver D.A. has been a Catholic as far back as I can remember. One in every four American voters is a Catholic.

One of the judges on the three-judge panel in the first disciplinary case against me to go to hearing--where I was suspended for a year for a peccadillo I self-reported--is at least a closet member of Opus Dei, since his son is the actual head of O.D. in Colorado. His name is Steven Ezell. His deameanor during my hearing was scary--rigid and unsmiling, never saying a word, while the other two judges were jovial--and now I understand why. He was put there to do a specific job and it had nothing to do with considering the evidence or the law.

The hypothesis I'm arriving at is that Catholic lawyers and judges are acting to further a common goal, which is to funnel money back to the Church or make it more powerful in other ways, as a result of their rulings and activities. So if a judge is taking a bribe, he tithes back to the Church, or the party his ruling benefits does, and that makes it OK. The Italian government has opened a $30 million money laundering inquiry into the Vatican Bank, in fact. The Vatican Bank transferred $26 mil to J.P. Morgan-Chase, an American bank. There have been mysterious deaths, too, such as the former chief executive of an affiliated bank (known as "God's Banker") found hanging from Blackfriars bridge in London in the 1980's.

And then there is the pedophilia in the Church. And the cover-up of the pedophilia.

Is the Mafia in actuality an arm of the Catholic Church (or vice versa)? To what extent is Opus Dei operating in Colorado? (Archbishop Chaput expressed approval of it--yet, according to The Da Vinci Code, Opus Dei sponsors assassinations.) When Billy Lucero thumbs his nose at the Constitution, does it count as mortification of the flesh?

I wish I could tell you. At the least, it sure appears the Catholics still love inquisitions--they have never quite been able to wean themselves from the heady pleasure of torturing the poor wretches who express views different from theirs, of tying them to a stake, lighting a big fire underneath, and watching them twist and scream.

Update, Dec. 4, 2011: I have been referred to
this site about the Red Mass held in Washington, for the Supreme Court justices, as well as other states! My interpretation is looking spot on.

John Gleason, Lawyer Impersonator?

2010-09-04T09:21:00.000-07:00

[This post is continued in "Gleason's Grease," my post of Feb. 20, 2011; and is a continuation of "John Gleason and Me," from Feb. 8, 2010. The document numbers below refer to exhibits posted in an online vault here, so you can review them yourself.]

Research on the web about John Gleason, the man holding the office of Regulation Counsel in Colorado--employed by the Colorado Supreme Court--has turned up compelling evidence that Gleason may not be a lawyer.

According to online bios [(1) and (2)], Gleason received his law degree from Ohio Northern University Pettit College of Law. This is a third-tier law school, which nevertheless says on its website [(3), from http://www.law.onu.edu/admissions/applicationprocess.html#requirements] that it requires a baccalaureate degree from an accredited undergraduate institution for admission. There is no evidence Gleason ever obtained the undergraduate degree.

In these online bios [(1) and (2)] Gleason has stated that he "attended" Columbia College--not specifying a location, so making it sound like Columbia University--and, elsewhere, that he "attended" Bowling Green State University. He never says he graduated from either of these undergraduate institutions. (In fact, he does not even use the word "graduated" in connection with Pettit College of Law. He says he "earned his law degree" there.)

There is a Columbia College in Aurora, Colorado, which appears to be in the business of selling degrees. Gleason is lecturing there currently, in juvenile law(1); and this is interesting, because he has no experience in juvenile law, or any other field of practice, as discussed below. As to Bowling Green State, it appears Gleason would have liked to call this school his alma mater, but cannot, because he did not graduate. A donors' list which turns up on the BGSU website contains the names of thousands of donors, almost all of which are followed by a year of graduation--e.g., "Barry Smith '67." John Gleason's name is on this list but is not followed by a year. [(4), on p. 52]

One of Gleason's bios states that he "previously served as a criminal prosecutor" for several years.(1) Another says he "served in the Allen County Prosecutor's Office"--without saying where Allen County is. Allen County, Ohio, is, in fact, where Ohio Northern University is located. I contacted the prosecutor's office and they have no record of Gleason ever working there, not even as a student intern. (5) I also contacted the Ohio attorney registration office and they said Gleason was not registered as an attorney in Ohio and had never sat for the bar exam in Ohio. So, Gleason's statement that he "served in the prosecutor's office" is intended to make people believe he had lengthy experience working as a prosecuting attorney, when he had no such experience at all.

Gleason's bios also state that he was “in private practice with a law firm in Denver for several years" [(1) and (2)], making it sound like he also had a wealth of experience in civil litigation before coming to OARC. This is misleading, too. I found that he was admitted to the bar in Colorado in 1985, and that he worked with a sole practitioner named Robert Bartholic before being employed by the Supreme Court's Office of Attorney Regulation Counsel in late 1987 or early 1988. I found this out by going through back issues of the Legal and Financial Directory to match up the office address. At best, then, Gleason worked 2-1/2 years for Bartholic after being admitted to the bar in 1985. I talked to Bartholic on Feb. 17, 2010, who said he did no litigation and that he "didn't really have enough business to keep Gleason busy." Thus, as I said above, Gleason has never had any experience in juvenile law as a practicing lawyer--although he is now teaching this subject to college kids--nor had he ever done any civil litigation or criminal prosecution as a lawyer prior to getting his job at OARC.

I note that the Attorney Registration Office in Colorado says it does not keep old employment records of attorneys or judges. I was shocked by this information–-I think this must be a recent change. Thus, it is nearly impossible to find out if a judge on one’s case has a conflict, due to prior employment. This is why I had to go through back issues of the Legal and Financial Directory.

I located the advertisement for the job Gleason got at the Office of Attorney Regulation Counsel, in the Sept. 1987 issue of The Colorado Lawyer (34). The text of the ad is as follows:

"Full time & half-time investigative counsel, Supreme Court Grievance Committee. $36,876-42,684, full-time; $18,348-21,342, half-time. Must be adm. to prac. in CO w/at least 3 yrs law prac. to related exp. Send ltr. of interest, res. & one writ. sample to Committee Counsel, 600 17th St., #500S, Denver 80203-5435 by 8/25/87."

This jibes with what Maximillian Potter reported in an article in 5280 Magazine last year (6), that Gleason was hired by OARC as an investigator. The problem is, he did not have at least 3 years experience (although the ad is garbled.) At the time he applied he might not have had even two, since he was admitted in 1985 (I believe in October, although I didn't check whether October or May specifically). Interestingly, too, it appears that the 8/25/87 deadline stated in the ad for submitting applications would already have passed by the time the September 1987 issue was published, so that the ad was spurious: the new hire had already been selected.

The ad also required the applicant to submit a letter of interest, resume, and writing sample. In open records requests to the OARC which both Sean Harrington (of knowyourcourts.com) and I made early in 2010, we were told, first--not by Gleason, but by deputy attorney general Maurie Knaizer--that only Gleason could produce these records, since he was in charge of the office, and that Gleason was out of town. Later, Knaizer told us the records "do not exist." So, what happened to them? These documents were part of a personnel file and a public record. Gleason was in charge of them and now they “do not exist.”

Thus, there are these carefully worded, ambiguous statements in Gleason's bios, which appear calculated to mislead. Pettit College of Law boasts on its website that fully half of its student body scored in the 25th percentile on the LSAT. I do not believe someone who scored in the 25th percentile on the LSAT could pass the Colorado bar exam. Also, as discussed, Pettit says an undergraduate degree is required for admission. Did Gleason lie on his application for admission to that school? Did someone let him in without this credential, and, if so, why? Did he lie on his application for admission to the bar in Colorado? A long statement from the applicant about his or her education and work experience is required, under oath, to gain admission to the Colorado bar–and then there is the bar exam, which is tough. Did someone just give him a bar ticket? And did he lie on his application for employment at OARC? Is that why it’s gone? Or is he lying now, saying that his application materials, which are public records, "do not exist"?

As for Pettit College of Law, there is a map online of the states where its graduates have ended up practicing law. The vast majority are in Florida–not in Ohio, as one would expect. In fact, I reviewed the bios of every lawyer at a law firm in a nearby city in Ohio, around 180 lawyers (can’t remember the firm now), and not a single one had graduated from Pettit (and only one had attended Ohio Northern University as an undergraduate.)

The Log of Accidental Deaths

2010-08-29T08:50:00.001-07:00

This is a list of "accidental deaths" I know of in Colorado and elsewhere, just to keep track of people whose demise might not have been that accidental! Or maybe they are not that dead.

A common denominator in some of these deaths is the acceptance of a gift to be given the victim in Colorado! Dear Reader, if you have any reason to suspect you might be "offed," don't take any gifts, and especially don't come to Colorado to get them.

I will be adding to and updating this list with more facts as time permits. This list so far is very incomplete. Note, however, how many of the victims have been involved in the water biz, including how many have had some association with Jim Lochhead (former Brownstein, Hyatt partner and now head of Denver Water) or David Robbins (probably the most powerful water lawyer in Colorado and my particular nemesis).

Gene Amole--"Geno" was a radio station owner for many years (KVOD in Denver) and also a columnist for the Rocky Mountain News. He's the one who taught me to look critically at some of the deals going down in this town, notably Denver International Airport. It's unfortunate that he comes first in this list, because he was 78 when he died. Stuff does happen when you're old. However, Geno would have been someone the Dark Side would've wanted to silence, since he was very knowledgeable, and before he got sick, a very effective critic. He died of cancer in 2002.

A street was named for him, next to the Rocky Mountain News building, which the City named "Gene Amole Way." That has now been obliterated by the fortress they call the "Justice Building."

Chips Barry: Chips was the director of Denver Water, and, before that, Romer's director of Natural Resources. Not exactly revered by his employees. ("Despised and distrusted" is more like it.) He died in 2010 in an accident on his macadamia nut farm in Hawaii, where he went after he retired. The tractor fell on him. (Sounds a lot like the demise of sculptor Luis Jimenez, don't you think? A piece of his horse statue supposedly fell on him.)

Gee, how did Chips get a macadamia nut farm in Hawaii? Well, one good source has said he gave away a choice piece of Denver Water's real property in the mountains. Although retired, right at the time of his death he was scheduled to come back to Denver to shepherd Denver Water through negotiations with the Western Slope over taking the last dribbles of water the city inadvertently left in the streams after its last raids.

J. David Barba--Mr. Barba was the Colorado state auditor. I did not know him. I know only that he did two audits, which are still online, very critical of the State Board of Land Commissioners and the Colorado Water Conservation Board. I have litigated against both agencies, both of which are determined to transfer public property to well-connected persons or entities, in secret and with no legal authority. Barba had criticized some of their doings in his audits, and I was able to use them. There may be many more pertaining to other agencies. I regarded him as an honest public servant doing his job. He died of a rare disease at age 52.

Barba had also criticized a $70,000 contract Vikki Buckley had entered into with consultant Sam Riddle, right before he died. See the post on Buckley, below.

Terri Brake--Terri was a criminal defense attorney. I know that she had been connected with Larry Pozner, maybe his partner at one point, because she "subbed" for him in a criminal procedure class he taught, which I took, at the DU law school. That was my only contact with her, but I know that she was very sincere, energetic, and capable. The newspaper said she had been given a hot-tub as a gift, which she had installed in her house, and died of electrocution the very first time she used it.

I have evidence Pozner is one of the attorneys who pays off judges in this state. See "On Winking Judges".

Maybe Terri knew.

Vikki Buckley: Buckley was a Republican African-American woman elected Colorado Secretary of State in 1994. Although the office was a shambles while she ran it, she was re-elected in 1998. She died of a heart attack in July 1999 at age 51. Curiously, a "good friend"--political consultant Sam Riddle--was alone with her when she died. See Aarone Thompson and Shely Lowe, below; and Dave Barba, above.

Carlson, Elliott & Land: These men were partners in a water law firm in Denver in the 1980's. They had just (along with David Robbins) won a big case in the San Luis Valley, with a water speculator called AZT (which had ties to the later water speculator AWDI). To celebrate, partners Elliott & Land, along with some others--can't remember exactly all, but know that water engineer Harlan Erker was with them--were flying to Alamosa for a victory dinner, but their plane crashed on the way and they were killed. This was sometime between 1983 and 1985, can't remember. Water lawyer Mary Mead ("Mooey") Hammond should have been on that flight, but was pregnant so didn't go. Partner John Undem Carlson, probably the most prominent water lawyer in the state at the time, was already in Alamosa, so was also not on that flight.

But John died a few years later, supposedly of "thick blood." Huh??? He was in his early 50's and slim and fit.

Peter Craven: Craven was a district court judge in Garfield County and replaced Judge Thomas Ossola on our Spring Creek Ranch water cases, when Ossola retired. (After Craven died, Ossola came back on.) Not that I liked Craven, but he did deny our opponents their attorney fees (after denying us a right to be heard in the case). Not long after he denied their motion for fees, in June 2006, he died--from (you guessed it) a heart attack!--riding his bike. He was not overweight. Water attorney Glenn Porzak and Supreme Court Justice Greg Hobbs (also a water attorney) gave memorial speeches in his honor. Funny how they are the ones who did so. I wondered if they were shedding crocodile tears. Both of them played key roles in the Spring Creek Ranch water theft.

Allan Francovich: Francovich was a moviemaker who had done in-depth interviews and investigation of the crash of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. His movie about it is online--The Maltese Double Cross--and it is the real deal, real Scots talking angrily about how, as soon as the crash happened, the site was swarming with Americans, FBI and CIA agents who were removing things, handling bodies, and going through luggage. Although Francovich's theory about Iranians and Syrians and the CIA's bumbling in letting the bomb get on the plane is supportable, even more supportable is a theory that the CIA and FBI exploded the bomb remotely. He didn't go far enough. Looking back, the Pan Am crash was the beginning of the sweeping intrusive legislative measures we have seen to "make us safe," which in reality have stripped us of our freedom. How else could the CIA and FBI have been on the scene so fast? And then Francovich dies of a heart attack in the Houston airport at age 56, on April 17, 1997. Right, that sure looks like a natural occurrence.

James Gardner--James was a rancher and the person in Park County, Colorado, who organized and chaired the Park County Water Preservation Coalition to fight the City of Aurora's (and Park County Sportsmen's Ranch's) applications to suck all the groundwater out of South Park. I represented PCWPC in the water rights litigation, so James was my client. He organized 4,000 well owners so that this grassroots opposition was successful; and along the way, we formed a new water conservancy district which now brings in over $180,000 a year in tax moneys. (Basically, I think we created a monster, but that's another story.) James became a Park County commissioner, and had enormous influence and credibility in the county. He then suddenly died of cancer at age 54, in 2006.

Samuel Hamilton: This man was the director of the Fish and Wildlife Service. He was 54, fit, and full of plans when he came to Colorado--and died--on Feb. 20, 2010. More here.

George Hickenlooper: He came to Denver and died. This happened Oct. 29, 2010. He was a moviemaker and the cousin of Mayor John Hickenlooper, who was shortly afterwards elected governor, having been anointed by Larry Mizel (as all must be if they are to have a political future in this state). Mizel and the Brownstein, Hyatt law firm which represents him are the face of organized crime in this state. See Brewton, "The Mafia, CIA, and George Bush" (1992).

The press said immediately afterwards that George Hickenlooper died "of natural causes in his sleep" and the St. Louis Post Dispatch said it was a heart attack. He had no prior history of heart disease. And who can say "natural causes" without an autopsy? See my postings on Sam Hamilton and Allan Francovich. George Hickenlooper was only 47. Forty-seven is not old and people don't just drop dead without exhibiting some warning signs.

There has just been a report from the Denver medical examiner that he died of a combination of ethanol and oxymorphone. Will anyone look to see if he had a prescription for oxymorphone, since it is a controlled substance, or tell us what the pain was he was having, for which this drug was prescribed?

He was here for the premiere of his movie Casino Jack, which is about the scams of Jack Abramoff--"money, greed, and illegal activities." The connections between Abramoff's payoffs and Indian deals--and Colorado--are legion. Some criminal convictions within Gale Norton's Department of Interior resulted. Our former U.S. Attorney Troy Eid had been in practice with Abramoff at Greenberg, Traurig, in the Indian law division (although he publicly denied it). In the movie, a sign prominently bearing the name "Greenberg Traurig" is displayed. I'm sure the firm didn't like that.

Maybe this "accidental death" is a message from the mob to cousin John, now Colorado governor. Toe the line, baby.

Anyway, so yeah. If someone wants you to come to Colorado to give you an award, take the next flight somewhere else. Or maybe don't take a flight.

Scott Lawrence--This was our original judge in the Castle Rock election contests, in 1998 and 1999. He was a good man, one of the district court judges for Douglas County, Colorado (in the 18th Judicial District). He awarded us four temporary restraining orders because of illegal activities of the Castle Rock Town Council and Town Attorney Bob Slentz, in their efforts to thwart my clients' initiative and recall efforts. The initiative and recall, brought by concerned citizens, were directed at obtaining some control over the go-go development in Castle Rock. A video of me talking about these election contests and the ballot box stuffing conducted by Rick Reiter and his employees is here.

In prehearing proceedings Judge Lawrence had awarded us our attorney fees for Town Clerk Sally Misare's violation of the Open Records Law. (She sent all the election records to the Town's attorneys in Glendale, 20 miles away, so my clients could not review them.) But ten days before our hearing was to begin in January 2000, Lawrence was rushed into emergency surgery, where they removed his voicebox and part of his tongue. He never returned to the bench, and died about a year later.

Judge Lawrence had previously been treated for throat cancer. However, he was a nonsmoker. His wife, I was told--also a nonsmoker--had also contracted throat cancer and died before Judge Lawrence did. It is very rare for nonsmokers to get throat cancer.

I want to honor Judge Scott Lawrence here--he was a good man, an honest man, exactly the kind of person who should be on the bench in Colorado but, I fear, no longer is. I often feel like the ancient Greek Diogenes, who went everywhere with a lantern, looking for an honest man. I am looking for an honest judge.

I note that in another election contest I had against attorney Mark Grueskin (who represented the Castle Rock developers in this contest), the judge was also switched at the last minute. That was a campaign finance contest against the City of Arvada. There, no reason was ever given for the switch. In both cases the judge was switched from one who was very good for us, ruling our way, to a political hack who rubberstamped everything the developers wanted.

Grueskin is married to a woman named Lola Farber Grueskin, who, it must be presumed, is related to Steve Farber of the mobbed-up law firm of Brownstein, Hyatt, Farber, Schreck.

Chuck Lile: Chuck had been the division engineer for Water Division 7, in Southwestern Colorado, and then was named to be director of the Colorado Water Conservation Board. Thus, he held very sensitive and important positions impacting water development in Colorado. Chuck died of a brain tumor at age 54, in 1999.

Parker and Carolyn Lofgren: Please see my post about Denver Public Schools. The Lofgrens won a stay at a house in Aspen through a fundraising option, where they met their tragic deaths.

Shely Lowe and Aarone Thompson: Aarone Thompson was reported missing in Nov. 2005, on the eve of her 7th birthday. The police concluded she had probably been killed at least 2 years earlier; but no body has ever been found. Shely Lowe was the girlfriend of Aarone's father, Aaron Thompson. She obviously knew what had happened to Aarone and was named as a "person in interest" by the police, then suddenly died of a heart attack at age 34. We next learn her church had taken out a life insurance policy on her!

A "good friend of the family's" had been Detroit political consultant Sam Riddle. Another famous friend of Riddle's also died of a heart attack: Vikki Buckley, the Colorado Secretary of State (see above). He was the only one around.)

Aaron Thompson, the father, went to prison for 100 years and all their kids were removed from the home. Where are they now, I wonder. Sam Riddle compared Aarone with JonBenet Ramsey, an interesting comparison, particularly if you suspect a child sex trafficking is going on in the Denver/Boulder area, in which high public officials are involved.

Riddle also became the spokesperson for the Shoels family, whose son Isaiah was killed at Columbine. Turns out Riddle actually lives in Detroit and his lover is Michigan State Rep. Mary Waters. Well, he's in prison at the moment.

Jennifer Moulton: She was the Denver Planning Director. I did not know her, but she obviously held a sensitive position in the middle of the go-go development years. I had understood she carried out her duties in a neutral and professional manner. She got a "rare form of cancer" and died at age 53, in 2003.

Sue O'Brien--Sue had been the editorial page editor of the Denver Post back when it was still a mostly functioning newspaper. When I ran for Colorado attorney general in 2002, I was being snubbed and excluded from coverage almost everywhere; however, Sue let me publish a guest column, along with the other two candidates. She had wanted them (Ken Salazar and Marti Allbright) to write about water. Ironically, although I am a water attorney, she would not let me write about water! She told me to write about anything else, so I wrote about how "easy" Colorado is. I compared it to the legendary community "Hole in the Wall," the place where killers, bank robbers and other outlaws went to avoid prosecution, since there are never any investigations or prosecutions in this State. In my column, I referred to Qwest as "a criminal enterprise that calls itself a phone company," and directly linked the law firm of Brownstein, Hyatt, Farber & Strickland (now Schreck) to organized crime. While I have no idea whether Sue's approval of this article had anything to do with anything connected with her personal health, she died not long afterwards of cancer.

Monte Pascoe: Geez, another heart attack felling a fit guy. Pascoe was in his early 60's walking to work in Denver in 2007, and dropped dead on the sidewalk. He had been involved in the Spring Creek water case in front of Judge Ossola, representing (I think!) Paul Tudor Jones, yet another mindbogglingly wealthy guy. In fact, Pascoe had committed misconduct in that case, simply blowing off interrogatories I'd served on him to try and find out why his client was in the case and even who his client was. He simply never responded. So that must've been one powerful client. Pascoe was also on the Denver Water Board, one of the most powerful (and corrupt) bodies in the state.

Mary Sylvester--Mary was a classmate of mine at the DU Law School, and had a Ph.D. in sociology. I was not in close touch with her, but we were friendly. I knew she had gone to work in the administration of Wellington Webb when he became mayor of Denver. She had worked enthusiastically on his campaigns, and he named her the head of Denver Excise and Licenses. Mary then died suddenly. She was single; I know her parents were both deceased; and I have not been able to find any of her friends who might be able to tell me what happened, although I looked for the people who had been quoted in her obituary. A couple years before she died, however, I ran into her and we briefly chatted. She gave me to understand that she was fighting corrupt things Webb had done. Because this was consistent with my own experience with the Webb Administration, from litigating over his carve-up of the Chatfield Arboretum and theft of the El Jebel Temple', and investigating how his people carved up Daniels Park, I wanted to know more from her. Unfortunately, I never did. Mary, I'm sorry.

Aarone Thompson: See above, under Shely Lowe.

Ray Wright and Doug Shriver: They were the top two officials with the Rio Grande Water Conservation District, David Robbins's client. They were killed in March 2010, supposedly by snow sliding off a roof of a cabin in Creede. No autopsy done. Ray Wright was a good guy. I did not know Doug Shriver.

Connections between DPS refinancing and Parker Lofgren

2010-08-26T09:41:00.000-07:00

There was a big New York Times article about Michael Bennet, running for the Democratic senatorial nomination in Colorado, on August 6, 2010. It discussed the vote by three Denver Public Schools Board of Education candidates in 2007 to put the pension fund into "exotic investments" which benefit only the banks, and are now costing DPS an arm and a leg. Bennet was hired, without any experience or qualifications in education, as the superintendent of DPS by these three boardmembers, and then repaid the favor by campaigning for their re-election in 2007. The Times article didn't mention that one of these DPS board members, Bruce Hoyt, is, in fact, an investment banker himself. Hoyt ran a joint campaign with Theresa Pena. I remember not voting for either, because they sent around so many glossy brochures I knew a lot of money was behind them (and if you look at their 2007 campaign contributions, you can see that was indeed the case).

One of Hoyt's and Theresa Pena's campaign contributors was Parker Lofgren, an investment banker who turns out to have been Bruce Hoyt's partner at St. Charles Capital. This fact has never been mentioned in any press I've seen. Lofgren and his wife Carolyn also show up on the donors list and at functions of the Denver Public Schools Foundation.

The connection is startling. Parker and Carolyn Lofgren and their two children were the tragic victims of apparent carbon monoxide poisoning in Thanksgiving 2008. They had bought a stay at a mansion in Aspen at a fundraising auction at their children's school (ironically not a Denver public school, but St. Anne's Episcopal).

There is very little information available on the web about how this particular prize ended up in this particular auction. The Lofgrens split it with another couple at their church, whose identity has been omitted from every article I have found online, who are the ones who found the Lofgrens' bodies when they arrived in Aspen the day after the night the Lofgrens died. The house was rented out for functions like this, and otherwise stood vacant; however, several other groups had stayed there without any problem, including one which left only a day before the Lofgrens arrived.

The house was for sale. The owner had had some other properties sold for taxes in 2009.

I have wondered whether Parker Lofgren might have been a critic of the refinancing scheme possibly about to voice a negative opinion to the school board. He obviously knew about the plan, as a partner of one of the school board members pushing for it and an expert in investments. The DPS vote was taken right around that time.

Maybe St. Charles Capital even worked on the refinancing, although that certainly would have been a conflict for Hoyt. I don't know. The name "St. Charles Capital" is interesting, too, since the name of Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper's real estate development company is "St. Charles Town Company." I haven't been able to find any connection between them, but why "St. Charles"? Is there some connection to the parish? (There's another "St. Charles"--Wendy St. Charles--who was convicted of felony cocaine trafficking. She was nevertheless admitted to the bar in Colorado, where she worked for MDC Holdings; and then George W. Bush pardoned her! She went on to work for Brownstein, Hyatt, and then Holland & Hart in Vail.)

I am compiling a list of "accidental deaths" in Colorado. In fact, since I've talked about a few already, I'm going to create a "sub-blog" just to deal with that! They look less accidental when all the circumstances surrounding each one are taken into account.

Benson and the closing of the CU Journalism School

2010-08-26T09:39:00.001-07:00

I sent a shorter version of this letter to the Denver Post on August 26, 2010:

So is Bruce Benson, as CU president, starting to do what everyone feared he might when he was appointed, by closing the CU Journalism School? Sure, closing the school will save money, but what is a University for?

Perhaps one would close the school to forestall investigation into the frauds of public officeholders, which journalism students might be trained to do. These students might, in fact, do well to investigate Benson himself, who gave $45,000 to three Denver Public Schools candidates in 2007, the same three who invested the teachers' pension fund in "exotic instruments" which solely benefit the banks. One of these candidates, and now a DPS board member, Bruce Hoyt, is, in fact, an investment banker.

Bruce Benson's contributions to these three were not reported until after the election. Other oil companies, banks, and developers also gave big bucks to them. What could their interest be in a school board race if not to get their mitts on the pension fund? Well, it's clear their primary goal is to dismantle public education generally. They start with the school closures and progress to looting the teachers' pension fund.

And now Benson and his buds have gone to work on CU. Lots fewer eyes on the pension fund if no journalism students around.

***
Coda, March 10, 2011: I was criticized by someone after I published this piece, who said, oh, the Journalism School is only being restructured to keep up with technological developments, and the intention is they'll be back soon, and do a better service to their students. Turns out that's not correct: a couple weeks ago, it was reported the Journalism School is staying closed. Kaput. Total blackout, even in the schools. There's not going to be any news coming out of the black hole of Colorado, by golly!

John Gleason and Me

2010-02-08T10:56:00.001-08:00

John Gleason is the director of the Colorado Supreme Court's Office of Attorney Regulation Counsel. As I've mentioned in other postings, this office has brought a string of harassing and groundless disciplinary prosecutions against me over the past three years.

I recently visited the website of John Gleason's law school, Ohio Northern University Pettit College of Law. I had never heard of it before.

It says, right up front, that half of its enrolled students scored in the 25th percentile on the LSAT! Yikes. I didn't even know you could GO to law school with a score like that. I mean, why would you even pursue it? It shows you would do better looking to some other field for employment.

And here is this law school effectively ADVERTISING for such students. Could this be why Gleason went there?

And now another possibility comes to mind: I scored in the 98th percentile on MY LSAT. Could this be why Gleason is obsessing about me? Got a little inferiority complex, maybe? Got to slap the uppity female down to prove she ain't so smart?

And I never see him litigate anything personally. In fact, I think I've set eyes on him only once in my life. He always dispatches Coyle or McMurrey to do the work. I found an online posting he made, consisting of only a couple sentences, and it has errors in spelling and punctuation in it.

This is yet another troubling example of the mediocrities who have been put into sensitive positions in state government, wielding great power--and abusing that power. Merit obviously not being the reason Gleason was selected for this position, there must be another reason. Any guesses?

Death and Emails on the Colorado River

2010-01-22T06:52:00.001-08:00

On January 15, 2009, Susan Greene, a Denver Post columnist, wrote "Tapping Mexico for Water," reporting on a ceremony between Interior officials and Mexican diplomats, who shook hands and smiled for cameras in Washington "after pledging cooperation on the Colorado River." This is because "parched communities in Nevada, Arizona, and California have been eyeing water south of the border." In other words, these communities want to steal even the little bit of Colorado River water which currently trickles into Mexico under our treaty, and they found somebody from Mexico to sign it over to them. The deal appears totally one-sided, favoring U.S. development interests, although undoubtedly American taxpayers will foot the bill for the proposed desalination plant in Mexico.

Greene then reported that "water talks between the two countries were set back dramatically in September when the main U.S. and Mexican envoys on the issue were killed, together, in a plane crash."

This was stunning news. I googled until my computer spewed steam, finding nothing, so wrote a letter to Greene, as well as to the Denver Post. I asked what the names of these envoys were and what they had been negotiating. I said that my clients, whose number one concern is the Colorado River, knew nothing about such "negotiations" with Mexico. There is a group which we know meets about Colorado River compact issues, but it has no website and does not hold public meetings, so we have never been able to get information. I asked Greene how she knew these things--who told her? Were the envoys who were killed about to sign an agreement that Mexico should get real wet water, to restore the desiccated Colorado River Delta?

The "lead negotiator" on the deal--after the deaths of the envoys, presumably--was Jim Lochhead, who is not a governmental official. He is a water attorney with Brownstein, Hyatt, Farber & Schreck, which represents real estate developers. In fact, Brownstein has the Colorado River sewn up since its mergers with the Schreck Law Firm in Las Vegas and the Hatch & Parent water law firm of California. Thus, it's disingenuous to say the "parched communities of Nevada, Arizona, and California" have been eyeing this water. Instead, it is a far more logical conclusion that Brownstein has been eyeing it, and now has made a deal to send all the water its way.

Brownstein is easily linked to the mob. After you google--and gag--at what comes up on Brownstein and his "client" Larry Mizel, try googling Mr. Schreck of Las Vegas; whew.

Greene did not respond to my email, and the Denver Post did not publish my letter. Remembering my emails, I just searched for them in my gmail account, and they are gone. On one attempt, I got the advice, "The conversation no longer exists." But I certainly did not delete them and it was only a year ago. The Denver Post's publisher, William Dean Singleton, has been reported by Pete Brewton, a former Houston Chronicle reporter, to be "best friends" with Larry Mizel, the guy who ripped off Silverado with Brownstein's help.

Through more googling, I learned that John Keys, the former Bureau of Reclamation commissioner, also died in a plane crash "on May 30." It's not clear what year, but I am guessing 2008. The only place that item appeared was in a Bureau employee newsletter. Google brings up not a single newspaper article in the entire United States about this incident.

Alison Maynard

Who I Am

2010-01-21T08:50:00.001-08:00

My name is Alison Maynard and my nickname is "Sunny." I have been a lawyer specializing in water rights and land use for 24 years. I have represented citizens' groups, environmental groups, and individuals, however--not real estate developers--and many times I have taken cases on a low- or no-fee basis, to provide access to legal representation to persons and causes who otherwise would not have it. I received my A.B. in physics from Cornell University, College of Arts & Sciences, in 1976, and J.D. from the University of Denver College of Law in 1986. Here's my resume, if you want to know more.

I was the Green Party candidate for Colorado Attorney General in 2002 and my Democratic opponent was Ken Salazar. I ran because, through the litigation I have done, I know of some enormously bad acts by public officials in the Romer Administration, one of whom was Salazar. I saw them secretly carving up public lands and water rights to give pieces to developers, so I made these campaign issues. Like one of my heroes, Ralph Nader, I was excluded from almost every forum and debate; but in the few I got to speak at, I drove some points home, many of which I will now post on this blog. They're still important, particularly given Salazar's ascendancy to Secretary of Interior.

One would think I should have gotten an award for my dedication to my clients and exposure of corruption. Instead, I have been subjected to an onslaught of groundless and retaliatory disciplinary proceedings against my license for over four years, as well as huge monetary sanctions imposed summarily by courts. The Office of Attorney Regulation Counsel has trumped up this string of charges, and smeared me with untruthful material. Its mission is not to correct ethical missteps, but to discredit me, and destroy me financially. What appears to have really set them off is some blogging I've done about judicial corruption, characterizing what I have been litigating against as "asset stripping enabled by judges." Hoo-boy, are we not supposed to talk about that! At bottom, I believe, is a Colorado Supreme Court justice--Romer appointee, natch--named Greg Hobbs. He has met with my opponents (repeatedly) in every appeal I have brought to his court. I believe he is, in fact, telling the judges in my lower-court cases, as well as OARC, to do this to me.

I have brought a racketeering/civil rights suit, which lays out what I've been through, at least as of August 2010; and then a suit I was forced to bring in April 2011 because of the latest sanctions, this time imposed by a Denver District Court judge. Here is the complaint.

These suits have the federal court in a tizzy. Eight judges and five magistrates have recused--and, although the first one has been on file since August 2009, nothing has happened. Disclosures, scheduling, discovery, everything has been "stayed," without an ounce of authority. The State is fighting disclosures because I am insisting on the judges' emails--particularly Hobbs's.
The latest development is a "transfer" of the case to Judge Kane, who struck my complaints and sanctioned me groundlessly about six times in the first week he was on the case. (He came on on March 29, 2011). You can read about it all in my "Motion to Recuse Judge Kane", filed April 15, 2011. He is closely associated with the same Democratic cabal whose corruption I have exposed.

This will give you a taste of what's going on in this state. It doesn't bear any resemblance to the American judicial system we learned about in 8th grade civics. It looks a lot more like the Soviet Union.

Is Ken Salazar reading my emails?

2010-01-21T08:32:00.001-08:00

Gee, it appears he is, although I haven't sent him any!

The New York Times on Jan. 12, 2010, had an editorial discussing a press conference Ken Salazar, present Secretary of the Interior, gave about his decision to conduct more rigorous review of proposed oil and gas leases on public lands. It was entitled, "No More 'Candy Store'" and said in pertinent part:

"The bureau [of Land Management], he declared bluntly,would no longer be a 'candy store' for an oil and gas industry that (mixing his metaphors) had been allowed to act like 'kings of the world' during the Bush years."

This is most interesting, because on Oct. 30, 2009, I sent an email out to two friends (who said they did not forward it), in which I likened Ken Salazar, Tom Strickland, and Anne Castle--now occupying the top three jobs at the Dept. of Interior--to "kids in a candy store." The context of my email was big water rights owned by the federal government. What I see is that this stricter review is not about the environment. It is about who gets the water, the oil companies (who generally fund Republicans) or the real estate developers (who fund Democrats).

I had sent an earlier email talking about the fact that, if the oil shale leases Shell Oil was granted in NW Colorado were nullified, its big senior conditional water rights for oil shale development would also probably be cancelled, for inability to show diligence. If Priority #1 goes away, Priorities Nos. 2 through 20,000 benefit from an increased water supply. Probably the juniors are water rights owned by developers represented by the Brownstein, Hyatt, Farber & Schreck law firm. Tom Strickland is a former partner of the Brownstein firm and that firm RAN--I mean, it RAN--Ken Salazar's campaigns for Colorado Attorney General and the Senate. As for Anne Castle, she is a real water lawyer--who also, of course, represented developers--with Holland & Hart. Basically, the Brownstein firm, with its recent mergers with the Schreck law firm in Las Vegas and Hatch & Parent in California, has the Colorado River sewn up,

I speculated that these appointments to the top three jobs at Interior were very likely payback to Brownstein partner Steve Farber for bringing the Democratic National Convention to Denver, where Obama was nominated.

Anyway, I used the term "candy store" referring to Ken Salazar, the federal government, and leases to public lands for oil development, the same context he used it in. Hmmm.

After I saw that NY Times editorial, and emailed a few friends about this coincidence, my computer went kerflooey. I could not even get into WordPerfect. It has just spent four days in rehab.

Alison Maynard

What really happened in Animas-La Plata

2010-01-20T12:11:00.000-08:00

I wrote the following for Wikipedia, but then got into a battle with the project proponents, who kept replacing the true--if somewhat sarcastic--story I had posted with their "official version." I will shortly be adding links to documents to support what I have said, in this blog.

The long and the short of it--if you've googled me--is that I have been ridiculed mercilessly on the web by my opponents in this case, apparently to divert attention from the very real multibillion-dollar frauds they have committed, along with lies to Congress, to the water court, and to the public
***

   "The Animas-La Plata water project is being built to fulfill the water rights settlement of the two Indian tribes that live in Colorado – the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe and the Southern Ute Indian Tribe." So say the promoters of the Project; unfortunately, there was no consideration for the "settlement," because the Utes have never had a valid claim for water.

   The Utes' reservation was extinguished by an Act of Congress in 1880. During the 20th century, they were permitted by acts of Congress to sue the government several times to recover for the property interests disposed of from their reservation, recovering, by 1950, over $1 billion (in 1998 dollars). In that year (1950), they signed several consent judgments agreeing that this was the last time they would come to court. They agreed they would never seek any more compensation for their extinguished property interests and that the 1950 judgment was res judicata.

   However, the very next year, 1951, they were back in court with more claims for compensation. The Court of Claims approved their application, with one lone dissenter, Judge Skelton, who was outraged by it. He said:

"I cannot agree with the reasoning of the majority nor with the result they reach. In my opinion, the Indians in this case, along with other Southern Ute tribes, were paid $31,938,473.43 in 1950 for the identical land involved here, together with other lands. This was the largest judgment ever awarded by this court since it was established in 1855. The attorneys who represented the Indians in the recovery of this tremendous judgment received an attorney fee of $2,800,000. [See Confederated Band of Ute Indians v. United States, 120 Ct.Cl. 609 (1951).] As will be seen in the following pages, the same Indians and the same attorneys are before the court again in this case asking that they be paid again (twice) for the same land, and the opinion of the majority is going to allow them to get this double payment. This results, in my opinion, in a shocking giveaway of millions of dollars of public money of the United States, and I cannot agree to it."

   191 Ct.Cl. at 32.

   The United States Supreme Court, in an 8-1 decision authored by Justice Brennan, agreed with Judge Skelton and reversed the Court of Claims in a 1971 opinion, United States v. Southern Ute Tribe or Band of Indians, 402 U.S. 159. True to form, however, the Utes--through their Anglo attorneys--were back in court the very next year, 1972, with more claims arising from their extinguished reservation, this time for reserved water rights.

   This brings us to the so-called Animas-La Plata Project (ALP), which is now being built to “settle” those claims for reserved water rights, claims which were prohibited because of the 1880 Act of Congress, the 1971 Supreme Court opinion, and the Utes' own agreement in 1950 that they would never come back to court again to seek more compensation for their lost property interests. In other words, the American taxpayers are being required to fork over a billion dollars to build a water project to "settle" nonexistent claims. And ALP is not even a "project"--it's only a hole in the ground. There are no plans to take the water anywhere: the original irrigation project was completely scrapped, also by an Act of Congress and the consent of the interested parties themselves, since taking irrigation out was the only way they could get it funded. We the taxpayers will be paying for this boondoggle for years, with interest, until a use for the water is discovered. And then we will have to build them a distribution system, which will be untold billions more, money never factored into the original cost. Anomalously for a Bureau of Reclamation project, all project costs have been transferred to the American taxpayer! That’s because, since there is no use for the water, there are no water users to pay for it.

   There are numerous other problems, including egregious frauds committed by the project's attorneys in the Colorado water court, and lies to Congress. The frauds in the court started in the 1960's, possibly in the 1950's. The applicant for the water rights was the Southwestern Water Conservation District, whose attorney was a man named Bill Eakes. In 1963, Eakes filed the statements of claim for ALP water rights in the court, as the SWCD's attorney; in 1965, he argued them to the referee; then, in 1966, he became the judge and granted the claims. Thus, he signed decrees, as the judge, awarding the very water rights he had filed for as the attorney! And then he signed decrees granting diligence on these rights several years in a row (and there is strong evidence that the applications for diligence were forged and placed in the court file long after the fact, by him personally). This was, again, when the A-LP was strictly an irrigation project, dreamed up to benefit the Anglo landowners in the La Plata drainage--the Indians were not involved in any way--but it was never economically feasible, according to the Bureau's own studies. Eakes's prodigy, an attorney named Sam Maynes, sat down with Judge Eakes and a Bureau engineer in the water court later in private conclaves to change the decree as they saw fit, adding new structures and uses in order to try and get the project funded, never with any of the notice to the public which the law requires.

   The court records from these proceedings have been altered in numerous ways; many documents are missing which should be in the court file; transcripts are missing reporter certifications and pages; and other evidence is just gone. In fact, the file reveals that an adjudication held in the early 1950's, which should have been closed and in which a decree should have issued on the evidence by 1952--prioritizing water rights all of which would have been senior to the ALP--was irregularly reopened by Eakes when he became the judge. It is highly likely that a decree from the 1951 proceeding was issued, but later disposed of, in order that Eakes and Maynes could draft a new one in 1966 and insert an ALP water right into the existing priority list, thus giving it seniority over many other water rights it should not have had.

   In the mid-1980's, Maynes and his cronies had still failed to obtain Congressional authorization for the project, so this is when they joined forces with the Utes (who were Maynes's clients in other matters, anyway) and "settled" the applications for reserved rights by giving the Utes the Animas-La Plata project. This moribund and economically infeasible irrigation project was thus magically transformed into an "Indian Project." The Utes' reserved rights applications are the very ones discussed above: illegal on their face because filed in violation of the 1971 United States Supreme Court opinion and 1880 Act of Congress. Obviously, reserved water rights could not have survived the 1880 extinguishment of the reservation, since they are implied from a reservation of land. The proceedings in water court from 1972 to 1991 then were themselves violative of state laws and due process. There were over 100 objectors in the case who were just "blown off" by the powerful interests who were feeding at the ALP trough, with the blessing of the court. These 100 objectors never stipulated to any decree, yet a decree was entered. In fact, everything that happened in the court happened ex parte: these objectors were not served notice of any of it. They were just excluded. And not much is of record in the court case, anyway--the "settlement" was a secret backroom deal which the court, Judge Al Haas by that time, just signed off on, in 1991, when he got a letter from Colorado deputy attorney general Lois Witte saying the Big Guys have settled now so please sign our decree. This letter also was not served on the 100-plus objectors, nor is it in the court file. And, as mentioned, the “settlement” was only among about ten parties, the powerful development interests. The other 100 objectors were totally ignored.

   The biggest joke of all--a sick joke on the taxpayer--is that there is no use for the water. There is no "project," in other words: there is only a hole in the ground, Ridges Basin Reservoir (now called Nighthorse Reservoir, dubbed “Nightmare Reservoir” by locals). There has never been any distribution system proposed, because there is no way to use the water. In this "reserved rights case," no quantification of the amount necessary to fulfill the purposes of the reservation was ever done--at least, none was presented to the court, which makes this “project” different from every reserved rights case ever litigated in this country. There was only this "settlement" executed by the federal government, the State of Colorado, the Southwestern Water Conservation District, the Animas-La Plata Water Conservancy District, the two Ute tribes, and a couple other water districts, most of whom were represented by Maynes. (The Bureau of Reclamation in Durango even leases offices in a building owned by Maynes.) The settlement has no basis in any engineering anywhere. These interests hogged all the water in SW Colorado, from nine streams (never even thought of in connection with the original irrigation scheme), and gave it to the Ute Tribes. And this is an important point: this is almost all of Colorado's remaining allocation of Colorado River water, under the Compact. It has been given away to other sovereigns.

In the mid-1980's, the SWCD got Congressional funding and EPA approval for the project, now as an "Indian water rights settlement," by agreeing that there would be no irrigation. Yet the sole purpose of the original project was irrigation: thus, the only possible use for the water was removed by an Act of Congress. Representatives of the SWCD, including their attorneys Sam Maynes and David Robbins, appeared before Congress and swore that they were dropping the use for irrigation, in order to get the funding. However, despite their statements to Congress–and despite never even stating, in an application they filed for diligence on their water rights in 2001, that they were seeking diligence on the use for irrigation--David Robbins assured the water court that they had never meant to give it up, and diligence as to irrigation was decreed. Congress and the EPA were lied to, in other words. These people never had any intention of giving up irrigation.

   Another incredible oversight on the part of the ALP attorneys is that they lost the water right for Ridges Basin Reservoir due to their failure to file for diligence on it in 2001. But never mind. As has been typical conduct for them, they created one out of thin air--a total fiction, as to which there was no public notice and no adjudication. They just slipped it into the diligence decree they drafted, so magically there was diligence on that, too, and the court signed it. It is a fraud, and here are the attorneys responsible for it: David Robbins, Susan Schneider, Scott McElroy, Jennifer Hunt, Eve McDonald, and Dan Israel.

   Beginning in 2001 and 2002, Citizens' Progressive Alliance contested both the diligence proceedings, and applications to "change" the reserved water rights, in good faith in the water court. Its members include a number of senior water rights owners in Colorado and New Mexico who have had their rights simply stripped away by the ALP deal. CPA has been the subject of sheer harassment by the other side for eight years. The proponents just played games in the court to buy time while they dug their hole. The water court, Judge Gregory Lyman by that time, ceded all control over case management to these project attorneys named above and smiled on the proponents’ attorneys’ misconduct. CPA could not even get any disclosures out of them, as the rules require. The rules didn’t apply to the ALP proponents, in Lyman's court. They were permitted to draft numerous "scheduling orders" exempting themselves from all deadlines and other requirements imposed by the rules, so they could get their project built before any of CPA’s claims were ever decided. CPA never even GOT any disclosures: a billion dollar water project, and the United States’ attorney, Susan Schneider, disclosed not a single person with knowledge of it, nor a single document other than a handful which were already publicly available. When CPA's representatives met with project attorneys two years into the case, after CPA finally got the court to set a date for the proponents’ disclosures, Susan Schneider told CPA flat out, "You're not getting anything." And she was right: CPA didn't get anything. CPA's attorney Alison Maynard moved to compel and for sanctions, and her motion was not only denied, but Judge Lyman warned her she would be subject to sanctions, herself, if she ever moved for sanctions again! So much for enforcement of the rules. CPA didn't get any. Jennifer Hunt, Robbins's associate, also waited until the last day in the period in which discovery was open--it was open for CPA all of two months--to disclose five new witnesses. Sharp practice, to say the least. At the reserved rights trial, CPA had an EPA official ready and willing to testify about the violations of environmental laws and the stipulations the applicants had made to Congress, and how it came to pass that his own disapproval of the project was overridden, and Judge Lyman would not let him testify.

   In addition, CPA knew, from other sources, that the practicably irrigable acreage of the reservation had been quantified by both the State of Colorado and the federal government many years earlier, but despite FOIA requests; a FOIA suit in New Mexico; open records act requests in Colorado; and demands for production of documents pursuant to Rule 34 in the water cases, CPA never got ANY of these reports--and they are strictly factual, as engineering. There is nothing confidential about them.

   After being jacked around for five years in the water court, only to see Lyman rubberstamp everything the other side asked for and deny CPA everything IT asked for, CPA went to the Colorado Supreme Court, where it saw its diligence appeal get dismissed on a pretext and no opinion whatsoever issue on the reserved rights appeal, 07 SA 100. In 07 SA 100, the Court just issued a one-line order "affirming the decision of the Division 7 water court." Shucks, I bet you thought the Supreme Court had a duty to determine the issues brought to it on appeal, or at least to mention them! And heck, CPA showed the blatant violation of a United States Supreme Court decision! But the Colo. Supreme Court didn't think it worthwhile to decide, or even mention, any of those issues. And it didn’t publish this embarrassing excuse for an appellate opinion, either, showing it knew, itself, it was doing something highly irregular, basing its decision not on the evidence or the law, but on impermissible considerations it wasn't about to disclose. It just swept the case under the rug. Obviously, if the Colorado Supreme Court mentioned the little problems CPA had identified, it would then have to decide the issues in CPA's favor--like the 100 objectors in the case who never stipulated to the "decree," and were never served anything else in the case, just blown off by the development interests and the court; like the fact there is no use for the water whatsoever, and the "project" is totally speculative; and that the Utes and their attorneys, particularly the United States Department of Justice, and the Colorado courts are brazenly thumbing their noses at a United States Supreme Court decision and Act of Congress.

   And then there is this string of fraudulent court decrees the ALP attorneys have caused to be entered, treating the water court as their own private playground. Janice Sheftel, and of course her mentor Sam Maynes, kept adding new uses into every diligence application, uses which were never the subject of public notice or any prior diligence decree. Nothing but fraud, all the way around, and Judge Lyman and the Colorado Supreme Court not only looked the other way, they actively enabled it, and acted like CPA had brought no issues to them for determination, at all.

   The Colorado Supreme Court has some other serious problems; notably, CPA got three justices of the seven recused from its reserved rights appeal. One in particular, Greg Hobbs, has made public statements advocating for the Animas-La Plata project. He has repeatedly accepted gifts and money and other favors from the Southwestern District and its attorney David Robbins (who is his good friend) and engaged in numerous ex parte contacts with them while our appeals were pending, and before. While CPA did get him recused in the reserved rights case, he did not recuse himself in the diligence case--instead, he unlawfully participated in the order dismissing CPA's appeal. CPA’s attorney has since found herself, for the last 2-1/2 years, having to defend against never-ending groundless disciplinary charges brought against her, as well as unwarranted sanctions imposed by other courts she is practicing in--to the tune now of over two hundred thousand dollars--which she believes Hobbs is behind. In other words, she believes she is being retaliated against for exposing the corruption in this project and in the courts, and for exposing Hobbs's misconduct in particular.

   So: a huge boondoggle, and at the bottom of it corruption in the Colorado courts. In addition, the Southwestern Water Conservation District is itself nothing but a racket. It is a money-laundering enterprise. It has no customers, does not supply water to anyone, has no works, no pumps or pipelines (although it now does have this big hole in the ground American taxpayers paid for). The SWCD exists only to tax and speculate in water rights. It brings in about a million dollars a year in tax money and it will not reveal where this money goes (although it does have two law firms working for it, both of whom had attorneys present during our trials, billing the SWCD between $1,000 and $2,000 per hour). It has shown CPA bills from lobbyists, such as Ray Kogovsek in Pueblo, which say simply "Lobbying: $25,000," with no itemization--no indication whatsoever how many lunches Kogovsek bought for which Congressional reps. And it's not simply that $25,000 buys a lot of lunches--it's a MILLION BUCKS A YEAR buying lunches. Or buying something else. Sure wish we knew what--but, of course, we can make an educated guess.

Far better to have elected judges

2010-01-20T10:51:00.000-08:00

There was an article in the New York Times on Dec. 24, 2009, about the Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System at the University of Denver, headed by Rebecca Kourlis, a former Colorado Supreme Court justice.

Rebecca Kourlis's writings as a justice reveal an agenda, which is to make it impossible for injured persons (meaning, plaintiffs who sue well-funded defendants) to have access to the courts. This is the kind of "advance" she wishes to see in the American legal system: more hurdles to tort plaintiffs in bringing their claims, for example, as well as the removal of governmental restrictions on real estate and water development. In numerous cases she has argued, in lone dissents, for the strengthening of landowners' defenses against tort liability; for ways to close the courthouse door against injured persons; and for loosening already loose restrictions on subdividers. In water cases, she avidly made the "notice" requirement, by which injured water rights owners are apprised of applications which might affect their rights so they can come into court and object, so broad, and including such vague, obscure references, as to effectively disembowel the requirement of notice.

The goal of doing away with the election of judges in other states, based on the Colorado "success story," I see as an important part of Ms. Kourlis's plan. Colorado is not a success story. The appointment of judges here is done under a veil of secrecy, completely removes all opportunity for the public to be heard, and has resulted in people holding judgeships who were never vetted by the bar and are plainly beholden to the political interests which put them in office.

Even after their appointment, almost no information is available about them. I have tried to get letters of recommendation written on behalf of judges when they applied for their judgeships and found I am barred by statute. I have asked Attorney Registration for information about past law firm employment, and been told they "do not keep old records." The Commission on Judicial Discipline also is prohibited from revealing information about complaints filed against judges. All of this information would be highly relevant to assessing whether a judge has a conflict in a case, as well as fundamental to assessing a judge's performance, but we are denied it.

The retention election, after a judge's appointment by the governor, is a meaningless exercise: the judges are always retained, with only two exceptions I can think of, where the power structure (with their lapdog The Denver Post) turned public opinion against them.

While there are obvious problems with electing judges, and letting them campaign and accept campaign contributions, those could be removed in one fell swoop with publicly funded elections. But there is never any discussion of this option, in this state.

--Alison Maynard

Whew, it's hot in here!

2010-01-20T09:41:00.000-08:00

At long last, I've decided to step out of the looking glass and tell the real world some of the things that are going on in Colorado.

In a nutshell, it's public officials using their official powers to transfer property from the true owners to real estate developers (and other financial interests). The scariest and most powerful are the judges, who accomplish this asset-stripping by means of solemn orders which bear the sheen of legitimacy, as presumptively the result of learned deliberations on the law and full consideration of the evidence.

My experience is that the law and the evidence aren't playing much of a role.

I see, in a new light, the extensive security systems at the courthouse. Ever been to the federal court in Denver? There are at least five six-foot-tall U.S. marshals there full-time standing around at the detector taking people's cellphones away and examining their shoes. They're there to protect the judges against disgruntled litigants, see. What the marshals don't probably realize, themselves, is that litigants these days usually have every right to be disgruntled, because the courts have become the instrument by which innocent persons' property is transferred to the financial cabal, without right. I have uncovered many links between the persons who benefit from these orders, the persons who appoint the judges in Colorado, organized crime--and the CIA--which I will discuss in this blog. I'm referring to it now as the "Banking/Judicial Complex."

I don't know how many times I've been denied discovery of my opponents' documents and witnesses, in blatant violation of the rules; had the judge threaten ME with sanctions--and even impose them--when I tried to enforce the rules; gotten nothing but a runaround, for YEARS, when I've tried to get a trial setting; and read orders which have no relationship to the evidence or the law. And now, because I have exposed several big rackets going on in this state, involving attorneys as well as judges, I am the subject of disciplinary proceedings without end.

And, of course, it makes sense this is how an attorney--someone who knows how the system works--can be silenced. Go after her license so she can't make a living and loses her home defending herself. Stigmatize and humiliate her, by requiring her to submit to a mental evaluation before you'll let her earn her living again.

Never mind that what you're doing looks an awful lot like Stalin's favored method for dealing with dissidents: put 'em in a straitjacket and send them to a mental asylum.

So this is my story. Stay tuned.