Following Benjamin Alfano's Money...

I don't know if there will ever be a final accounting in the passing of Benjamin Alfano.

But I have a copy of the final bill.

And Ben Alfano is still picking up the tab for the fastidious services rendered in his name by the Oregon Department of Veterans Affairs, guardian Chris Farley, attorney Richard Pagnano and Oregon's Department of Justice.

Follow the money? That is a particularly painful journey in the Alfano case because it is difficult to believe the 72-year-old veteran would have wanted so much of his estate -- which totaled $407,000 in August 2010, six months before his death -- to be invested in the legal battle with his four youngest children.

Once ODVA was named Alfano's conservator in 1998, the agency charged him a 5 percent "conservatorship fee" on his various sources of income, including his VA pension.

"It was never our contention their fees were unreasonable," said Steven Alfano, Ben's son. "It was our contention that if you're getting paid, you should do the job right. If you do it the wrong way, then we'll object."

And when the children objected -- to the ODVA's campaign for a professional guardian or that guardian's decision to move their father out of the assisted living center he loved -- ODVA fought back with their father's money.

In the ODVA's September 2011 "final accounting" of Alfano's estate, the agency lists total disbursements of $188,121 in the past year.

True, more than $55,000 was paid out to Raleigh Hills Assisted Living and Ana Coco, Alfano's personal caregiver. The bill for the cemetery plot and funeral home topped $15,000.

The rest of the money?

$26,784 to Farley's firm, Farley Piazza & Associates.

$27,642 to the law firm of Cartwright Whitman Baer, home to Farley's attorney, Sibylle Baer.

$19,022 to the firm of Richard Pagnano, Alfano's court-appointed attorney.

$2,302 for conservator fees.

$23,876 for ODVA's "attorney general fees," meaning assistant attorney general D. Kevin Carlson. (In the previous year, by the way, Carlson billed Alfano's estate $21,762 for "reasonable legal fees." Pagnano's firm rang up $28,184 in charges, much of that for the contested hearing in which Washington County Circuit Judge Rita Batz Cobb appointed Farley guardian.)

In Alfano's final year on the planet, in other words, the lawyers, conservator and guardian collected more than $99,600 to "defend" his interests. Throw in those 2009 legal fees and the bill exceeds $149,500.

But that's not the worst of it.

Of the $262,000 that remains in Ben Alfano's estate, Carlson is asking the Washington County court to "reserve" $120,000 in anticipated legal fees for the ODVA and Farley.

Full Article and Source:
Following Benjamin Alfano's Money

See Also:
Benjamin Alfano's Final Weeks Spent in Isolation