Betrayal of trust, Part 4: How to help the vulnerable

Shannon Mullen, @MullenAPP 

Billions are stolen from the elderly and infirm across the country each year. Here's how to stop it

On June 15, some 200 New Jersey judges, attorneys, guardians and court employees heard a sobering message from the state's top judge.

Read the Betrayal of Trust series

A "silver tsunami" is about to hit New Jersey, New Jersey Chief Justice Stuart Rabner warned attendees at a conference on elder abuse at Stockton University in Galloway, Atlantic County.

By 2027, just 12 years from now, 1 in 5 state residents will be 65 or older, according to the New Jersey Department of Labor.

That's 2 million people, with homes, retirement funds and other assets worth billions of dollars — a tempting target for criminals who prey on the elderly.

In time, many of these boomers will fall victim to Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia. When that happens, thousands of additional cases will pour into a guardianship system that's already in trouble.

"Judges appoint, of late, 2,000 guardians each year, and it's an enormous challenge for surrogates, for the court system," Rabner said. "To be able to oversee that large number of guardians, it's simply not possible based on the resources that exist."

Yet without major changes, cases like the one involving Barbara J. Lieberman, the now disgraced former Atlantic County attorney who stole millions from incapacitated wards and other elderly clients, are bound to increase.

With all its fiscal woes, what can New Jersey do?

For now, it's counting on volunteers to pick up the slack.

Under a program first introduced in 2013 and expanded across the state last year, trained volunteer monitors are helping the surrogates in all 21 New Jersey counties to review guardian reports and case files.

To date, 69 volunteers have reviewed nearly 4,900 guardianship case files statewide, according to the New Jersey Judiciary.

Click here for a breakdown of volunteer monitoring efforts in each county.

What they've found so far, Rabner said, is a "high level of non-compliance" with reporting requirements by guardians across the state.

Four key fixes
Reforming a guardianship system rooted in medieval laws that allowed for the seizure of property owned by "lunatics" won't be easy, experts say.

For starters, they point to four major areas that need immediate attention:

Better data. How can you fix any problem when you don't know how widespread it is? That's the quandary with guardianship today. There simply are no reliable statistics on the number of Americans who rely on guardians to manage their affairs. That's because only a couple of states track these cases, which are typically administered at the county level. One "guesstimate" pegs the total at 1.5 million, but the real number could be twice that.

Closer monitoring. Most states, including New Jersey, require guardians to file periodic updates on the status of their wards' health and finances. But few courts across the U.S. have the manpower or technology to track and scrutinize these reports. Disreputable guardians know that. With no one looking over their shoulders, they're free to use their wards like ATM machines. One notable exception is Minnesota, which recently implemented a centralized, statewide auditing system to hold guardians accountable.

Barbara Lieberman in Superior Court. (Photo: Staff photo/Bob Bielk)

Greater use of alternatives. Guardianships that strip someone of their autonomy and all their legal rights are supposed to be the remedy of last resort. Yet in too many courts across the U.S., it's the default option, experts say. On the federal level, the U.S. Administration on Aging has tried to promote a more individualistic alternative, called supported decision-making. Using a case management approach, it starts by digging deeper to identify the elderly or disabled person's specific needs. The next step is to line up different people or resources that can address those needs. One person might help pay their bills, for example, while another might help with transportation or household chores. "It's kind of a community taking care of someone, instead of (one person) taking all their rights away and having control over them," explains Elaine Renoire, president of the National Association to Stop Guardianship Abuse, based in Indiana.

A more accessible review process. For some, guardianship operates like the Hotel California in the old Eagles' song: "You can check in any time you like, but you can never leave." Stripped of their legal rights, wards who recover from alcoholism or a traumatic brain injury often have a hard time getting back in front of a judge to have their autonomy restored, especially if their guardians won't cooperate. "It can be extremely difficult to get out from under a guardianship," says researcher Brenda K. Uekert, a leading expert on guardianships in the U.S. At the same time, she adds, many courts lack a mechanism for relatives or concerned friends to have the person's guardianship reviewed.

'Entitled' to steal
Until now, monitoring and enforcement has been so lax, the few people who have been charged with abusing their authority practically had to turn themselves in to get caught.

Sources have told the Asbury Park Press that it was one of Lieberman's co-defendants, Susan Hamlett, who triggered a criminal investigation after she brought one of Lieberman's elderly victims to see another attorney. The attorney alerted authorities that he suspected the woman was a victim of elder abuse.

Christopher J. Donadio says he incriminated himself while being deposed in a civil case involving unpaid bills.

Then a K-9 officer with the Monmouth County Sheriff's Department, with an annual salary of $87,400, Donadio had power of attorney over his first wife's elderly aunt, Edna Prester. Prester suffered from Alzheimer's disease, according to court records.

Donadio, 48, says he helped move Prester from her filthy, rodent-infested home in upstate New York to an expensive assisted-living facility in Colts Neck.

But he also helped himself to Prester's money.

Donadio arranged to pay for Prester's care with proceeds from the sale of three properties she owned, authorities said.

When the facility requested the funds, Donadio produced and presented several bogus expense receipts, authorities charged.

After the assisted-living facility filed a lawsuit, Donadio says he revealed in his deposition that he had misappropriated some of Prester's money. The facility then notified authorities.

Prester died in 2010 at age 87.

A grand jury charged Donadio with stealing $100,000 from Prester's account.

Donadio pleaded guilty in 2011 to the theft of more than $75,000. He also admitted that he opened a credit card in the name of his second wife's mother and used a co-worker's credit card number to make purchases. He agreed to pay $32,000 in restitution to the assisted-living facility.

"He wanted to live the good life," says Donadio's second wife, Maura Johnson, 37, of Holmdel. The couple divorced in 2008 after 11 months of marriage.

"Concerts, jewelry, vacations," she says, "it was all for luxury."

Sentenced to four years in prison, Donadio was paroled after serving three months.

Today, Donadio, who now works in the restaurant and transportation industry, says he's sorry for what he did.

With nobody watching over his shoulder, he says, "It was easy for me to take the money."

He describes his rationale for stealing Prester's money this way:

"Well she's OK, she's in an assisted living facility, I improved her living situation, so I should be entitled to that."

A first in the U.S.
New Jersey's volunteer guardianship monitoring program — which Rabner says is the first of its kind in the U.S. — addresses the first two of those key issues.

Stuart Rabner, chief justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court. (Photo: Mel Evans / AP)

As volunteers work through case files, looking for missing reports or red flags pointing to possible improprieties, they're also entering information into a new statewide database.

Until now, New Jersey has never tracked guardianship cases. Some county surrogates don't even know how many of their cases are still active.

Rabner believes the total number of active guardianships statewide may be in the tens of thousands, but no one is sure.

While prior experience with accounting or the courts is a plus, it's not required to join the program.
"To be sure, we need to enlist (and) train yet more volunteers to be able to continue and review these reports on a sustained basis," Rabner told the conference attendees.

"But make no mistake, the very fact that this program now exists in New Jersey will cause people to think twice before they might even consider to take a step to take advantage of those they've promised to help," he added.

Uekert, for one, believes New Jersey is taking a practical approach. She spoke at the elder abuse conference in Stockton and came away impressed by New Jersey's commitment to do a better job policing guardians.

"Ideally you would have a cadre of trained professionals (reviewing guardianship case files) but the courts generally don't have the funds to have those types of personnel," says Uekert, principal court research consultant for the National Center for State Courts, based in Williamsburg, Virginia.

"Volunteers," she believes, "would be better than nothing."

But at least one other expert is strongly opposed to the idea.

"It's just another way of trivializing the problem by saying, 'We can handle this with volunteers,' " says Minnesota law professor A. Kimberley Dayton.

"It's about money, a lack of resources. Until that's fixed, none of this is going to be fixed," she says. "It's just going to keep on going and going."

In Atlantic County, where Lieberman was based, two volunteer monitors have helped the county surrogate review more than 330 cases so far.

But by the time the volunteers began their work last year, the damage was already done.

Shannon Mullen: 732-643-4278; smullen4@gannettnj.com.

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Betrayal of trust, Part 4: How to help the vulnerable