A Montgomery County man is facing criminal charges after investigators discovered he was operating two unlicensed personal care homes out of residential houses where bedridden and disabled seniors were living without required fire safety equipment or state licensing.
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Man arrested for running two unlicensed care homes in Montgomery County
A new report outlines how former professional guardian Traci Hudson failed to protect elderly people under her care.
A year-long investigation by the Pinellas County Inspector General's Office led to criminal charges and identified new concerns about how Hudson treated her clients.
It's been almost two-and-a-half years since professional guardian Traci Hudson was arrested, accused of using a power of attorney agreement to take $541,000 from a 92-year-old man under her care.
She is currently out of bond awaiting trial.
“She’s still walking the streets," advocate for people in guardianship Hillary Hogue said. "She is still free to go. She has not been held accountable.”
Hogue also served on the Florida Guardianship Improvement Task Force.
Investigators allege Hudson used her ill-gotten gains to make payments on a 4,888 square-foot Riverview home, buy Tampa Bay Buccaneers tickets and go on shopping sprees.
Investigators identify red flags leading to charges
“That case that she’s charged with is a power of attorney case, so totally different than our guardianship cases,” Pinellas County Probate Judge Pam Campbell said in a Nov. 2019 hearing a few days after Hudson’s arrest. “If there are any red flags that are brought to our attention, then we’ll address that at that point in time."
On February 14, 2020, Campbell ordered the Pinellas County Inspector General's Office to investigate all of Hudson's 45 guardianship cases and identify any concerns involving the healthcare or financial matters related to wards under her care.
It turns out there were lots of red flags.
The IG’s Office identified criminal activity in three other cases, leading to 17 new felony charges last year.
One of the alleged victims was Robert Moore.
“She totally destroyed my family,” Moore’s son Ryan Moore said in an interview last year.
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| Ryan Moore |
Investigators said she sold Moore's guns at pawn shops, didn’t include them in an inventory of his property and kept the money.
“I asked her about the guns and she said all of the guns were stolen except for one and it was in a police evidence room somewhere,” Ryan Moore said.
“It just destroyed us”
“It was a tough, tough lesson,” Gedi Pakalnis said of the five years he spent fighting the guardianship system.
His great-aunt Genyte Dirse was put into guardianship after selling Pakalnis part of a St. Pete Beach hotel at a below-market rate.
A realtor, who previously asked Dirse to list or sell her property, petitioned the court to have Dirse put into guardianship.
Hudson was appointed her guardian by the court.
Pakalnis said during the guardianship, Dirse was abused by a caregiver Hudson hired, then moved into an assisted living facility where she later died due to COVID-19.
Hudson obtained a court order preventing Pakalnis from seeing or talking to his great aunt.
“It just destroyed us,"Pakalnis said. "Not only destroyed our family but physically cost us health-wise, and of course financially."
After interviewing dozens of people and reviewing more than 1,700 pages of bank records, real estate transactions and other transactions, investigators drafted reports on 19 of 21 Hudson’s cases they reviewed.
“Fortunately we have someone who’s working to stay on top of this and digging into this and we’re glad to have the people doing their job,” Pakalnis said.
More than a thousand pieces of wards’ mail abandoned
According to the report, investigators collected and delivered 933 pieces of mail belonging to former wards that were delivered to a PO box at a UPS store in St. Petersburg that Hudson abandoned.
Hudson's criminal attorney, Richard McKyton, told us his client was not allowed to access her PO box after she was removed from her cases, which lead to a mix-up in mail being forwarded to the wards' new guardians.
That mail could have included bills, medical documents, tax information and other important items necessary to provide appropriate care for the wards.
The report says 86 mail items were delivered to the home of another ward but never collected.
“If you have almost a thousand pieces of mail you haven’t retrieved from your PO box, it says you haven’t been doing much,” Hillary Hogue said.
“If I could just say one thing to the community at large… please don't even think about initiating a guardianship concerning your loved ones. And if you hear the word guardianship, run,” she said.
Hudson received money from libel judgment, property sale
The I-Team learned while Hudson was out on bond she continued to make money.
In February, Hudson’s attorney John Hayter took possession of Lesa Martino's home to satisfy a $240,000 libel lawsuit judgment.
Hudson was the guardian of Lesa’s father Roland Martino.
Hudson sued Lesa Martino after she reported allegations of abuse and neglect to state agencies and wrote disparaging remarks about Hudson on websites and social media.
Hudson was arrested on the original felony charges months after she received a summary judgment against Martino.
“It’s just so unfair because all I was doing… I was a whistleblower to the corruption and then I get punished,” Martino said.
She is now homeless, living in a motel while she appeals her foreclosure case.
Hudson sold her own home last month for $849,900, which was $256,000 over the amount Hudson paid for it in 2019.
Her attorney attributes the sale to her recent divorce.
A status hearing in Hudson's criminal case has been scheduled for next month.
No trial date has been set in the case.
If you have a story you’d like the I-Team to investigate, email us at adam@abcactionnews.com.
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| Thomas K. Schindler |
WEST CHESTER — A once prominent but now discredited and disbarred Chester County attorney has been arrested again by Chester County Detectives and charged with two separate cases of stealing $86,000 from former clients, essentially looting an escrow account that had been set up to handle the victims’ funds.
Thomas K. Schindler, who was disbarred in 2020, is charged with multiple counts of theft by unlawful taking, theft by deception, and theft by failure to make the required disposition of funds. He was arraigned by Magisterial District Judge Albert Iacocca on March 29 and released on bail.
Schindler had been awaiting trial before Chester County Common Pleas Court Judge Jeffrey Sommer on charges of stealing nearly $1 million from former clients who hired him for their divorce. The charges stemmed from a 2018 financial agreement with the victims where he failed to make required transfers of proceeds from the sale of their home.
The current charges deal with two clients, the first involving a man who hired him to represent him in a federal criminal case in 2019 and who allegedly paid him $95,000 in legal fees. The case was taken over by Schindler’s former co-counsel at the Schindler Law Group, Stephen Patrizio, after Schindler was disbarred. When the case was resolved and the man was ordered to pay a fine, he told Patrizio about the $95,000 he had given Schindler.
Even though Patrizio pressed Schindler to return the money on several occasions and Schindler allegedly promised to do so, the funds were never recovered. When Chester County Detective Keith Cowdright investigated Schindler’s legal escrow account, he found that Schindler had withdrawn all but $4,100 in 2019.
The second case involves a man who had hired Schindler to handle his divorce in 2014. As part of the settlement, a check was made out to the man for $100,000 from the sale of the former couple’s home. That check went to Schindler’s escrow account.
Despite making attempts to receive the funds, according to Cowdright’s affidavit, the man only received $30,000. Detectives reviewed the bank records of Schindler Law Group in 2021 and discovered that after fees and payments for the victim’s divorce, the victim had not received the $2,070 that he was owed.
“Clients place enormous faith and trust in their lawyers to always have their best interests at heart, but that is broken when lawyers put their own greed above anything else,” said District Attorney Deb Ryan in announcing the arrests. “In stealing his clients’ money — and breaking their trust — Thomas Schindler also tarnished the reputation of the many good lawyers in our community. My office will push to hold him accountable under the law for his criminal actions.”
Schindler, 61, of Newlin, was once one of the most well-known and well-liked criminal defense attorneys in the Chester County Justice Center. A county native and son of a well-respected child psychiatrist, he is a graduate of Westtown School and first worked in the D.A.’s Office as a prosecutor, and then went to work for the law firm of Lamb, Windle & McErlane in West Chester.
He left that firm in the 1990s and opened his own private practice with a succession of partners, finally opening up the Schindler Law Group in Kennett. He handled all manner of criminal cases — including representation of one of the largest drug dealers in county history, Ricky Maitre — as well as family law matters. He was disbarred on consent in 2020, although the specifics behind that action have not been made public.
He is represented in all of the cases by defense attorney Vincent
DiFabio of Tredyffrin. Deputy District Attorney William Judge is the
assigned prosecutor.
Speaking so softly he could barely be heard, Walter Strong of Celina entered the guilty pleas under an agreement where charges of rape by an authority figure were dropped. From 2004 until 2011, Strong was the conservator of a handicapped couple. He admitted to sexual battery on the woman and theft of $105,479 from both of them.
