Off the seat of a bicycle
Chapter 63            the shenanigan-family fights over money    

My older brother was a CPA and had a tax business plus worked for a big corporation in their accounting division. He was perfectly suited to be executor of Mom’s estate and kept telling us the paperwork was almost done.

We trusted him explicitly. Mostly since, according to our parents, he did it right. He graduated college and got a corporate job and got married and got a mortgage and had three children.

The rest of us kids were diminished stumble-bums compared his shiney star.

So we waited for him to finish the estate. But the delay stretched into the third year, and we started calling. At first we got stories, and then accusations, and then yelling and screaming, and finally stonewalling. The epitome of insult came when he said we were ‘only calling to get the money.’ Making us feel like jerks for leaving him alone to sort out Mom’s house.

It seems golden-boy who never got ‘beat up’ had some family issues to sort out, and I thought he was distressed by Mom’s death.

Finally the third year passed without resolution, and I convinced my now-sober procrastinator sister to retain an Indiana lawyer to wrest the estate from our golden-brother in Maryland.

The Indiana lawyer wrote a threatening letter and received the little shoebox of estate documents almost immediately, and then the lawyer informed us that golden-brother had cleverly made off with half of Mom’s estate. And the lawyer said the whole shenanigan was legal.

Our older brother stole Mom’s estate money from his siblings, LOL. But we never said a word to him about it, so he probably thought he got away with it … but nobody gets away with anything … people know who you are.

My sister used Mom’s estate money to revert back to drinking. And I used the money to help finish the house that my Mom never got to see. And my younger brother used it to stay afloat in Chicago for a few years more until he descended into homelessness.

But fast-forwarding three more years, and our fraternal grandmother died in Kansas. She left behind an estate worth one hundred thousand dollars, and the court named her sole surviving child, my father, as the executor of her estate.

Ok, get this. My father had one brother, Uncle Bob, who died in a drunken car crash years earlier, and he had four children living in Kansas. These were our cousins, and they knew grandma their whole lives, and visited her frequently … but our side of the family barely knew grandma and hadn’t visited or written her since before grandpa died 15 years earlier. We never even went to Grandpa’s funeral or sent a card.

Our cousins were part of grandma’s life and they discovered her lying on the kitchen floor after the stroke; and they placed her in the nursing home in their home-town; and they spoon fed her and visited her for three years until she died … but our side of the family, except for our father, never visited or sent a card or flower … we didn’t even inquire where the grave was.

So Uncle Bob’s kids were at the funeral and we weren’t. Grandma was a ‘nobody’ to us; a total stranger, but when it came time to divide up her money … our father gave grandmother’s money to us and Uncle Bob’s kids were completely out.

My father stole money from own his brother’s kids. How greasy was that pig?

No wonder my older brother thought nothing about stealing half of Mom’s estate … maybe ‘theft from family’ is a genetic marker, like a predisposition to heroin.

But the story gets better!

My father took grandma’s stolen money and set up a Trust for us four kids, and named my older brother as Trustee. Can you believe it? My chicken-snake older brother was now back in the hen-house watching the family nest-egg.

The rest of us siblings strongly advised my father against trusting older-brother because of Mom’s estate fiasco, but we were flat-out ignored … because my father wanted to punish everybody for being such losers.

My cousins had to hire a lawyer two years later and forced my father to fork out a fifty thousand dollar check for half of grandma’s estate. And later my father said he ‘had to pay-off Bob’s kids.’

Pay-them-off is exactly what my father said. No sense of remorse or obligation … hell, money was bigger than that to my father, and he proved how important it was by stealing money from his brother’s kids and never forgetting to send us that special Christmas-time check of one hundred twenty dollars. Never a ‘material’ gift to acknowledge our interests, always a check so he didn’t have to get too involved.

Anyway … back to my chicken-snake-brother the Trustee. Cleverly, golden-bro wrote the Trust agreement in his home state of Maryland, with no provisions for oversight or removal-of-Trustee, and my fool father signed off on it … thus paving an open road for misappropriation.

And within three years, financial irregularities appeared and money was shuffled around and put in one name and then another, and then disappeared. Our phone calls to golden brother were met with snickering. We hired a lawyer but golden bro answered by mailing a copy of the Trust Document … saying that all our questions could be answered by reading the document (tee-he-he).

This is when I nicknamed him the Chuckler, and can hardly wait until I see him face-to-face so I can call him that in front of other family members ... it’s my vengeful mind at work.

Finally, after ten years of big-brother’s full-throttle bullshit, I hired a Maryland law firm that jumped on his neck and forced him to dissolve the Trust immediately, with all the missing money taken from his share.

It was a shameful event because the leverage came when I put pressure on his wife and friend.

My brother’s Achilles heel was his wife and a CPA friend. They unwittingly allowed their names to be put on questionable transactions, so the court filing named the whole-lot-of-them in a lawsuit for losses and punitive damages far in excess of the Trust’s value. Lawyer’s fees alone would have chewed up my brother’s share of the trust, and we could’ve taken his house.

But in reality my brother could have taken all the money and blown us a kiss, because there is no law to protect individuals 100% from other people … not unless you’re one wealthy mf and can afford to call out the hounds to chase the fox.

So what caused my crazy fucking brother to acquiesce to the lawsuit? It was the local code of human behavior. He didn’t want to appear too far outside that parameter for sake of his family and friends and business clients.

But he enjoyed every sadistic moment wreaking havoc in our lives, and that is as inexplicable as my father allowing him do it.

Index of chapters