Part 2 - The Algorithm of the St. Louis Family Court Racketeering Enterprise
The racketeers of the St. Louis Family Court have their fraudulent schemes under color of law down to a science. Here's how they do it - and how to destroy it!
If you’re reading this, you’re getting a divorce, or establishing paternity, or, for some other reason, need a court to write an order on a child custody matter in St. Louis.
Having read Part 1 of this series, you now know that your situation is not special, that an attorney will not help, that the St. Louis Family Court Racketeering Enterprise™ sees you coming, and that they already have a plan to strip mine you of your assets and maybe even of your parental rights.
The worst may not necessarily come to pass! If the parties involved are enlightened adults, and if a plan to raise the children is designed before family court attorneys are contacted, then the assets will be divided in a reasonable manner in the best interest of the kids. Thus, an unforeseen, unfortunate next chapter of life will then unfold, sadly but peaceably.
Now we need to talk about the other 99.998% of society. You know, normal people. Regular human beings who probably are not feeling like their most philosophical, gentle selves during a divorce. Heck, even if you are feeling like moving on and rebuilding the family in a harmonious new structure, you may hire a St. Louis Family Court attorney.
And there is where your problems become inevitable.
Your family will now be fed into a machine.
Here is how that machine works and what it will do to you.
1. The attorneys are all friends
If you have middle class income, you and/or your spouse will likely both “lawyer up.”
The attorneys all know each other. You don’t know this because you are doing this for the first time. They are doing it for the 1000th time. The “Family Law Bar” is small. They all know each other.
Nevertheless, your attorney will pretend not to know opposing counsel. This is to protect how they justify billing you for fake legal work. When your attorney tells you that they received a call from opposing counsel (for which both attorneys will charge an hour at $250-350/hour) to discuss your nonexistent heroin habit, they need to make it sound like the call actually took place. They need to make it sound like this was actually a contentious argument in which you were zealously defended.
In reality, they probably discussed the case over lunch with opposing counsel. They shared what each client’s hot buttons were with each other. Because they are all friends, they may have discussed it within earshot of unrelated attorneys. In their mind, they are all on the same team anyhow, and attorney/client privilege does not really matter.
The entire thing is a theatrical production to justify taking your money. They know each other; they have dozens of cases a month with the same people; they see them daily. Everything they tell you about their interactions with the other attorneys is basically nonsense that sounds plausible to you while you are sitting in the smoldering wreckage of your attempt to build a happy household.
The most important thing to remember is that these people are all friends, put each other first, and will be lying to you. That will guide your understanding of the rest of your family’s torment.
2. The amount of money charged is determined by your assets
The first thing the Racketeering Enterprise™ does is get disclosure of your household assets. This, and only this, determines how much “litigation” you will be doing. If you are two wage-earners with two kids, and there is only $45,000 of home equity along with $50,000 stashed in retirement accounts, they’re probably going to take around $30,000-$65,000. After all, in normal circumstances, they don’t want you all that angry with them, just the co-parent of your kids. So the standard practice is to figure out how much you can afford from your savings accounts, salaries, and available credit from credit cards, and perhaps cash loans from friends and family. They determine that total number and then attempt to bill enough hours to extract the cash without touching your retirement accounts, which would have heavy tax penalties to access.
This Viking raid on your household’s assets will be blamed on the unreasonableness of your ex-co-parent—on both sides! But the treasure from that raid goes entirely to their Racketeering Enterprise™.
If you have more money, they will charge higher rates and do more Litigation Theatre with you. They will attempt to have the whole thing settled within 6-12 months.
3. Your children are the key to their racket
Missouri is a no-fault divorce state. Infidelity is not considered as part of the equation, nor is who sues as Petitioner or Respondent in the dissolution of the marriage.
“Marital misconduct” or “being an especially bad spouse” is a subjective issue that falls under the judge’s discretion. Behavior during the marriage would have to be extreme to enter the calculus of one of the most critical issues in the dissolution of marriage, the split of marital assets. The law, insofar as anyone here cares, is very clear—assets shall be equally split. Judges have discretion over this, but to hear family law attorneys tell it, that misconduct must be some combination of a significant cocaine habit flaunted at breakfast in front of the school-age children while the mistress is still clad in last night’s cocktail dress—repeatedly. Domestic abuse can enter this calculus as well, but this usually requires an arrest record, which is something the judges also ignore despite their legal obligation not to.
Suffice it to say, unless you abandoned the spouse on the side of the road immediately after his/her Stage III cancer diagnosis, your divorce will be considered no-fault, the assets will be split 50/50, and spousal support is not guaranteed.
The only opportunity they have to make real money is if there are minor children who require a court-ordered parenting plan. If there is a child involved, then the attorneys and judges can appoint a “Guardian ad litem” to represent the children at your expense, and now the litigation can stretch into multi-year territory.
4. The Racketeering Enterprise™ picks a winner and loser in the custody battle
After the first month or so of “conferences” with their respective clients, the attorneys of the Racketeering Enterprise™ have a general idea of how much money there is to take, and generally who you are. They also determine if the children have any actual problems that have been diagnosed by non-court professionals. If there are real problems that have already required therapy, the litigation theatrics are going to be more limited in scope, because the situation has already involved professionals not from the Racketeering Enterprise™. Those professionals may have taken notes that can be subpoenaed, and this will inject entirely too many admissible facts into any potential trial on the merits.
For the Racketeering Enterprise™, the far more preferable situation is if the children have limited or normal problems which are not yet documented and if you and your co-parent are garden-variety dysfunctional humans. Now, the attorneys, judges, and psychologists can create their own narrative, usually with one person as the presumptive “winner” and the other as the potential “loser.”
A favorite technique of theirs is to pick the parent to whom the kids are most attached, the most involved parent, and designate them as the “loser” who will receive the least custodial time and be stripped of legal rights to make decisions. The most involved parent will fight the hardest for the children, and thus commit more energy to the fake custody battle, thereby justifying the raid on household assets.
The party with the least income need not be the presumptive loser; threatening the most involved parent with the most income with harm to their children will induce a pouring out of cash for years to come. The essential move is to put the children at risk, to make them pawns, and to justify endless pseudo-legal activity.
5. A “Guardian ad litem” is appointed for the children
Now that a “high-conflict litigation” has been produced by lawyers for the parties, they will demand that the judge appoint a private attorney to gather information on the children’s situation. This is a quasi-judicial arm of the court known as a “Guardian ad litem,” or GAL. Supposedly, their role is to represent the best interests of the child. In reality, they are low-skilled attorneys who are friends with the rest of the Racketeering Enterprise™, will likely never conduct discovery, never write a report, and never even meet your kids. Strangely, this person is whose opinion will be relied upon by the court for its final judgment.
The role of GAL is so contentious that it will need its own chapter. The American Bar Association doesn’t like the use of GALs, and after you read more, neither will you.
6. Your personality will be dissected through fraudulent discovery
Now that the GAL is in place for the kids, everyone claims to need more facts about the specious allegations made by one or both parties—or even by the attorneys alone. There is a small group of “professionals” whose practice is almost entirely St. Louis Family Law cases. These are psychologists, and less frequently, “vocational assessors.”
If you’ve had as much as a single bout of the blues, or even if you haven’t, someone from the Racketeering Enterprise™ will raise questions about mental illness. The court, during a “settlement conference” held in judges’ chambers, out of their clients’ earshot—and not during a hearing on the record about the merits of such a claim—will appoint someone from their stable of pseudo-psychologists to provide forensic analysis of your personality.
These pseudo-psychologists have little or no experience, licensure, training, or expertise in providing psychological evaluations, but they have considerable experience working with the same attorneys in violation of their profession’s ethical standards. You will be asked to meet with these pseudo-psychologists for two to four hours. After your brief chat, they will usually “diagnose” the most committed parent with an Axis II Cluster B personality disorder, and “diagnose” the most aggressive parent with being an extremely reasonable person who has suffered under their ex-co-parent’s putative psychopathology.
Like with the GALs, the pseudo-psychologists will get their own chapter here, if for no other reason than their habitual diagnosis of mental conditions that simply do not exist in the scientific literature.
There are other forms of invasive discovery also ordered, depending on the available liquid cash assets in the household. If you’ve ever been between jobs, they could order a “vocational assessment” which will—literally—ask what your favorite classes in high school were, and whether you can type. You can have two decades of a career under your belt and—literally—still have to spend $3000 of equity in your home on an interview about your ability to use Microsoft Word and your feelings about history class versus French class back in high school.
An allegation that you get tipsy on cherry brandy during the winter holidays can justify that you be strapped to a round-the-clock breathalyzer for months. Even while marijuana is legal here in Missouri, the Racketeering Enterprise™ still orders drug testing for Reefer Madness, demanding that you submit—and this is not a made-up example, despite its insanity—bags of only toenail clippings to a private lab owned by the locals. (Hair and urine will not suffice for certain Guardians ad litem, and they can make these demands despite no such authority or expertise.) They can order infinite numbers of your toenails to test for the presence of a legal substance in your body—all without any justification that this affects your ability as a parent.
7. You will be threatened with further losses if you demand a trial
After months of the above-mentioned litigation drama, you may be expecting a trial. After all, you have been led to believe that there have been months of discovery, and a trial date may have been set which is rapidly approaching.
What you do not realize, because this is your first litigation, is that the attorneys have not been preparing for trial at all. Few or no subpoenas have issued, nor efforts to quash their production. You, your co-parent, and the players involved have not been ordered to sit down for a deposition under oath where you testify in advance of the trial.
Further, the GAL generally will not collect records from the school or pediatrician, witnesses are not being lined up, and that trial date may or may not even be on the judge’s docket. Nevertheless, you will be told that a trial is approaching—and threatened not to expect one.
You will be threatened with loss of custodial rights and/or your remaining assets if you have the temerity and bad taste to ask that the past months of nauseating psychological abuse be committed to a public record.
Remember, it’s all fun and games for the Racketeering Enterprise™ until this thing goes to trial. There can be no appeal on a settled case; you consented to the order of the judge. If you submit to a settlement, the judge’s Order cannot be reviewed, the GAL cannot be disciplined, and the attorneys were merely offering their clients zealous representation. So the Racketeering Enterprise™ will threaten a trial, but they absolutely do not want one. If you demand your Constitutionally-guaranteed day in court, your own attorneys will turn abusive and threaten you and your kids with unspecified, serious harm.
Unfamiliar with your rights and options and exhausted from their systematic abuse—not to mention broke—you will likely settle, and move on with your life.
8. The settlement will allow room for future litigation theatre of the same expensive type
If you even seem like you might make another few tens of thousands of dollars to capture later, the Racketeering Enterprise™ will not write you up a Parenting Plan and split of assets that assures stability. Instead, they will fail to resolve any of the toxic allegations made and will order a Parenting Plan that sticks in the craw of at least one parent.
That way, after a couple years of dealing with the co-parent who supposedly accused you of being a homeless drifter who snorts hairspray around the kids, there will be enough conflict to justify a second round of the same litigation theatre.
The Racketeering Enterprise™ has set themselves up for at least one more Motion to Modify litigation. It looks the same as the first one, only they will cook up brand new accusations so at least it feels fresh.
The Racketeering Enterprise™ has this down to a science. After your family goes through their for-profit abattoir, their kids will go to a local private high school with tuition financed by your life’s saving. Your kids will be raised by destitute, emotionally-battered parents.
Or worse. If your kids are sufficiently damaged by the Racketeering Enterprise™, they may become fodder for an even more brutal for-profit machine: foster care or juvenile justice. Those rackets will be explored in later chapters.
Don’t worry—you can beat the Racketeering Enterprise™
All of the above looks daunting, but in our next chapter we get right into the legal loopholes they use to pull off this scam.
Those loopholes can be closed.
You can put these pirates on the public record.
You can get their licenses suspended.
You can hold them liable for what they do to your family.
Forewarned is forearmed. You and your kids are worth it. So is the rest of our community.
Tune in next time for a few simple tips to dismantle this Mob hustle!