FLORIDA'S GUARDIANS OFTEN EXPLOIT THE VULNERABLE RESIDENTS THEY'RE SUPPOSED TO PROTECT
Lacy Waters lay on a hospital gurney, her head a hornet's nest of pain and confusion. Between the brain parasites and the drugs designed to kill them, she could hardly think — let alone answer questions. Yet that was exactly what the strangers at her bedside now demanded. As the 45-year-old Nicaraguan maid with a grade-school education desperately tried to recall the names of American presidents, the three men made careful notes on their clipboards.
These men weren't her doctors, however. Instead, they had been sent by a Miami-Dade judge at the behest of Royal Caribbean — the very company Lacy blamed for her sickness.
Three years earlier, in 2005, Lacy had left Central America to work on a cruise ship. The job was supposed to be a ticket to a better life for her and her ten children. Instead, it had nearly killed her. Tapeworms — contracted from tainted pork served aboard the ship, she says — had infested her brain. Lacy was now fighting for her life. Little did she know that her visitors had just taken it from her with the stroke of a pen.
Lacy doesn't remember her visitors, but she has been suffering from their decision ever since. Based upon their 15-minute evaluation, the judge declared Lacy a ward of the state. She was instantly stripped of her most basic rights. A woman Lacy had never met was appointed her "guardian" and given control over every aspect of her life, from her medical treatment to whether she could marry the man she loved. Most important: The guardian was also in charge of her assets and finances, including Lacy's ongoing lawsuit against Royal Caribbean.
It would be five years before Lacy would win back her rights. By then, the ordeal cost her more than just her freedom. She would also lose more than $250,000.
"All I could do was cry. I was powerless," Lacy says. "Thank God I got out of it."
Despite her travails, Lacy was actually lucky. Few of the roughly 50,000 Floridians inside the state's guardianship system ever escape. And for some, losing their rights is just the beginning. In cases of abuse, they are isolated from families, overmedicated, and physically neglected while guardians bleed their accounts.
Ostensibly set up to protect the state's most vulnerable citizens, Florida's guardianship system has itself become dangerous. Miami-Dade's might be the most dangerous of all.
A five-month New Times investigation, which entailed reviewing thousands of pages of guardian files, has found the following:
• Miami-Dade has more than 7,000 guardianship cases — more than any other county in the state — yet has arguably the least oversight and no dedicated watchdog.
• By contrast, Palm Beach County has uncovered more than $3 million in guardianship fraud since starting its watchdog program in 2011 despite handling less than half as many cases as Miami, while Broward's watchdog has caught a dozen guardians engaging in fraud worth more than $4 million.
• There were regular failures to file basic information. Guardians were often years late in filing financial forms, and until this month, Miami-Dade lacked any electronic system to track the programs.
• Guardians have given thousands in donations to the election campaigns of the same judges who appoint them to cases and award them their fees.
As America ages and baby boomers retire, elder abuse is quickly becoming a national epidemic. Florida, the state with the oldest average population, is its epicenter. Millions of dollars are lost every year to an out-of-control system, but the cost is more than financial. For wards such as Lacy Waters, their lives are at stake. And for their family members, bad guardianships can drive them to despair and even prison.
After years of inaction, state legislators are finally addressing the issue. Two bills cracking down on guardianship abuse were recently passed in Tallahassee. But some observers warn that tougher measures are needed to solve the fundamental problems.
"There are professional guardians out there who are robbing estates blind," says Naples Rep. Kathleen Passidomo, the Republican sponsor of two successful reform bills. "Some guardians do a great job and you'd trust them with your life. But then there are some who are horrendous."
Guardianship cases can become incredibly complicated, but the basic idea is simple: Those who are too old or infirm to take care of themselves and their assets need protection. So courts appoint a "guardian," often a family member but sometimes a professional, paid either by the public or from the ward's estate.
The practice dates back to ancient Greece — where Sophocles once had to prove to a court he wasn't senile to keep his son away from his property — and has found limited use in America as far back as colonial times.
By the 1970s, though, high-profile horror stories exposed the Catch-22 at the heart of guardianships. Guardians are appointed to protect the incapacitated and their estates, so guardians have to be given wide leeway with those assets. That leeway is a natural gateway to abuse. All it takes is a dishonest operator to run wild.
A seminal 1972 study by George J. Alexander and Travis H.D. Lewin showed that guardianships often benefited only one party: the guardians. The two law professors recommended cutting back on their powers.
In 1986, the Associated Press published a yearlong investigation that found between 300,000 and 400,000 Americans stuck in guardianships, often without ever being examined by a doctor. Many were simply elderly people who had been shuffled into nursing homes without an attorney, let alone a court hearing. Some didn't even know they had been stripped of their rights. A Fort Lauderdale woman found out she had a guardian only when she was turned away from a polling booth on Election Day.
Although Congress failed to enact national reform, the AP investigation did spur some changes. States including Florida began requiring a three-person committee — including at least one physician — to examine someone before declaring him or her incapacitated. Both the ward and his or her guardian were now required to have attorneys.
A few counties went further. Broward, Leon, and Hillsborough appointed their own court monitors. After a string of scandals, Broward judges appointed a former cop named Robert Twomey to the post in 1996. Within months, Twomey, a Vietnam vet now in his 60s, began uncovering abuse by professional guardians.
Jacinth Preston was one of his first targets. The flight attendant had been cherry-picking patients from Northwest Regional Hospital in Margate and wooing them into naming her their guardian. Then she squeezed them for all they were worth. Three weeks after one of her wards died of a stroke, she used his Sears credit card to buy a dishwasher. She later pleaded guilty to eight felonies.
In another case, Twomey became suspicious when examining an attorney's staggering $2 million fees, which were signed by a Broward judge. When Twomey looked closer, he found the papers had the wrong judicial district: They had been cut and pasted. Twomey called the FBI, which discovered the attorney had been faking the judge's approvals and then using the stolen money to buy six houses in New York and Florida.
If there's one case that haunts Twomey the most, however, it's that of Kathleen Ulsrud. A grandmotherly woman with a master's degree in social work, Ulsrud was one of Broward's most respected guardians. "She really seemed to care about the elderly," Twomey says.
During a routine review, however, Twomey discovered that Ulsrud had lied about a bankruptcy on her initial application years earlier. Judge Mel Grossman ordered all of her cases examined. Ulsrud, Twomey learned, had been juggling dozens of wards, stashing them in garbage-filled apartments or, in one case, a drug den. Most hadn't seen a doctor in years; Ulsrud had forged their annual exams. When the feds raided the flophouses, they had to rush one ward to the emergency room. Another one was found in a mortuary freezer — Ulsrud hadn't bothered to bury him yet.
As her wards lay dying, Ulsrud was busy stealing their money. She wrote herself checks from their accounts, pocketing up to $225,000, not including the jewelry she took. By the time she pleaded guilty to 34 counts of elderly exploitation, fraud, and perjury in early 2002, all but one of her wards had died. Ulsrud received five years in prison and ten years' probation.
More than a decade later, Twomey is still hard at work. Prosecutors recently filed charges against a caregiver who pretended to be the daughter of a Holocaust survivor. Once appointed guardian, the woman allegedly stole $168,000 from her ward, an art heiress. "It all comes down to the almighty buck," Twomey says with a sigh.
Several other counties have recently followed Broward's lead, including Palm Beach, where clerk Sharon Bock has made guardianship fraud her Moby Dick. She set up the state's first guardianship fraud hotline in 2011 and hired a full-time auditor.
In two years, Bock and her auditor, Anthony Palmieri, have investigated more than 100 cases, uncovered more than $3 million in questionable payments, and referred 26 guardians for prosecution. So far, two have been charged with crimes: a father who took from his daughter's trust fund to buy himself a Jaguar, and a woman who stole almost $40,000 from her son.
"I had a caregiver spending the ward's money on Botox and cruises," Palmieri says. But the $3 million in fraud he's caught so far is just the tip of the iceberg, he says. He estimates there's $500 million worth of assets wrapped up just in Palm Beach's 2,700 guardianship cases.
"We are ground zero for the graying of America," Bock says. "This is an issue that we are not going to be able to ignore any longer."
But even as the rest of South Florida gets serious about guardianship abuse, Miami-Dade seems stuck in the past. Its probate courts are straight out of the 1980s: a paper filing system, bare-minimum background checks, buddy-buddy relationships between judges and guardians, and no Robert Twomey or Anthony Palmieri to catch bad guardians in the act.
"I don't understand why every jurisdiction doesn't have a special court monitor," Twomey says. "But if you put me in Miami, I'd be frightened to death of what I'd uncover."
A decade after she went to work for Royal Caribbean, six years after she was stricken with sickness and stripped of her rights, and a year after finally winning them back, Lacy Waters remains mired in the kind of poverty she tried to leave behind in Nicaragua. Despite a multimillion-dollar settlement with the cruise line, she spends her days confined to a crumbling apartment in Liberty City. Rotten floorboards bow beneath the 52-year-old as she plods between a cluttered bedroom and a claustrophobic kitchen.
Because Miami-Dade lacks a court-appointed monitor like those in Broward and Palm Beach, it's exceedingly difficult to find documented cases of guardian abuse. Waters is adamant that she never should have ended up under the thumb of a guardian for four years, especially when the same company she believes is responsible for her injuries pushed for the oversight. But her guardian and attorney tell a different story: that Waters was far too ill to handle her own life or lawsuit proceeds.
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