I'm heading out of town early tomorrow morning for work, and then for an event on Wednesday morning that I have been waiting a long time for. I'm going to observe the trial of a criminal that I turned in to the authorities. I am looking forward to this.
Two years and a couple of months, that's how long it has taken to get this far. The criminal has actually already plead guilty to her crimes about six months ago and is returning to court to prove she has kept her nose clean, which was a condition of the deal she was given after her first appearance to answer to the charges against her. However, she hasn't, and the prosecutor has been given stacks of evidence to that effect. He has been handed an open and shut case. If this court is worth anything (which, I'm sorry to say is debatable), she won't be getting off so easy this time.
It all began one afternoon in the shop I was once part owner of. We dealt in nutrition supplements, specifically sports nutrition (think protein and nitric oxide powders, creatine, etc.). Before my business partners and I knew that the criminal was a criminal, she had weaseled her way into the operation by passing herself off as a multi-credentialed expert in related things, with business cards and all that had an alphabet soup of letters following her name. Unfortunately, like most people, none of us questioned the presented credentials - really, how many people do? My girlfriend at the time, who was a student of pharmacy at the nearby university, did question such things however.
That afternoon, when I was getting ready to close up the shop, my girlfriend asked me why the criminal did not have any credentials on display (licenses and whatnot). I said something like, "I don't know, couldn't find a nail?" That's when my girlfriend informed me that people using the credentials the criminal claims to have are required to have them and related licenses on display in their place of business. My girlfriend then showed me the Washington State Department of Health provider database, something I hadn't known of prior. We searched for the criminal's name, and she appeared in that database. But instead of appearing as a licensed professional with the various titles she claims, she showed up as having only a RN (registered nurse) license that had been indefinitely suspended years prior... for repeated use of credentials she was not entitled to use.
That was the loose thread of the sweater. We began to tug at it, and more and more of the sweater unraveled. The criminal claimed to be an ordained minister, and the ordination turned out to be from one of those online "churches" that will ordain anyone. This same "church" also offers "doctoral degrees" for "life experience" for a fee - right in the middle of the list of fake PhD's offered is one that is titled exactly as the PhD the criminal claims to have (we emailed them and asked if she even paid them for it or just falsely claimed to have been awarded one of their false degrees - we got no response, go figure). Another claimed professional credential turned out to have come from a defunct "institute" that was little more than a PO box. In her multitude of web postings, she always claims to have these degrees and whatnot, but with the exception of a BS in nursing, she never, ever, says what institutions the advance degrees are from (at one point, when pressed, the criminal claimed to have gotten her degrees from two well known fake diploma mills, one of which has been knocked over by the FBI). People with real degrees proudly tell you where they got them from (such as my M.A. in philosophy, which I earned at Washington State University. You can look that up and verify it, too - precisely why the criminal never states where she supposedly got her degrees from).
We realized we had a problem. Before I joined in ownership of the company, my business partner and a former business associate of his came up with a concept for a niche market sport supplement. Because they already knew the criminal and thought she had an encyclopedia of valid credentials, they contracted with her to create the formula for the product. She produced one (out of stuff that probably anyone could have come up with with a tiny bit of research online) and then the building of a brand began.
It's important at this point in the story to understand that when it comes to the nutrition supplements market in the United States, the credibility of the development team is very important to the perceived value of the product. The major reason for this is that unlike prescription medications, nutrition supplements are largely unregulated and without oversight by a body like the FDA. Anyone can bring a supplement to market (there are some limitations to the claims that can be made in advertising a nutrition supplement, but otherwise, it's a very open market). Most consumers of these products then rely upon their impression of the development team's knowledge and credibility in deciding if a product is good or not. When my business partners selected the criminal to formulate a product for their concept, they were under the impression that she was the real deal, not some fraud with a basket full of made up degrees and titles.
Hundreds of thousands of dollars spent building a brand later, there was the bad news: the person behind the formula was a complete fake. This meant that the brand was a house built on sand - if it only took us a little bit of digging on the internet to realize that she was a liar, it would probably take some third party, such as someone trying to bring a competing product to market, to find this same information and torpedo our brand. We had been victimized by a con artist.
There was also the fact that, having uncovered this info, to continue on as if we knew nothing of it would be to aid and abet a criminal. None of us wanted to do that. So, knowing that we were putting our business in danger, we turned her in (and boy were we ever right about the danger to our business). But considering that this fraud poses a danger to the community - she constantly attempts to interfere in doctor/patient relationships by trying to convince people to stop taking prescription medications they're on for their ailments in favor of her "alternative" herbal and nutritional remedies - we simply could not pretend like we knew nothing. Ours was an infant company and very lean on capital, we knew the venture probably could only survive if we played along and that it would likely die under the pressure of trying to right this wrong, but I like being able to look at myself in the mirror, as do my business partners, and so down the rabbit hole we went.
It took the agencies involved in bringing us to the point of this Wednesday morning's court date so long to do anything that the criminal set about filing bogus lawsuits against our company with the force of her false identity as a credentialed professional to drive them. We tried to fight back with the proof that she was a fake and that her contract was therefore acquired under false pretenses, but having only spineless wonder lawyers at our disposal, it didn't help. We ended up in mediation where the evidence did help us to put the criminal in check (we began that day with her making ridiculous demands for hundreds of thousands of dollars, and we left that day giving her nothing and having stripped her of the royalties the fraudulent contract originally contained on top of that), but the cost of it all proved fatal to the business (which is itself also a strike at the criminal - the moron apparently wasn't able to grasp the fact that killing the goose that lays the golden eggs means no more golden eggs). Sadly, only a few months later, she plead guilty to charges that proved our claim, which would have destroyed her claim that the bogus contract was valid and we would still be in business today (with a new formula for our product, too - the brand is what was valuable, her "formula" that she whipped up after a couple of hours at a kitchen table simply was not and could easily be replaced by the work of a team of real professionals). Instead, our operation is dead and each of us have thousands of dollars of debt to clean up.
It has been two years of writing letters, making phone calls, sending faxes, and compiling evidence. We have dealt with local and state law enforcement and regulatory agencies that apparently feel that doing their jobs - protecting people's rights, health, and property - is a bother. Fortunately, we did find some of the people who want to do their jobs along the way, and it was enough to carry us through to this point. The criminal, having been given plenty of rope, has spent the last six months tying it around her own neck. Now we just need the prosecutor and judge to kick the chair out from under her.
For this country, my country, I have put on the uniform of its army and gone to the other side of the world to stand as an infantry soldier at the line in the sand we had drawn on a foreign battlefield, but I have yet to witness one of our nation's most basic, defining institutions in action: an open court of law that weighs the evidence in deciding one's guilt or innocence. I guess I've moved around so frequently that I've escaped jury duty, and I've never been hauled in to court to answer to charges, so after 33.5 years on this earth, this will be a first. I am going to enjoy watching the criminal answer for her crimes. I look forward to seeing the evidence of the criminal's continued crimes that I, my business partner, and a state investigator have compiled laid before the court. But most of all, I'm looking forward to the criminal having to admit in front of my business partner and I that she is exactly what we know her to be: guilty.
I hope I can contain my laughter.
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