A family saga.
Read at: https://inproperinla.blogspot.com/2023/02/mediation-among-three-privileged.html
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Uri writes:
---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Uri Zernik <uri.zernik>
Date: Tue, Feb 14, 2023 at 8:42 PM
Subject: בקשה לאחי
From: Uri Zernik <uri.zernik>
Date: Tue, Feb 14, 2023 at 8:42 PM
Subject: בקשה לאחי
ספי, דרור,
חזרתי לקליפורניה. ובמילים פשוטות אני פונה אליכם שתדברו ותתפשרו.שלושה אחים פריבילגים קיבלו ירושה מהוריהם ולא מסוגלים להגיע לפשרה בלי לשכור עורך דין, ומגשר, וכפי הנראה כעת אפילו בית דין לענייני משפחה.הקרקע מסביב בוערת -- אם לא שמתם לב. בדחיפות צריך למכור את הדירה ולהוציא את הכסף מחשבון הבנק.אני מוכן להסכים לכל פשרה ששניכם תגיעו אליה.כל מה שיש לי לומר זה בושה, בושה, בושה!אורי
"... In simple words I ask you to talk and compromise.Three privileged brothers, who received an inheritance from their parents and can't reach a compromise without hiring a lawyer and a mediator, and now apparently even the family court.The land is burning -- if you haven't noticed...I am willing to accept whatever compromise the two of you reach.All I have to say is shame, shame, shame..."
Amazing how concern regarding tax liability can transform a person!
Initially, I thought I would just treat this sanctimonious note as water off a duck's back.
But then again, it is about time to recount where we stand today and how we got here.
Whatever compromise the two of you reach
First - if it were not for my efforts, there would have been no mediation, and we would have been in court by now.
Second - until just a couple of weeks ago, Uri colluded with Dror in the shenanigans of hiding key estate property, such as the Wilhelm Lehmbruck oil painting, which may be one of the highest value items in the estate...
Third - when I suggested to Uri and Dror that we enter mediation, in order to avoid a court process, Dror tried to induce me to approach Atty Rachel Ben-Ari to accept the case for mediation. Neither Dror nor Attorney Ben-Ari disclosed that she had been Dror's counsel at least since 2021. That fact I discovered soon afterwards on my own, through inspection of court records.
Fourth - a key issue, which prevents progress in the matter at hand is that Dror has failed for years to file due reports (financial and assets) in his capacity as Ima's conservator, in violation of the law and regardless of repeat instructions of the family court.
Later Uri explained that Uri and Dror's conduct was merely "lack of transparency". I considered it more in the line of lack of good faith, misleading, or deceit.
Hiring lawyers
In the mediation, currently underway, Uri and I appear by ourselves, unrepresented. Dror, on the other hand, the one who holds the necessary information for proceeding and concluding the mediation, refuses to participate in person. Only his attorney participates, and she too, by and large, engages in obfuscation.
I copy all my mediation correspondence to Dror (who wouldn't acknowledge receipt, as has been his practice for over 10 years). Uri until now has colluded in communicating only through Dror's attorney, who according to Uri is there to serve as Dror's "bulletproof vest".
Why would anyone, participating in a good faith mediation, need a "bulletproof vest"???
And until now, when I asked Uri to talk with Dror and get him to more actively cooperate in the mediation, Uri's response was either that he, Uri, was unwilling to do so, or alternatively - that Dror was unwilling to talk with him regarding these matters.
The land is burning
Nothing is burning. The Israeli Apartheid regime is fully patronized by the US.
What is propagandized as a "pro democracy" protest is just a sham. The Jewish Israeli public is united in its support of Jewish supremacy and the Apartheid regime (a crime against humanity in international law). There are only some disputes among the various factions regarding the manner in which the Apartheid regime should be administered.
For example, a key argument of the "pro democracy" camp is that the "reform of the justice system", now being advanced by the Netanyahu-Yehudistic coalition, would expose the occupation generals and foot soldiers to an increased risk of prosecution by the Hague International Criminal Court on charges of war crimes...
Three privileged brothers
I dunno.
Maybe Uri is privileged. Maybe Dror is privileged, I don't think I am privileged, or haven't been privileged for a long time...
Between 2007-2010 I was targeted for intense persecution by the California and US authorities.
As I quickly discovered, I was targeted by Sandor Samuels, Chief Legal Officer of Countrywide, then also serving as President of Bet Tzedek ("Justice for All" - one of the most visible institutions of the Greater Los Angeles Jewish Federation) and key figure in the Los Angeles Jewish legal mafia.
Once I exposed him, things only got worse...
January 13, 2009 - BET TZEDEK - DINNER GALA
I wasn't even a customer of Countrywide, I had no business with Countrywide at all... I was just a collateral damage in a much more complex, multi-billion dollar banking fraud by Countrywide on the US government... which started years prior to the 2008 Subprime Crisis...
By 2009, after Senator Dianne Feinstein (then Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee) had filed on my behalf a couple of Congressional Inquiries on the FBI, I was told that I had been designated by the FBI a "bad guy".
White vans with tinted dark windows were parked in front of my place 24/7. My phone line was tapped. My email was tapped...
A couple of years ago, I was communicating with FBI whistleblower Coleen Rowley (one of Time magazine's 2002 "persons of the year"). I wrote to her that I had been designate by FBI a "bad guy". She confirmed that FBI used such a tag. However, she was astounded, b/c the tag was usually reserved for major crime figures.
By the end, in 2010, I escaped from the US in shorts, a T-shirt, flip flops, and carrying three computers, under clear and present danger of being shot by Federal agents.
The last email I got from Federal agent Darcy Smith, who was trying to capture me, was:
"Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me..."
Within 2 weeks after arriving in Israel, a police snitch was attached to me 24/7, harassing and threatening me for the next 2 years...
Later, in 2017, the Israeli prosecutor especially came from home on a Saturday night to visit me in my detention cell. He then informed me, as if I needed any notice, that I was under total surveillance in Israel as well...
By early 2013, whatever money I had managed to salvage from the US was "frozen" by Bank HaPoalim without any legal foundation. There was no written record either. I was told that it was done on behalf of the Israeli and US governments...
Similar unlawful retaliatory actions were perpetrated in 2010 against Wikileaks (by the way - I appear about 20 times in the Wikileaks archives...). They led to a Christmas 2010 NYT Editorial "Banks and Wikileaks", which explained that under the new circumstances the NYT was intimidated by the banks, and wouldn't be able to freely report news regarding the banks.
Editorial "Banks and Wikileaks" NYT (December 25, 2010)
Similar unlawful retaliatory actions were perpetrated in following years against some drone whistleblowers in the US.
I was left penniless, and ended up as a "registered homeless person" in Tel Aviv (in Tel Aviv you must register to be homeless...) living in a protest tent for the next 5 years. The protest signs referred to government corruption in Israel, at a time when the protest movement in Israel was still focused on the cost of living ["the Cottage Cheese Protest"].
Bank of Israel Governor, a world class bankster, Stanley Fischer, refused to accept the due filing of my Consumer's Complaint against Bank HaPoalim for its unlawful actions against me. Eventually I got a letter from Fischer's office, a couple of pages of fake legal narrative (based on FATCA - a law that was not in force in the US at that time, surely not in Israel), ending: "We are sorry for the aggravation, but we would not be able to assist in your case."
Had I not been able to gain protection by the German government, I would have been minced meat by then, and in consequent incidents...
In 2017, when I was presenting in an EU-sponsored e-Government conference in the Portuguese Military Academy in Lisbon, large police, Shin Bet and Tel-Aviv municipality forces appeared with heavy equipment in the middle of the night and demolished the tent. I again lost whatever was left of whatever was left of my possessions.
A video of the demolition was posted in Facebook:
Shame, shame, shame!
So let's do the walk of shame:
2010
On February 7, 2010, I was caught by LAPD (purportedly for driving with an expired license plate sticker) and locked up in Twin Towers Jail. Twin Towers Jail is a notorious US post-modern dungeon. ACLU wrote tomes about it...
ACLU "LA COUNTY JAILS"
I was one of only a couple of white men in a "pod" of about 40 blacks and latinos, some of them gang members. However, The most dangerous part of Twin Towers Jail are gangs of Sheriff's deputies. Lee Baca, LA Sheriff at the time, eventually landed in a federal prison...
I barely had access to a phone, neither a phone book, nor pen and paper. I managed to keep Uri's phone number on me and called him from jail and asked him to pay bail for me, which I would return to him immediately upon release.
Uri failed to pay the bail.
Later he explained that the problem was that that evening was Super Bowl night.
My friend Hemi later told me a different story: Uri called him that night and told him that I called from jail. Uri told Hemi that Uri thought that there was no need to bail me out, since I would manage to be released sooner or later anyway...
As was the case in a number of dire situations, I was rescued neither by family nor by friends, but by total strangers.
That evening a menacing Black guy approached me and told me: "We need a preacher for tomorrow morning." I answered that I grew up in a Jewish home. He answered: "That's what we've got." I suggested: "Let's cut a deal," I would do my best in preaching, and they would get me out of jail.
We shook hands.
Sunday morning, with neither book nor paper, I preached to them on Genesis 1:1 and John 1:1, the life of Jesus under the evil Roman empire, and their lives under the evil American empire...
By Sunday late afternoon I was out - the prisoners arranged for me a bail/bond agent!
2010
From Israel, I hired a contractor to pack whatever was left of my belongings and ship it to Israel. The contractor demanded that a person on my behalf would open the door for his workers.
I asked Uri to do it.
Uri declined. Uri agreed to do it only on the condition that I would instruct the contractor to ship all my belongings to Uri's place, where Uri would sort them out and decide what would be shipped to Israel...
Eventually Linda agreed to do it.
From Israel, I asked Uri if he would agree that I forward my mail to his address, then he would put it once a month in a big envelope and mail it to me in Israel.
Uri declined. He agreed to do it only on the condition that Uri would open my mail and decide each month which were the 2-3 most important items, scan them and email them to me in Israel...
Eventually Linda agreed to do it.
What a f@#$ed-up privileged brother!
2010
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April 28, 2010 I returned to Israel,
Visiting my father, Robert, I told him that unfortunately I had become sort of an expert on frauds, and I asked him not to start any new shenanigans. My problems with him had gone back as far as my late teens.
Robert answered that he was not impressed by my new skills...
I slept a few nights at Uncle Eli's home.
I slept a few nights at Cousin Amit's home.
I slept at my parent's home.
I slept at Dror's home.
May 11-13, 2010 - I shared a room with Uri in the Hebrew University Guest House, and had a receipt for it (pic above).
June 1-5, 2010 - Robert Zernik, Uri Zernik and Dror Zernik colluded in secretly filing a request for appointing a conservator for Ima without disclosing it either to Uncle Eli or to me, in violation of the law.
In such a request all three of them filed false and misleading affidavits, stating:
a. That Uncle Eli consented to their request,
b. That they didn't know my whereabouts.
I discovered that matter later, during inspection of the court file.
Uncle Eli was furious. Neither b/c Robert, Uri and Dror hid the filing from him in violation of the law, nor b/c of the false affidavits, stating that he had consented to their request. He was furious b/c of the fact that no conservator had been appointed for Ima for the previous 5 years...
When I told Robert that I had discovered the affidavits, he was upset. He said that I shouldn't have inspected the court file, but instead, I should have asked him what was in the court file...
2011-2012
In one of the rounds of such shenanigans, Robert (with Dror as a lackey with plausible deniability), again assisted by an attorney, tried to induce me around 2011-2012 to sign a Gift Agreement, materializing Ima's future inheritance, accepting under such terms the ownership of an apartment in Ramat Gan.
Such agreements are explicitly prohibited by Israeli law. They are null and void by law.
Robert refused to inform me regarding the assessment of the property, he refused to allow me to see the property, he refused to allow me to receive a key to the property, and he refused to allow me to inform the tenants of the change in ownership.
And why was the urgency to materialize Ima's future inheritance???
In short, it was clear to me at the time that they were trying to induce me to enter a fake, straw real estate deal - a recipe for a future legal dispute.
To their great disappointment, I refused to accept the "gift".
At the same time, my father repeatedly complained to me that b/c of me he had to resort to hiring the most expensive family attorney in Haifa and spent considerable sums of money.
I employed no attorney and refused to become a party to any such court process, although Robert and Dror tried to drag me at that time into a court dispute.
2013- 2016
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My father, Uri and Dror started a new scheme - trying to misrepresent me as legally incompetent.
As part of such a scheme, following Robert's passing away, Uri and Dror filed affidavits in the office of the Registrar of Inheritances, stating that my legal competence status was dubious (pic).
When I asked Uri about it a couple of weeks ago, he explained that they were sincerely concerned about me...
In the meantime, during the same years, while Robert, Uri and Dror were sincerely concerned regarding my dubious legal competence...
* In 2010 - I published and presented papers in a conference in the Czech Republic on Data Mining. These two papers are probably my most cited papers to date. In Wikipedia and CS textbooks, they are summarized as follows:
Wikipedia – Data MiningApplications: Human rightsData mining of government records – particularly records of the justice system (i.e., courts, prisons) – enables the discovery of systemic human rights violations in connection to generation and publication of invalid or fraudulent legal records by various government agencies.[24][25]24. Zernik, Joseph; Data Mining as a Civic Duty – Online Public Prisoners' Registration Systems, International Journal on Social Media: Monitoring, Measurement, Mining, 1: 84–96 (2010)25. Zernik, Joseph; Data Mining of Online Judicial Records of the Networked US Federal Courts, International Journal on Social Media: Monitoring, Measurement, Mining, 1:69–83 (2010)
* In 2012 - I published and presented papers in the World Criminology Congress in Japan, the subject of which was the Criminological Background of the Banking Crisis.
* Starting in 2011 - I published and presented multiple papers in various international conferences on e-Government.
* In 2013-2015 - I conducted archive research and editing work for the Hebrew edition of Yitzaq Shami's works. It was a project that I had started in the early 1990s as a 70th birthday gift for Ima. She was very happy with it. Eventually it included the publication in English, French, Hebrew and Arabic.
I discovered a new story by Shami - "Keeper of the Last Mosque" - and had part of it published in the Haaretz literary supplement.
שומר המסגד האחרון
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* By 2015 - I have completed the negotiation of a deal for the Hebrew publication of Yizhaq Shami's works with the largest book publisher in Israel. The case involved complex copyright issues. Soon after publication the book won the Israeli Ministry of Culture "Masterpiece Book" prize.
In conjunction with such work I published papers on Shami with Prof. Y. Schwartz, who was nominated for the Israel Prize in Hebrew Literature Research (vetoed by Netanyahu).
I was invited as a speaker in an evening organized by the Hebrew Writers' Association, marking the publication of Shami's works.
* Starting in 2010, I submitted reports to the UN Human Rights Council on the US (2010, 2015) and on Israel (2012, 2018). My submissions passed review of the UN professional staff and were incorporated in the respective final UN Human Rights Council reports. These were most likely the first ever Human Rights reports, which were based on IT system analysis. The 2010 UN Human Rights Council report on the US summarized my submission, hundreds of pages long, in one sentence:
"Corruption of the courts and the legal profession and discrimination by law enforcement in California."
* November 2018 - I was invited to lead a 2.5 hour seminar in a colloquium of law professors from throughout Europe in Goettingen Law School, subject of which was Cyber and Law. My seminar was on Cyber and Law in Israel.
* June 2018 - I received a thank you note from the bureau of Israeli Supreme Court Presiding Justice E. Hayut, after she acted upon my advice, following the 2018 UN Human Rights Council Report. Hayut corrected a feature of the Israeli Supreme Court IT system, which had been introduced in 2002 by then Presiding Justice Aharon Barak (father of the "Israeli Constitutional Revolution"), which had rendered the Israeli Supreme Court incompetent...
* October 2018 - I was invited for a small closed meeting with senior officers of the Israeli Cyber Security Agency and representatives of various agencies of friendly nations to review the Israeli Cyber Agency Bill (still not enacted!).
* January 2019 - I was invited to participate in a small closed meeting with Assistant Presiding Justice of the Israeli Supreme Court - Justice H. Melcer (then Chair of the Central Election Committee), former heads of the Shin Bet Technological Dept. and the Legal Dept., and chaired by former dean of Hebrew Univ. Law School, Prof. Y. Shani, to review threats to the integrity of the then upcoming Israeli general election.
* August 2020 - I won an appeal in the Supreme Court against the judges in Netanyahu's criminal prosecution, which was reported by notable Atty Avigdor Feldman in Haaretz as "one of the historic events in our justice system".
א' פלדמן "ביבי נתניהו ושביל הפתקים הצהובים" הארץ (27.8.2020)
* 2020 - I was asked by the US State Department, by their own initiative, to contribute a short report on the Israeli justice system.
* December 2023 - my petition against the Israeli Minister of Health, pertaining to the secret agreement with Pfizer corporation to use the Israeli people as guinea pigs in Pfizer's "world lab" human medical experiment of their mRNA product, was reported in the evening news by Kan, the Israeli public broadcasting service.
נ' ראובני "משרד הבריאות מסר לביהמ"ש: ההסכם עם פייזר נעלם" כאן (15.12.2023)
Two opposites
My parents first met in 9th grade, when Ima was ~13 and Robert Zernik was ~14, at the High School affiliated with the Hebrew University - still one of the best schools in Israel.
Ima was sent there by Savta Sara (who had a total of 2 years of education), after graduating with distinction from an orthodox, girls-only school near Me'a Shearim.
My father was sent there after he was kicked out of the Hebrew Gymnasium for academic incompetence and bad conduct.
Ima's attitude regarding shenanigans and frauds
One of my childhood memories is my admission to the Reali school: 50% discount in tuition was a major benefit of Ima's job, and the main reason that she went to teach there. I was going up to 3rd grade. Admission tests were required. Uri and Dror were admitted. I purportedly failed the exam. Ima knew that I was a much better student than them. She interrogated me about every question I was asked (I still remember some of them). I was positive that I provided the correct answers.
It turned out that I was not given a written test, but was orally examined by a secretary. Apparently no teacher was willing to be part of the scheme. It turned out that management had decided in advance that no one would be admitted to 3rd grade for that year.
Ima did not give up. She was a young, untenured teacher, appearing as a "Mizrahi" in a school that was headed by a forceful, all German management. She stood up to them and I was admitted.
Moreover, she did not hesitate to explain it all to a 2nd grader...
It was the first time that I was exposed to a simulated process, a subject that is still one of my interests to this day.
In later years, she kept her disdain of the school's management. Her protest was expressed in knitting during the never ending teachers' conferences, chaired by the general manager Y. Shapira, regarding his objection. She also bothered to tell me so...
We got new sweaters every year, all in dark blue - the school uniform color.
