RACKETEERING SUIT AGAINST 98 ALLEGEDLY CORRUPT BARBADOS ATTORNEYS BRINGS BACK DARK MEMORIES FROM BAJAN VICTIMS: PART ONE

Alex Mitchell et al vs Mia Amor Mottley et al, the civil racketeering lawsuit filed in the United States against ninety eight of Barbados' most experienced lawyers, which alleges that they are willing participants in an organised campaign to deprive their island nation's citizens of their valuable real estate inheritance, through systemic probate and real estate fraud, has caused each of the victims to recall how unethical lawyers, charged with the administration of estates of family members, fleeced them of their historical patrimony and heritage.   

Each of victims' families have a story to tell, one of how a trusted attorney, engaged to handle the estate of a beloved relative recently deceased, feathered his or her nest financially by diverting one or more of the family's real estate properties, which should have been distributed to the heirs, to their personal use and control. Some of corrupt lawyers forged wills to achieve such dark ends, others merely omitted properties from estate inventories, and filed bogus warranty deeds in favour of themselves, or nominees they chose, all for the purpose of stealing valuable, often waterfront, land.

It gets worse; some government officials, working with corrupt judges, engineered court approval of miscarriage of justice on a grand scale, preventing those few victims who were aware enough to seek justice through the court system from achieving it. Court cases were fixed to deny relief to those victims who accessed the Barbados courts. Those who spoke up were subject to threats and intimidation, to silence them; some were actually charged with bogus criminal offences, and even jailed, which in Barbados can be a death sentence, as they were intentionally housed with violent criminals. The local bar association, run by the very same attorney-criminals who were stealing every property that they could, intentionally ignored or delayed most victim objections or complaints filed with it. 

As the direct and proximate result of this wholesale injustice, there were both direct and indirect casualties; when your family's most precious asset is taken away from you, hopelessness, serious illness, and an early death often resulted, though it was usually blamed upon anything other than injustice on an institutional scale. Bajans died in poverty and obscurity, while corrupt lawyers, feasting upon the proceeds of their crimes, bought lavish residences, transferred their lucre to accounts in the Cayman islands or the United States, and thereafter enjoyed a upscale life.

We have been reviewing the stories of some of the victims, and we intend to tell some of the more outrageous ones here, on this blog, so that our readers can understand the enormity of a systemic fraud, committed by greedy lawyers, and enabled by the courts and government officials, how it has impacted the lives of innocent individuals, often with minimal education, who had their bright future abruptly taken  away from them, and those who came after them. Only by bringing these accounts into the sunshine can we hope that meaningful reform will ever come to Barbados.