"Countess Navigato asks for eternal peace" (E.L. Masters, "Spoon River Anthology")
Steve Pardee
Add a story Add a story, image, video or epitaph


Cloud
At this moment, 7 stories have been added to Steve Pardee's Cloud
Jo Ann Douglas, Ms Mirabellis guardian
SHE'S QUEEN FEE, OF COURTS
By WILLIAM SHERMAN and BOB PORT
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
MAY 30, 2004 | 12:00 AM
https://www.nydailynews.com/archives/news/queen-fee-courts-article-1.622793
For years, Jo Ann Douglas has raked in hundreds of thousands of dollars from parents in a little-known side business of divorce court child-custody battles. She's appointed by judges to represent the interests of the children, her title is law guardian, and the warring parents pay the bills. At 52, she is the queen of the small club that gets most of the business, with more than 35 appointments from judges in recent years. Under court rules her $300-an-hour bills become, legally, a court order, and she has been paid more than $600,000 over the years for one case alone. She has had many of the big ones: Rudy Giuliani, Woody Allen, John McEnroe. And she has very low overhead. She meets children at an East Village apartment adjacent to another apartment where she lives with 17 noisy dogs and three cats, according to one frightened mother ordered to pay a recent visit. She has also met clients at a nearby Starbucks Douglas' home is registered as a nonprofit dog shelter called K9 Kastle Corp. Former Mayor Giuliani, who was ordered to pay Douglas to represent his teenagers during his divorce, calls her "the dog lady.
" At the same time, she enjoys good relationships with the judges who appoint her. While some parents and lawyers called her "star-struck" or biased, and questioned her bills and recordkeeping, other lawyers praised the quality of her work and her dedication to the children who are her clients. All agreed on her tenacity as bill collector. Fail to pay Douglas or withhold payment in protest and liens will be filed - like the court-enforced $20,000 debt attached to publisher Judith Regan's co-op apartment. "I didn't discover it until I went to sell," said Regan, who called law guardians "parasites and bloodsuckers who take a look at your income and then figure out how much they can make.
" Douglas declined to be interviewed, but her spokesman, Bob Liff, said her fees are reasonable, she's entitled to be paid what she's owed and that she is in compliance with court regulations. "I do not represent or work for the parent, or owe them any disclosure that would undercut my commitment to those children," Douglas said in a statement.
Constance Mirabelli, a widowed bookkeeper with a jolly laugh and a love of riding city buses, had a rent-controlled apartment in the West Village and a burial plot in a Catholic cemetery before she was placed under a guardianship in 1999 at her landlord’s initiative.
“I’m not dilapidated yet,” Ms. Mirabelli told the psychiatrist sent by the city after her landlord complained that she was incontinent and sometimes let the bathtub overflow. “I can still kick pretty good.”
Four years, two guardians and two nursing homes later, Ms. Mirabelli died at 91. And despite her plot at St. John Cemetery in Queens, despite a $2,000 burial fund culled from her modest pension and preserved by court order, Ms. Mirabelli was among the last of 137 bodies to be lowered into Trench 307 in February 2004.
The guardian responsible for her at the time, Jo Ann Douglas, was a lawyer known for lucrative appointments as a law guardian for children in celebrity divorces. In her final accounting, she wrote that she had arranged “appropriate transport and burial for Ms. Mirabelli” — not specifying that she meant a city morgue truck and a pauper’s grave. Questioned 10 years later, Ms. Douglas found nothing in her old notes to explain her decision. “Do you know if she can be moved to St. John’s?” she asked in an email, seeking a way to undo the past.
The New York Times, by Nina Bernstein
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/15/nyregion/new-york-mass-graves-hart-island.html

I miss you, Mom. After all these years, my heart aches I still miss you so much. I love you, your son, Paul. I will come see you soon...
63625 May GOD grant you his blessings and bestow peace on your sole and open the gates of heaven. You are dearly missed and loved.