Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 10, 1994 TAG: 9404100061
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: APRIL WITT KNIGHT-RIDDER/TRIBUNE
DATELINE: MIAMI LENGTH: Long
George W. Stinson Jr., 31, is a hungry young stockbroker who couldn't, or wouldn't, say no to her lonely largess.
He took a $20,000 check, which he asked her to make out to his father-in-law so he wouldn't get in trouble. He took her dead husband's diamond ring. And he tried to take $200,000, drafting a will that would have made him Donohue's executor and prime beneficiary.
Donohue now says that Stinson conned her. He says he just accepted gifts she wanted to give - conduct that could be questioned because he is a stockbroker with a fiduciary responsibility to her.
But Stinson's not the one who is being hauled into court to answer for what happened when the two met in Donohue's well-tended Hallandale condominium last fall - with only Donohue's beloved toy poodle, Toni, to bear witness.
It's Donohue who faces a sanity hearing and may lose her rights and freedom to a professional guardian - all because she gave Stinson the $20,000 check.
"I cry myself to sleep every night now," said Donohue, the daughter of Polish immigrants who worked her way from poverty to comfort making shrewd stock purchases.
"If I did something wrong, if I hurt somebody, if I was a nasty person, then fine, I'd be getting my just deserts. But I wouldn't even kill a fly, and this is the way I'm going to go out in my life?"
Donohue became entangled in Florida's badly flawed private guardianship system when a woman who never met her - or even spoke with her on the telephone - filed court petitions seeking to have Donohue declared incapacitated and placed under her control.
Carol Whitton, a Coral Springs, Fla., entrepreneur who makes a living as a professional guardian, said she filed the petitions after getting information about Donohue from county social workers she trusted. She filed them in Broward County Circuit Court on Feb. 16, calling the $20,000 check financial abuse and saying it indicates Donohue is unable to manage her life or money.
In the petitions, Whitton said Donohue is so physically and mentally impaired that she should lose her right to vote, marry, travel, contract, sue, work, consent to medical treatment, handle her money, pick her friends and decide where she lives.
People who have known Donohue well for years say Whitton paints a false picture of a woman they call remarkably able, for her age. Friends describe Donohue as an immaculate housekeeper who is quick with a joke and so keen she knows all the numbers of her bank accounts by heart.
"It's so unfair," said John Molinari, who testified on Donohue's behalf Feb. 25, during the first hearing on Whitton's petitions. "They made it sound like she is bedridden. I said, `Oh my God, I saw her out walking her dog just the other night.' "
Donohue, a proud woman, said she is humiliated by the prospect of having to defend herself at a competency hearing Monday.
"It just never seems to end," she said. "If my husband had foreseen what I'd go through, I think he would have killed me the day he died."
Ambrose Donohue died Sept. 7, after 50 years in a marriage so close there was no room for children. After surviving a brutally poor Brooklyn, N.Y., childhood in which both her siblings died young, Anna warned Ambrose before they wed that she never wanted children of her own. "We were sufficient with each other," she said.
Soon after her husband died, Donohue, who doesn't drive, gave his new Cadillac, with just 171 miles on the odometer, to a female neighbor downstairs who had been friendly and helpful.
What might have been irrational behavior for someone younger and struggling financially was logical for her, Donohue said. "What was I going to do with it?" Donohue said. "Sell it? I don't need the money."
She also ordered a $22,000 Mustang for the woman who lives next door. That neighbor has run many errands for her and walked her dog several times a day for years.
"She helps me," Donohue said. "I show my appreciation, and that's not a crime or crazy, as long as I don't give it all away."
Crazy, Donohue said, would be giving away money she needs to live. "I'd never give up my stocks," she said. "The dividends are my income. I would never give that away. But do I have to convince people of that?"
Giving to organized charities is also out of the question. "They have beautiful offices," Donohue said. "That comes out of donations."
"When my husband was alive and we wanted to give money, we'd go down to Flagler Street with $50 worth of dollar bills and give to people who were living in cardboard boxes. There would be a lot of drunks. We skipped them altogether. We gave money to the people who had babies in their arms. That was our way of doing good."
On Sept. 28, Stinson came to Donohue's condo to inventory stocks that Donohue owned jointly with her late husband. Donohue wanted Stinson to help transfer them to her name alone.
Stinson, a broker with Josephthal, Lyon & Ross in Hallandale, says he met Donohue through a "cold call," which means he telephoned her home unsolicited to ask if she wanted to do business.
Once she said yes, Stinson began visiting and reveling in Donohue's generosity.
Stinson says he tried on her late husband's expensive suits to see if they fit.
He left her condo wearing the dead man's diamond ring, he said. "It's a nice ring."
On Oct. 15, Donohue gave Stinson a $20,000 check as a gift. He instructed Donohue to make the check out to Robert Lanza - his father-in-law - because he didn't want to get in trouble with his brokerage firm, Donohue said.
"He conned me," Donohue said. "George cried great big crocodile tears that he and his wife needed a bigger car for their new baby, but they didn't have the money, so I offered to write him a check. I thought he was a nice young man.
"If somebody wants to judge me on that, they have to realize that my husband had just passed away and I wasn't thinking clearly. But I am now."
Stinson insists Donohue pushed the gift on him, and the money did go to Lanza, his father-in-law, who has never met Donohue. "I didn't ask for anything," Stinson said. "She offered to give me money. I wasn't going to say no.
"I admit this was probably borderline," Stinson said. "But the way I looked at it, if she was going to be giving stuff away, I might as well."
Ten days later, Oct. 25, Stinson drafted a proposed will for Donohue, naming himself as executor, and leaving $100,000 to himself and his wife and another $100,000 to his baby daughter. "I thought I was helping the lady out," Stinson said. "She told me she had no one to leave her money to."
Donohue says she never intended to leave Stinson and his family $200,000, was shocked to see that amount in the draft of her will and became nervous when he made plans to drive her to a lawyer in Miami to have the proposed will executed. "Then I got wise to him, and I got rid of him," she said.
Stinson accuses some of Donohue's neighbors of turning her against him because he was "horning in on their action."
"I believe that her neighbors are expecting to get a lot out of her," Stinson said. "I think these people were scared I was going to take their little golden goose."
At some point this year, a county elderly services social worker, Polly Magee, visited Donohue, who told her about the $20,000 gift to Stinson, Donohue said.
Magee could have determined that Donohue needed a case manager to check in on her periodically and coordinate appropriate support services. Magee would have become Donohue's case manager, adding to her workload, said Magee's supervisor, Rose Marie Seekamp, a mental health program coordinator for the county. That arrangement would have meant that Donohue received assistance, without any loss of her rights or control over her own life.
Instead, Magee decided that Donohue might need a professional guardian, and contacted Whitton, who initiated the court proceedings against Donohue. Whitton is one of 14 private guardians to whom county elderly services social workers regularly steer potential business, according to a county document provided by Seekamp.
It's a potentially lucrative referral. Like many other professional guardians, Whitton charges $30 an hour for her services. Once clients have been ruled incapacitated and made wards of a guardian, many lose their legal right to fight those bills, which are paid out of their assets.
Neither Whitton nor Magee, nor another county social worker who knew about Donohue's gifts to Stinson, took any formal action against him, according to interviews. They did not report him to the state abuse hot line - even though the law requires people to report suspected instances of elderly abuse, neglect or exploitation.
They did not report Stinson to the Securities and Exchange Commission or the National Association of Securities Dealers.
But they plunged Donohue into a fight for control of her life.
As a result of the petitions Whitton filed, three court-appointed experts - a psychiatrist, a social worker and a gerontologist - have evaluated Donohue. They have submitted conflicting reports to the court.
One expert described Donohue as an "alert," "coherent" and "oriented" woman whose memory is largely intact. She said Donohue "should be allowed to continue to manage her personal affairs," but might benefit from a limited guardianship to handle financial transactions of more than $2,000.
A second expert said Donohue's memory is impaired and she needs a limited guardianship.
A third says there is nothing wrong with Donohue and she should not have a guardian at all.
In light of those findings, Whitton says that the court petitions she filed - under penalty of perjury - may have overstated Donohue's problems.
But she says she filed them in good faith after talking to social workers who knew Donohue.
"It appears, since the reports were so mixed, that she possibly needs some intervention, and it could possibly be handled without guardianship to any degree," Whitton said.
But Donohue says that just by suggesting that she is incapacitated, and subjecting her to court, Whitton has her half-licked.
"It's so degrading, so terribly degrading to have to go before a judge to prove I'm sane," Donohue said. "George should have to go before a judge, not me."
Stinson may not escape his encounter with Donohue unscathed.
He has been placed on a temporary leave of absence while his company reviews his actions.
by CNB