Driving by the office of the evil scum of the earth that defrauded us I noticed that it looked empty.  Checking it out, I discovered that all of the furniture was gone and the place had been emptied out.  I wondered if he’d closed shop or if our discovery that we’d used his occupancy of his former digs as evidence against his new firm in our suit caused him to find different shelter.  His website is not updated, the same address is still there. Could he be out of business?

Since I was in LA yesterday I did not follow up, but the Missus received a call from the evil one’s former wife who had been treated miserably by him and left penniless when he walked out on her a few years back, taking everything and declaring bankruptcy to hide his ill gotten gains.  Synchronicity.  Suffice to say we will not be dropping the suit any time soon.

In any event, I phoned our attorney to inform him of the office closure and to see what, if any, progress had been made.

Turns out that the evil one is filing for personal and company bankruptcy and is apparently waiting out the 4 year cooling off period between the last personal bankruptcy and this one.  However, our understanding is that he cannot file back-to-back Chapter 7s for his company and the best he can hope for is a Chapter 13 in which he will probably have to recognize our claim against him….  We will see how long that takes.

His attorney called ours asking if we could just forget the whole thing to which ours replied that if he dropped every case where someone claimed that they were considering bankruptcy, he’d never win one….  And such a filing won’t be a magic bullet for him in any event. 

Here’s where it gets good: once he files, we will send paperwork to the State Construction and Industry Division so that he will never again be granted a license (and of course I will monitor him to see if he sets up an illegal, unlicensed business so that I can report him the moment he does).  Even better, it appears that we may be the proximate reason for him shutting down his newest firm.  The judge granted our motion to include the new firm in the lawsuit against the old one and the evil one personally.   We had filed the paperwork, his attorney appealed and the judge rejected the appeal and granted our motion. There had been no talk of another bankruptcy until the appeal was rejected and our motion granted. 

So we move forward.