When I Went to Court Today...

If you read this blog religiously (like you should!) you know that I've been trying to wrap up my judgment enforcement/debtor locator business since about December. (If you need a refresher on what the heck judgment recovery is again, check out What is it that you do again?)

There are many convoluted provisos behind the whole judgment recovery business, which I've had for about two years now, but I'd say the main reason, besides the money, is that I love a good mystery just waiting to be unfurled.



Like one of the cases I just can't seem to put to death is this one I have with this pilot guy. I ended up getting an assignment for this judgment against this former pilot who had a crop dusting business in the area. Apparently he liked to dust crops while tossing back a few too many, if you know what I mean. Let's just say that you never really knew what exactly was going to get "dusted" with this guy around, maybe a cattle pasture, maybe a few grain crops, maybe a town, you just never could really tell.

So I pull a credit report on the guy, along with some other investigative tracing reports and realize that the guy is now in Oklahoma. And despite the fact that he's running from every Tom, Dick, Harry and their dog, he just happened to be magically listed on whitepages.com under Oklahoma. Wonderful.

So with a home address under my belt, I figure, maybe he's back to his old gig and maybe he's dusting cattle pastures out in Oklahoma. His address is some dinky little town in Oklahoma, that just happens to have a local airport, so I call em up and ask if they happen to know a crop duster with my debtor's name. Whoever I end up talking to says, "Oh yeah, he's out on the landing strip right now." Perfect.

Without asking too many questions that might lead the guy to ask, "Why the heck do you want to know?" I try to get out of this guy some facts on whether or not my debtor is doing business on his own or if he works for a crop dusting outfit (did I just say "outfit?" what am I? my grandpa?). But the guy doesn't have a clue and I don't want to press the issue at this point.

So I check with the secretary of state's office to see if he's registered a business or corporation. It's a no go on that one.

Then I get the brilliant idea that maybe there is some kind of crop dusting association out in Oklahoma that my debtor could be a member of or something. I end up googling "crop dusting" and "Oklahoma" and come up with just that, a list of crop dusting companies in the southern part of the states. I figure it could take me a million years to make it through that list, especially since he lives in a border town and he could be listed under any one of three states. But I come across an article from a small town newspaper near my guy's town and it's all about how crop dusting is a dying art and so many mom and pop crop dusting companies are going out of business and yada yada yada. The reporter interviewed a couple different crop dusting "outfits" and I decide to look up the one and call em. I get a hold of a really nice guy who says, "Oh yeah, up in that area there's only one crop dusting guy I know. He hires out a lot of contracting work." He gives me the guy's name and phone number and I call the guy up to ask him if my debtor works for him.

I usually tell people when I call them looking for info that I'm with an investigations firm and I need some information on such and such a person for an investigation we're conducting. The guy tells me that yeah, he just hired my debtor as a sub-contractor, which means it'll be harder to garnish wages, but at least the guy has wages.

Because the debtor was hiding money in accounts in all kinds of neighboring states, I really couldn't get my hands on his bank accounts to drain all the funds, so I stuck with the wage garnishment. Oh, and I also placed a lien on the airplane that he owned. Guys always love that.

The situation got really complicated when my debtor someone convinced the owner of the crop dusting company to ignore the wage garnishment forms I had served on him. And when an employer ignores a wage garnishment summons for one of his employees, it's a big no no. Big no no.

In Oklahoma, the employers get a million chances to right the wrong and respond to the garnishment summons with a complete report of how much the debtor is paid and when and to send me a portion of the debtor's earning.

The guy's time was up and he never responded, so I got an order from the judge to have the employer's name added to the almost $10,000 judgment.

Let's just say that he responded after that. He hired a really lame-o attorney and from there we had a telephonic hearing with her, me and the judge about the employer now being on the judgment. The attorney and I kind of got into a screaming match during this hearing and the judge was like, ok, I've had enough, I'm not reversing my ruling.

Now my debtor guy is on his way to live in Australia or something like that, so I think it's a given that I'm now going after the employer, since he's officially a party to the judgment now. Heck, I can only go after whoever lives in this country, and it's his bad luck that he got himself involved in the judgment. And of course in Australia outlaws are allowed to be outlaws, so I probably won't see a dime from that guy. Too bad I can't force him to move to China where they probably chop people's hands off for not paying their debts. Or maybe they just enslave them in prison camps in caves until they pay.

So, long story short, some poor sucker is now probably going to get all the money drained out of checking accounts until he pays the judgment off. That's what you get for not responding to my wage garnishment forms.




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