Past the Bitter End : Divorce: Couple give new meaning to irreconcilable differences. Keeping control in court was ‘like going into a lion’s den’ judge says.

It was the divorce from hell.

Samir and Najat Bashout took their battles from the privacy of their home in Rancho Park to lawyers’ offices, courtrooms and even a courthouse parking lot, where Samir Bashout was accused of using the family Mercedes to try to run over his ex-wife, the mother of their six girls and his partner in innumerable public screaming matches.

That charge was dropped Tuesday, but Judge David Perez made no secret of his exasperation when he sentenced Samir Bashout to serve two years in state prison and pay a $1,000 fine for destroying a court document--an act that violated his probation from a 2-year-old charge of wife-beating.

As the judge pronounced the sentence, Bashout, 46, interrupted to say that he had only crumpled up a scrap of his own scratch paper.

“You’re still lying, Mr. Bashout, and it’s incredible,” Perez said. “Court documents are sacred. They cannot be tampered with.”

As a bailiff led him away in handcuffs, the defendant, dressed in pale blue jeans, a brownish-green shirt and a black blazer, said he was worried about his Mercedes. The judge told him to have his friends take care of it.

The Bashouts were divorced in December, 1991, but they have been squabbling over the division of property ever since. Police ledgers are filled with dozens of complaints of harassment. Their appearances are widely dreaded at the Santa Monica courthouse.

“They don’t talk to each other. They scream at each other,” said Maynard Davis, Samir Bashout’s attorney.

Trying to keep control with the two of them in the room was “like going into a lion’s den with a whip and a chair,” Superior Court Judge James Albracht said. It was in his court last year that Bashout made off with the court document--a photocopy of a check--that led to Tuesday’s sentence.

“Their divorce is a major mistake,” added another attorney who is familiar with the case. “They deserve each other.”

It wasn’t always that way, Najat Bashout said in an interview earlier this year, although there were hints of what was to come. Their romance started with an argument over a Beirut taxicab.

The Lebanese schoolgirl and the young Egyptian engineer, now parents of a half-dozen girls aged 5 to 19, ended up sharing the ride. Soon they were engaged.

“Everybody said, ‘What do you want with him?’ So she married him,” said Najat Bashout’s brother, a Los Angeles resident who asked not to be named.

His sister gave him a dirty look as he made the comment. But it was clear that she has not forgotten how she once felt about a man she now calls “thieving, deceiving and violent.”

“He’s good-looking and he could be very charming and persuasive,” she said. “He can be so sweet.” But then two years ago, soon after they separated, he pulled her hair and slammed her head against a wall while their children watched, according to a police report. He threw her to the floor and she bit him before she wriggled free, the report said.

Now, she said, “I don’t count him as human. I count him as an insect on this earth.”

And yet, she said, “I’m sad about the way he is. He doesn’t think there’s a problem. But if he’d work on it, I’d take him back. The kids need a daddy.”

The two agree on that, at least. “This is very difficult for me, to lose my wife, my children, everything you own,” Samir Bashout told the judge.

“I can’t see the kids grow up without a father,” he said. “I was wrong, I was stupid. Wrong, wrong, wrong. I learned too late. It’s in your hands. Do what you want.”

Najat Bashout said the marital problems started about four years ago, when her husband was involved in World Arabic Television News (WATN), an Arabic television network that apparently did not deliver on promises to provide extensive programming.

According to Mike Jose, a reporter who looked into the WATN affair for the Houston-based Arab Times newspaper, “Many people paid money to Mr. Bashout to get the service and there was no service. We got a lot of complaints.”

It was a copy of a check from WATN that set off the incident in Albracht’s courtroom, when Najat and her attorney, Behrouz Shafie, were hovering over him while he examined a pile of documents.

“He was trying to protect his honor and other people were trying to expose him for what he was,” Shafie said.

Although he was trained as an engineer, holding a BS degree from Cairo University and a master’s degree in operations research from Polytechnic University in Brooklyn, N.Y., Bashout sold insurance and qualified as a real estate broker (under the name Khalaf B. Bashout) when the family moved to Southern California in the late 1970s.

He was convicted of disorderly conduct in connection with a 1981 Inglewood incident in which he wielded a deadly weapon or firearm, according to court records.

But he also prospered. At one point, Najat Bashout had 19 fur coats, her ex-husband said. He, too, dressed expensively. Outside the courtroom at a recent hearing, he called a reporter’s attention to his “$2,000 suit and a silk tie--and look at this watch, this is a $37,000 diamond.”

He established two firms, Midland Financial Services and Midland Realty, which he merged in 1983 into Midland Financial Corp. In interviews and court records, he defined his occupation as banker, and said the firm deals in foreign currency transactions and third-party loans.

Najat Bashout said there was some evidence that her ex-husband may have sometimes inflated his status in the course of his dealings.

At her home, for example, she has a yearbook published by Midland Bank International, a major British financial institution. Stapled to it was a business card. It read: “Midland International, Bank and Trust Ltd., Dr. Samir Bashout, Chairman of the Board.” The address was their home.

Of herself, Najat Bashout said, “I’m a typical Middle Eastern housewife,” she said. “He’s the boss. He brings in the money. I don’t ask any questions.”

Samir Bashout told a probation officer that as much as $44 million was at stake in his divorce, the records of which occupy several files in a big cardboard box at the clerk’s office in the Santa Monica courthouse. “This file must be reviewed only with a clerk present,” a note on the box warns.

According to the documents, however, little remains but the equity in two properties, the modest house in Rancho Park and a large, uncompleted residence in Woodland Hills, and about $100,000 from the court-ordered sale of an empty lot in Florida.

Another document shows that a mechanic seized Samir Bashout’s 7-year-old Rolls-Royce in lieu of payment of a $4,600-bill.

Some of the documents raise the possibility that there is more money elsewhere.

“Respondent (Samir Bashout) has a history of and has previously admitted in his pleadings that he kept his various assets under other names in order to protect himself against creditors,” an attorney for Najat Bashout said in a court document.

For his part, Samir Bashout said that his wife made off with $150,000 from a safe deposit box, $48,000 from a checking account and $75,000 in certificates of deposit.

“I do not have sufficient funds to pay my basic necessities of life,” he told the divorce court one year ago. “I have borrowed from others.” His agreement with WATN to receive a 1% fee for monies brought in resulted in no income or cash flow, he said.

Given Bashout’s age, his record and his college degrees, he may end up serving no more than six months in a work camp, followed by another six months in a halfway house, according to his attorney.

Prosecutors originally offered a six-month sentence in County Jail. With good behavior, Bashout would have been out in four months or less, but he turned it down last month.

Undaunted by his multiple collisions with the system--he spent two weeks in jail for violating his original probation in 1991--Bashout insisted before his latest sentencing that district attorney’s investigators stole $45,000 in cash from his car when they picked him up outside his Westwood home last November.

“Please. That’s a bit much,” said one of the arresting officers, Donald Grayson, supervising investigator for the district attorney’s Santa Monica office.