Conservator Suspected of Bilking the Frail

Helen Conrad is 95, quick to smile and break out in song, but too mentally frail to grasp that she may have fallen victim to the very person appointed by a judge to protect her worldly assets.

Probate records show that in less than two years, a court-assigned private conservator spent more than $264,000 of Conrad’s money in caring for her. That amount includes nearly $170,000 for in-home care--much of it paid to a home health care company owned by the conservator.

Conrad’s estate--valued at about $300,000 five years ago--has dwindled to about $13,000 today.

Prosecutors are investigating whether 400 Riverside County residents, including Conrad, may have fallen prey to a private conservator suspected of theft and skimming money from the people whose affairs she managed.

Most of the possible victims are old, live alone or are in Inland Empire care facilities, with little or no family to watch over them. A Riverside probate judge concluded that they were unable to manage their own lives and assigned Bonnie Cambalik to do the job.

Cambalik, who opened West Coast Conservatorships Inc. in 1986, recently admitted to a criminal investigator that she siphoned about $100,000 from her clients, according to a search warrant affidavit filed by the district attorney’s office.

No arrests have been made in the investigation. But the county’s public defender, who is entrusted to protect conservatees, has been fired by the county Board of Supervisors because of her office’s apparent failures in the case.

Cambalik would not discuss the case, said a man who answered the telephone at her home in Tennessee, where she recently moved. Her attorney, Steve Harmon, said it was too early in the investigation to comment. “It’s a long and complicated matter, and we’re just going to reserve comment until more of the facts come out,” he said.

County prosecutors are examining 10 years of court files and say the case may take more than a year to unravel. Those close to the investigation say the amount of alleged losses is expected to climb dramatically.

“It’s worse than grave robbery,” said Jay Orr, who supervises special investigations for the Riverside County district attorney’s office. “It’s not so much the dollar loss, but it speaks to an institutional breakdown . . . where the checks and balances of the system failed and the victims are people who were at the end of their lives and are the most vulnerable.”

Search warrant affidavits for Cambalik’s office contain allegations that the conservator stole money, jewelry, antiques and other personal property from her clients, failed to list substantial assets that were later missing and padded bills.

In one case, according to the search warrant affidavit, Cambalik listed a client’s assets at about $325,000 at the time of her death in 1993. When Cambalik was then appointed administrator of the estate, she listed the woman’s assets at $102,000, the affidavit said.

In the case of Conrad, a widow with no children, Cambalik was appointed conservator in 1993 and soon fired two in-home workers. She used employees from her own firm, Care World, to provide much of Conrad’s care. The cost more than doubled to more than $6,000 a month, probate records show.

Quality of Care Is Questioned

In a subsequent court filing, Cambalik said Conrad had come to require in-home care 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

But the quality of that care came into question. In a 1995 letter to Cambalik’s firm, the administrator at the retirement home where Conrad lived complained that she had been abandoned one afternoon by her in-home care worker at the facility’s beauty shop. “This borders on elder abuse,” he wrote.

In 1996, county staffers discovered--and brought to the attention of the county’s primary probate judge--that Cambalik was using her own employees to care for Conrad. The judge ordered Cambalik to refund some of the Care World payments by forfeiting future conservator fees.

About the same time, Cambalik transferred Conrad to a Riverside retirement facility that provided 24-hour care, and cost less than half the previous board-and-care situation.

The people who finally triggered the current investigation said they were stunned by what they had found.

“When we were first contacted by private citizens about their concerns and suspicions, I was kind of skeptical,” said Ann Flaherty, executive officer of Elder Angels.

The San Francisco-area nonprofit organization runs a hotline for people who suspect that their relatives or neighbors are victims of financial fraud. It then initiates its own investigations to gather information to turn over to authorities for possible criminal prosecution.

“Only after we got into it and looked at the evidence did the sheer magnitude of the case hit us,” Flaherty said.

Cambalik, whose firm was the largest of its type in Riverside, learned the conservatorship business while employed at the Orange County public guardian’s office for about 1 1/2 years. She worked for about a year at the Riverside County public guardian’s office. That county agency is typically assigned conservatorships in cases in which the person’s estate is limited and there is no relative to handle the task.

In 1986, Cambalik left the public guardian’s office to start West Coast Conservatorships. One public guardian official told investigators that when Cambalik left she asked her to turn over “five of the wealthiest clients,” according to the search warrant affidavit. The county official refused, saying that it would be unethical.

On her own, Cambalik successfully sought conservatorship appointments from the sole Riverside probate judge.

“Since fraud and undue influence toward the elderly continue to rise, I feel the courts need credible persons to serve as conservators,” Cambalik wrote in a 1988 court declaration seeking assignment to a case.

In that declaration, she stated, among other things, that she had earned a degree in gerontology from USC. A spokesman for the university says that no one by her name is listed in the school’s alumni database.

But already, the court’s probate examiners had begun questioning some of Cambalik’s accountings and charges; court records show the question marks and other notations in Cambalik’s files. But Superior Court Judge William H. Sullivan, who oversaw all the conservatorships handled out of downtown Riverside, seldom asked for documentation, according to court documents and interviews with court personnel.

“Upon being alerted of the . . . suspicious accountings, [the judge] would usually ask Ms. Cambalik for an explanation,” district attorney’s investigator Larry E. Thayer wrote in a search warrant affidavit. “The court would accept an oral response and never require documentation to support Ms. Cambalik’s explanations or prove the obvious discrepancies.”

In theory, challenges to Cambalik’s accounting also should have been raised by the public defender’s office, which is charged with guarding against abuses of conservatees.

Although officials say that they frequently challenged Cambalik’s accounting, there are many instances in which they did not or now believe they were deceived.

In 1996, a competing private conservator learned of complaints about Cambalik from the relatives of other conservatees.

The complaints were taken to the Riverside County Grand Jury, which heard testimony from some witnesses--but did not pursue the matter. Neither did the district attorney’s office--a fact for which it now expresses sheepishness.

“It probably didn’t receive the attention it should have at the time,” said Orr, who is heading the current investigation. Assumptions were made, he said, that the probate court system had sufficient checks and balances in place: the probate examiners, the public defender’s office, the judge--as well as the bonding company that insured West Coast Conservatorships, and the company’s attorney.

Riverside’s system is different than many others. Counties such as Los Angeles appoint private attorneys, not public defenders, to protect conservatees against fraud, and many counties--including Los Angeles and Orange--hire staff attorneys, instead of clerks or paralegals, to inspect the accounting reports submitted by conservators.

‘We Rely on Them to Tell the Truth’

But probate court officials in counties including Riverside note that they rely on the private conservators to be truthful in their estate accountings.

“We don’t have the actual records, and we’re not getting the canceled checks,” said Linda Martinez, the supervising probate attorney for Orange County. “We rely on them to tell the truth, under penalty of perjury.”

If an accounting report seems to contain obvious errors or raises questions, court probate staffs are supposed to challenge them, she and others noted.

After the Riverside County district attorney’s office did not act on the 1996 complaints against Cambalik, her critics eventually turned to Elder Angels and to probate attorney Barbara Jagiello, both in San Francisco.

Jagiello said she was startled not only at the discrepancies she discovered, but over the fact that others had raised similar questions in the past.

“The court probate examiner had been complaining all along, and nobody was listening,” Jagiello said. “It was like the emperor wasn’t wearing any clothes.”

Reviewing cases including Helen Conrad’s, Jagiello concluded that “the money was going fast and furious” without accounting. “Conservators are supposed to conserve estates,” she complained in an inch-thick report she compiled on a handful of cases to Riverside County officials.

It was too much to be ignored this time. County officials swiftly demanded that Public Defender Margaret Spencer immediately place on leave the three attorneys in her office assigned to conservatorships pending an investigation.

Spencer refused, protesting that her overwhelmed staff--with 1,000 cases--had done nothing wrong and was allegedly deceived along with everyone else. A week later, the Board of Supervisors fired her and ordered an audit of her office.

The same day, Sullivan, the only probate judge in downtown Riverside, asked to be reassigned to different duties, and has since declined to comment.

In addition to coming under scrutiny in his handling of probate court, Sullivan was criticized in Jagiello’s report for having purchased a home from a person whose conservatorship his court supervised, and before it was publicly on the market. Sullivan later said he paid more than a fair price for it.

Court officials say that they have launched an investigation of the matter.

In undertaking their Cambalik inquiry, county prosecutors quickly uncovered “a major fraud and embezzlement scheme,” according to Thayer.

“Equally troubling,” Thayer added, “[are] the ‘cracks’ in the Riverside County probate system.”

At this time, no county or court officials are under criminal investigation, Orr said.

In January, Cambalik moved to Tennessee, and began resigning from many of the conservatorships she had been handling. One of her associates began seeking court appointment as the successor conservator.

Yet to be determined by investigators is whether the money spent by Cambalik in handling Conrad’s affairs--and the estates of other people it controlled--was justified.

Many bills assessed against Conrad’s estate were for everyday expenses: clothes, toiletries, beauticians and medicine. Other charges in accounting lists are more ambiguous, including three separate unexplained “cash expenses” for “personal needs” totaling $1,100 in a six-week period in late 1995 and early 1996.

The largest expenses for Conrad relate to her in-home health care--including a charge of $11,764 for a five-week period in late 1995, and charges of $8,500 to $9,000 for three other three-week periods in early 1996.

Home health care experts say that 24-hour in-home care generally should not cost more than $7,200 a month--and can be far cheaper if the caregiver is not hired through an agency such as Cambalik’s.

Other accountings of what happened to Conrad’s estate confused Jagiello and others. For instance, Conrad’s beloved baby grand Steinway piano with ivory keys, worth more than $30,000 by some outside estimates, had not been inventoried by Cambalik when she took over Conrad’s estate--but was noted as being sold to an unknown person for $800, 1999 probate records indicate.

Berdell Whalen, who cared for Conrad for about six years before being removed by Cambalik, remains distraught. She remembers the grand life that Conrad led at the Sun City retirement home, where the two watched Lawrence Welk, played bingo downstairs and dressed up for the various social functions.

“I don’t think Helen knows what’s happened,” Whalen said. “She’s a victim, and she’s not the only victim, and now I want justice to be served.”

Riverside County Dist. Atty. Grover Trask says the case has broad repercussions.

“It’s unfortunate,” he said, “that abuses have occurred in a system that was designed to protect a vulnerable segment of our society.”