Justice for All

The old man lived in a car with his dog, parked in front of the only home he had ever known.

“No, I’m not homeless,” he told anyone who asked. “The people in my house are strangers, and they won’t let me in.”

It took the lawyers of Bet Tzedek, which offers free legal services to the poor, to unravel the man’s tortured tale. Yes, he had lived in that house with his mother all his life. And, yes, he became the home’s owner when she died.

But he was mentally infirm and physically disabled and had never lived on his own before. He felt helpless and confused until two men showed up to become his friends. They took him to doctors, the market, and out for some fun. They showered him with kindness and earned his trust. Then they had him sign papers so his house could be repaired. They even put him up in a motel 50 miles away--”just until the repairs are finished,” they said.

He never heard from them again.

Attorney David Lash, executive director of Bet Tzedek, cites the case not because it is unusual, but because it is so typical of what happens every day to people with no access to legal help.

“They often lose the basic necessities of life, and sometimes life itself,” he said.

The helpless man’s “friends” were con artists out to steal his house, Lash said. One of the papers he signed gave them full title to the property, which they sold as soon as they installed him in the motel. He could never go home again. (Bet Tzedek lawyers eventually got the man the full cash value of his house, and the con artists were jailed.)

Bet Tzedek handles about 10,000 cases each year--cases of poor people who have been swindled, defrauded, abused, denied benefits they deserve, wrongfully evicted from apartments or nursing homes; people who plunk down life savings to buy a car and then find out they are only leasing it. The list of legal atrocities seems endless, and Lash, 44, says it is. Each year brings new variations: people wasting away because they aren’t fed properly at nursing homes, young families who rent apartments that appear clean but find out they are dangerously unsafe or infested after moving in.

“Bet Tzedek” means “house of justice” in Hebrew, and the mandate of this nonsectarian, nonprofit firm is to provide the poor people of Los Angeles with the same quality of legal help to which wealthier people have access.

“Justice, justice, you shall pursue” is the biblical injunction on which the organization was founded 25 years ago to help the poor people in the mostly Jewish Fairfax district. It has grown since then to a paid staff of 50 (22 are full-time attorneys) and an unpaid volunteer staff of about 300.

To succeed in this cause, lawyers must be willing to work on Bet Tzedek’s staff for salaries that are one-third to one-half of what they would earn in private practice. And lawyers in private practice must be willing to volunteer many hours to Bet Tzedek’s clients for no fee. Paralegals and office support staff must forgo the prestige and higher salaries they might find elsewhere for the deep satisfaction they say they can only derive in a place like this. Although the name and origins of the organization are Jewish, many lawyers and support staff--and the majority of Bet Tzedek clients--are not.

“People come from every part of town, from every ethnic and racial background, speaking every language you can imagine. They all come to this place and lovingly pronounce our name because we help save their lives and their dreams,” Lash said. “We prove how a diverse community like L.A. can blend together and build bridges every day.”

A Guide Through the Nursing Home Maze

Attorney Eric Carlson, 39, directs Bet Tzedek’s nursing home advocacy project. After 10 years on the job, he has become a nationally known expert in legal issues related to long-term care, and his work has spurred reforms, legislation and a recently published “User-Friendly Guide to Nursing Laws and Practices” for laymen.

Carlson, a graduate of Boalt Hall law school at Berkeley, says he is “struck by how powerless even sophisticated people are when confronted by the prospect of long-term care for themselves or loved ones. When I started here, even I was misled by lies and half-truths that sounded reasonable until I checked them out and found them to be utterly untrue.

“It’s way too common for facilities to claim, ‘We don’t do that, we don’t have the staff, we don’t get paid enough money, we can’t keep you here anymore,’ ” Carlson said. A study he conducted of Los Angeles County nursing homes showed that the overwhelming majority violated state and federal laws and deceived residents about their rights and about the responsibilities the facility is obligated to shoulder.

Carlson found that 71% of the nursing homes in his study illegally limited visiting hours; 90% claimed the right to evict residents for reasons that were illegal. Carlson said he had one client who wasted away because meals were set in front of him, but he was unable to feed himself and the nursing home wouldn’t assign someone to help.

Carlson said he has seen physical therapy illegally denied, and sick elderly people illegally put on the street with no notice to them or to their families. He now counsels clients “not to believe anything they are told until they check it out. What the nursing homes often claim is ‘standard practice’ can be a practice that is completely contradictory to law.”

His study also found that many contracts that some nursing homes ask clients to sign are illegal. They may authorize evictions that would be prohibited by law or limit responsibility for injuries suffered by residents.

“Health-care providers cannot legally relieve themselves of responsibility or liability through consumer contracts,” Carlson said.

As a result of his work, a law has been passed requiring nursing homes to use standardized admission contracts starting in 2000.

Lauren Saunders, 38, is a Harvard Law School graduate who joined Bet Tzedek five years ago as directing attorney for the housing conditions project. Her clients are mostly Latino working families in Pico Union, Hollywood or the garment district, she said.

“They are typically families in which both parents work and travel up to two hours by bus to get to their jobs. They do their best to make ends meet, to raise good children in decent conditions. But there is a terrible shortage of affordable housing, and they often rent tiny apartments that appear to be clean and well taken care of. But when they move in, problems often start to surface. Rats gnaw through the freshly painted walls; roaches [temporarily eliminated by the landlord] return in huge numbers. Water pipes which the landlord may have temporarily taped start to burst and ruin the tenants’ possessions. Faulty wiring delivers shocks to the children. Ceilings fall at the first rain.”

One of Saunders’ vivid memories is of a young woman eight months pregnant with her first child whose husband was in Mexico on a family emergency.

“She came home from work one day and found their apartment empty,” Saunders said. “Everything gone, including furniture and clothes the couple had just bought on credit for their baby. The locks had been changed, and the landlord claimed they had abandoned the place.”

Saunders filed a lawsuit, got a court order restoring the couple’s apartment and eventually won a damage award for the contents, which were never found and which the landlord claimed he had never touched.

Saunders, the mother of two toddlers, said she frequently thinks about how horrible it must have been for the woman to come home alone and find everything gone, with no one to turn to and no place to live. But she is always cheered that she could help.

“Bet Tzedek prizes creativity and initiative, gives us freedom to vigorously represent our clients and to try and stop broader patterns of abuse,” she said.

Speaking for Those Who Can’t Help Themselves

The attorneys are not office-bound. Janet Morris, for example, spends most of her time doing outreach work at senior centers in East L.A., where she offers legal counsel in Spanish for Alzheimer’s patients and their families.

“Nobody thinks that people with dementia need a lawyer. But they need it more than anybody else,” Morris said. “They are automatically going to lose mental capacity, and if they don’t take care of things ahead of time, at the beginning of their disability, they will be in big trouble both legally and financially.”

Antonia Chavez, 73, fit that description. She lived alone in El Monte, not far from her two daughters, Loretta Bravo, 44, and Shirley Manning, 49. When Chavez’s dementia became pronounced, the sisters decided to care for their mother at home. But the task became a nightmare of bureaucratic foul-ups as their mother’s health insurance suddenly doubled in cost, and a variety of benefits to which she was legally entitled were denied to her.

“We got the runaround everywhere we went,” Bravo said. “At the Social Security place, we saw five different people, and each said the person before had done the wrong thing. We called Janet [Morris, at Bet Tzedek], and the next thing you know, we get a letter saying that everything has been taken care of. And it really was.”

As their mother got worse, Manning and Bravo said, she needed more and more medical supplies and specialized home care, to which she was legally entitled but denied until Morris again stepped in.

“My mom doesn’t talk, but we know she’s very happy because we care for her,” Bravo said.

Morris said the “overwhelming gratitude” she gets from these kinds of clients “make me work harder than I ever thought I could.” Bet Tzedek is not a walk-in operation. The offices, in a Fairfax Avenue high-rise, are open only to those who have made appointments after a screening interview on the phone.

Theresa Rodriguez, 29, Bet Tzedek’s intake supervisor, oversees screening of potential clients to see if they meet financial and other criteria that qualify them for services. The organization does not handle immigration, personal injury, divorce or other family law cases, or any case that attorneys would handle on a contingency basis.

“I’m so proud of this place. That’s why I’ve stayed for 10 years,” Rodriguez said. “I just lost my great-grandmother, who was 90. I saw how frail she got, and how difficult it can be on family members who try to provide care. It is all one big circle for me--seeing my own family, the services they need and do or don’t get. And then seeing the people who come here, who face some of the same problems. There is no better feeling than the feeling I get when I know I have helped.”

* To contact Bet Tzedek for screening in a legal matter or for information about getting involved in the agency, call (323) 549-5850 or the North Hollywood office at (818) 769-0136. The office can be reached by e-mail at betzedek@pacbell.net.

* Bettijane Levine can be reached by e-mail at bettijane.levine@latimes.com.