I am shocked to learn just two days before the election that Judge Kristin Booth Glen is up for election two days from today for New York Surrogate. Nineteen years ago in a moment of illegal and wrongful misconduct, Judge Glen destroyed my family in ways which adversely affect me and my children to this day.
I have just learned that Judge Glen got on the ballot by surviving a close and hard-fought primary contest in which she narrowly defeated her opponent by just a few votes. Several other persons made charges of misconduct against Judge Glen at that time, but they were apparently ignored by the voters.
I will be filing a formal complaint against Judge Glen tomorrow for her misconduct in 1986, in the hope that this matter be heard and that she be disbarred from the practice of law before she can take office in January.
The date was September 3, 1986, a date I remember well because of the events which changed the lives of my family and especially my children on that date.
On that date a final hearing had been scheduled for the custody of my two children, Peter and Mary, in the New York Supreme Court at 60 Centre Street. My ex-wife Anda had been refusing for more than a year to comply with a court order giving me two hours of weekly visitation with my children, ever since she had remarried. I had filed several petitions for habeas corpus with respect to these children. In violation of CPLR 7003, Judge Glen had refused to sign these petitions. She had postponed the matter several times over a period of months. She had ordered me and my ex-wife to submit to examination by a psychologist, Dr. Bennett, who had charged us each $1000. Dr. Bennett was supposed to have his report ready in time for the hearing, which was scheduled for September 3, 1986.
I brought my mother, Dr. Marjorie Sloan, with me to the hearing. When the case was called, the attorney for Anda, Walter Anderocci, stated and indeed insisted that he needed urgently to speak in private to the judge.
Judge Glen refused to agree to this. When Anderocci persisted, Judge Glen told him that she found his conduct objectionable.
At about that time, the clerk informed the judge that she had received a telephone call. Judge Glen went back into chambers to receive the call. When she returned some time later, she stated that she had received a call from "Judge Larry Janow" in Virginia. Judge Janow had stated that he was the judge in the case of the custody of another of my children, Shamema, aged 4. Charles and Shelby Roberts, who were unrelated to the child, had filed a petition for the custody of the child. Judge Janow wanted the child returned to Virginia. Judge Glen had stated that she had seen me with a four year old child when I had come to her courtroom to check on the status of the case the previous day. Judge Glen had concluded that this was the same child that Judge Janow wanted. Therefore, Judge Glen had called the police and ordered my arrest. As a result, she was disqualifying herself from the case.
As Judge Glen was explaining all this, I turned around and found several New York City Police Officers standing behind me. Walter Anderocci stated that he had arranged for my mother to be transported to my brother, Creighton's, house in North Carolina. My mother replied sharply that she wanted nothing to do with Creighton. She preferred to go to jail with me, she said. With that, the New York City Police Officers carted us off to the Police Station on Elizabeth Street in Chinatown and locked us up in jail.
Only about two hours later, however, the police unlocked the doors to the jail cells and let us out. They stated that they had been on the phone with the Commonwealth Attorney in Amherst County, Virginia and had learned that there was no warrant for our arrest and that Charles and Shelby Roberts did not have legal custody of my daughter. They also said that the silly assed judge had no right to order us arrested and her order meant nothing. Therefore, they were letting us go. They specifically referred to Judge Kristin Booth Glen as a "silly assed judge". That was their exact words.
My mother and I immediately went back to the same courtroom where we had been arrested a few hours earlier. It was not yet 4:00 PM and I was still hoping to get the hearing that had been delayed for nearly a year for custody or visitation with my two children, Peter and Mary Sloan. However, Judge Kirstin Booth Glen had left the courthouse. The courtroom was empty.
The following day I went to the clerks office to check the case file. There was an order in the case file signed by Judge Glen stating that she had disqualified herself from the case because I had been arrested in her courtroom. The clerk informed me that the case was over. I would have to file a new petition for habeas corpus and start a new case from square one to get the matter back into court.
The case is Sloan vs. Sloan, Index No. 36654/1980. I have just been to the clerk's office at 60 Center Street and learned that the original case file has been sent to Philadelphia for microfilming. The clerk informed me that it will take about two weeks to get the file back. When the file comes back I intend to obtain a copy of Judge Glen's order stating that I was arrested in her courtroom and present this document to the Appellate Division to have Judge Glen disbarred from the practice of law so that she cannot take office as New York Surrogate in January.
What Judge Glen did was plainly illegal. Because of what Judge Glen did, I realized that the situation was unsafe for me, my mother and my daughter. Judge Janow had not told Judge Glen that Charles and Shelby Roberts had only filed for custody on August 27, 1986, one week earlier. No hearing had been held on the matter. There was no jurisdiction in Virginia because neither the child nor either of the parents of the child had been in Virginia since the time of filing. The mother of the child was in Pakistan and I, the father of the child, was in New York. In any event, the courts of Virginia had no jurisdiction because the custody of the child had already been decided by Judge Anthony Mercorella of the Bronx Supreme Court in Sloan vs. Awadallah, 17815/1981. Virginia had no jurisdiction to modify this award.
Had I been allowed to speak, I could have addressed these issues and demonstrated that what I was saying was factually correct. However, Judge Kristin Booth Glen had given me no opportunity to say anything. Based on nothing more than a telephone call from a person she did not know, she had called the police and ordered my arrest. She had also cancelled the custody hearing which had been pending for nearly a year.
Realizing that both Judge Glen and Judge Janow were acting crazy,. It was clear that my family was in imminent danger. Therefore, my mother decided that she had no choice but to flee the country. I agreed to go with her, as I had already been scheduled to go to Argentina as the trainer and manager for the Polgar Sisters. My mother had never had a passport in her life, because she had been born in a rural area of Iowa in 1910 and no birth certificate had ever been issued for her. Nevertheless, she managed to convince the US Passport Office in Rockefeller Center to issue her a passport and off we went to Rio Gallegos, Argentina.
Soon thereafter, we discovered that my brother Creighton had frozen all the bank accounts of our mother and had cancelled her credit cards, so she had no funds to travel on or to live on. I soon figured out what should have been obvious all along that Creighton was the mastermind of this entire plot. Creighton had known both Anda and Charles and Shelby Roberts and had introduced them to each other. That is how Judge Janow in Virginia had known that a custody hearing had been scheduled with respect to my other children in New York in September 3, 1986.
We soon became aware that Charles and Shelby Roberts were feverously trying to kidnap my daughter Shamema and Creighton was trying to kidnap his own mother. My mother, my daughter and I became vagabonds traveling from place to place without funds. Eventually, we reached Dubai, United Arab Emirates, where I got a job working as a journalist for a newspaper, the Gulf News. We were able to survive until I was able to open a computer business there.
Exactly four years later, on September 3, 1990 Creighton finally succeeded in having his mother kidnapped and brought back to America, where he had her locked up until she died 12 years later, in 2002. Shamema was kidnapped on October 7, 1990 and was held prisoner by the Roberts for ten years until she became of legal age, joined the Marines, and went to fight in Iraq.
My children, Peter and Mary Sloan, who were the subject of the custody proceeding that was supposed to have been heard on September 3, 1986, never got to see their father again. My daughter Mary, who is now 26, refuses to see me because she believes that I abandoned her when she was a child. She thinks that I just stopped coming to see her. She does not realize that her mother cancelled all visitation when she remarried and that I went to court more than 50 times and filed three habeas corpus petitions and two family court proceedings all in a fruitless attempt to see her.
My son Peter recently established contact with me because he has become a chess master and sees me at chess tournaments. At the same time, he had no contact with his father at all from 1982 until he became an adult, except for a few visits that were allowed in 1985.
My children have suffered problems because of having no father. In spite of bring bright and talented, scoring in the 99 percentile on standardized tests, they have a history of failure and near failure in school and being left back. They both have serious problems which they might not have had it not been for the actions of Judge Kristin Booth Glen.
The actions of Judge Glen were illegal. If there were valid grounds for having me arrested, Judge Janow could simply have contacted the police in Virginia where he was a judge and the police could then have contacted the New York City Police who would then have come to the courtroom and arrested me. This is obvious. Accordingly, Judge Glen should have realized that the call was bogus. Judge Glen simply had no right to call the police and have me and my mother arrested.
CPLR 7003 c provides for penalties for this violation.
7003. (c) Penalty for violation. For a violation of this section in refusing to issue the writ, a judge, or, if the petition was made to a court, each member of the court who assents to the violation, forfeits to the person detained one thousand dollars, to be recovered by an action in his name or in the name of the petitioner to his use.
The actions of Judge Kristin Booth Glen on September 3, 1986 have had a devastating impact on my life and the lives of my children and they were illegal. Accordingly, you should not vote for Judge Glen on November 8, 2005. Judge Glen should be disbarred from the practice of law and not be allowed to take office as New York Surrogate in January, 2006.
Sam Sloan
1664 Davidson Avenue, Apt. 1B
Bronx NY 10453
samsloan@samsloan.com
http://www.samsloan.com/notoglen.htm
917-507-7226
347-869-2465
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