As I have stated before, I survived my days with Dennis because of my youth and idealism. In early 1989, my life was in ruins. It could have been worse, but as I wrote, going bankrupt was the easy part of 1988, which was my life’s worst year. That year began with Dennis’s going into orbit over the potential of our operation and free energy, and ended with his sitting in solitary confinement, with our business long gone. After Ken Hodgell stole the business, he screwed over all of the people from Dennis’s operation who signed up with Ken. It was as if he helped make sure that nothing of consequence arose from the ashes of Ventura. That may well have been his job.
When I heard, many years later, that the Mormon financial empire was the leading organization that ran the world and kept free energy under wraps, and Mormons stole our Seattle and Ventura companies, it was one the many “Isn’t that interesting?” moments of my life. I’ll never know for sure, but I strongly doubt that it was all coincidental. The CIA was likely involved, as were many corrupt officials, etc. It was all at a much higher level than when Dennis “only” had to deal with the Mafia and thieving business partners on the East Coast. The global elite were definitely involved, pulling strings here and there. Dennis should have died dozens of times over, but what happened in Ventura was the darkest chapter of his journey.
In January, 1989, I no longer cared about our dead business and the pursuit of free energy. I only wanted to help so that Dennis did not spend the rest of his life behind bars. I could go on and on about the corruption in Ventura, the incredible lack of professionalism, and the like. One more example should suffice. Soon after Dennis was arrested, his attorney approached Ms. Prosecutor and asked if some kind of deal could be worked out. As I noted in my previous post, it was Mr. Deputy’s finest hour, and Ms. Prosecutor was also a little full of herself that day. Her reply to Dennis’s attorney was, “If he pleads guilty to all charges, I will see that he doesn't get the death penalty!” That was the kind of people that we were dealing with, such as Ms. Prosecutor’s sidekick who replaced Mr. Deputy, who was the first president of the Southern California Fraud Investigator’s Association, who admitted to Mr. Researcher that he did not care if his prosecutorial targets were innocent. He only cared about convicting them, and he would lie as much as he needed to, in order to get his coveted conviction. Because I have linked to a lawsuit that named her, I will also link to an article that announced that Ms. Prosecutor was named Ventura County’s trial judge of the year. She was given her judgeship because of her involvement in Dennis’s case. Again, it was promotions all around, from those palms that the CIA likely greased on behalf of the global elite. Oh, the storybook lives of the high and mighty in Ventura County!
In early January, after I made my hour-long commute home from LA, I dropped by Mr. Professor’s house and talked to Alison. I asked what I could do to help Dennis. Mr. Researcher was still in hiding at the time. She handed me a book that was given to her at one of Dennis’s hearings. It was titled, There’s a Fish in the Courthouse. It was written by a former policeman who was fighting the same corrupt officials who had Dennis behind bars. I took it home and began reading. Its author, Gary Wean, was not shy and named names. He named the fathers of boys that I grew up with in my housing development, one of whom became a close friend. One of those fathers took huge bribes, and I saw the evidence of those bribes while growing up, as his children were dressed very fashionably. Gary chronicled events so evil that I had a hard time sleeping. I did not read all of it that week, as it was so traumatic to read. But when I had read enough of it, I asked Alison how I could contact Gary, and she gave me his phone number.
When I called Gary’s home, his wife answered and I asked to speak with Gary. She was initially brusque and challenging, saying that not just anybody could call Gary and talk to him, not with what their lives were like. After I identified myself and told her that I was Dennis’s partner, she became very helpful and told me that I would hear back from them. I was soon told that I could meet Gary that evening at a donut shop across the street from the county complex, where the courthouse and jail were. That evening, Gary had been at a meeting of some people near where I was raised who were having their lands stolen by the local oligarchy, and Gary tried to organize them. I then had my fateful meeting with Gary. Gary went out of his way to meet me that night, and he will forever be in my pantheon for that alone.
I got right down to business. I asked where in the USA I could go, to find some justice for what was happening. I would camp on a Senator’s doorstep, if that was what it took. Gary then gave me the advice that was critical in my springing Dennis from jail. Gary said that what was happening to us happened across the USA all the time. The system was rotten to its core, and no official in Washington, D.C., Sacramento, or anywhere else was going to intervene. They are all in the same dirty club. If I was going to save Dennis, I had to take them on in their own courtroom.
We then talked for two or three hours, in perhaps the most educational night of my life. Gary said that he was only alive because he never broke the law, no matter how innocuous, such as going two miles per hour above the speed limit. Otherwise, the judges and other officials would have murdered him long ago. As it was, they still nearly murdered him. He talked about an incident in his book, in which his business was broken into by the fire department, and they “found” an extension-cord “violation” that they prosecuted Gary for. When Gary saw that the jury was stacked with relatives of firemen, he knew that the fix was in, and the gangster judges had him under their thumb with that “conviction.”
Gary tirelessly filed lawsuits and motions. Gary said that the court clerks routinely put his lawsuits and motions through the shredder, and even with his receipt of what he filed, they conveniently had no record of it. Gary said that he had to become his own attorney, because when he hired attorneys, those attorneys would then be threatened with disbarment unless less they dropped Gary as a client. Gary told me of an incident when he testified, and he watched the court reporter erase his testimony from the transcript, when he revealed something especially damaging to the gangster judges.
Gary advised me to refile my civil rights lawsuit from the raid. After our meeting, he followed me home and I gave him my lawsuit (which he wanted to study), which I never saw again, but it did not matter. I did not have the stomach or competence to take them on in their own court. However, Gary made it clear that nobody, anywhere in the American government, at any level, was going to help us. Gary already knew that organizations such as the ACLU were useless (and it is a parody of a human-rights organization today).
However, Gary’s advice led to my strategy to save Dennis. I had no illusions left of a fair trial or any fantasies like that, but they planned to kangaroo Dennis into prison and likely murder him there (which they nearly accomplished). To this day, people can see that Dennis was charged with “violating” a civil law, and they could never put him away for life for that. So, they threw fraud charges on top of them. But the only way that they could make fraud charges stick was to successfully portray the world’s best heating system as something that did not work. That was why they intimidated that test lab in Arizona, why Mr. Deputy threatened Mr. Researcher, and why they paraded “experts” on the witness stand who had never actually seen one of Dennis’s heat pumps, but who declared that those high COPs were “impossible.” There was a mountain of test data, and thousands of those heat pumps were working across the USA. Mr. Deputy and friends could not get to all of them. I had met experts, including scientists, installers, and I had seen plenty of test data. My strategy was to bring that evidence and those testimonies into the court. If those high COPs were established, then I thought that Dennis could beat the fraud charges.
So, what could I do? At age 30, with a long career ahead of me, I sold the only asset that I had left: my life. A month after meeting Gary, I asked Mr. Professor to mortgage his house and create a $50K legal fund to bring in those experts, which I would pay back with interest, and to get Dennis some legal representation. When Dennis was in solitary confinement, he was his own attorney, as the original one quit when the farce of a preliminary hearing ended. I was making $28K per year at that medical lab. I was effectively signing my life way. At that moment, I knew that I could not afford to have a family, own my own home, etc., which came true.
The first thing that Mr. Professor did was hire an attorney who had never worked in a courtroom before, but it gave Dennis private communication with the outside world through his legal mail with his attorney, which is legally protected in the USA. I noted earlier that some of our employees broke into our building, stole our customer files (and computers and any other valuable assets, some of which we had rented), and gave them to Mr. Deputy and friends. We had to pay to get copies of those documents, which became part of the discovery evidence. Paying to copy documents stolen from us was one of the many ironies of those days, documents that the deputies encouraged the theft of.
The jail was a new steel-and-concrete facility, built by bilking the public, as Gary discussed in his book. Since there were 10,000 pages of discovery evidence, Dennis needed two boxes to hold it all in his cell, so that he could study them and respond to them. The prosecution fiercely contested Dennis’s motion. He was only allowed one box in his cell, as they called two boxes a fire hazard. Is this getting surreal enough for you? The judge granted Dennis his two boxes, for perhaps the first motion that Dennis won. Dennis was not idly waiting to be rescued: he filed far more than 100 legal motions while in jail. When he won the right to have two boxes in his cell, the man who really ran the jail went to Dennis’s cell and threatened his life, saying that if the jail burned down because of Dennis’s two boxes (the stupidest idea on Earth), he would take personal vengeance on Dennis.
Realistically, I thought that my efforts had about a 1% chance of working. I was signing my life away on the thin hope that it could make a difference in a kangaroo court show trial. But in the month after Dennis hired an attorney, the tide began to turn, almost imperceptivity at first. From Dennis’s arrest to the end of the preliminary hearing, Dennis had several judges presiding over aspects of his case. Dennis made several appeals to have his astronomical bail reduced. Other than the first one, which I attended immediately after Dennis’s arrest, when the judge reduced it from Mr. Deputy’s million dollars to a paltry $750K, his bail motions were all rejected. Also, the bail-bond companies smelled the political winds behind Dennis’s incarceration and made it so that Dennis’s bail was impossible to meet. Ken Hodgell also lied to and threatened people who might have helped Dennis raise bail. After the farce of a preliminary hearing ended, Dennis was assigned one judge for the rest of his case, and that judge would be accountable for how Dennis’s treatment and trial went. He was the smartest judge in Ventura County. Then the miracle happened, which we all knew was an act of divine intervention.
During a hearing in late March, 1989, the judge expressed his surprise that Dennis had not filed a motion with him to challenge his “possibly excessive bail.” Dennis replied that he had made several motions that were all rejected, and he was planning to make one last appeal before the trial started, but he was not ready to make that motion yet. The judge replied that then he was going to call for his own hearing on Dennis’s bail. It was extraordinary, and Dennis did not need to be told twice. Something was up. Before Dennis got an attorney, Dennis was allowed 30 minutes a week with visitors, which, of course, Mr. Deputy and friends abused. Dennis’s visiting time one week was taken up by officials who served a lawsuit against him. When Dennis got an attorney, Alison became the legal runner and was able to spend some time with her husband at the jail.
The deputies were used to a Nazi-like impunity at the jail. Dennis saw them throw inmates down stairwells, several had died in jail in recent years by “suicide,” and they had already been caught opening Dennis’s legal mail, which the judge reprimanded them for. When the judge called for a bail hearing, Alison began amassing affidavits from the employees and others whom Mr. Deputy and others had threatened. For one example of many, one of Dennis’s salesmen had sold 60 kits, and Mr. Deputy told him that he could serve 60 years in prison for selling those kits. Mr. Deputy told that minister salesman’s wife that she didn’t even know the identity of her husband, and so on.
Just before the bail hearing, which I attended, intending to testify as a character witness, Alison told Dennis over the jailhouse phone (that conversation was obviously listened to by the deputies) that a legal-mail package was coming to him with those affidavits on the threats that Mr. Deputy had made. Mr. Deputy apparently panicked and had Dennis’s legal mail opened, to see those affidavits. Legal mail had to be delivered unopened to the inmate, and it is delivered to the inmate immediately after it is delivered to the jail. For that package, it was delayed by several hours, delivered with the normal mail, and it had been opened. When his legal mail had been delivered like that, Dennis had his entire cellblock witness that and sign to it.
I took a day off from work to attend the hearing, which was short, sweet, and hard to believe. Mr. Deputy attended, with his own attorney. As the hearing opened, the judge said that Mr. Deputy’s attorney had something to say, and gave him the floor. The attorney claimed that opening Dennis’s legal mail, after the judge had already reprimanded them for doing so, was an innocent clerical error, the clerk who did it would happily testify to his “error,” and the attorney promised that it would not happen again. The judge replied that he was sure that it would not happen again.
In the next sentence, the judge said that the prosecution’s “victims” of Dennis’s business were out about $20K in total, and he moved that Dennis be released from jail on his own recognizance, once a $20K cash-restitution deposit was made, which would be forfeited if Dennis was convicted of the fraud charges (he wasn’t). I have tears in my eyes as I write this. Mr Professor was there with his wife, as was my future wife. I did not pay attention to Mr. Deputy, but Mr. Professor did. He said that Mr. Deputy looked like he was having a heart attack when the judge made his ruling. His career-making case was falling apart. I knew that their only chance of putting Dennis away for life was to have him hogtied in jail and unable to defend himself. Once Dennis was out of jail, I knew that he was resourceful enough to defend himself. My heroics were no longer needed.
As I mentioned previously, Dennis turned his cellblocks from places of fear into dormitory atmospheres. Once Dennis had tamed one cellblock, Mr. Deputy would capriciously move him to another, which was one more legally questionable practice, as Mr. Deputy did not want Dennis to become too comfortable. But Dennis did the same thing to all of the cellblocks that he was put into. The week before Dennis was released, it was Easter, and Dennis mounted an Easter egg hunt for his inmates. When Dennis got back from the bail hearing and announced the verdict, the inmates hoisted Dennis onto their shoulders and carried him around the cellblock, to the shock of the guards, who had never seen anything like it.
The day after the hearing, Mr. Professor took $20K from my legal fund, paid that deposit, and Dennis walked out of jail. I met him that evening, after I got home from work. Dennis had known about his mystery benefactor with the $50K, as Mr. Professor told him while he was in jail, but I did not want anybody, including Dennis, to know that it was me. I did not want to face the wrath of Mr. Deputy and friends if I did not need to.
The deal that Dennis had was that he had to ask permission to leave Ventura, and he had to sign-in at the jail daily. Mr. Professor lived only a few minutes’ drive from the jail, so that was easy for Dennis to do. Dennis lived with his family at Mr. Professor’s house for the next several months.
Dennis lost about 80 pounds in jail, as the jailers starved the inmates (obviously skimming money from the food budget – everything about the county’s legal system was corrupt). A few days after his release, in Mr. Professor’s kitchen, Dennis told Mr. Professor and me his plans for rebuilding. I told Dennis that I was done and was picking up the pieces of my shattered life. But Dennis kept trying to get me to go back to work with him for the next seven years, even almost 20 years later, and that is another story.
When Dennis was in jail, he was told that the best Constitutionalist attorney in the USA was Bill Cohan. Just the year before, Bill kind of won a case over the IRS in the USA’s Supreme Court, which was relevant to our case. Bill represented tax protestors, and the IRS committed felony acts in pursuit of his clients, which Bill got the IRS convicted of. One of their crimes was identical to what Mr. Deputy and friends did: encourage people to steal evidence for them. But the Supreme Court also ruled that even though the IRS personnel were convicted of felonies that they committed on the case, that it did not taint the state’s case. They could just put new IRS personnel on the case and continue to prosecute. Thurgood Marshall notably dissented from that kangaroo court ruling. The Rehnquist court became infamous for kangaroo court rulings like that.
As I later learned, Bill did not become a Constitutionalist attorney because he believed in the cause, but because he saw it as a lucrative area of legal practice that was unexploited. He took cases largely to sue the government for crimes committed, such as police brutality. Bill lives in a mansion today, from his successful lawsuits against the government.
Dennis had to get permission from the judge to leave Ventura to meet Bill and try to hire him. Bill had just moved to San Diego from Colorado and had not yet passed the California bar. Bill had heard of Dennis’s case, and when Dennis described what had happened, Bill’s mouth began watering, as he saw a big payday coming from suing the corrupt officials in Ventura County. Bill was about to get the education of his career, but that will have to wait until my next post.
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