The general courses page sets the scene. The design+build your own page presents various topics for you to pick and choose as you design your own courses. The bottom of this page mentions nine off-the-shelf courses.

As you consider exactly which topics are germane to your needs—MHNA does not espouse 'One size fits all'—we would like to mention a very few of MHNA's favorite course subjects, or points. We think all of them are relevant to inheritance crime.  

These subjects—and of course there are many others of equal pertinence—illustrate that inheritance crime—the indictable, imprisonable, heavy-duty, high-value, professionally executed kind that earns percipient pertinacious prosecutors publicity, prominence and promotion—is not just about murdering one's parents, pushing around an enfeebled testator or forging a will. After-death estate management is a particularly fecund criminal environment. Merely embezzling and laundering estate trust funds is the least of it. 

If you don't know what to look for and what you're looking at in a plain-view, primitive, obvious inheritance crime scene, you will likely miss all of it every time, and declare yourself mystified (especially where the inheritance criminal is a self-important, stern-faced lawyer in an apparently respectable law firm) at the well-informed and angry victim heir's mere suggestion of any criminality.

Anyway, here are a few of our favorite inheritance crime subjects.

accounting and auditing: this is one of the conspicuous front ends of estate management crime. In-house and outside accountants, and outside auditors, and their work processes and work products, are often necessary accompaniments to financial and all sorts of other inheritance crime by estate manager criminals: a bent set of estate manager (never 'estate') accounts has wide criminal application and utility. Prepared by willing accomplices or willing dupes, estate management accounts for heirs (whom the estate manager criminal lucratively coerces into 'approving' them), courts, tax authorities etc. are the estate manager's passport to the perfect crime. We have no reason to think that there is even such a thing as forensic fiduciary auditing of inheritance-related books, accounts, primary source material and underlying situations. And the most pompous, punctilious forensic accountants will labor indefinitely to find financial or any other inheritance crime existing under their very noses. Properly mis-directed, especially by plausible perpetrators, they will never find it.

art theft and auction houses: the trusted insider — possibly a power-attorney; let's call him Simon — enters the testator's residence (having consigned the testator to a care home) and steals her priceless pictures. Simon then contacts his luvvy at a famous auction house, who is delighted to accept the stolen collection for sale, agreeing to give the thief commission, the sale proceeds and contras (an auction term). The pictures are laundered, the sale proceeds are laundered, Simon has pulled off multiple thefts, and the testator's estate is denuded. The victim heir now has to go after the auction house and the buyers, among many others.

'best interests of the estate': though transparent nonsense to the sagacious victim heir on the spot at the time, this invocation is likely to fool and distract many a timid prosecutor: how can he gainsay the estate manager criminal's sworn devotion to the estate, embodied in various patently idiotic, corrupt, dishonest decisions, acts, omissions etc., especially if emanating from specialist lawyers?

bogus distributions: the estate manager, having apparently been successful in estate front-office litigation, grandiosely makes distributions to the heirs. Except that the estate manager is a criminal; the litigation was bogus and achieved nothing except diminution of the estate in favor of the estate manager and her cronies; the distributions are refunds of misappropriated, criminally envested estate trust funds to which the estate manager criminal is not entitled in the first place; the whole thing is an elaborate deception and pretense that looks unimpeachable. Let's see the inexperienced prosecutor go after any of it!

bogus legal advice: this is fascinating. The estate manager criminal is a lawyer. She multiply pretends to ask for legal advice from lawyers who are actually her criminal accomplices. The issues are bogus, the instructions and supporting material are bogus, the advice is bogus… The only things accomplished are depradation of the estate trust fund in favor of the estate manager criminal (who bills the estate for her fees), her lawyer accomplices (who bill her; she then bills the estate for her expenses) and the front-office opponents and or relevant others. Unless you positively knew exactly what was going on, you would miss this one every time.

consent requests: assume that there is no legal basis for any consent request from an estate manager to an heir. There is no rational reason for any (random or systematic) consent request. it will never produce any legally viable consent. Its only purpose is to generate fees and expenses for the estate manager criminal, and elicit a refusal to consent on the basis of which the estate manager criminal then makes a multiply comprehensively criminal application to a chancery judge for meaningless, pointless, multiply useless relief (as one judge put it, "I'm not sure what i'm being asked to do, or why", but he went along with the applicant's patent criminality anyway, and made a very adverse costs order in favor of the estate manager criminal against the wholy innocent, highly principled victim heir. How much did the estate manager criminal pay judge out of that take?)

conspiring criminal heirs: if you see a Cinderella situation among the heirs, assume that something fishy is going on.

continuum criminality: we interject to mention a feature of crimes such as criminal non-disclosure, criminal misrepresentation, criminal accounting and so on. Unlike theft, which is an event, these other crimes are committed until stopped: relevant to indictment drafting (and limitation periods, if any). 

costs estimates: a criminal tool in the hands of an estate manager criminal, especially a lawyer.

duty-interest inherent and exherent conflicts: inherent and exherent conflicts are the keystone of a criminal estate management set-up. Where the estate manager criminal is a practising lawyer in a law firm, you will probably be indifferent to her appointment of her own firm as her lawyers (an inherent conflict); and you will probably miss the conflict components in her relationships and transactions (includind forced loans from the estate) with co-criminal heirs (exherent conflicts). It's all bad.

elder abuse: this comes in many guises: the post-stroke frail, friendless, slightly demented little old lady who needs to go into a care home for her own good and who will say 'yes' to anything and anyone; and the physically diminished, mentally sharp father criminally deprived (in a crude ambush) of his favorite son by a wicked, mentally retarded older brother who is also manipulating the deranged complicit evil mother. The father, vigorous, narcissistic and all-controlling in his prime, is now too debilitated, frail and reliant to put up any resistance to anyone, as much as he hates the situation. Helpless in his wheelchair, he longs, and yearns, and pines, and cries, and dies. We know this case rather well. We have no idea what happened to the father's will. We think that every vulnerable elder needs independent protection from the people—especially family— looking after him. And see powers of attorney below

estate managers: we have the usual horror stories of estate managers stealing from estates and sabotating and vandalising estate front-office business. We are particularly favored with such stories involving lawyers.

fabricated front-office litigation: we've seen this fascinating criminal gambit of criminal fictitious estate management. On some criminal pretext (eg the victim heir declines to be coerced into giving the estate manager imposter a meaningless consent to a multiply comprehensively multi-dimensionally criminal consent request), the criminal estate manager and her lawyer cronies make a plain-view application to a chancery court for various orders, including an order for costs against the victim heir, that further her criminality. Watch every move the estate manager makes in court.

fictitious estate management: this outrageous criminality evokes Kejserens nye klaeder (The Emperor's New Clothes, H.C. Andersen, 1837). A lawyer criminal illusionist who fancies her chances at stealing from various estates (having done it before) criminally obtains worthless unenforceable consents from duped heirs to her making a multi-dimensionally multiply comprehensively criminal application to the court for an order appointing her interim administrator; later, she similarly applies to another court for a grant of probate and an order appointing her full administrator. Everything that has so far taken place is criminal. She then proceeds to pretend to manage the estate, and in the process steals from the estate trust fund and sabotages and vandalises the estate's front-office business. The whole performance is an illusion, a deception and a pretense. For all the posing, the lawyering, the activity, the billing, there never is any estate management or any lawyering. The whole thing, right down to real barrister-fronted applications to chancery court for relief against the victim heir, is completely fictitious (and of course criminal). This is a real case—MHNA knows it well—involving numerous lawyer criminals operating in law firm-based gangs, involving millions of dollars of stolen art. Another screenplay.

'fraud': we really don't like this word. (We like 'inheritance theft' and 'inheritance hijacking' even less.) American indictments / complaints, neglecting to cite the statute, insinuate that 'fraud' means anything they want it to mean. That will not do.

infiltrating alien estates: this appears to be sophisticated criminality by an estate manager criminal but is just crude opportunism. Here's how it works in one multi-jurisdiction multiple succession case of our acquaintance. Dead N's probated will leaves her estate's net residue to W (25%), X (25%) and Y (50%). The management of her estate is governed solely by Swiss law. Before N's estate has been finalised, W dies. W's probated will, the administration of which is governed principally by English law, leaves his estate's net residue to heirs A, B and C; W's net residue includes his 25% share of N's estate. W's estate ends up in the chronic clutches of estate manager criminal Red. X (a criminal) has renounced; Y is a co-criminal with Red; A and B are co-criminals with Y and Red. N's estate has no functional executor. This gives Red — who has no legal standing of any kind in any jurisdiction to have anything to do with N's estate or the relevant rights of any N estate heir — the perfect opening to manage N's estate criminally, criminally assisted by A, B and Y, including by arrogating to herself the relevant individual rights of N's heirs, of whom C is a wholly innocent victim. Very important point: one can look, until one is green in the face, into relevant Swiss and English civil law about the rights of Red to infiltrate and arrogate, but it would be a complete waste of time from the criminal point of view. This is an example of the universally applicable principle that civil law is utterly irrelevant to the perpetration of inheritance crime.

infiltrating the estate of a dead front-office co-criminal opponent: this is a small masterpiece of criminal strategy, and again an all-too-real case of our direct acquaintance. To greatly simplify: X (a deep-dyed society wide-boy criminal of extensive range) has stolen valuable pictures from N and N's estate (and fenced them at various auction houses, given some away to a co-criminal heir, and sold a few privately). For various reasons of outstanding inheritance criminality, we find that estate pseudo-manager Red (or Pink) — in what capacity is wholly unclear; she has no standing to sue on behalf of either N's estate or N's heirs, and the heirs of the estate which she has criminally infiltrated have no standing to sue as N's heirs (although as W's heirs they are N's heirs by multiple succession), nor has W's estate nor W's estate manager (still less its criminal pseudo-manager) in any sense — is making a play of pretending to sue X (X and Red are now criminally active severally and jointly to screw the living crap out of estates 1 and 2). Anyway, relations between Red and X are comprehensively criminal. Comprehensive estate pseudo-manager criminal Red's litigation complaint against X is wholly bogus and nonsensical (an extreme example of plain-view dishonesty, bluff etc., very like her various other bold criminal uses of the court). They pretend to reach a compromise. Red even then applies to the court for its rubber stamp. There follows various bogus fabricated fictitious enforcement litigation against X, who has no intention of ever paying anyone anything. All of Red's litigation is orchestrated and conducted by Red's shadowy deeper-dyed criminal law partner Petal. And then X dies (hence the third estate in an amazing saga of serial and parallel inheritance criminality). X leaves a will appointing an executor and heirs. Here's the switch — and have in mind that throughout, Red and Petal and X have been criminally interacting to rob estates 1 and 2, in both cases in their own ways idiopathically and as a gang. On the multiple pretexts of W's estate's heirs being creditors of X's estate (which they are not), or N's estate's heirs being creditors of X's estate (which they are, but criminal Red and still less criminal Petal have no authority or standing to represent them collectively even if they were otherwise entitled to be anywhere near any of this), criminal Petal engineers the displacement of X's will's executor (probably bewildered, or somehow criminally involved) and her own appointment as X's estate's administrator. This is intensely clever multi-dimensional multiple comprehensive criminality. Why?

instruction manual: sometimes knowledge of an estate will reside in only one person, without whom management of the estate is impossible: maybe the testator's personal lawyer, or someone in a similarly privileged position. Two criminal situations come to mind. The dishonest instruction manual can say whatever he likes, true or false. The other danger is that the honest virtuous diligent conscientious unimpeachable instruction manual will be displaced and discarded by the estate manager criminal acting in conjunction with heirs, lawyers and front-office opponents threatened by the instruction manual. Where an estate manager infiltrates her way into an estate, perhaps as interim / full administrator through an opening such as the removal of the executor, and patently knows nothing at all about the estate, and discards and tries to discredit the instruction manual, obviously that is a suspicious situation.

interim reports: these are the estate manager criminal's stock-in-trade, spinning falsehoods about her competence, diligence, conscientiousness, knowledge of relevant estate facts and business. Unless you knew exactly what was underneath, you would never think that any of it could possibly be criminal. Certainly none of it looks or smells criminal. The formalities, the earnestness, the detail, the apparent thought, application, expertise, sense of direction, substance all bespeak a genuine estate manager. And it's all phoney. It's all an illusion. 

interim financial statements: these are more stock-in-trade. Always criminally giving the wholly false impression of earnestness, probity, honesty, exactitude, punctiliousness… All phoney.

lawyers for the estate manager criminal: enough said. Some of our case stories belie belief. A particular favorite is the  estate manager puppet (lawyer) criminal who acts as the front for a gang of lawyer criminals (in the same law firm and outside).

lawyers for the victim heir: MHNA is all too familiar with criminality by the victim heir's own lawyers. 

lying to the judge: the concocted estate management court application: we have seen breathtaking dishonesty to judges by earnest pompous lawyer criminals: a real class act (especially by barrister criminals in the English Chance'ry Division). And corrupt 'eye-watering costs' judges going along with all of it, especially when ordering costs against the victim heir on the estate manager criminal's multiple court applications of multiple criminality. Check out the criminal liability of judges in your jurisdiction. And perjury.

obstructing justice: alleged and or actual redactions: this is slightly intricate (but one must never be discouraged by mere intricacy from trying to pellucidate something important). Here's what we have in mind, by reference to a real case. Estate pseudo-manager criminal Pink of estate 2 — ditto of estate 1 — criminally colludes with and is the multiply criminally conflicted corrupt compromised lawyer of estate 1's heir Y. With their lawyer criminal accomplices — all Gordianally criminally conflicted — they embark on a scheme of massive criminality against estate 1, estate 2 and the victim heir C. Pink cannot contain herself: she issues a criminal consent request for something patently criminal to which C refuses to consent (consent is impossible anyway because of Pink's non-disclosure etc. etc.; it would and could never be a consent worth asking for or worth having). Pink having demanded and failed to extract C's 'unconditional unqualified' legally meaningless consent, she makes good on her threat to criminally make a criminal application to the chancery court for a meaningless order (all this is very lucrative). In order to spin her false story, which would have led to her relationship with Y, she claims to have spent a small fortune paying herself from C's share of estates 1 and or 2, which she is multi-dimensionally mutiply comprehensively criminally handling, to REDACT — in order to decept* the court, C and everyone who might ever get on to her, her file with Y, which of course C is after. She bills all this to C's share of estates 1 and 2 (both of which she has criminally infiltrated, is stealing from and is criminally otherwise dabbling in — an exquisite form of fictitious estate management in each case). She never produces to C even the redactions (which he has been forced to pay for). C has no idea if the redactions were ever done. Of course C's lawyers do nothing to help him. Of course C's co-heirs ditto: they are co-criminals with Pink, each other, and various front-office opponents. C's own lawyers are behaving comprehensively criminally to him and with everyone else (and C knows the risk, if not the pointlessness other than to incur costs, of applying to the court for any relief). The issue comes up against in subsequent costs litigation, in which C's specialist costs lawyer — 'fraud a specialty' — colludes with Y and Pink and fails to extract the redactions or anything else; and of course all the lawyers fail to challenge Pink's assertion that the redacted data are 'privileged'. Any first-year law student can work out that little scam. We trust this is clear. All very criminal indeed. Redactions! (*We use 'decept' as the verb component of 'deception'. Curious that it is not in common use.)

powers of attorney: these are commonplace in pre-death inheritance crime; they also figure in after-death inheritance crime. The ones we find stunning have been prepared by the thief-in-waiting's own lawyer, whom he has instructed to draft a power of attorney in his favor over a post-stroke wheelchair-bound mentally impaired friendless little old lady who can barely hold a pen and definitely does not know what's going on, however much her doctor, corruptly in attendance, might criminally attest to her competence and capacity. The power having been criminally obtained, a stroke of genius is for that same lawyer to then impose himself on the victim as her 'appointed' lawyer—a second client—thus making a true criminal partnership with the client thief and engulfing the little old lady client from both sides. But she's out of it anyway and knows nothing about it: the client thief and the lawyer just make up that she really knows what's going on, is involved, is giving instructions, knows what's happening with her assets, etc. And of course we won't be appointing a guardian for her, will we? And of course we'll stick her in a nursing home so no-one except us can get to her, won't we? And now client thief gets busy cleaning out her art collection and her bank accounts under the nose of her (and his) own lawyer; the lawyer criminal conveniently overlooks the 'dear' client thief's sale of her pictures at auction and pocketing the sale proceeds; gets busy setting up offshore tax fiddles in her name for the criminal sale proceeds; forges her instructions throughout (or is the client thief instructing their common lawyer on her behalf, invoking the criminal power of attorney they both know is criminally worthless?); files false tax returns; and billing, always billing. Meanwhile little old lady client is semi-comatose in a nursing home. After her death, it's not looking good for the solitary victim co-heir, especially if this is a case of multiple criminal co-heirs and multiple succession in different jurisdictions, and of course there are no accounts, the file is missing, certain permissions are needed from still more criminals to disclose it, the money is missing, the pictures are missing, many more lawyer criminals get involved (say around twenty of them)… This real case is a screenplay, so we've been told. 

principals and accessories: the closest scrutiny is required of all participants in an estate situation. Principals and co-principals will be easy to determine (if one can spot the criminality in the first place). Accessories before, during and after the facts are more challenging. Heirs, lawyers, accountants, auction house insiders, bank insiders, tax authority insiders should all be suspected. 

probate: we deplore the abuse of the word 'probate' (and gibberish such as 'in probate'). Properly used, it means 'proof' and only that. An estate manager criminal need only wave a multiply comprehensively criminally obtained grant in front of a timorous prosecutor to get her 'get out of jail free' card and collect $200. Probate is the estate manager criminal's open invitation to steal from the estate and sabotage and vandalise its affairs. 

the obsession with 'motive', whether (and especially) in the presence or absence of evidence of commission. We find the whole subject of 'motive' comprehensively disreputable. It has no forensic relevance, no juridical pertinence (unless expressly so) and no proper evidential value. Among other things:-

• Motive is an extraneous, extrinsic artifice. It is an idea. Motive is conjectured and inferred, never known. If supposed, it is then only ever ascribed, imputed and attributed: a person has a motive only according to others, never himself (cf. motivation, and the marginally more proximate and tangible, but also irrelevant, intention). Because it is only an insinuation, it can never be proved as a fact

• In inheritance crime — as in all other crime — motive, like intention (cf. the entirely different 'intent'), is: (1) irrelevant to the act of commission; (2) unless expressly stipulated juridically, irrelevant to procedural and substantive guilt

• We particularly see no necessary intellectual, rational, forensic, evidentiary, juridical, conceptual or other relevant connection between motive and planning, premeditation, malice aforethought etc., and of course (to repeat) there is no juridical connection between motive and intent

• It is technically difficult if not impossible to judicially and or legislatively criminalise motive (ditto 'intention'). We are presently unaware of it having ever been done or attempted in any rational jurisdiction 

• Let's see: assuming some juridical relevance can be contrived for 'motive', how far are you going to go with it? How many serial and or parallel levels and layers of 'Why, do we know or think, does he apparently think…?' (motive, always lawful) and 'What, do we know or think, does he actually think?' (intention, always lawful) will content the prosecutor intent on wasting time, resources and money with this grandiose white elephant wild goose-chase distraction in the presence or absence of evidence of commission? Down to some sub-atomic psycho-neuro-physiological level? Some intellectual or spiritual level?  

• Since it is always lawful, it is technically impossible (and wholly improper) to infiltrate motive into any juridical provision of any crime that does not explicitly stipulate motive as an ingredient, and hence impossible to properly prosecute motive, or anything supposedly derived from supposed motive ('We suppose he had a lawful motive, so we suppose he must have done it because we say so and we don't have anything else to go on'). We are troubled by prosecuting someone who did not do it by adducing irrelevant evidence of a conflicted prosecutor's belief in some intellectually chaotically prescribed proscribed level or layer of surmised ascribed (and in any event always lawful, always irrelevant) 'motive' device that he must have done it or probably did it or is most likely to have done it because of a 'motive' — which is basically whatever you say it is (we consider prosecuting on evidence of opportunity even more disreputable: 'he had the opportunity so he must have done it')

• We have been recently entertained by (uncomprehending) journalists reporting law enforcement 'scrambling to piece together a motive' for the smoking-gun assassination of the UnitedHealthcare executive. We do not fully understand this

• MHNA considers pursuit of evidence of motive, and consideration of motive, and the whole subject of motive, a poor substitute for the presence and or absence of evidence of commission.

wills: before- and after-death testamentatiousness is a universe of mostly commonplace criminality: 'loss', destruction, defacement, falsification, fabrication, forgery, false attestation, and of course suspicious provisions. Among the latter is any and every beneficence to any lawyer, whoever he is. Even the trite 'I confirm that he has not influenced me in any way to put him in this will' needs probing. Sometimes the generosity is thoroughly legitimate: the lawyer, a demonstrably genuine friend of the testator and known as such by the testator's other sensible responsible shrewd cynical friends, is genuinely surprised — and nonplussed — to find that he is an heir. We feel that a testamentary gift to anyone short of that standard is highly suspicious, and that the prudent lawyer in that position would do well to disclaim. At the other extreme, the whole thing could be criminal.

will challenges: disgruntled parties, whether or not in the will anyway, will shop around for hearse-chasing lawyers to file wholly meritless caveats, giving them time to sniff around for or concoct something impeachable. Every will challenge should be regarded suspiciously, to say nothing of subsequent estate management should the challenge have been pulled off.