At 13 Old Square Chambers, Lincoln's Inn, London, my practice in and from 2005 was unexpectedly monopolised by one client's succession of cases of inheritance criminality (one of them an uncanny version of the Marshall-Morrissey hosing of Brooke Astor — a quadruple coincidence) committed by specialist inheritance lawyers and others in multiple jurisdictions. 

That criminality, which continues, was instituted both before and after each testator's death. It was and still is organised, systemic and systematic. The perpetrators include lawyers at professional level, colluding with each other; pulling their own idiopathic, spontaneous, professional criminality on the testator and the estate as self-motivated principals; and, as co-principals and accessories, fully supporting, enabling and otherwise professionally participating directly in the inheritance-related crimes of others. 

Some of those others include heirs behaving criminally against their own estates and a co-heir. 

The work also involved looking into relevant actionable misconduct in multiple jurisdictions. 

I retired from the Bar in 2009. I'm an heir of various estates in various jurisdictions. Some of them involve criminality by estate managers; lawyers, including solicitors and barristers I myself hired; heirs; and others, including one professional regulator, one policeman and three judges.

So far, it adds up to twenty years and counting of immersion in a wealth of multi-jurisdictional, multi-layer, multi-level, multi-perpetrator inheritance crime. 

Well informed and highly motivated, MHNA is fuelled by, and has evolved naturally and directly from, those first-hand professional and personal experiences, including of entire communities of high-end international financial criminals; plausible lawyer criminals; abstruse, obscure, obfuscated, neglected inheritance-related law; and inheritance-related professionals to whom inheritance crime is unfamiliar.

You're entitled to know at length what I think about MHNA handling your multi-million-dollar inheritance crime case. You're entitled to something more substantial and substantive than vapid self-aggrandising propaganda and collapsible FAQs. Here's the simplified gist in one place, digressive conversation style, for your leisurely consideration, as if you and I were talking over a good lunch. When we meet, I'll have very little of a general nature to add.

"Before you get started. Let me see if I understand you.

(1) inheritance crime is almost a certainty, especially by lawyers as such and as estate managers (and lawyers should never be allowed anywhere near estate management).

(2) the victim heir will almost certainly be screwed not only by the estate manager (as defined) and her gang of lawyers but also by his own civil lawyers, the very lawyers he hires to behave honestly and protect and rescue him, and who give him various legally binding assurances that they will do that.

(3) specialist civil lawyers know nothing about the legal, procedural, practical and fiduciary forensic aspects of inheritance crime and will stampede the victim in the direction of chance'ry litigation.

(4) chance'ry litigation and its precursors will usually be an insane option for the victim heir.

(5) chance'ry judges cannot be trusted to recognise or deal with any relevant criminality.

(6) chance'ry judicial decisions on inheritance misconduct in favor of a patently criminal perpetrator smell corrupt even if they aren't.

(7) we're not saying that there doesn't exist a super-smart chance'ry judge in some extraterrestial quick cheap jurisdiction who will cut through the civil-configured criminality with a chainsaw and give the correct decision in half a day; or that the defendant won't capitulate at the door of the court. we're saying it's unlikely

(8) there's no such specialty as inheritance crime because inheritance crime is just regular crime committed in the inheritance context; there are almost no offenses specific to inheritance; generally speaking, there are no such offenses as 'inheritance theft' and 'inheritance hijacking'.

(9) but the criminal lawyer handling an inheritance crime case must be intimately acquainted with deep-detail technical inheritance law, practice and other relevant context — including everything relevant about relevant estate front-office business, and inner-office and back-office law practice — in order to riposte the defendant inheritance criminal's mischievous irrelevancies.

(10) generally speaking, criminal lawyers do not have that knowledge and will be easily overwhelmed, distracted and disconcerted by relevant and irrelevant inheritance technicalia; nor is there a culture, in the rare cases where inheritance crime is prosecuted in the first place, of general criminal lawyers seeking out, finding and working with genuinely appropriate (or any) inheritance specialists.

(11) police and prosecutors, who generally speaking know nothing about civil law and especially nothing about inheritance law — and are certainly not the inheritance law or even the general criminal law or the inheritance crime specialists they claim to be — are definitely going to rebuff the victim heir with their uninformed, misinformed, misconceived, misguided, pretentious, presumptuous, irrelevant "It's a civil matter" nonsense.

(12) there's no culture in any jurisdiction on the planet of prosecuting inheritance criminals and never has been.

(13) any inheritance crime prosecution is susceptible to becoming instantly confused by phony complexity easily concocted by the defendant and readily indulged by the uninformed prosecutor and judge.

(14) the victim heir, even if disposed to do something meaningful about it, is eventually going to crawl under his rock and do nothing… 

If all this is correct — if the civil route is inappropriate to inheritance crime and the criminal route is not established enough — why are we wasting our time here? why don't we all just go home?" 

I address all your points below. Have a read. The bottom line: MHNA will handle your inheritance crime case as crime and force it through the criminal justice system, including in the face of ignorance, unfamiliarity, incompetence, misunderstanding, confusion, misconception, hostility, corruption and dishonesty at every turn, including from the very people supposed to protect the victim heir.

The situation summarised:-

• Inheritance litigation is expensive, protracted, and speculative, usually too so

• Inheritance crime is pandemic but its prosecution is largely unknown

• Because inheritance crime, whatever form it takes, is almost always plain-vanilla ordinary primitive feral crime, however abstruse the context, prosecuting inheritance criminals follows the ordinary rules of criminal pursuit

• Inheritance lawyers know next to nothing about:-

  • ordinary crime

  • ordinary crime committed in the inheritance context. It is unconventional for a specialist inheritance lawyer to interact with an appropriate criminal lawyer

• Crime lawyers, police and prosecutors know next to nothing about relevant and irrelevant inheritance law or practice, or the opportunities, the open invitations, the open doors available in estate management for plain-vanilla crime in th inheritance context 

• There is no such field of practice as inheritance crime

• There are almost no offenses specific to inheritance

• Almost all inheritance crime is simple ordinary plain-vanilla crime committed in the — usually irrelevant — inheritance context

• Yes it's necessary for the inheritance crime practitioner to have an intimate knowledge of relevant local inheritance law and practice NOT because relevant criminal law requires it but to realise that relevant criminal law does not require it, and to dispel all the phony grandiosity about pretending that this is a difficult, recondite or substantively specialist field of practice. It's almost always, in every jurisdiction on the planet, just regular crime.

'So why are you making such a big deal of it?' Because (eg, as elaborated later on this webpage):-

• inheritance crime, ancient and ubiquitous, is still not properly understood or handled for what it is: ordinary plain-vanilla crime committed in the simple context of inheritance, which requires its practitioners to be fully familiar with inheritance law and practice so that they won't get side-swiped with phony irrelevant estate management and other inheritance detail. With that knowledge and experience ancillary to familiarity with relevant plain-vanilla criminality, we will have begun to create the specialism of inheritance crime. That process starts with MHNA

• so few people seem to get how appropriate and easy it is to treat inheritance crime as criminal

• some criminal lawyers, uninformed about the civil side, don't get it

• perpetrators use the recondite context and illusory complexity of inheritance to commit, conceal and consummate their plain-vanilla crimes in plain view, knowing that

• police and prosecutors habitually behave disgracefully in rebuffing the victim, including by their absurd declarations, even if wholly true, of irrelevant case-specific forensic civil-law expertise on irrelevant civil law (a jurisdiction's civil and criminal systems will usually be separate and independent of each other)

• civil lawyers, uninformed about the criminal side, tend to misdirect the victim to litigation. Chance'ry litigation is multiply comprehensively insane. Threatening it, especially cluelessly, can be strategically and tactically dangerous. I've seen some breathtakingly idiotic civil lawyers' correspondence with plain-view inheritance criminals…

• grandiose ignoramus victims get themselves into tangles of phony-baloney intricacy and are eaten alive by their own civil lawyers

• the whole field is a multi-layer, multi-level, multi-location, multi-issue procedural and substantive moral, intellectual, legal, technical, forensic and general mess, but full of potential

• aside from the initial and continuing criminal insults and injuries from the inheritance criminals and the victim's own lawyers, one must duly consider the situation holistically and in its various components:-

  • the experience generally and particularly

  • the interactions

  • the harm

  • the losses

  • the cover-ups, disguises, denials, exacerbation etc.

  • the exposure

  • the pursuit including arrest, search, seizure, freezing, prosecuting, appeals

  • the termination of the criminality

  • the extracting of whole-truth genuinely full disclosure of everything relevant

  • the expiation including restitution, disgorgement

  • the remediation including locating, recovery

  • the expunging and purging of the whole nasty saga from one's consciousness and moving on.

• in each case in relation to — in each case individually, in combination and collectively:-

  • the perpetrators

  • the other victims 

  • the issues

  • the situations

  • the time periods

  • the relationships (including conflicts individually, in combination and collectively)

  • the transactions

  • the money

  • the assets

  • the liabilities

  • the data

etc.

"Gosh. You need a super-computer to work out, track and deal with the combinations, permutations, iterations, approaches, angles, accounting, accounts, reckonings, etc. It's a real thing." Indeed. Working it all out doesn't take long, and is not that expensive, if done the MHNA way.

"What to do if you absolutely can't get law enforcement to take the obviously criminal case and the jurisdiction doesn't allow private prosecutions?" When you come up against a phony brick wall, knock it down. We do that. We don't rest in our private and (where appropriate) public exertions until we find an appropriate person to take the case — at a minimum, a professional prosecutor who knows his job well enough to do it, with our assistance as appropriate.

"And the victim heir, whichever system he uses, still has the uncertainty of the trial. Nothing is guaranteed." Correct. The victim heir is at the mercy of whichever of the civil and or criminal systems he uses, including their tribunals of law and fact. No-one on the right side of the law can control that. I maintain that in the right hands, in an appropriate case, the criminal route will be cheaper, more devastating and potentially quicker than the civil. Of course the most diligent advance comparisons, simulations, modeling and thinking must be done. But at least with MHNA the situation will be clear. We do not mince our words or pull our punches.

'Do you try to prevent inheritance crime?' If duly hired, fully instructed and deeply embedded (overtly or covertly) early enough, MHNA will obviously exert every proper effort to forestall, preempt, deter, dissuade, discourage, fortify and protect in the first place. Whenever hired, MHNA helps identify, expose and pursue inheritance criminals and (where we are hired too late) tries to help prevent them doing more damage.
 MHNA is very much at home in protecting high-value, intricate, vulnerable estates from plain-vanilla and other crime committed in the context of inheritance.

"'High value'?" You know what I mean. I won't put a number on it. At the top end, inheritance crime is perpetrated by no-bond, no-court-supervision estate fiduciaries having unfettered access to large, tempting amounts of vested estate trust money. Piece of cake for large sums of money to disappear, whether or not hidden in false accounts. Including through bogus bills from the estate manager to the estate, and bogus bills to her from her co-criminal law firm colleagues and from outside lawyers, as they vandalise and sabotage the estate's front-office business. Quite a racket. Seen it.  

"'Intricate'?" To wit, not a plain vanilla case. Some wrinkles, some angles; some profound intellectual challenges; something intractable. I dislike, and avoid using, the subjective words 'difficult', 'complicated', 'complex'. 'Intricate' conveys the factual situation objectively and unambiguously.

"'Vulnerable'?" There must be — and usually will be — something about the situation that make the estate and the victim heir especially attractive, ripe easy pickings for inheritance criminals who think they will definitely get away with everything, especially if they think they have an extensive comprehensive criminal support system: an entire law firm; local soft regulators; corrupt judges; complacent or complicit co-heirs; weak, disorganised heirs; undeveloped local law and practice; no seasoned inheritance crime consultants; no local suitable lawyers or other assistance; no suitable interested police or prosecutors (yet), etc.

"Give a 'frinstance'." It greatly helps an inheritance criminal to operate in a jurisdiction where the relevant professional community is inbred, stupid, phony, prissy, culturally retarded and not regulated, such as England and some US states. Foreign estates and foreign victims are especially at risk of being comprehensively criminalised in such jurisdictions. By 'regulated', I mean nothing less than genuinely regulated. No pretending to regulate.

The "Let's Mess It Up" equation: It is always more lucrative, and less of a challenge, to mess up a high-value, intricate, vulnerable estate than to grasp its peculiarities — on which the estate fiduciary can always be closely informedly questioned — and manage it to real-deal standards; and I venture to suggest that most functionaries of intricate estates are not the real deal in the first place, especially if they be any kind of lawyer. Of course part of the fun is for the estate fiduciary to spend estate trustfund money on herself and others to cover it all up. Lots of criminality here.

Criminal intentions from the outset: It should be assumed that all knowingly unsuitable estate fiduciaries intend from the outset to criminalise the estate: a high-value, intricate, vulnerable estate can and will never be properly managed by an unsuitable estate fiduciary other than by luck. If he lacks the skills to manage it properly, does not resign and does not get lucky, the unsuitable estate fiduciary will quickly get the estate and himself into deep trouble and will find himself multiply criminalising the estate, including by dishonest billing in the back office and dishonest misfeasance in the front office. He will steal from and mess up the estate all the way to the bank.

"What's the worst sort?" The worst category includes, for example, unstoppable inheritance crime by inextricably embedded, heavily invested insiders who cannot be controlled: estate managers, regulators, judges, other heirs, in gangs, who cannot be controlled. Inheritance crime is above all the perfect crime committed by insiders who cannot be controlled. Incredibly sometimes other heirs are part of this particular criminal problem. Maybe they made a dishonest will challenge against the victim heir and had to back down, and lost face. Then they'll criminally cooperate with the lawyer criminals to screw themselves out of their own and each others' inheritances just out of perverse spite and not to lose more face, as long as they get at the target victim heir. A momentum develops that soon seals in the criminals as a gang and seals out the lone victim heir except as a victim. Seen it. To experience personally all of this happening in real time and be able to do nothing about it is annoying, but at least you have your eye on it, since it's impossible to miss, and you're collecting incriminating data. You have to let it run its course. No point asking a corrupt chance'ry court to help you. When it's basically all over, you then attack it by painstaking reconstruction and deconstruction, but at least then you might have the foundations of an open-and-shut inescapable case, if you know what to look for. If the victim heir is determined not to let it all go — the gain to the criminals, the loss and damage to the estate and his inheritance — then he might have to do it that way, which can take years, and requires implacable resolve. Along the way it might involve defamation court, rejection by unsatisfactory police and prosecutors, a lot of tough fighting to get into criminal court. Worth it? You can't tell until you do it. If the case is good, well prepared and well made, at least you will definitely destroy some double-life phoney-baloney reputations by public exposure well done, and take them off the street that way. That might be worth it. But to get restitution, recompense, expiation, rectification, convictions, custodial sentences, and, on top of all that, to have to start all over again with the estate's still unfinished business, only this time doing all of it properly, all that can be a significant undertaking with a high-value, intricate, vulnerable, thoroughly pillaged and vandalised estate. Even this is not the worst of it.

Are all estate lawyers all bad? Management of an intricate, high-value estate with complex front-office business to be done is definitely not a job for a lawyer as such in the first place, however expensive, experienced and specialised, and however impressed he be by his own self-image. Testators, lawyers and courts get this badly wrong. Entrusting the front-office business of an intricate high-value estate to a lawyer estate manager with no business sense or experience, paid by the hour and or by reference to the estate's net value, has long been the default approach because of the scarcity of genuinely well rounded estate managers. All this invites, encourages and protects dysfunction and dishonesty.  

A FEW ELEMENTARY RULES:-

1: THE NECESSARY DISTINCTION MUST BE DRAWN AND MAINTAINED BETWEEN ESTATE ADMINISTRATION AND ESTATE MANAGEMENT. 

2: THE TESTATOR SHOULD NEVER, AND THE COURT SHOULD NEVER, APPOINT ANY INHERITANCE OR OTHER LAWYER AS ESTATE MANAGER. 

3: THE ESTATE MANAGER MUST NEVER HIRE AN INHERITANCE LAWYER TO ASSIST IN THE CONDUCT OF ANY ESTATE FRONT-OFFICE BUSINESS.  

4: CIVIL LAW AND CRIMINAL LAW ARE TOTALLY DIFFERENT, SEPARATE, NOT-CONNECTED LEGAL SYSTEMS THAT FUNCTION INDEPENDENTLY OF EACH OTHER.

What's wrong with a lawyer as estate manager? The financially responsible, commercially astute and legally sharp lawyer genuinely suitable to manage (or supervise the management of) a high-value, intricate, vulnerable estate with major front-office business to do is, in reality, a multiple contradiction. It is too easy for a lawyer to plausibly assume the management (cf. the mere adminstration, which is completely different) of an estate beyond his paygrade, especially absent anyone more attractive. He may then delegate the management to even less suitable lawyers in his own firm and take two or three fees: his own office fee, plus a cut of his firm's profits, and maybe an additional firm- or department-level kick-back. A lawyer estate manager incapable of managing the estate choosing inappropriate lawyers, especially in his own firm, and unquestioningly paying their bills out of the vested estate trust fund, is classic elementary, ground-level inheritance criminality. And what a mess of the estate, in addition.

MHNA's general experience-based position: No testamentary estate management can be wholly risk-free for any heir. it is beyond naïve that every heir of a high-value, intricate, vulnerable, easy-pickings, perfect-crime estate will always get every cent of his rightful inheritance free of all criminality by the estate fiduciary and others; the very idea is ridiculous.
 Intricate, vulnerable, high-value, multi-jurisdictional estates are obviously particular prey for both estate fiduciaries and, separately and or collusively, each heir's own lawyers and the local legal system, but so is every other estate. The inheritance criminal at any level conspires and colludes with others in the inner office, steals from the estate in the back office, screws up estate business in the front office, and lies to the court and others. It's all simple, easy and obvious, and it's all already happening to estates near you.

In short, something that adds up to a case one wants to tear down, tear apart, rip to pieces and properly satisfactorily expeditiously Deal With. Something a pretentious deadbeat lawyer specialising in inheritance who doesn't know which way up to hold it, from whom nothing constructive will ever come, might describe as 'interesting' (I've heard that damn word a lot from that type; only gradually, with experience, does one realise that the lawyer doesn't know a thing about it).

Yes but…: You can have geniuses of inheritance crime consultants on your case, to no avail if you can't get the case into criminal court (you might have to do it via defamation court: MHNA can help you there too). 'Pressing charges', private prosecution, whatever it takes in your jurisdiction, with your cast-iron water-tight bullet-proof case? If only police and prosecutors knew what they were doing, or could be persuaded to at least take a genuine intelligent informed experienced determined sincere interest. This is what we're up against in addition to the inheritance crime itself (think of the victim heir's situation, on this point at least, as one of fiduciary financial rape). 

Time to educate law enforcement: MHNA offers intense, intensive, deep-detail induction, explanation, orientation, training and consulting to law enforcement. Yes. The very police and prosecutors who might have never seen an inheritance crime scene, the official folks you need in your corner to take an interest, MHNA will deep-educate for you, if you so wish and they permit. That way, everyone gets moving in the same direction on the subject and on the case. Part of MHNA's service to the customer heir. 

Police thinking: Law enforcement need to start thinking of inheritance crime as a specialist field of ordinary crime. It won't do to theatrically prosecute just the smoking machine-gun. I have much bigger fish for you to fry. Inheritance criminals, especially lawyers, perpetrate a huge range of very-high-value, pure-profit inheritance criminality, and it's probably an everyday, routine, banal phenomenon everywhere. Inheritance criminality is not always obvious even when committed in plain view — and you can be sure that specialist inheritance lawyer criminals are going to commit it and hide it however and wherever they can. I can tell you how they do it, from an already extensive, ever-growing library of real-life horror stories. (If you're one of the good guys, spare me your self-righteous, jejune indignation. I really do have the evidence.) 

Reflections on the perfect crime: For specialist lawyers and others, inheritance crime is the perfect crime. Police and prosecutors — who want to score big on stamping out this behavior, who want promotion, who want to be voted into high office, who want national and international reputations for their expertise and experience in this all-too-abstruse discipline — definitely need to know about wills, estates, estate representation, estate management, estate execution, estate accounts, estate data, estate front-office business, estate dynamics, and the lawyers, law firm departments, entire law firms, bookkeepers, accountants, heirs, regulators, judges and others who perpetrate inheritance crime on victim heirs and how they do it and get away with it so easily. 

Back to law enforcement: Law enforcement needs to KNOW this subject and take it seriously, even if locally it doesn't yet seem a major problem. It's coming your way. And in your unfamiliarity of everything except the smoking gun sitting right under your nose and staring you in the face, presented to you on a plate by a confused, distressed, outraged victim heir — an inheritance crime case which you won't know how to treat in any specialist sense, and where you'll likely miss most of the structural, transactional, continuing, deep-damage, multi-location, multi-level, multi-layer, multi-dimensional, multi-perpetrator, multi-issue general, financial, legal, technical, professional criminality — you need to stop insulting my customers' intelligence by rebuffing them with "It's a civil matter". INHERITANCE CRIME, UNLESS STATUTORILY HYBRID, IS NEVER A CIVIL MATTER.



That training: MHNA separately offers and provides training for police and prosecutors anywhere who happen to wish to learn the subject, if only for fun: I know that inheritance crime is presently a rarity for law enforcement, and a deeply unattractive one on many intellectual, practical, social, cultural, financial, procedural, professional and other levels, especially if perpetrated on heirs who seem to be able to afford it by fancy, well-defended lawyers more than able to look after themselves and who seem to comprehensively hold the advantage over the entire criminal justice system and all its operatives and operations. But let's try doing our public duty, shall we? MHNA educates, trains and assists police and prosecutors to recognise, expose, pursue and nail inheritance crime and criminals. We run customised courses. We help set up inquiry, identification, analysis systems, examine data, draft indictments, and provide assistance at all stages of the investigation and prosecution processes. 

Need for intimate familiarity: I assert categorically that you are definitely going to miss tons of inheritance and other criminality, especially committed by lawyers, if you don't know this subject. I want you to be steps ahead of even the complaining heir with his voluminous dossier. I want you to know what to look for and know what you're looking at. I want you to be able to dig into rich veins of inheritance criminality and really go for it (and however technical it might be, it's not rocket science and it's not 'difficult'). No more misleading the public about law enforcement's availability, suitability, range, competence, expertise, experience: the outrageous "It's a civil matter". INHERITANCE CRIME IS NEVER A CIVIL MATTER.

The right prosecutor: The victim heir can have an iron-clad gold-plated bullet-proof water-tight slam dunk of an inheritance crime case, including one prepared by MHNA, that will take down entire law firms, and it will go flat nowhere if you can't find the right prosecutor to properly handle it in the right tribunal. The case-specific process starts with educating, training and supporting law enforcement at every stage.

Order of events: MHNA services are available before, at the outset of, during and after the {representation + management + execution} of a high-value, intricate, vulnerable estate. MHNA needs to get in early. The earlier MHNA can get in, the sooner we can all agree and put in place appropriate procedures. The apprehensive heir should consider being inclined to consider consulting MHNA before prudence becomes concern, before concern becomes alarm, before alarm becomes consternation (get the idea?). Put MHNA in place before things visibly go wrong. The earlier we are retained, the earlier we can work with the heir to protect that inheritance, and to deter and detect inheritance crime. We are the heir's watchdog. Our message to everyone with a finger in the estate: we are looking over your shoulder at everything you do.

 We can start even before the estate fiduciary's involvement, by doing a full risk assessment on the estate and on every fiduciary about to be let loose on it
. And label, inventory and track every estate asset and liability; all its relevant front-office business; all its legal, financial, procedural and technical affairs. 

Retained late, too late: If retained once some inheritance crime has started — the beginning of a continuing, deepening process: the primary offenses and then the secondary offenses needed to cover up the primary ones; the data deficits; the thefts; the messed-up front-office business; the criminal applications to chancery court; the principal criminals and their accessories all in on the death as far as they dare: it evolves into quite a saga; saturation continuum fractal criminality — it's already too late, in a sense. For the inheritance criminals, there's no turning back. There's no genuinely full whole-truth disclosure to the victim heir of their own criminality, no restitution, no correcting the false accounts, no revisiting or reversing patently criminal — and likely idiotic — front-office business positions. Now he and the estate are in trouble. We might have a gibbering wreck of a victim heir, perfect putty in the hands of the practised, fully embarked and invested inheritance criminal and her gang. Grandiose, furious, disoriented, demoralised, the victim heir is already at the end of his rope trying futilely to get his existing 'It is what it is' advisers, who know nothing about inheritance crime but do know that they are where they are, to accept that he even has a problem (I have in mind an heir who knows the testator's unfinished front-office business better than anyone — maybe the testator's closest friend, best informed adviser, former business partner — frozen out by inheritance criminal infiltrators); his voluminous relevant archive is chaotic; he is not in a fit psychological state to rationally seek, find, choose or hire, coherently instruct or commit to sensibly pay anyone; the inheritance criminals are still in place and just getting started. I've see this disorganised type. It's an aggregation of multiple spirals. It's already a mess. I'd rather not have this heir as a customer. And don't forget criminal law limitation periods, if any, in each relevant jurisdiction.

MHNA is not neutral: In the scarcely-begun, never-ending fight between victim heirs and inheritance criminals, MHNA is definitely not neutral. I am not a neutral player, neutral observer or neutral commentator. I am on the side of the victimised heir and whomever is on his side, such as police and prosecutors genuinely determined to pursue the perpetrators. Folks who use their profession and position to steal from estates — and sometimes more directly from the victim heir — and fabricate, falsify, sabotage, vandalise and otherwise mess up estate affairs, often in plain view and under the noses of helpless, incredulous heirs, are among the worst sort of common criminals. I've watched them in action. I know how they work — especially the lawyers — and how they try to get away with it. You might find that one or two inheritance criminals happen to be convicted multi-felons, having committed somewhere else more or less exactly the criminality of which you suspect them in your case.

My own professional and personal experiences with inheritance crime: In one deplorable case, the testator was screwed criminally — of course they knew what they were doing — by no fewer than three trusted paid specialist wills lawyers: two English solicitors, one American lawyer. After his death, his will's executor, the testator's best friend, was then screwed criminally by two specialist estate solicitors (in a fancy-shmancy big law firm scoring high in a lawyer directory). It took a third estates solicitor — one out of six — at another firm to behave honestly, and it was the lay executor who meanwhile solved the problem. Worse than common criminals. 


I won't even begin to describe the encyclopedic idiopathic and collusive criminality of organised-crime gangs of specialist lawyers in another couple of {testator+estate} cases that come to mind. Interesting that all these cases involve professional specialist inheritance lawyers, contiguously and or in relays, and also involve the professional screwing of both the testator and his or her estate. And of course there's the cover-up factor: some estates lawyer criminals retained by the executor will criminally cover for the wills lawyer criminals retained by the testator. It gets worse but let's leave it there for the moment.

Let's see now: that makes ten or so specialist solicitor criminals, four or so specialist barrister criminals (with all the rancid affectation, the stupid accents, the silly walks, the other phoney-baloney bullshit), three criminally corrupt judges, a criminally corrupt regulator, a bent copper, to say nothing of a whole bunch of criminally complicit co-heirs working against their own inheritances (bizarre, but very easily explicable forensically and conclusively demonstrated evidentially); plus, additionally and separately, nine or so specialist solicitor criminals, two specialist barrister criminals etc. retained by the victim heirs. And all these lawyer criminals, you can be sure, punctiliously, pompously, criminally tendered and chased criminal bills, to criminally give a criminally false impression of their criminality, and as a criminal tool and pretext to steal direct from the vested estate trust fund and from the victim heir personally.

An inkling: This might give you an inkling of the breadth, depth, range and scale of the problem as seen by a few victims in one locality. Conjecturing, inheritance criminality likely takes place every day of the week all over the place, at the highest levels, on an epidemic scale, on the most high-value estates, by the fanciest of specialist inheritance lawyers who know a mark when they see one; and victim heirs — and victim executors for that matter — find themselves as appalled and consternated as they feel helpless against it. Can't be having that.

'Prosecute, not sue?' Correct, in an appropriate situation. For all the pilpul, it boils down to that. Even in a hybrid case.

MHNA puts it all together: If hired, MHNA fits in to the situation at whatever stage it happens to be, and in whichever way instructed: visibly or invisibly, overtly or covertly, discreetly or indiscreetly. I immediately get working according to the agreed plan. Every MHNA customer has a 365-24-7 direct line to me and never deals at any time (unless i'm really indisposed) on any matter with a secretary, colleague, assistant or receptionist. Your MHNA account and documents can be accessed online + password at any time. I provide reports  and recommendations on pre-agreed subjects at pre-agreed periodicities. I bill on pre-agreed dates pre-agreed amounts for pre-agreed services. In detail, amount and time, no MHNA bill will ever come as a surprise because it will always have been agreed in advance. Every MHNA bill is payable on receipt. I provide dynamic, up-to-date financial statements. MHNA fees and expenses might be recoverable from the inheritance criminal(s): we'll have to see.

Not 'difficult': None of what MHNA does is 'difficult' (whatever that means), and it's all obvious. It's incredible to me that MHNA-type services are not embedded in every relevant inheritance situation. It just requires ability to recognise and investigate, and willingness to call out, dysfunctional and dishonest inheritance criminals and relevant others; relentless rigor; absolute integrity; regulatory freedom (I have no regulator breathing down my neck telling me what and whom I can and can't properly, lawfully investigate, expose and denounce; others might feel regulatorily inhibited); cultural freedom (I don't have any inappropriate loyalties); deep financial, commercial and legal instincts, especially of law practice and inheritance management; knowledge of relevant law and practice; mastery of relevant document and financial analytical techniques; common sense; a flawless, preferably photographic and phonographic memory for relevant detail; database, spreadsheet and graphics smarts.

Not a law firm: MHNA is not a law firm. No MHNA person as such, including those who happen also to be practising or not-practising lawyers, uses MHNA to practise law. We can help you look for, find, research, interrogate, size up, evaluate, inform, retain, instruct and real-time supervise, scrutinise, interrogate and gross- and net-value genuinely appropriate lawyers in relevant jurisdictions of the highest ability and integrity — the only level I'm willing to deal with — with genuine prowess in case-specific inheritance crime (I'm not going to pretend: I don't know anyone anywhere, and I've done a lot of looking). We will liaise as instructed with our customer heirs' lawyers, if appropriate. I won't hesitate to scrutinise your own lawyer's contributions and tell you bluntly and pointedly, with particulars, if he's part of the problem.

But law research, translation, explanation: On the other hand — there's no such thing as raw law that only a lawyer can ascertain and explain intelligently — MHNA has no problem locating and sending you (for free: we never charge for research) jurisdiction-specific raw law information: statutes, cases, rules, principles, books, articles, talks, videos etc — using the internet and other appropriate sources just like anyone else. And MHNA can translate into plain English, and decipher and elucidate, data in any human language (if expressly agreed in writing in advance, we might or might not pass on the translator's fee). It's so in lawyers' interests to obfuscate raw law: it keeps the uninformed, misinformed, confused, stupefied, credulous, craven, lazy, intimidated, demoralised, inappropriately reliant customer on a short leash. Show me a pellucid judicial decision, law opinion or law book full of graphics and practical examples, and i'll say that's one rarity. Idiotically superficial internet summaries are another extreme of unacceptable.

Not fiduciary officer-holders: MHNA doesn't undertake or execute, directly or indirectly, any fiduciary obligation for anyone at any time on any issue. We don't act individually, in combination or collectively as trustees, estate managers, power-attorneys, health care proxies or anything similar in any MHNA-related matter.

No inherent or exherent conflicts: No MHNA operative has anything in his closet that conflicts in any way with his, and our, paramount duty of undivided loyalty to each MHNA customer.

Back to civil vs criminal: I can't speak for the relative merits — which would have to be extensively compared and contrasted in detail — of civil and criminal proceedings in the relevant jurisdiction(s), but I do say categorically that the comparison is worth making and might end up being net-favorable to the criminal route. In each case, a full analysis obviously needs to be made before MHNA is hired.

The civil route generally eschewed: Civil law and civil recourse (litigation, arbitration, mediation etc.), however much they arouse chancery practitioners, are irrational approaches to inheritance criminality and inadequate substitutes for prosecution. It's embarrassing, watching quaint, polite, genteel, gauche chancery lawyers — I have in mind, of course, the bizarre multi-generational affected English stereotype (you really have to see this for yourself, outside court and in court, to get the full idea), but there are local variants elsewhere — trying so civilly in civil court to reprimand inheritance criminals for outright crimes' civil analogs (fraudulent breach of trust, fraudulent breach of fiduciary duty, deceit, civil-fraudulent non-disclosure, civil-fraudulent misrepresentation, fraudulent conversion, fraudulent trespass to goods etc etc etc). Go ahead, spend years in chance'ry court, Jarndyce style!

Taking a (big) chance'ry: However civilly 'fraudulent', chance'ry litigation just isn't the same, connotes in the public mind little or no dishonesty, inflicts few or no stigmata, is something from which the defendant can saunter away, and is basically a non-event, especially if settled, especially confidentially. In the chancery racket (even worse to call it 'probate'), the culprits, if they are even ever considered as such, might be perceived to get off relatively lightly. The public, if it ever hears of it, is left bemused. If the conduct was dishonest, why was the defendant not prosecuted? What was the victim heir thinking? Where are the police and prosecutors? Why are they not all over the case? And what does this mean exactly, to sue for dishonesty in civil court? You can really do that? Is it the same thing as prosecution?

Too cosy: Whatever else might be going on, chancery lawyers have a duty and obligation to refer cases of inheritance criminality to police and prosecutors, and I'll bet you they rarely if ever do it. Those 'fraud' defendants and their criminal support systems and their victims all deserve their day in criminal court. Of course police and prosecutors get to defer to yet another case their public duty to come to grips with this abstruse genre — or are we to reconcile ourselves to inheritance criminals, especially lawyers, being exempt?

But MHNA will get involved: If appropriate, MHNA will of course assist our customers' civil lawyers on criminal matters in civil recourse procedures — including the stuff mentioned above and recovery proceedings, insolvency proceedings, injunction applications, defamation defense and counter-attack, costs litigation etc. — if directly relevant to the inheritance criminality on which we also happen to be retained, but don't expect me to like it.

"So you're saying that not only do you insist on the case itself being inherently high-value, intricate and vulnerable to begin with, and i get the sound and sensible reasons for that, but you're saying that there are further exherent intricacies that you first need prudently to go into, such as, for example, the exact criminal justice system set-up and lie of the land in the relevant jurisdictions, which you will routinely look into for free before taking a case: local limitation periods, local other defenses, does the case really truly definitely have a chance of ever making it into criminal court in the right jurisdiction, and what exactly are the dynamics of getting it there, what with local police and prosecutors and their attitudes and limitations and such, and how does that route compare and contrast, on a thorough analysis, on any number of relevant fronts, with the conventional civil litigation route, including dynamics such as lawyers on both sides, judges, laws, remedies, costs, timings, tactics, strategies, speed, net ultimate benefit to the estate and the customer heir, net ultimate detriment to the criminals… (are you getting all this?)?" You're THINKING, which is good. It's all very well for the victim heir to want to stick it to the inheritance criminals in criminal court. And there's nothing quite like seeing a lawyer arrested in her place of business. But the inheritance crime ecosystem is very immature. I want to be sure the victim heir is not on a hiding to nothing, would not be better off spending decades expensively, fruitlessly marooned in a Jarndyce situation at the behest of his own fancy-shmancy civil lawyers.

"Is not MHNA being too cautious, for isn't it TRUE that, as you have said elsewhere, criminal law is criminal law, criminal justice is very well established all over the place, and if the inheritance criminal has committed crime, especially flagrantly, especially as definitively dispositively nailed by MHNA, then damn it all, why can't you then just drag him or her into criminal court? So what if the subject is inheritance? So what if that's underdone in the criminal justice system? The system is ready and waiting for it, surely?" We've been through this. I keep saying that inheritance crime — real deep, dirty, multi-dimensional, multi-faceted inheritance crime pulled on a high-value, intricate, vulnerable estate by sophisticated lawyer criminals operating in organised crime gangs, not the caught-red-handed-with-smoking-gun sole-practitioner theft case that any child could prosecute — is an inherently and exherently specialist subject: it has certain special features and requires certain special approaches and specialist knowledge and experience. It is just not correct that inexpert inexperienced police, prosecutors and generalist crime lawyers are quite sufficient to nail these situations or these perpetrators; that they are yet more lousy criminals who fit automatically into the criminal justice system and the criminal justice process regardless of the criminality's technical details. If you want to nail the hard stuff, get real.

Where were we? I was saying that a close comparison of the victim heir's civil and criminal routes, positions, options and alternatives, and broad and narrow comparative and local analyses, are necessary, appropriate and worth doing, if only for MHNA internally (and some useful developmental, epidemiological and other statistics; no-one else seems to be collecting any relevant data) and for the customer heir's reference, and I'm telling you that that's what MHNA will do before taking the case, and, if hired, will monitor throughout the case. Expert inheritance crime practitioners must not storm into criminal court without the full holistic picture having been ascertained, modelled, costed and considered in detail in advance. Only then they can storm in, if appropriate. Yes, before it agrees to take a case, MHNA will do the civil-criminal comparative analyses. We'll compare burdens and standards of proof and other evidence and data issues. We'll look into limitation periods, and do comparative general, financial, technical, evidential, legal and other relevant macro- and micro-modelling and simulating, and other prudent preliminary thinking, including on how the inheritance criminals might try to game chancery court, probate court, defamation court or any other civil court or process and what all that looks like in a simulation. We'll examine the indefinite inherent and exherent continuity of their criminality, the indefinitely continuing loss and damage to the victim heir, the indefinitely continuing illegal gain to the perpetrators, the continuity of the lawyer criminals' professional practices, their other victims, and things like that. I want to get maximum recovery, recompense, restitution and compensation and maximum victim net benefit, and I want to know, on every relevant issue, in every relevant jurisdiction, in relation to every relevant inheritance criminal, exactly, precisely and specifically which route or routes — civil and or criminal — is or are going to get all that for him most efficiently, effectively and cost-effectively.

Inheritance criminality generally: In the estate management environment, I suspect everyone, especially anyone in any way directly or indirectly concerned, especially in what might turn out to be a gang, with any aspect of any part of the testamentary estate. I require conclusive evidence that an act and an omission is not in some way dishonest. (Interestingly, there is presently no noun in the English language to describe a eufunctional professional who just does a good job.) I spreadsheet, timeline, graph and map every email, letter, document, bill, bill item, account, phone call and meeting and its content. I archive everything in machine-readable files. I create and maintain a master concordance of words and phrases and a master index. I will research, find, analyse, model, evaluate and elucidate, in holistic, full-context macro- and micro-scopic fiduciary-forensic detail, every pixel of every relevant general, financial, legal and other move these people make. Who they work with. What they do. Gross and net detriments and benefits. Every minute of every relevant day. Every relevant issue. Every relevant location. Every relevant cent and penny.

I'm especially fascinated by lawyer criminals who criminally procure appointments as estate management operatives and who then steal from the estate trust fund (bogus bills for bogus fees and bogus expenses; outright pilfering, embezzlement) and vandalise and sabotage the testator's relevant unfinished front-office business (eg claims against the testator that require technical knowledge of his relevant activities, the lawyer criminal deliberately discarding the file and criminally conspiring with the criminal adversary to rip off the estate). Some of these types even make surreal criminal applications to chancery court and costs court, at unbelievable expense to the victim heir. I've seen it. I've been in it. Guess what?

Organised crime directed against the victim heir: Inheritance crime is often highly organised crime, involving close coordination, cooperation, collusion, complicity and conspiracy between members of a criminal gang — such as, to take one configuration, a lawyer criminally managing an estate with accomplices in her own firm, in criminal conjunction with outside specialist lawyers, professional regulators (who ignore the victim heir's complaints), judges (who render decisions against the victim heir that are just plain nuts), and even among the other heirs (who for reasons of their own would rather see their own inheritance stolen and squandered by the estate fiduciary than see the victim heir receive his due share). Some racket.

Financial criminality against the victim heir: I look very particularly at the inheritance criminal's criminal bookkeeping, books, accounting, accounts; primary and other source material, including what she and her associates have forged, fabricated and falsified; criminal billing targets and criminal unverifiable timesheets; criminal 'cost estimates'; bogus fees for bogus or criminal activities; criminal bills, bill narratives, bill 'discounts'; concealment, forgery, fabrication, falsification, vandalism and destruction of financial and other records. False interim, final and 'draft' accounts presented to the victim heir with and without supporting primary source material. False accounts and false accounting to courts and tax authorities; false claims and criminal failure to defend and counter-claim involving estate actual and contingent assets and liabilities. I enjoy poring over criminal financial statements.

Commercial criminality against the victim heir: Let's face it. One can hardly imagine a lawyer acting as a CEO or executive board member. Lawyers generally make bad business persons. I've never met a lawyer with a genuine talent for business, especially someone else's, especially where that someone is dead and the lawyer has criminally discarded fundamental data and resources and lies, bluffs, blusters and bullshits her way through everything. If you think this is far-fetched, I have some striking recent real-life examples for you.

To repeat: a lawyer as such is always the wrong choice to be appointed executor of a will by any testator, and always the wrong choice to be appointed estate manager of an estate by a rubber-stamping court, where there is real-world unfinished testator-specific front-office business to be done. This is so even if the business to be done involves running a law firm. No exceptions. Why would you ever appoint a lawyer, with his secret files, billing targets, tunnel vision, etc., to run a business, especially one of which he has no knowledge or experience and for which he has no aptitude, and where she proactively trashes at the outset the instruction manual (if she's lucky enough to have one)? None of it makes sense.

I'm also fascinated by charlatan lawyer fiduciaries' lies to the appointing testator (executor) and the appointing court (administrator), and their pretensions while in office to competence in the dead testator's relevant unfinished front-office business about which they know nothing on every level, and their phony, bogus, criminal theatrics, funded by the estate trust fund, and which are really overt and covert theft, vandalism and sabotage. Whatever the outcome, an inheritance fiduciary playing around with the estate's front-office business without the required knowledge, expertise and experience is always criminal.

She doesn't care: The lawyer charlatan doesn't care: the estate will pay for everything, and she'll go on gaming it until she has stolen as much estate money as she can, or dare. (I've seen enough of this at first hand, as an heir, to get the general idea, and can help you locate, identify and articulate it to police and prosecutors.) Only luck will save the estate from material loss. In the real world of business, bad businessmen usually don't get lucky. They get eaten alive.

Law practice criminality: This includes an estate manager corruptly hiring her own law firm to do the lawyering; patently unsuitable lawyers, corruptly chosen, retained, instructed and paid by the lawyer criminal with stolen estate trust fund money, knowingly doing bogus legal work, knowingly implementing bogus legal and commercial points, issues, approaches, strategies; unnecessary work done by knowingly inappropriate lawyers corruptly chosen, retained and supervised; dishonest over-work; dishonest file padding with paper and verbiage (veneer criminality); missing link criminality and key man criminality; dishonestly deficient and defective work process, work product and work deployment; suitability criminality ('dupe and scoop'); bogus legal complexity; unexplained protraction; upward and downward spirals and layers of criminality; compound criminality including criminal attempts to remedy earlier criminality; dishonest overbilling including dishonest 'discounts'; dishonest consent+exoneration requests to materially uninformed and misinformed heirs; dishonest permission+exoneration applications to a materially uninformed and misinformed court; no genuinely full, proper, timely, wholly honest disclosure to some or all heirs. To say nothing of secret billing targets (when did your lawyer last tell you about his?); unverifiable, patently dishonestly concocted timesheets; unverifiable, patently dishonest bill narratives; ludicrous, patently criminal 'cost estimates'; outright embezzlement, etc etc. 

There are many lawyers of whom I can speak critically from bleak direct professional and personal experience. They are absolutely deplorable. I have every reason to think that they are typical. Inheritance criminals who happen to be lawyers tend to be deeply uninteresting, unintelligent, dull people in whom it is pointless to take an interest. Sometimes their behavior — pathologically grandiose, palpably shallow, deeply cunning, and talentless — conclusively evidences a delusional personality and or other mental instability (these are among the people who tend to retire precipitously for 'ill-health'). In the classic financial criminal paradox, they compensate for estate management performed stupidly with sometimes spectacular inheritance crime executed and sustained cannily. This surreality can complement, even flatter, disoriented heirs. But it perplexes, bores, repels and disgusts intelligent, sensitive heirs who intuitively know they're obviously being 'done'.

MHNA's is a novel approach: So far as I know, going after inheritance crime and criminals is a new — certainly a rare — discipline. Where, first, in any jurisdiction, are the statutes, cases, inheritance law textbooks, crime law textbooks, commentaries, articles, conferences, communities, practitioners, investigations, exposés, prosecutions, convictions, sentences, bespeaking the specialty? Seems to me there's no specialist cadre anywhere of genuinely appropriate inheritance crime practitioners practising this stuff. Inheritance crime is not yet a recognised subject among civil lawyers (who do need to know something about it) or among crime lawyers who take the cases (ditto). A generalist crime lawyer should be presumed to know nothing at all about it.

But, you counter, relevant criminal law is so generic, general and generously non-specific, it can be applied by generalist crime lawyers to inheritance crime as easily as to crime in any other business, so who needs specialists? You argue that it would be correct and necessary, would it not, for the generalist crime lawyer to examine the victim heir's complaint strictly and solely per the crime law book: he won't need to know anything about inheritance law or practice unless some relevant inheritance point be expressly or implicitly right there in the offense, right? I differ. The wording and workings of whichever relevant offenses you have in mind do indeed transcend relevant civil law (which is the whole point), but the inheritance process's deep detail is always inherent in the wording of every inheritance-related crime statute and always inherent in all inheritance crime. Every aspiring inheritance crime lawyer must be sufficiently informed about generic, general, technical, financial, business, legal and other aspects of the inheritance process, per relevant jurisdiction, both generally and in relation to the instant case. He has to see the problem in the full context of, say, the testator, the heirs, the assets and liabilities, estate management, and things like multiple multi-jurisdiction succession, multiple estate execution in multiple jurisdictions, chancery law issues, issues of other civil law in multiple jurisdictions, intricate fact issues, accounting, disclosure, misrepresentation, abuse of position, obstruction of justice, money laundering, data criminality, etc, often highly specific to lawyers, law practice, law firm departments and entire law firms. Determined, well funded inheritance criminals demand worthy opponents, and their advisers, who get all this.

Postulates: It is a waste of time to expect a chancery, civil or commercial lawyer to do anything useful with inheritance crime. It is a mistake to litigate, arbitrate or mediate civil analogs of inheritance offenses. It is a waste of time taking an open-and-shut case of inheritance crime to police or prosecutors who know nothing about inheritance crime. That every crime lawyer is a maven on inheritance crime is a false and dangerous assumption. Generalist crime lawyers should be presumed to know nothing about inheritance crime. It is a waste of time and money expecting anyone to develop your inheritance crime case who does not have in his professional and personal bloodstreams genuine familiarity and experience of specific inheritance crime directly bearing on your case. That goes for MHNA too. If we haven't already come across — generally or specifically — the inheritance crime of your case, we'll likely decline it. It's not fair on you for us to learn on the job.

"So after all this, how can you be sure you'll end up convicting the inheritance criminals and putting them in prison where they belong?" I'm not sure. I'm not sure the victim heir will get a bent cent in any civil court, and I'm not sure he'll get a conviction in any criminal court. Of course the most practised, the most venal of inheritance criminals — lawyers — will criminally fight tooth and nail (whatever that means) to avoid getting convicted. And so might other inheritance criminals: they really are the worst, these people. Even when up against it, and so heavily invested, they won't give the victim heir an easy ride, they won't yield an inch, they'll deploy the most absurd, untenable, dishonest defenses, and the victim heir just has to get himself through this ordeal in addition to everything else he has gone through. No world-class prosecutor, even with a slam-dunk case, can properly be sure of anything. (That reminds me of an important point of evidence, universally misunderstood. There is no such thing as probative evidence until the fact tribunal agrees with you. Don't ever fall for the line that a trial lawyer will ever definitely be able to prove something. Anything. The most conclusive, unanswerable, smoking-machine-gun evidence doesn't prove anything until the fact tribunal — judge, jury, whatever — finds that it does. Some fact tribunals — and not just intimidated juries — find the most unsustainable facts and render the most perverse verdicts against the weight of all the most conclusive conclusive evidence. Not even conclusive evidence is conclusive. Just saying, is all.)

So what's the MHNA deal? Always for fixed fees expressly agreed in detail in writing in advance — never hourly rates — MHNA sells:-

to victim heirs: monitoring, supervision, investigation, examination, analysis, valuation, evaluation, elucidation, exposure, denunciation, pursuit and other appropriate lawful services. I like finding and articulating the cast-iron, bullet-proof, water-tight inheritance crime case. I'll put it together for you, probably in the form of a draft indictment with all currently available supporting written evidence attached, plus elucidatory 'how they did it' videos, and present it personally for you to police and prosecutors

to police and prosecutors: basic and advanced training and consulting on inheritance crime, so you are not at a loss when the victim heir slams his dossier on your desk or throws it through your window; and for when I drop by later. I'm here to stop you pretending, to yourself, your colleagues and the complaining public, that you know enough about civil or criminal law or the facts, either generally or particularly, to be able to fob off the victim heir with "It's a civil matter".

Presenting inheritance crime cases to police, prosecutors, regulatory and disciplinary bodies: I do guarantee that police and prosecutors will usually not get, and not want to get, inheritance criminality unless they have the most blindingly obvious complete case on a plate on the lines of nothing more exotic than straightforward, jury-digestible hand-in-the-till theft, or obvious elder abuse. For all its prevalence, inheritance crime is an unknown quantity to the generality of police and prosecutors. Well will the despondent victim heir rationally apprehend that the rank and file of materially uninformed, all-too-easily materially misinformed police and prosecutors will definitely misunderstand him and his multi-layered, subtle case. Inheritance crime is such a specialist subject for law enforcement, it is not even generally recognised as a subject either for practice or training. This phenomenon bears scrutiny. How come officials charged with the enforcement of criminal laws are so universally ignorant and neglectful of inheritance crime, especially the subtle kind committed by estate fiduciaries, lawyers, etc.? 

MHNA's way: MHNA not only puts together compelling inheritance crime complaints. It will present each case to appropriate police and prosecutors, my way. I leave you to imagine what that is likely to look like.

Hiring MHNA: the economics: It depends when we're hired. The earlier and longer we are hired, before the estate cash goes missing, before the estate's art collection starts walking out of the door by itself, the more economical, efficient, effective, cost-effective and net-valuable we think we'll be. I give every customer a daily or weekly written net-value statement showing, if possible, the cost-effectiveness of hiring us and how we've saved him money, including by limiting the estate fiduciary's expenses and discouraging lucrative, expensive misadventures on the estate's time and money, and help the customer heir get and keep all data in good order.

Nothing chummy: We do not have chummy relationships with anyone. We do not play in teams. We are demonstrably detached from suspects and transactions. We liaise as instructed between the customer (never 'client') heir, his circle, the target fiduciaries, and where appropriate police, prosecutors and regulators. We have arm's-length professional access to genuinely appropriate accountants; archivists; auditors; data crunchers; data visualisers; eufunctional, real-deal estate managers; former law enforcement and regulatory personnel; intelligence specialists; psychiatrists and psychologists; practising, not practising and retired lawyers and judges; private detectives; statisticians; and rehabilitated fiduciary estate criminals. We think we are no more expensive than a consulting firm  lacking our skills, experience and intellectual range.

"Do you guarantee anything?" MHNA does not guarantee any final outcome. I do undertake to astorise every pixel of every relevant datum you give me and put you in a stronger position re your inheritance than you would be without me. The problem is that you need to have the resolve to then do something — and then do it and see it through, like denounce the inheritance criminals to appropriate police and prosecutors; and then work hard with willing law enforcement, if they exist in your locality in the first place: I can try to educate them and prise them off their stock insult "It's a civil matter" perch but I don't promise. I don't guarantee that any law enforcement anywhere in your jurisdiction will have or express any interest in your case, know what to do with it, do anything useful or at all with it, and not tell you to go to hell with "It's a civil matter". We all know that the whole law enforcement culture needs radical reform just on that one point, never mind on specialised specifics such as inheritance crime, before any of us can be sure any police or prosecutor will know what to properly effectually do with your case and do it.

The 'embedded' option: cash savings: For example, as the customer heir's embedded vigilance from the beginning to the end of the estate's management, we aim to pay for ourselves in hard cash:-

• continually deterring the estate fiduciary's financial, commercial, legal and other misadventures


• continually promoting efficiency, cost-effectiveness, transparency and honesty


• continually monitoring fees, costs, expenses, spending, transactions: we track, log, check, verify and validate every cent in real time, all the time, as we get the data (bills, accounts, statements etc)


• continually monitoring, analysing, validating, evaluating and valuing everything: we track, analyse, evaluate and value the estate fiduciary's every financial, commercial and legal move: every cent, every act, every omission, in real time all the time


• sparing the customer heir the expense of hiring lawyers, forensic accountants, private investigators who just don't get it


Our real-time activities can help avoid misunderstandings and prevent later costly, protracted legal disputes.

The 'embedded' option: saving the customer heir's time, money and inheritance:-

• continually alerting the customer heir to anything that doesn't smell right, look right or add up. Timely digging after our alerts will in itself save time and money later


• generating, and keeping up to date and ready at all times, a complete, comprehensive set of estate logs, accounts, documents and other records in perfect order for the customer heir to consider and send to legislators, regulators, police, prosecutors, lawyers, and anyone else he chooses. This saves the expense of retrieving and assembling data, and interpreting it, after the event. We are available to personally present our data as required. Our presentations are vivid, lucid and persuasive, which can also prove economical and efficient in the long run


All data are stored in appropriate databases and spreadsheets and plotted onto instantly available hotlinked lists, graphs, charts, timelines and other visuals. That's an efficiency which might prove a saving in the long run. We save customer heirs worry, time, effort and energy.


The "don't call us, we'll call you" option: Alternatively, MHNA is available at specific phases, for specific stages, for limited assignments and to troubleshoot specific problems. Here the economics of hiring us may be less favorable to the customer heir if we have to do a lot of work reconstructing, tidying up, collecting, assembling and analysing stuff after the event, as issues become entangled and trails goes cold. Inefficiencies are bad economics.

"How come no-one ELSE is trying to figure all this out, is trying to protect and avenge the victim heir, is trying to change the culture among just about everyone, starting with victim heirs, police, prosecutors, regulators, judges, juries? Well?" For all I know there's a popular movement out there. MHNA would be pleased to be a part of it.

Getting hired: MHNA's own preferences: In trying to protect the customer heir from inheritance criminality, intelligent, proactive anticipation is helpful. MHNA appreciates being approached before his concern becomes well-founded suspicion, and before suspicion engenders neuroticism — as the victim heir sees his inheritance drain away, including straight into the estate fiduciary's personal bank account. Whatever the inheritance criminal's protraction, the victim heir's procrastination obstructs, impedes and prolongs our work, and tends to increase costs in the long run. And I prefer to not have to deal with the victim heir's fading memory, intensifying anger and increasingly disorganised file.

Dysfunctional estate fiduciaries: MHNA requires genuinely full estate fiduciary transparency and accountability in real time, all the time. Every act, every omission, every person, every cent. We then take present and known-absent data and test, scrutinise, analyse, validate and evaluate it. We track and nail the deep detail, good and bad alike, of the estate fiduciary's every move, in real time, all the time. We are methodical, systematic, scientific and relentless. 

Her game plan: The miscreant estate fiduciary approaches estate management from at least two angles. Dishonest, her gameplan is to maximally exploit the estate and stay one step ahead of undisciplined suspicion. Incompetent, she is likely to get herself and the estate into multiple layers, eddies and spirals of deep trouble early on, all the way to her bank account, in a way that cannot easily be followed without an intimate knowledge of the estate. To camouflage, justify, protract and conceal how she monetises both, she displays — paradoxically — considerable skill and imagination. The crime scene is likely to be a mutating, self-perpetuating, self-sustaining, self-justifying, multi-dimensional cascade of financial crime, business crime and law practice crime, elaborated and concealed under the contradictory pretexts of professional prowess and estate difficulty. The net costs and net benefits of the fiduciary's services are misrepresented, falsified and exaggerated. Relevant incriminating data are usually concealed and or falsified. In extreme cases, the estate is gutted like a fish, brazenly in plain view, because the fiduciary enjoys the support and encouragement of colleagues and the local culture. The estate fiduciary plays a zero-sum game: she knows that she is off the streets if and when fully exposed. Every estate scam has to succeed in full.

"How big is the problem of inheritance crime, would you say?" It’s definitely an industry out there. I believe that inheritance crime by specialist lawyers is on the scale of organised crime, and has a full support system embedded within the local law practice, judicial, regulatory and law enforcement communities. I have seen enough of it for myself. It is a structural, practised, well developed culture of dishonesty, criminality, corruption, collusion, and contempt for the victim heir strongly redolent of organised crime. Sometimes hosing a high-value estate requires extensive collaboration and collusion between estate fiduciaries, specialist lawyers, banks, notaries, judges, specialist regulators, law enforcement and every other source of victim protection and assistance as each is drawn in. I've seen inheritance crime extending exponentially beyond just the estate fiduciary and her inner circle.

Reputation management: Loss to the victim heir might be only financial, but that would be unlikely. Other incidents might include a damaged personal reputation at the hands of an inheritance criminal trying to discredit him as part of her calculated criminal operation. Classic tricks by dishonest estate fiduciaries, with no justiciable reputations of their own, include trying to dishonestly discredit the victim heir's knowledge, credibility, standing and sincerity. She will do this in the inner office with her colleagues, who will like the idea; in the back office with the other heirs, who will welcome the tactic if they don't like him and have nothing much to lose themselves. They might even welcome the idea though it supports her inheritance criminality and costs them some of their inheritance; in the front office with estate debtors, who will encourage it if they know he is on to them too; to the court, and particularly mischaracterise him as 'difficult', 'unreasonable' , 'argumentative' and 'hostile'. The court will corruptly or naïvely give her the benefit of the doubt. She will also pull this one to silence the victim heir by falsely alleging that his criticisms are defamatory (and, by innuendo, concocted). All this is on top of the underlying inheritance criminality she is perpetrating, and determined to try to get away with, in the first place. Especially if committed online, it can be an expensive proposition to correct and neutralise. We handle it.

MHNA fees, expenses, billing: Except for expressly and in writing pre-agreed raw time spent traveling, MHNA never charges fees by raw time or valued time. We never charge by time. We bill only formally pre-agreed fixed fees. We fix our fees in advance in close cooperation with the customer heir. They depend on the amount and nature of MHNA work and resources required. The estate's gross or net value, the value of particular estate assets, and the value of particular estate transactions, are never factors in how we calculate fees. We use a mix of time, duration, protraction, intensity, difficulty, stages, deadlines, the amount of data, and the MHNA work processes and products required.

More about that: The customer heir can stipulate all of these as he chooses. We will never dragoon you into paying for anything more than you want. We never send a bill that we have not previously agreed with the customer heir. You will never get a bill you're not expecting. Every bill is scrupulously detailed and states, wherever possible, the discrete and cumulative net value to the customer heir of each billed service. We incur expenses only if specifically and expressly agreed in writing with the customer heir in advance. We account to the cent for every expense incurred and provide original supporting documentation, not copies. We can bill fees and expenses in USD, EUR, CHF, GBP and other mainstream currencies. Our fees and expenses may be recoverable from a dysfunctional estate fiduciary personally. It depends. We'll look into that for every customer (we really don't like the demeaning word 'client').

MHNA style: I don't use gold pens or have a gold watch (or gold anything, for that matter). I don't hurry you except where something is urgent. I don't use legal-speak. I don't speak jargon or gibberish. I'm a stickler for terminology and the mot juste. I use 'estate fiduciary' for anyone — estate manager, relevant advisers, agents, assistants and associates etc. — owing fiduciary duties to my customer heir. I like the self-explanatory 'fiduciant' — the beneficiary of a fiduciary duty. Incredibly, there's no standard word in English for it. I dislike it for the potential for confusion with realty, but use 'estate management'' for estate representation, estate administration and estate (cf. will) execution — all very different functions and situations. I use 'inner office', 'back office', 'front office', recourse' and 'criminal support systems' an awful lot: I like to know precisely where criminality is taking place. Incredibly, the law profession in general, I believe, does not share this wish.  

MHNA range: MHNA is much more than a relentless, uncompromising, fearless, no-nonsense, common-sense forensic consulting firm experienced in finance, business and law. MHNA can handle any stage of any issue in any management of any estate by any estate fiduciary in any jurisdiction and in multiple jurisdictions. There is no estate procedural, substantive, financial, commercial or legal issue — and no fact, idea, proposition, argument, pretext, excuse, justification, attack or defense, including in litigation, arbitration, mediation and negotiation — outside our scope or beyond our grasp. If it can be said, we can parse it. If it can be done, we can deconstruct it. If it has dimensions, we can measure and evaluate it. If it exists, we can validate it. In any high-value estate however intricate and vulnerable, I know what to look for, will know it when I see it, and can elucidate it — including in appropriate criminal, civil, regulatory and disciplinary proceedings — vividly and compellingly. I particularly call out bluff, bluster, bullshit and baloney by lawyers, judges, regulators and law enforcement. The more obfuscation and phoney complexity, the more I like it. It helps to have inside knowledge of how honest and dishonest lawyers work.

MHNA approach: MHNA gets straight into the detail. I'm methodical but not obsessed by method. MHNA will go wherever we need to go. The firm can investigate comprehensively. It has fun proprietary tools and techniques for micro-fact finding, ensuring that everything gets looked at and nothing gets overlooked, including material that should be there and isn't. MHNA systematically and scientifically logs, tracks, monitors, investigates, analyses, validates, evaluates, and net values all the estate fiduciary's financial, commercial and legal conduct and misconduct in real time, regularly reporting in with micro-crunched data and reasoned bottom lines. I require genuinely full estate fiduciary transparency and accountability in real time, all the time. Every act, every omission, every person, every cent. MHNA then takes those data — and we also log absent data — and test, scrutinise, analyse, validate and evaluate them per datum. We track and nail the deep detail — good and bad alike — of the estate fiduciary's every move, in real time, all the time. I am methodical, systematic, scientific and unrelenting.

Baseline calibrations: The estate's and the customer heir's best interests will fluctuate, sometimes dramatically, according to current reality. To ascertain appropriate absolute and relative baselines, we begin by mastering the estate and the situation. MHNA aims for a demonstrable, tested grasp of its character, peculiarities, business, needs, strengths, weaknesses, vulnerabilities, problems, assets and liabilities, and the principal issues bearing on each of them.

'Team'?: Absolutely, positively, definitely never. MHNA will summarily terminate the customer relationship and all relevant transactions, all rights reserved, if we discover we are working in, as part of, or with a 'team'. It's that bad.

"Ahem. if i may. you appear determined — most admirably, if i may say so — to pioneer a subject that, however universal and deplorable, just hasn't caught on anywhere with any of the usual authorities anywhere. victim heirs are still marooned in chancery or probate court, or even in defamation court, or some other civil court, praying to find a decent rottweiler to fight their corner and getting nowhere even with their own lawyers, who are trying to screw him. police and prosecutors don't know the problem even exists and are stuck, like a broken vinyl, on "It's a civil matter". lawyer criminals and all the other inheritance criminals know to a flat certainty that they will all definitely get away with whatever they pull. the terrified, intimidated, disoriented, disillusioned, demoralised, dejected, demeaned, degraded victim heir slinks off with his tail between his legs to lick his open wounds, consider his various absurd options — BECAUSE INHERITANCE CRIME IS NOT THE DEVELOPED SUBJECT IT NEEDS TO BE — and anyway and above everything else no-one anywhere gives a living crap about what happens to a few wealthy heir types who can well afford to lose what they never had in the first place. this is the situation. correct?" I think so, yes.
 

Multiple victimisation: The dysfunctional estate manager will steal estate money in elaborately concocted bogus fees and expenses, and expose and damage the estate in elaborately bungled estate business, all formulated, calculated, executed and defended by bluff, bluster and bullshit. But that's all only the beginning for the victim heir, who faces finding and paying lawyers to try to help him, and enduring often elaborate, time-consuming, protracted and uncertain judicial and other processes to try to get the estate made whole — a comprehensive ordeal during which the inheritance criminal's destructive pillage continues, including in order to cover her tracks and protect herself and her gang.

Stunned etc.: After that, the heir may already have become stunned and worn down by both the inheritance criminal's perceived protracted, embedded criminality — inheritance criminality is typically chronic — and from the frustration of trying to get traction on it, with every protest a pretext for the estate fiduciary to spend yet more estate money paying herself and others to exacerbate the misconduct. The victim heir might not consider himself to be in a fit psychological state to articulate the problem or rationally retain yet more help; his relevant archive may be disorganized; his own unsuitable, self-professedly specialist lawyers may be frustratingly unresponsive, dilatory, vague and ineffectual; clinical demoralisation may have set in. The legal and cultural decks are often fully stacked against him. He is often technically ill-equipped and out-manoeuvred by the inheritance criminal's creativity. Individual victim heirs usually lack the psychological and intellectual machinery to effectively protect and defend the estate or themselves timeously or affordably, and may reconcile themselves to being powerless, comprehensively traumatised victims, their behavior 'modified' by the dishonest estate fiduciary (the same happens in law, medicine and other service industries).

MHNA interactions: MHNA has arm's-length professional access to, and is happy to work with, some genuinely appropriate independent experts. But it would be misleading to say we know a whole bunch of people switched on to inheritance criminality. The whole point is that, presently, it is not an established discipline. We are always looking for the brightest, most intellectually accessible practitioners to help us, both generally and in individual cases, including accountants, auditors, business experts, data analysers, data archivists, data crunchers, data visualisers, eufunctional estate managers, finance experts, former law enforcement and regulatory personnel, intelligence specialists, programmers, psychiatrists, psychologists, private detectives, statisticians, rehabilitated estate fiduciary criminals, retired judges, and practising, not practising and retired lawyers.

Nosing around: Nothing escapes. We treat every brick wall as a crime scene. Acquiring, compiling, sorting and studying known and known-unknown, present and absent raw data from the estate fiduciary — especially partial, self-serving data — is just the beginning of what we do.

Pixelated micro-granular data analysis: MHNA uses proprietary and other data analysis tools, and lots of 2D, 3D and 4D graphics and tables, to plot, map, model and track all raw data in real time as they come in. We log, deconstruct, pixelate, archive and index such financial, commercial, legal and other disclosure as the estate fiduciary happens to make, sortable by fields including person, date, issue, document, transaction and money. Every element is pixelated and fully searchable by multiple fields. Our system and method will pick up, label and track suspicious objects, trends, activities and spending and net value. We automatically alert the customer heir to odd, inconsistent, incongruous, suspicious and missing information, and where our models indicate the estate is headed.

Scrutiny: We scrutinise honesty, good faith, expertise, transparency, utility, timing, pacing, speed, risk, cost, process, results and net value within the general or detailed procedural, substantive, financial, administrative, methodological, technical and other tolerances specified by each customer heir. We are especially alert to games and gaming, ruses, scams, justifications, pretexts, rationalisations, falsifications, fabrications, churning, bluff, bluster, bullshit, wastage, risk, endangerment, irrationality, dishonesty, 'fraud', corruption, incompetence, negligence and stupidity, especially by lawyers. We deep-scrutinise every act and omission of the target estate fiduciary within the issue, fee-earner, time, risk, money and other tolerances stipulated by the customer. We look at two bottom lines: the estate fiduciary's past, present and future conduct, and her past, present and future misconduct. We monitor, track, shadow, log, model, scrutinise, validate, evaluate and value everything. We alert the customer heir when we see or suspect any misconduct or irregularity anywhere. Where appropriate, we certify that every detail of estate management has been conducted properly, fully and timeously per issue, fee-earner, bill and other factor, and withhold certification wherever appropriate. We suspect interim and final reports, interim and final financial statements, all fees, all expenses, all inner-, back- and front-office activity and inactivity, all recourse activity, and everything else.

More scrutiny: MHNA systematically and scientifically scrutinises and measures the estate fiduciary's financial, commercial, legal, technical and general performance. We separate an estate's management into its relevant phases, stages, levels and layers using a proprietary multi-dimensional grid which captures the estate fiduciary's every act and omission by date, fiduciary, issue, fee, expense, process, product and result. Everything is noted, logged, timelined, archived, considered, analysed, processed, validated, evaluated and net valued. We can perform deep-detail financial, commercial and legal structural and transactional audits of reports, bills, fees, costs, expenses, accounts and business transactions. Anything unobjectionable elicits a tick and a shrug. It never merits congratulation.

Simulations: I especially like to map, model and simulate where, on every issue, the estate is actually headed and the alternatives. MHNA can alert the customer heir to estate fiduciary joyriding, especially if it's towards or over a cliff on reinvented wheels.

Alarm bells: Anything that fails any relevant MHNA smell test will ring various alarms which we immediately convey to and urgently discuss in detail with the customer heir. Tracking the pixels individually and collectively in real time, our services include three-dimensional monitoring, supervising, scrutinising, reviewing, critiquing, evaluating and net-valuing of the estate fiduciary's every known and unknown act and omission, including using real-deal to real-deal, and real-deal to raw-deal, comparisons.

remuneration analysis: The quicker and cheaper a high-value estate can be dispositively managed by the real deal, the greater the financial incentive for the dishonest or delusional raw deal, spirited, incentivised, protected, shielded, paid by the hour, to protract, complexify and mess it up — all the way to the bank on the captive estate trust fund dollar. A plausibly protracted and justified 'complex', 'difficult' estate management willfully tangled in lucrative knots spells self-generating, self-sustaining layers of self-enrichment for the estate fiduciary and trouble for the concerned heir. No estate fiduciary should ever charge or be paid by the hour, or by the estate's 'value' (however valued). Ever. MHNA net-values the estate fiduciary and assists in establishing a fair value for his services. It will not be a percentage of the estate's value or a success fee. It will be an objectively appropriate figure based solely on the amount and duration of net-valued work (and I have a simple formula for it).

Estate fiduciary's expenses analysis: Costs, fees, outgoings, disbursements, expenses — whatever fancy confusing names the estate fiduciary wants to use, to us they're just expenses, and each one, however small, is an annoyance demanding investigation. We scrutinise the estate fiduciary's personal and professional expenses throughout and draw up a comprehensive account, analysis and report. Where it is appropriate to require the estate fiduciary to repay or reimburse the estate, we will say so with particulars.
Computing, verifying, evaluating, validating and net-valuing expenses is about as easy as it gets, if we know about them.
However many there are, however obfuscated, we can log, track, investigate, analyse and report on all of them by day, biller, issue, ground, excuse, pretext, screwup and any other criterion you stipulate.

Deconstructing, reconstructing and evaluating everything: When we've dredged and drudged all available data, MHNA can start thinking about them, and exactly what's going on generally and specifically. We help you decipher, interpret and understand exactly what the estate fiduciary is and isn't telling you, and why. Is there a trend or pattern of criminality, including criminality she may have pulled off previously against other victim heirs or trust beneficiaries? An estate fiduciary's every act and omission should be continually examined and validated microscopically and multi-dimensionally. Every word, nuance, evasion, pretext, hesitation, bill, expense, penny, act, omission, plan, simulation, estimate, ceiling, budget, colleague, dynamic and gross and net effect. If anyone tells you any differently, s/he doesn't know how to do it, or doesn't want to do it, or doesn't want you to do it.

"Stop. WAIT! this all sounds very heavy-duty to me. I'm not convinced I need all of this." I don't want to convince you. And you can hire MHNA only for what you do need (if anything).

Routine and special lab work: Inheritance crime is not a conundrum or conjecture that needs solving. It's illegal conduct — usually blindingly obvious — that needs nailing quickly, thoroughly and cost-effectively. MHNA looks closely at locally defined criminal misconduct by each estate participant on the lines of non-disclosure, misrepresentation, abuse of position, theft, embezzlement, false accounting, conspiracy, corruption, perjury, money laundering, organised crime, coercion and extortion. If something attracts attention, we will lab it. We treat every estate situation, and the work of the heir's own advisers, and the output of judges, as one big crime scene until we are certain otherwise.

On top of it, not underneath: To ensure the customer heir is on top of every known detail of estate management and not underneath it, MHNA systematically and scientifically logs, tracks, monitors, investigates, analyses, validates, evaluates, and net values all the estate fiduciary's financial, commercial and legal conduct and misconduct in real time, regularly reporting in with micro-crunched data and reasoned bottom lines. We track and trail every issue. We are attuned to estate fiduciaries' bluff, bluster and defensiveness. We apply billing forensics, transaction forensics, modelling, simulating, cost estimate and cost-benefit analyses: what is the estate fiduciary really up and how does it affect her and the estate's financial bottom lines, and play to her criminal career agenda? 

Reporting in writing: We form and express clear, quantified, bottom-line opinions on the quality and honesty of the estate fiduciary's work, and whether and precisely what criminal, civil, regulatory and disciplinary misconduct may have been committed and by whom (this is not law advice, it is simply fact-finding). We report and provide opinions, at times and on issues, as required by the customer heir. In each relevant criminal, civil, regulatory and disciplinary jurisdiction, we work to relevant legal standards, court rules and evidentiary requirements. We can report to the customer heir regularly and irregularly, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, etc on every issue, problem, person, bill, act, omission, cent and other detail of how the estate fiduciary and her associates have been and are handling, managing and mismanaging your inheritance. We prepare draft questionnaires and letters the heir or his lawyer can send the estate fiduciary. We're ready to analyse holding, partly responsive and fully responsive replies. We are especially interested in judicial procedural, substantive and costs decisions intelligible only in terms of direct or indirect graft.

Liaising with fiduciaries, lawyers and accountants: It is up to the customer heir to tell or not tell the estate fiduciary that we are on his case. We can work invisibly in the background or openly the foreground, overtly or covertly, obtrusive or unobtrusive, locally or remotely, and anything in between. We don't expect every estate fiduciary to like us scrutinising her every act and omission. We avoid giving any pretext for dislike. We aim to be scrupulously professional at all times in everything we do: punctilious, discreet, diplomatic, tactful, circumspect, fair, careful, neutral and unrelenting. No comprehensively sound estate fiduciary has anything to fear from our presence or our work. We can also interact with heir factions, law enforcement, prosecutors, regulators, professional bodies and appropriate others.

Shadow accounts: We'll keep at least three sets of shadow accounts: a set literally based on the estate fiduciary's, a set that aims to reproduce the estate fiduciary's own secret second set, and a real-world set. We take the estate fiduciary's estate accounts and throw them into our own proprietary account machinery so we can see exactly what is going on financially. We mesh all that with estate transactions, fees, expenses, reports, and other documents to try to find false accounting, missing money, questionable and dubious financial transactions. We aggregate and consolidate all available numbers. We produce analyses of gross and net fees, expenses, disbursements and other costs per issue, fee-earner, person, adversary, issue, item. We pay special attention to the estate fiduciary's disclosure of her budgets, cost estimates, fees, expenses, billing targets, firm financial models and her handling of estate assets.

shadow logs and archives: We'll keep a separate set of records. We'll log everything and archive every document. So you don't have to. And we'll look out for stuff and tell you when we think anything is missing, incomplete or has been tampered with or falsified.  

Estate diary, calendar, ledgers: We keep a diary of past and future estate events, including whatever the estate fiduciary has and has not done, is intending to do, should do, doesn't want to do, etc. We send you periodic reminders, alerts, accounts etc. as stipulated.

shadow estate management: We like to have from the estate fiduciary, in real time and continually, the whole truth and nothing but the whole truth, to demonstrably put the customer heir on genuinely equal terms with the estate fiduciary. We set up a shadow estate management to include shadow plans, cost estimates, models, simulations, transactions, accounts, logs, archives and other devices that mirror, test and rate everything the estate fiduciary does and doesn't do according to her own terms and as calibrated to the real deal. We aggregate and consolidate all available raw data, and create and maintain ledgers, books, accounts, logs and archives.

'Do you use AI where appropriate?' Yes. Cautiously.

Data analysis: We use data analysis and graphics to plot, map, model and track all raw data in real time as they come in. We log, deconstruct, pixelate, archive and index such financial, commercial, legal and other disclosure as the estate fiduciary happens to make, sortable by fields including person, date, issue, document, transaction and money. We pay special attention to the estate fiduciary's disclosure of her budgets, cost estimates, fees, expenses and her handling of estate business, transactions, assets and liabilities.

Real data in real time: We believe our customers should be as informed as we are about his affairs. His entire file is available 24-7-365 to him through our password-protected, secure encrypted online dashboard service. At any time online, you can access your case's fully inventoried, logged, annotated, modelled, simulated library — the estate fiduciary's own disclosure plus the dynamic databases, accounts, graphs and timelines that we then produce — to find out the exact state of the estate. See the correlations. Fun!

Missing, false and suspect data: How do you know the estate fiduciary has given you the real thing? Forgery, falsification, fabrication and concealment are the stock in trade of the inheritance criminal. It has to be. We get on the authenticity case. Estate fiduciaries lose, camouflage, conceal, hide, fabricate, forge, falsify and deform data all the time, including by providing irrelevant data to confuse you. We can identify and report on that racket. It leads to two files: the files actually provided by the estate fiduciary, and the same file with the perverted data highlighted, so you can see the discrepancies instantly. We alert the customer heir to odd, inconsistent, incongruous, suspicious and missing information, and where our models indicate the estate is headed on every issue in every location.

"Me again. What, exactly, precisely and specifically, makes you so sure that your traumatised, traduced, taken-to-the-cleaners customer heir is going to get a bent dime, net, from having anything to do with MHNA and enduring a long process of investigation, examination, elucidation, banging on the locked door of his local law enforcement, criminal trial if he's lucky in front of a gauche naïve jury against practised professional criminals, all in addition to being fleeced in the first place? With all due respect, isn't the victim heir much better off to just let himself be brazenly, flagrantly, outrageously, monstrously criminally hosed of his inheritance and escape, if he can, with what's left, if anything? And not risk the uncertainties of chance'ry court, or any other civil court, where he might not get a bent dime either. Isn't all that the safest thing for him to do? Isn't that what all victim heirs already do, and for good reason? Doesn't MHNA have a heck of a task ahead of both it and its customers to change what works so well right now for everyone? Well? Answer the question." You are correct in everything you say. Let the victims take their lumps. 'Suck it up', I believe is the expression; and let's not forget 'It is what it is.'

"'She'?" We've heard that 90% of professional inheritance criminals are women. I can well believe it, and it closely fits my own experience. Every inheritance criminal is required and entitled to be judged on his or her de-gendered merits. We make no allowances for — we give no latitude, exemptions or privileges to — female inheritance criminals no matter what act they pull, including bad hair days, missed episodes of her favorite soap, someone tore out a page of her favorite magazine at the hairdresser, the mascara is running, it's the wrong time of the month to be an honest fiduciary, it's the right time of the month to be an inheritance criminal, "I'm just a frail feeble female in a man's world — I thought I'd give it a shot — I should get points for effort", etc. It's questionable whether such things, not fully disclosed or approved at any previous relevant time or ratified afterwards, rolled out only after the event when she is finally nailed, are even relevant. 
Standards and assumptions: for us, there are no standards higher than those morally and legally branded on a fiduciary for hire.
 We won't hesitate to identify — for our customer heirs — fiduciaries, lawyers, judges, legislators, regulators and appropriate others for any evidenced infraction of any fiduciary standard. We assume that every honest estate fiduciary will behave and is behaving comprehensively negligently and will, at a minimum, overbill the estate 'honestly'; and that every dishonest estate fiduciary will criminally pillage, endanger and damage the estate in any and every way she can, for as long as she can, until the money runs out. We require every estate fiduciary to continually prove us wrong with whole-truth primary source material genuinely fully disclosed in real time.

Exposure, pursuit and remediation: Obvious priorities include (for example):-

• extricating the estate from the obdurately dysfunctional fiduciary. Sometimes this isn't so easy, especially if the victim is a minority heir and all the other heirs think nothing is amiss or amissing. A corrupt or lazy court may not see it your way. Imaginative strategies and tactics might be required here

• obtaining genuinely full and comprehensive disclosure

• taking feasible, affordable, realistic steps to stop and reverse every inappropriate gain to the fiduciary, and rectify every inappropriate exposure, endangerment, loss and damage to the estate.

Our damage control services include robustly reporting, presenting and elucidating the problem, with all available evidence in perfect order, to law enforcement, regulators and courts to promote and facilitate appropriate criminal, civil, regulatory, disciplinary and other legal action.

Miscellaneous MHNA services: MHNA is available to give in-depth tutorials to families on the perils of estate management; what to look out for; administering the smell test; avoiding certain types of lawyer and accountant; why falling out with each other on anything is a gift to an inheritance criminal; how to avoid getting discredited and disregarded by an inheritance criminal; why appointing a dominant heir is a bad idea. And private tutorials, workshops and bootcamps: My personal presentations are cogent and engaging. I can elucidate, demystify and explain anything except mathematics. I can train and motivate a victim heir to go through his ordeal and come out much stronger. Away-from-home vacation bootcamps include Speaking Up For Yourself for litigants in person; Dealing With Your Crooked Saboteur Lawyer; Keeping and Using Records, Logs, Ledgers, Books, Accounts and Archives; Understanding the Local Legal System etc. Of course MHNA will also make appropriate forensic technical presentations to judges and juries.

"WAIT! PAUSE BUTTON! you're telling me that inheritance crime is endemic (you're probably right). that police and prosecutors know and want to know nothing about it (ditto). that criminal courts and criminal juries are totally unfamiliar with it (same). that there are no specialist inheritance crime lawyers anywhere (dunno about that, but again you're probably right, 'cos where the heck are they?) that no-one else is trying to establish this subject (maybe yes, maybe no). that no-one else comes close to you in anything relevant (egad!). so with all that, how can you be so sure time and money invested by your victim heir customers in MHNA services, all that effort, is going to produce anything, such as, for example, a conviction and a prison sentence in a particular case?" I'm not.

Bailing the cornered inheritance criminal: If cornered, the miscreant estate fiduciary will probably try to keep lucratively brazening it all out to the bitter end on the estate's dollar, emboldened by the absence of established tools to expose her. Billing all the way, she may even relish the chase as yet another source of 'reputation', and realise the necessity of an all-or-nothing bluff to preserve her practice for the next victim: that's her business model and her operating method, for herself, her associates (who may not all realise what she's really up to) and her victims.

Talking her way out of it: We can assist with detailed back-office and front-office deal parameters and appropriate negotiations if, uncharacteristically, she starts looking for a way out having made genuinely full whole-truth disclosure and offers to make genuine full confession, expiation, restitution, recompense and compensation, and turn herself in to law enforcement. It is not for us but for our genuinely fully informed customer heir to show forbearance to the exposed dysfunctional, dishonest, criminal, corrupt, incompetent estate fiduciary. MHNA gives customer heirs the facts and data to decide for themselves.
 

Deep due diligence: We do deep, comprehensive due diligence on the estate fiduciary and other relevant parties — lawyers, appraisers, valuers, auctioneers, realtors, bankers, investment advisers, etc. — and their respective (sometimes intersecting) circles. We ascertain whether the estate fiduciary has the aptitude, expertise, experience, record, independence and other qualities to properly, fully and timeously handle all her assumed and assigned estate fiduciary tasks honestly, efficiently, effectively and cost-effectively. We correlate her skills, weaknesses, acts, omissions, games and other phoney-baloney to the estate's needs. We ascertain what real deal qualities, attributes and talents are required, and measure initially and throughout how she measures up to that baseline. We alert the customer heir to relevant anomalies including conflicts of interest, phoney credentials, concealed past, deficient record, lack of expertise and experience, and other danger signs. MHNA can evaluate estate representatives, and others. Our proprietary list of questions, inquiries and sources allows for no shades of grey. We give an unequivocal 'yes' or 'no' based on what we've evaluated.

What her cv omits: What's not in the resumé of a person of interest is important and probably significant. Surprising how little 3D due diligence is done on estate fiduciaries, including everything relevant about their personal and professional lives and their micro-suitability to manage your particular estate with all its peculiarities, vulnerabilities, weaknesses and opportunities. We replace that culture of lassitude, laziness and complexity with one of business-sense, common-sense skepticism and vigilance. We'll report back and tell you what your estate fiduciary is really up to, whether that resumé checks out and is complete, and what she hasn't told you — and why. As the estate fiduciary's grip on the estate trust fund tightens, we can look into her changing personal and professional lifestyle.

The inheritance crime scene: It's not just an estate crime scene. It's a real-life real-world inheritance crime scene. What does it look like? A paradoxical mix of incorrigible stupidity and, on the other hand, instinctive, cold, calculated, calculating, shrewd, cunning, committed criminality, indefinite in time, scope, range and extent. These people are not so stupid. The fiduciary estate crime scene has all the calculation and phoney financial complexity of, say, investment fund manager criminality, plus lots of plausible, wholly bogus legal filler. This mix helps the inheritance criminal evade the vigilance of experienced forensic accountants, two-dimensional auditors (who, I insist, are likely to know absolutely nothing about it and will likely be positively dangerous to the victim heir — yes, yet another mess for the poor guy — when pretending to investigate the merits of an inheritance crime transaction in full context), and 'fraud' police, and regulators, and judges, and juries, and often, if not usually, the victim heir's own clueless or collusive lawyers. I keep telling you that this is a specialist subject where the generalist is likely to try to fake it and where the victim heir needs every advantage he can get. See, you're making me write italics! MHNA brings insider insights into relevant law, legal practice, legal systems, legal cultures, dysfunctional lawyers and unusual estates that professionals typically or definitely do not have. MHNA knows what real-deal and criminal estate management and inheritance delivery look like.

defamation, discrediting of victim by perpetrator: defense, attack: I like this one. Criminally alleging actionable defamation and criminally threatening comprehensively criminal defamation litigation is the first resort of the scoundrel against the victim heir who has dared to take his problem to others and those others have betrayed him to the inheritance criminal (yes, I have whole-truth stories all about it). Credibly, effectually, cost-effectively meeting this preposterous, outrageous challenge involves a thorough grasp of relevant facts; rigorous, relentless, ruthless rationality; and fluency in relevant laws on whole truth, accuracy, authenticity, publication, defamation, crime and free speech. MHNA can provide all that. "You say that being properly, lawfully called out as a criminal is actionably defamatory? Happy to look at that, at your expense, once you give, in the next 48 hours, full particulars of exactly what you say is defamatory, and exactly why you say it's defamatory, plus full conclusive authentic whole-truth, micro-particularised refutation on every point plus genuinely full disclosure, accounting, elucidation, etc etc. And until you do, I'm going to keep defaming the living crap out of you." Surprising how few scoundrel lawyers reply to that one.

Dishonesty analysis: Irrefutable conclusive evidence of dishonesty is useful when alleging dishonesty. Estate fiduciaries and their associates are skilled in laying a debris trail that looks pristine to someone unfamiliar with the estate and with criminal estate fiduciary methods. Here's where police and prosecutors will likely struggle even if — which is unlikely — they've genuinely mastered all other relevant facts. We'll look closely at the dishonesty that only long-in-the-tooth, incorruptible expert lawyers may genuinely pick up.

"Seems like no picnic, what MHNA is embarked upon." Correct. And I'm not going to sugar-coat it for you. You're looking at a lot of very determined lawyer criminals and others criminals — cold, calculated greed and the most flagrant criminality committed by lawyers in the ordinary course of their professional practice and official functions with the help of corrupt co-heirs and regulators and police and judges and so on — all likely heavily invested and mutually dependent; entire communities of professionals who should be able to help but know and want to know nothing about it (the caseload doesn't justify it); millions of dollars or pounds or euros or Swiss francs or whatever in stolen, embezzled, lost, wasted, thrown away, given away, relinquished, discarded, sequestered estate assets — cash, art, investments, jewelry, whatever; and maybe elder abuse, and will and codicil forgery; and an innocent, rightfully expectant victim heir — yes, a potentially wealthy or even more wealthy expectant victim heir, and there's nothing wrong with that. In these circumstances, I say 'no' to polite chancery, probate and or other civil litigation (except the right sort of defamation litigation in the right case), with effete, squeamish, rapacious, dilatory, corrupt, disloyal, hopelessly ineffectual, fancy predators (to speak only of the victim heir's own lawyers: I have plenty of recent real-life horror stories for you); at least not as the victim heir's only possible approach. I say that someone has to do something sensible now to drag the perps by their dirty fingernails directly and effectually into the criminal justice system as well as into every other relevant system. That person would be me (and of course everyone else presently trying to do the same; and hopefully others, as practical forensic inheritance criminology, or whatever you want to call it, catches on as a professional discipline).

"Your pre-inheritance-crime law practice, centuries ago?" Before inheritance crime, my law practice touched on a significant part of the London insurance market: Lloyd's of London, a long-misunderstood subject of chronic, pandemic, brazen and rapacious malpractice by its practitioners. It included very-high-value international commercial transactions and high-value private client transactions. I wrote technical articles and books and made numerous technical peer-to-peer presentations to specialist lawyers (the relatively few who were not full of it and who genuinely wanted to get it right: it was hopeless because the subject was so intricate, on such corrupted foundations, and the good-guy lawyers could have never surmounted the learning curve on their own), exposing both how that enterprise really worked and how dishonest lawyers on both sides were getting it materially and lucratively wrong. In just one case (to give you one example), my unprecedented, pioneering, uncontroverted analyses and allegations resulted in a Lloyd's US corporate old-years policyholder obtaining — just from the Astor component of the case — more than one hundred million dollars compensation for bad-faith claims handling.

Let me put it this way: I cracked the Lloyd's-Equitas front-office claims and claims handling double-ended, double-edged super-mega-scams: the scams being pulled by Lloyd's of London and Equitas on American old-years APH corporate assureds-at-Lloyd's, and the scams being pulled on those very same policyholders by their very own American specialist policyholder-side insurance lawyers, who knew next to nothing about their whole subject and were basically just making it up (they said the most absurd things!). The assured-at-Lloyd's was so often a victim of his own charlatan lawyers.

I opened the door to the right lawyers in the right cases in the right US jurisdictions being able credibly to claim, in aggregate, billions of dollars out of Lloyd's for bad-faith — criminal — claims handling, including for pulling that atrocious "let's just share" Equitas nonsense. Here there are two scams going on: the assured-at-Lloyd's was a victim of Lloyd's and Equitas on both the claim and the claims handling, for a grand total, with the nonsense from their own lawyers, of three macro-scams being pulled on the assured-at-Lloyd's (and any number of micro-scams).

So did I have these charlatan policyholder-side lawyers beating down my door asking for the formula to get their clients full payment from Lloyd's with no claims handling nonsense? OF COURSE NOT! For all the work, my shtick ended up being rather under-stated and under-utilised. The policyholders lost out from Lloyd's, from Equitas, and from their own lawyers. It was only for the very few — but that constituency alone tapped into billions of dollars using the Astor approach. Imagine if it had gone mainstream! We did have a few conferences, but I think only for the courageous and clean-of-conscience, and the curious. The majority of US old-years assured-side lawyers didn't want to know, didn't want their corporate counsel clients to know, and didn't want them to know that each of them didn't know. This was a community of lawyers already professionally and financially committed to and heavily invested in very profitably giving the wrong information, the wrong opinions and the wrong advice to their policyholder-side corporate clients, and corporate counsel committed to giving the wrong ditto to their boards and shareholders (I allude to all this in my collected articles ebook). For these American maven lawyers — patsies to Lloyd's and Equitas — to have changed course and done it the Astor way would have been to lose face, lose business, and set themselves up for who knows what fraudulent malpractice claims; the damages would have been astornomical. So no, that didn't happen en masse. (A few policyholder-side lawyers DID get it and DID accurately — to a point — inform and advise their clients and DID go for Lloyd's and Equitas for bad-faith claims handling. But there was no movement and, so far as I know, little or no publicity, especially of the confidential arbitrations.)

To continue the personal digression: The board and shareholders of the multiply victimised US corporate APH assured-at-Lloyd's never even knew that it was being hosed, and still don't know, and maybe the corporation still uses the same lawyers. (I wouldn't be surprised if, at the time, those lawyers demurred from pointing their corporate counsel customers to my books and articles. Corpulescent corporate counsel wouldn't have understood them anyway.) Billions of dollars in claims money, and billions of dollars in triple damages for bad-faith claims handling (not speculative at all if you know what you're doing), have been left on the table by these sagacious types all the way to the bank. And those specialist American lawyers weren't the only ones. I've seen the most atrocious garbage on the subject from eminent English lawyers and English judges who had no idea what they were talking about. (Were they doing it on instructions, so to speak?) (If anyone finds any of this personally or professionally objectionable, you're welcome to contact me for a discussion. Bring your complete file and a fully representative sample of the folks you took to the cleaners.)

I suppose this multi-billion-dollar, multi-faceted criminality, including by self-professedly expert lawyers, in positions of extreme trust because of their self-professed expertise, has been excellent training. It informs my approach to other stuff like inheritance lawyer criminals and inheritance crime on high-value, intricate, vulnerable estates. The victim criminally deep-hosed by the main gang, and criminally deep-hosed — idiopathically and or supportingly; corruptly and or gratuitously; in the inner office, back office, front office, recourse and everywhere else, on every relevant issue — by his own trusted, self-professedly expert lawyers pretending to know what they're doing and to be doing it. Sounds familiar?

Too much? Too difficult? If you find yourself yawning over this discussion, then you're not getting the grand, multi-dimensional, multi-faceted scale of this stiff-collar crime, how much work goes into uncovering and exposing it, how much money is involved, how much misery is inflicted on the victims, the vested interests of the lawyer perpetrators, and how necessary it is for someone to deal with it properly and openly. MHNA is not for you. We have the inheritance crime scene covered for victim heirs who do get it.

Inheritance crime: when is it really over? Whatever the practised perpetrators' criminal tactics such as a 'final' distribution and 'final' criminal accounts, and whatever the craven, supine, dejected, delusional, irrational victim heir might prefer to think, inheritance crime never really is over until the criminals stop and remedy all their criminality: genuinely full whole-truth confession + disclosure + accounting on everything relevant; full expiation, restitution, recompense, compensation and due deterrent-style punishment publicly administered through the criminal justice system. And stolen estate assets might show up at any time in the future, raising important issues about estate management, title, the entitlement of criminal heirs, the costs of recovery, etc. Until all of that and the rest, how can it be over?

"By the way — just wondering — is there something more to what you're doing? Are you, by any chance, trying to stick it to lawyer criminals generally, which would not be surprising given your experiences? As in conveying to lawyer criminals, however they might choose to victimise their own clients, in whatever subject, that the criminal justice system might be waiting for them, that they can't con all the regulators, disciplinary tribunals, civil courts, ombudsmen, corrupt directory editors, corrupt trade press journalists and so on all the time? that they have to reckon with the criminal justice system?" Yes. Inheritance crime by lawyers is a sub-set of crime by lawyers. I contend that secret billing targets, fabricated not-verifiable timesheets, delegating to unsuitable juniors, back-office draft churning, front-office negotiation churning and transaction churning, dishonest litigation, lying to the customer about capabilities, impersonating an expert and humiliating the customer (all very entertaining to an expert), being a downright charlatan, and ordinary everyday commonplace messing about of this kind are, well, downright criminal. And not always as low-grade, harmless, inconsequential, spontaneous or jovial as you might think. I've seen cohorts of expensive lawyers chronically, structurally, lucratively lie to their credulous, gullible, uninformed, misinformed customers, and bluff, bluster, bullshit, bamboozle and brazen it all out all over the place, and dig the most appalling holes for themselves and their victim customers in fulsomely billed multi-million-dollar transactions. In the cases I have in mind, the customers have never found out (customer ignorance) or done anything about it (customer disorganisation and cowardice). If only victimised customers, police and prosecutors could be bothered to treat lawyer crime as CRIME, we might be able to start to clean up the law profession generally, and inheritance crime, and inheritance lawyer criminals, with it. So far as I know, there is no lawyer specialty, not even a textbook, on lawyer crimes or lawyer criminals: nothing to educate, prepare, alert and fortify the customer. There should be special criminal courts, and maybe specially trained juries, and police and prosecutors with the necessary expertise, experience and backbone. They would all be backed up with work for years. As for MHNA, every lawyer, in every case handled by the firm, be he ever so affable, is a suspect. And let's not overlook one fundamental: the lawyer is the criminal principal or co-principal and or the before, during and after criminal accessory in vertical stacks of acute and chronic offenses. (You should try mapping, timelining and offense-lining your nearest intricate inheritance crime case to see just how involved it gets, on any number of levels, by locations, issues, perpetrators and degrees of perpetration, days, minutes, estates, levels, layers, each field and each combination of fields individually, in combination and collectively — it's interesting practical utilisation of set theory and combinatorics. MHNA produces grimly informative multi-dimensional graphics on these lines.)

I bring to MHNA the stamina, vigor, tenacity, determination, motivation, and personal interest to do the right thing: to look after every estate, to go after every dysfunctional estate fiduciary, to help MHNA customer heirs deal properly and thoroughly with the wicked inheritance criminals victimising them. To confront what victim heirs are up against and try to do something solid about it. Every shirking of that moral responsibility and intellectual duty is a victory in advance, impunity for life, for inheritance criminals.