The Prisoner - By Janet Phelan

• Posted by Scamraider on May 7, 2010 at 3:00pm
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Dr. Joseph Zernik had become very persistent. The fifty four year old former college professor had been accumulating a large amount of data supporting his perceptions that the US federal courts and the Los Angeles court system were involved in systematic fraud upon those accessing those courts. Zernik alleges the fraud appears to be linked to the digitalization of court records, when the new computer systems introduced layers of obfuscation to previously transparent processes.

Dr. Zernik, who has a PhD in molecular biology and a holds a doctor of dentistry degree and had taught at both the University of Connecticut and the University of Southern California, decided to make his findings public. He launched a campaign to get this information into the hands of the media, and began emailing and calling various publications and reporters. The information was technical and fairly complex and met with a somewhat puzzled but polite response from reporters. Zernik had become adamant that the impact of this fraud decimated many of the constitutional protections that our justice system promises. In the face of an unresponsive press, he went ahead and registered at examiner.com and was attempting to master the journalistic skills to write his findings as news reports, himself.

On January 31, 2010, this reporter, having toiled over pages of Zernik’s evidence, agreed to write an article summarizing his findings. Within a week, Joseph Zernik was arrested and jailed at Twin Towers in Los Angeles. Joseph Zernik had never been jailed before.

Zernik reports being pulled over on February 6, 2010 by the LaVerne police. Zernik relates that the police did not inform him he had broken a traffic law nor did they write him a ticket. Instead, he states that he was asked if he were indeed Joseph Zernik. When he replied affirmatively, he was told that there were two outstanding bench warrants for his arrest and that he was being taken into custody. The warrants, as it turned out, were for minor vehicle related infractions that were about two years old and which Zernik believed had been resolved. Zernik, who drives an unusual and easily distinguishable make and model of car, thinks he may have been under surveillance.

What happened then and in a subsequent arrest on February 19th is tantamount to a Disneyland “Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride,” littered with court documents issued from non-existent courts, finessed records and computer irregularities of the type which Zernik had previously pigeonholed as fraudulent in other cases.

Dr. Zernik was transported to Twin Towers and booked. According to him, the arresting officer, LaVerne PD Officer McKindly, denied his requests to view the executed warrants. The LaVerne police have also denied requests by this reporter to view these records. However, the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department website lists one warrant as issued from Burbank Municipal Court and one from Beverly Hills. Curiously, Burbank Municipal Court actually ceased to exist about a decade ago, long before that court purportedly issued a warrant for Zernik’s arrest.

From jail, Zernik contacted a bail bondsman, Erika Higgins at Bond Services, for the purposes of issuing a $35,000 bond so he could be released. Higgins researched the matter and told him that the bail had been reduced to $30,000. According to Zernik, he was “alarmed, since it appeared as a potentially deceitful manipulation of records” leaving him subject to possible arrest at a later date. He states he stipulated that Higgins would supply paperwork to support the legal foundation of the arrest, and in particular the bail reduction, as a condition for payment.

Zernik was cut loose. When Higgins failed to keep her end of the bargain, he subsequently stopped payment on the check to her bonds company.

He was then re-arrested on February 19 for failure to make good on his bond check, by parties acting on behalf of the bail bonds company.

Richard Rodriguez, who was involved in this arrest, has refused to speak with this reporter other than to say that “Zernik is a nut who has made a lot of complaints.” He suggested that Zernik’s doctoral degrees were bogus and when informed otherwise, referred this reporter to Erika Higgins. Erika Higgins has declined to respond to questions from this reporter.

What transpired during this February 19th arrest of Dr. Joseph Zernik belongs in the annals of Alice in Wonderland meets Quentin Tarantino. Zernik reports that two men, Richard Rodriguez and a man identified only as “Javier,” showed up at Zernik’s home around noon, dressed in black ninja outfits. He alleges they held him at gunpoint and robbed him of his wallet, credit cards, identification and keys. Zernik says that Rodriguez told him he was being arrested for failure to pay his bond fees. However, Zernik states that Rodriguez did not transport him to jail. Instead, he was held for about eight hours and transported back and forth between Southgate and Twin Towers jail in downtown L.A., as the would-be arrestors first ineptly attempted to extract money from him and then repeatedly failed to produce licenses which the jail would accept as proper to execute the arrest.

Zernik states that he was first hijacked to Southgate. When he refused to provide monies to Rodriguez and Javier, Javier then loaded him into the car stating he was taking him to jail. Javier instead got lost in the maze of the L.A. freeway system, ending up in Culver City. Zernik reports having to direct him back toward downtown LA and to the Twin Towers jail.

When they finally arrived at Twin Towers, it turned out that Javier lacked the proper license and authority to execute the citizen’s arrest. Zernik states that even though the Sheriff’s Department issued a preliminary booking number at 4:53 p.m., the Department refused to accept Zernik into custody from Javier.

Zernik states that Javier then called Rodriguez and asked him to come downtown to complete the arrest. Apparently, Rodriguez did not possess the proper papers either and refused to show up.

At that point, Javier piled Zernik into his car again and took him back to Southgate. Zernik reports there were more attempts to extract monies from him. When he again failed to comply, Javier called “Dave,” who agreed to execute the surrender. Back Zernik went to Twin Towers with “Dave” and his companion, Albert.

Joseph Zernik arrived back at Twin Towers around 8 p.m. He reports that an unnamed Sheriff’s Deputy relieved him of his Braun tungsten watch, valued at about $500, and passed it to Dave. In an interview with this reporter, Steve Whitmore, the media relations representative for the Sheriff’s Department, admitted that this did indeed occur, which is ostensibly in violation of the policies concerning securing inmates’ possessions.

The Deputy then demanded that Zernik sign that he entered custody with no possessions other than his clothes. Zernik refused to do so, insisting that his watch be listed as property. He reports being “violently shoved” into a solitary confinement cell and held in chains there for about four hours. Periodically, he states, a Deputy would enter the cell and exhort him to sign the possessions form. He reports being threatened that his head would be “split open” if he did not and also that he was called degrading and obscene names by the Deputies.

Around midnight, Zernik reports he was “violently removed from the solitary confinement cell” and booked. The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s inmate website lists his booking time at :23 on February 20.

While there is a paucity of documentation available, a booking and property slip survived the ordeal, having been stuck inside Dr. Zernik’s sock. This slip reveals that Zernik had failed to sign the possessions slip at around 9 pm and lists his property only as “clothing worn.” This document supports Zernik’s statements that he declined to sign the slip and that he was later booked at a falsified time.

First thing Monday morning, Zernik was taken to Beverly Hills Court where he resolved his outstanding matter. No valid warrant was found in the court file and no record of warrant execution by the LaVerne police was found, either. Later that day, Joseph Zernik was released.

Upon his release, he filed several complaints with Stephanie Maxberry, the Ombudsman for the Sheriff’s Department. He has stated that, at this point in time, he has not received any complaint numbers to track his complaints. The practice of law enforcement agencies refusing to supply complaint numbers in order to keep a complaint out of the system has been explored in an article entitled, “How the California Justice System covers up Crime Reports.” (http://www.scamraiders.com/profiles/blogs/how-the-california-justice)

Stephanie Maxberry states that Joseph Zernik has been supplied at least one or two complaint numbers. “He just didn’t get the numbers he wanted,” she stated. When asked to provide these numbers, Maxberry refused and declined to discuss the Zernik matter any further.

The only complaint number that this reporter could locate was apparently issued when this reporter first contacted Steve Whitmore, asking questions about Zernik’s arrest. At this time, no complaint numbers attached to Zernik’s own written complaints to the Sheriff’s Department have surfaced.
Mike Genaco, of the Office of Independent Review, promised to look into the matter of the whereabouts of Zernik’s complaint numbers. At the time of going to press, he has not responded to repeated follow up calls.

Erika Higgins hung up on this reporter when contacted for input. Steve Whitmore, media representative for the Department, refused to speak on the Zernik matter after admitting that the Deputy gave Zernik’s watch to the bounty hunter. When told that he would be quoted as refusing to answer questions on Zernik’s allegations, he shot back, “Please do.”

A Los Angeles attorney, speaking on the condition of anonymity, warned this reporter to “stay away” from Joseph Zernik. “He is on a list,” this reporter was told. “He is being watched and followed where ever he goes. Leave him alone or you’ll be watched too.”

“Computerized or Con-puterized: Are the courts defrauding the public through digitalization?” was published on scamraiders.com on March 3, 2010. (http://www.scamraiders.com/profiles/blogs/computerized-or-conputerized)

Epilogue: As of today, May 7, this reporter has been notified that “a group of badge-wearing agents” appeared at Zernik’s residence on April 24th, attempting to apprehend him. A neighbor reports them as “trigger eager.” He was not home at the time and is not clear which agency had shown up at his home, although he suspects it was the US Marshals. Zernik had recently been contacted by a US Marshal Threat Investigator, Deputy Darcy Smith, who was requesting to interview him concerning his communications with a judge on the issue of court corruption and fraud. This reporter has received the communications between Smith and Zernik, wherein he requests the legal authority for the interview request and goes on to supply more information on his work in exposing corruption within the courts. His tone, as usual in his letters to public officials, was professional in nature. At the time of going to press, Deputy Marshal Darcy Smith has not responded to calls from this reporter.

Janet Phelan is an investigative journalist with over twenty years in the saddle. Her articles have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Santa Monica Daily Press, the San Bernardino County Sentinel, the American's Bulletin, Oui Magazine and elsewhere. She is best known for her article "Water As A Weapon" and her investigations on the war against the elderly and vulnerable through the conservatorship and guardianship programs in State Superior Courts. Janet was educated at Grinnell College and U.C. Berkeley, and studied journalism at University of Missouri -Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. Her first book, "The Hitler Poems," was published in 2005.