The Acting Guardian

Prologue

The Two-Thousand-Dollar Rule

To qualify for Medicaid as an elderly adult in New Jersey, a person may keep almost nothing. The regulation sets the ceiling for “available resources” at $2,000. N.J.A.C. 10:71-3.1, -4.5(b), as recited in In re Keri, 181 N.J. 50, 55 n.2 (2004).

Everything above that line — the house, the pension arrears, the savings — must go somewhere first. The law calls this spending down. For forty years, the fights in this story have all been about the same two questions:

Who does the spending? And who is watching them do it?

Act I · 1985

The Promise

In 1985 the Legislature created the Office of the Public Guardian for Elderly Adults — a state guardian for people over sixty with no one left: “where there are no willing and responsible family members or friends to serve as guardian.” L. 1985, c. 298, N.J.S.A. 52:27G-20 et seq.; purpose language at 52:27G-21, quoted in Keri, 181 N.J. at 66-67.

N.J.S.A. 52:27G-25(h) · Powers of the Public Guardian

The Public Guardian “[m]ay intervene in any guardianship or conservatorship proceeding involving a ward … if … an appointed guardian or conservator is not fulfilling his duties, the estate is subject to disproportionate waste because of the costs of the guardianship or conservatorship, or the best interests of the ward require intervention.”

Read that power again. The office was designed to be the antidote to a specific poison: a guardianship that consumes the estate it exists to protect. Hold on to that sentence. This story is about what happened when the antidote became the poison’s largest producer.

Act II · 2004

Mildred Keri’s House

Mildred Keri was ninety, living alone in her New Brunswick home with irreversible dementia. Her two sons visited on alternating days; Meals on Wheels came at noon. After they found the house filled with smoke one day, her sons had the stove disconnected and capped. The house — worth about $170,000 — was nearly everything she had. Her income was $1,575.45 a month.

Her son Richard petitioned to become her guardian and, with the petition, submitted a “Medicaid spend-down plan” for the court’s approval: sell the house, give $92,000 of the proceeds to himself and his brother — the two people her will already named — and keep $78,000 to pay the nursing home privately through the penalty period. Seventeen months later, she would be at the $2,000 line, and Medicaid would take over.

Three courts looked at that plan. The first two recoiled.

Superior Court, Chancery Division · June 26, 2002

The trial court refused to approve strategies designed to “[pauperize] human beings and citizens in the United States solely to make them [wards] of the taxpayers.”

Appellate Division · 356 N.J. Super. 170, 174 (2002)

“Putting euphemisms to one side, the plan, if followed by a competent person, is nothing other than self-imposed impoverishment to obtain, at taxpayers’ expense, benefits intended for the truly needy.”

Amicus curiae · The Public Guardian for Elderly Adults

The Public Guardian took the position that a child-beneficiary serving as guardian should not be permitted to propose a spend-down plan at all — that petitioner “is violating his fiduciary duty to his mother by self-dealing through medicaid planning.”

Note the signatures Hold this brief. Act III reads its caption.

Then, on August 5, 2004, the Supreme Court of New Jersey answered — unanimously, through Chief Justice Poritz:

“This case presents the question whether self-sufficient adult children who serve as their incompetent parents’ legal guardians may transfer to themselves all or part of their parents’ assets in order to hasten their parents’ eligibility for Medicaid benefits. We hold that when certain criteria are satisfied, they may, in order to effectuate a decision their parents would have made if competent.” In re Keri, 181 N.J. 50, 53 (2004) · Poritz, C.J. · Reversed, 6–0 · “Opposed — None.”

“So long as the law allows competent persons to engage in Medicaid planning,” the Court concluded, “incompetent persons, through their guardians, should have the same right, subject to the legal constraints laid out herein.”

Those constraints were real: the Trott criteria — the ward’s care must not suffer, the transfers must go to “the natural objects of the ward’s bounty,” a court must approve, and nothing may contradict what the ward herself would have wanted. Keri was a case about keeping a family’s modest wealth inside the family, with judges watching.

And the Court waved the watchdog off. Declining the Appellate Division’s instruction to bring the Public Guardian into every such case, it found existing safeguards sufficient — accepting the office’s own plea that mandatory participation “would take significant resources away from its important primary function.” 181 N.J. at 67-69.

Act III

The Cast of Keri

Every published opinion carries a caption — the roster of who stood before the Court. The Keri caption, read twenty-two years later, is a casting sheet for this story. Here it is, verbatim from the reporter:

In re Keri, 853 A.2d 909 · counsel of record

“Donald D. Vanarelli argued the cause for appellant, Richard Keri (Mr. Vanarelli, attorney; Mr. Vanarelli and Whitney W. Bremer, on the brief).

Linda S. Ershow-Levenberg argued the cause for amicus curiae New Jersey Chapter of National Academy of Elder Law Attorneys (Fink, Rosner, Ershow-Levenberg, attorneys). …

Peggy Sheahan Knee argued the cause for amicus curiae New Jersey State Bar Association (… Ms. Sheahan Knee, Sharon A. Balsamo, Janet B. Lurie, Sharon Rivenson Mark and Shirley B. Whitenack on the brief).

Edward H. Tetelman, Acting Public Guardian, argued the cause for amicus curiae Office of the Public Guardian for Elderly Adults (Mr. Tetelman, attorney; Mr. Tetelman, Joseph A. Fontana and Helen Dodick, on the briefs).

Daniel J. Jurkovic submitted a brief on behalf of amici curiae National Academy of Elder Law Attorneys and Guardianship Association of New Jersey, Inc. (… Mr. Jurkovic, Sharon Rivenson Mark and Mary E. WanderPolo, on the brief).”

Read the fourth entry twice. The brief warning the Supreme Court that guardian spend-down was self-dealing was argued by an “Acting” Public Guardian — the office was already running on the acting expedient in 2004 — and carried, on the briefs, the names Joseph A. Fontana and Helen Dodick. The people who signed the warning are the people this story is about. Where did the cast go?

**Donald D. Vanarelli**Argued Keri — and won Nineteen years later, appointed the first guardian of Nadia Romanov (June 2023). His own case’s court-authorization safeguards were not followed in hers — Act XVI. 853 A.2d 909 caption; S-8455 judgment 6/7/2023.

**Sharon Rivenson Mark**On two of the amicus briefs State Bar brief and the NAELA/Guardianship Association brief. In February 2025 she joined Meyerson, Fox, Mancinelli & Conte — the firm that recurs at this story’s closings. 853 A.2d 909 caption; mfmclaw.com attorneys page (2025).

Linda S. Ershow-Levenberg, for Fink Rosner Ershow-Levenberg — **Fink, Rosner, Ershow-Levenberg**Argued for the elder-law bar Counsel for amicus NAELA-NJ. The same firm — today Fink Rosner Ershow-Levenberg *Marinaro* — appears inside the Romanov guardianship two decades later, for the ward’s adverse family side. 853 A.2d 909 caption; S-8455 record (2024–26).

the office’s brief —
three signatures,
no portrait among them

Tetelman · Fontana · DodickThe Office of the Public Guardian, as amicus The “Acting” Public Guardian of 2004, and the two lawyers on his briefs: one now holds the office’s recorded power of attorney; the other has held the office itself, as “Acting,” since 2009. 853 A.2d 909 caption; Acts V–VII.

The warning was not ignored by strangers.
It was inherited by its authors.

Act IV

The Inversion

Keri assumed a family at the center: children spending down a parent’s estate so that what remained stayed with “the natural objects of her bounty.” But the same doctrine — sell the house, liquidate the accounts, run the ward down to the $2,000 line — works just as well with no family at all. When the guardian is the State, there are no children to receive what the ward built. There is only the office, its fee schedule, and its accounts.

You do not have to take that characterization on faith. The State Auditor measured the office before Keri and after it, four times across four decades. Watch the line.

Fifteenfold growth in the fiduciary assets of an office whose caseload merely tripled. And the office does not merely manage that money. By statute, it lives on it:

The self-funding architecture · N.J.S.A. 52:27G

-36 — fees charged to wards “shall be retained by the office for the implementation of this act.”

-42 — a dedicated, non-lapsing fund administered by the office; “all interest on monies in the fund shall be credited to the fund.” The float on ward-derived money accrues to the office — not the wards.

-27.1 — the office holds a lien on the ward’s estate for the cost of its own services.

-23 — the office “shall be independent of any supervision or control by the department or any board or officer thereof.”

An office paid out of the estates it controls, keeping the interest on the money it holds, holding a lien on whatever remains, supervised — by the terms of its own charter — by no one. Keri put a judicial blessing on large-scale asset liquidation by guardians. The statute decided who would profit from the liquidating while everyone stopped watching.

Act IV · The Living Ward

The One Thing It Takes From the Living

The office is built to settle the estates of the dead. The one thing it reliably takes from a ward while she is still alive is the authority over how she dies.

The order that appoints the Public Guardian is supposed to be a court form. The Judiciary’s own promulgated judgment — the one a pro se family downloads and files — revokes the ward’s health-care proxy: the person she named to speak for her, now displaced by the guardian. That much is ordinary; a guardian steps into the proxy’s shoes. And where the form touches her advance directive — the instructions she wrote for the end — it is careful: the directive is voided “as to proxy designation” only, and the guardian “shall consider the preferences expressed” in it. The messenger changes; the message survives.

Same paragraph, two different orders

The court’s promulgated form (CN 11802 ¶14; today CN 11988 ¶13) — the advance directive is voided “as to proxy designation”, and the guardian “shall consider the preferences expressed” in it.

OPG’s version — “Any advance directive for healthcare / living will or similar document concerning healthcare executed by [the ward] is hereby revoked.” The preferences clause is gone.

That second sentence is not the court’s. It is OPG’s — and the county land records date it. The office runs its own version of the appointment order, and when a ward owns real estate the self-drafted judgment is recorded with the deed — the one place its text becomes permanently public. A Bergen County instrument embeds the office’s judgment of October 20, 2008, for ward Goldie Jaffe: it revokes her power of attorney and her proxy designation, and hands the office “the authority to make any and all medical decisions … including but not limited to the authority to consent or withhold consent to surgical procedures … and any decisions concerning withdrawal or denial of life support.” Her advance directive itself is left standing. Sixteen months later, a judgment of February 19, 2010 — same county, same office, recorded the same way, the drafter block reading “Helen C. Dodick, Esquire, Acting Public Guardian” — carries the new sentence: the ward’s advance directive “is hereby revoked.” The sentence enters the record months into the acting succession, over the office’s own drafter block, with none of the preferences language the promulgated form carries.

New Jersey law runs the other way. An advance directive exists for incapacity — by statute it becomes operative exactly when the declarant can no longer decide; revoking one is reserved to the declarant herself; a guardian’s health-care authority is expressly made subject to the ward’s directive unless a court revokes or alters it; and willfully concealing or destroying another person’s directive is a crime. The promulgated form honors that architecture case by case. The office’s sentence — drafted by the office that will hold the pen — revokes wholesale. The ward wrote down how she wanted the end handled; the office’s order strikes it, and hands the choice to itself. Recorded Bergen County deed-embedded OPG judgments, quoted verbatim: Oct. 20, 2008 (ward Goldie Jaffe — ¶9 medical-decisions grant, ¶11 proxy revocation, directive untouched; deed rec. May 11, 2009) and Feb. 19, 2010 (ward Madeline Rutherford — advance-directive revocation; Dodick drafter block). Promulgated judgment forms CN 11802 (rev. 02/2017) ¶14 / CN 11988 (Directive #11-21, 2021) ¶13, njcourts.gov. N.J.S.A. 26:2H-59 (operative at incapacity); -57 (revocation reserved to the declarant); -78(d) (fourth-degree crime); 3B:12-56(c); R. 4:86-6(d)(1).

A DNR becomes a discretion

Once that transfer is complete, a Do-Not-Resuscitate order stops being what the law designed — the ward’s own standing instruction, operative from the moment she can no longer speak — and becomes a permission: something the office may grant, withhold, or leave unanswered. Nadia Romanov had answered the question while she could still be heard: her POLST of December 8, 2023 — approved by telephone by her then-guardian, Vanarelli of Acts III and XVI — reads DNR, DNI; under “Goals of Care,” in her reported words: “To be home.” Twenty-six days later, the judgment installing the Public Guardian over her — filed on the office’s own letterhead, “By: Christopher R. Weldon, Esquire” (Act VII) — revoked her power of attorney, voided that directive “as to proxy designation,” and bound the office, in the promulgated form’s own words, to “consider the preferences expressed in such advance directive.” Hold that duty. By the following September she was declining, and the facility went looking for whether her instruction still governed. What it found was that the instruction was no longer hers. In her own chart — obtained by her family through a medical-records request — you can watch whose it had become:

CareOne at the Highlands · progress notes, Sept. 13–20, 2024 · quoted verbatim

Sept. 13, 3:45 pm — social services: “POLST form in chart stating resident is DNR/DNI/DNH. Writer reached out to OPG as resident has a public guardian (Awilda Martinez). Writer informed that Awilda was not available to speak and call was given to Ann, care manager, from OPG. Ann stated POLST form is still valid and to follow orders.”

Sept. 14, 2:15 pm — social services: “Received a call from the MD; per their instructions, disregard the current POLST. The resident will remain FULL CODE. According to the MD, multiple discussions have already been made with the public guardian who refused to sign any advance directive or accept Hospice/palliative care.”

Sept. 20 — nursing: “I spoke with Awilda and Jonna, and it was confirmed that the resident’s (DNR) and (DNI) orders, as per the most recent (POLST), remain valid. The public guardian will send a Physician’s Questionnaire (PQ) form for the medical doctor’s signature to assess whether the resident qualifies for hospice care.”

Read what the chart is recording. Her code status — whether anyone would try to restart her heart — flipped three times in seven days, tracking nothing about her and everything about the office: which staffer picked up (“Awilda” and “Jonna” recur on the office’s own expedited time report for this ward — Care Management, $110 an hour), and what the office had or had not signed. And the September refusal was no paperwork lapse. Per the MD, “multiple discussions have already been made” — the office had been asked, and had declined, and so a woman carrying a signed do-not-resuscitate instruction was ordered run full code against it — against the preferences its own judgment, in its own staffer’s drafting, had bound it to consider. Her doctors could not honor her; the person she had named was gone from the file; her family held no pen. The only signature that could let Nadia Romanov go was the office’s — and through September, the office declined to give it.

What else the office held that month, its own paper shows. The sale of her house — 2253 Shawnee Path, notice of settlement April 19, 2024, Guardian Title Services at the settlement table (Act X) — was still pending; it died with her. The billing meter was running — 206 staff hours, $27,711.20, at rates the office assigns itself (Act V). And the pen over her death sat in the same office whose charter holds a lien on her estate, retains its fees from estates like hers, keeps the interest on what it holds (Act IV) — and whose Discharge/Deceased Unit, the unit that computes the final bill, is paid entirely from the estates of the dead (Act IX). Whether those clocks were connected is a question the record poses rather than answers. What the record shows is who held every one of them.

The permission, when it came, came on the office’s letterhead and the office’s schedule. October 1: a form letter over the Acting Public Guardian’s signature, consenting to the “code status changes” “[i]n following the known wishes of NADIA ROMANOV” — and dating the Do-Not-Resuscitate and Do-Not-Intubate approvals December 8, 2023: the day the prior guardian had signed. October 3: a second letter — signed for Dodick by Suzanne M. Dykes, of Act V’s power-of-attorney chain — adds “Do Not Hospitalize — Approved on October 03, 2024.” October 16: the court dismisses the family’s pending complaints — “no further action can [be] taken” (Act XIV). October 18: Nadia Romanov dies. Her instruction had been on file for ten months. It was permitted to operate for fifteen days — the fifteen days after the office decided it could. CareOne at the Highlands progress notes for N. Romanov (obtained by family records request), quoted verbatim: Social Services 9/13/2024 15:45 (A. Kaiser); Social Services 9/14/2024 14:15 (R. Adem, R.N.); Nursing 9/20/2024 (E. Cinquemani, L.P.N.). NJ POLST, verbal order 12/8/2023 — “Goals of Care: To be home”; surrogate line “Donald Vanarelli (legal guardian).” OPG letters to Dr. Rita Goradia, Oct. 1 and Oct. 3, 2024 (the second: “By: Suzanne M. Dykes, Esquire”; cc Awilda Martinez). Care-management names/rate: OPG “Expedited Time Report of Nadia Romanov” (Care Management, $110/hr); rates and hours also at Verified Complaint ¶¶ 36–38. House-sale clock: Union County notice of settlement of 4/19/2024; the sale’s collapse at death, S-8455 record (Act X deed card). Oct. 16 dismissals: S-8455 record (Act XIV timeline). The appointing judgment: Order & Judgment Discharging Guardian and Appointing Substitute Guardian, S-8455, FILED Jan. 3, 2024, Union County Surrogate — OPG letterhead, “By: Christopher R. Weldon, Esquire”; ¶13 quoted verbatim.

The doctors were never the ones refusing

And this is the part that inverts the usual story. It is not a physician standing between the ward and a peaceful death. The doctors are the ones who open the door: incapacity is established by clinicians’ sworn certifications, and that finding is the key the whole guardianship turns on. The treating physicians document the ward’s condition; the facility’s social workers keep the POLST and the DNR notes in the chart. (In the Romanov chart, the September notes above are social-services and nursing entries; the physician they route to — and the one the office finally answered on October 1 — is Dr. Rita Goradia.) The medical record is ready; no one in a white coat is refusing — in September it was the MD who had to order full code because the office would not sign. What stands between the ward’s written wishes and their honoring is not a doctor’s judgment — it is a guardianship order that moved the pen from her hand to the office’s: an office that answers by phone, staffer by staffer, holds the estate its signature opens, and signs last. Incapacity certifications: R. 4:86-2(b) (affidavits/certifications of two affiants, at least one a physician). POLST/DNR chart notes: CareOne at the Highlands progress notes, Sept. 2024, quoted above.

The estate is taken from the dead. The pen over the death is taken from the living.

Act V

One check survived on paper. The Public Guardian — the human being who wields all of this — must be “appointed by the Governor, with the advice and consent of the Senate.” If the office falls vacant, the Governor may name an acting public guardian — “but in no event longer than six months.” N.J.S.A. 52:27G-24.

Helen C. Dodick — the third name on the office’s Keri brief — first appears in the public record as “Acting Public Guardian” in 2009, succeeding Edward Tetelman, himself an “acting” incumbent whose title drifted within a single 2008 transcript. She has never been nominated. The Senate has never held a hearing. Four gubernatorial administrations, both parties, have come and gone. The State’s own website today lists the officeholder as “Helen C. Dodick, Acting Public Guardian.” Verified Complaint (quo warranto), ¶¶ 23–28, 31D, and exhibits cited therein.

2009 · designated “acting” ■ the six months the statute allows 2026 · still in office — year seventeen

In 2026, the Office of the Governor — the entity that would have made any of this lawful — was asked under the Open Public Records Act for the paper trail. Seven categories. Its custodian of records certified the answer:

Office of the Governor · OPRA response · April 2, 2026

Executed letter of appointment or designationNo responsive records

Civil Service authorization for continued “unclassified” codingNo responsive records

Senate nomination transmittalNo responsive records

Senate Judiciary Committee correspondenceNo responsive records

Waiver or authorization to exceed the six-month capNo responsive records

Cabinet directory listing for the officeNo responsive records

Ethics clearance / conflict-of-interest waiverNo responsive records

“Not an expired act, not a deficient act, but no producible act at all.” Verified Complaint ¶ 29, on the Governor’s April 2, 2026 certification

Government by power of attorney

How does one unconfirmed officer sign for thousands of transactions? On recorded paper. County land records hold at least 34 recorded power-of-attorney instruments for the office between 2010 and 2025 — including a 2011 general delegation of the Public Guardian’s authority to two staff attorneys, Joseph A. Fontana and Suzanne M. Dykes, an instrument notarized under a commission that had already expired. At least 32 deeds across 19 wards’ matters were executed by attorneys-in-fact on that paper chain, and a fresh Dodick-to-Dykes power of attorney was recorded in Monmouth County as recently as September 6, 2024. Fontana, meanwhile, certifies in court filings that he is “authorized to act on behalf of Helen C. Dodick, Esq., the Acting Public Guardian.” Both delegates’ names have appeared beside hers since the Keri brief. Recorded POA inventory, 34 instruments 2010–2025 (county clerk records); Monmouth POA rec. 9/6/2024; Fontana Certification, S-8455 accounting Ex. 4.

The loop

Inside that vacuum sits a billing machine with no outside wall. The Public Guardian designates her own staff titles; the titles carry the hourly rates; the rates are billed to the estates of incapacitated people; and approval is sought through accountings her own office verifies. In one estate alone — Nadia Romanov’s — that loop produced 206 staff hours, $27,711.20. Verified Complaint ¶¶ 36–38. Rates: Attorney $285/hr; Finance Worker & Property Paralegal $125; Investigator & Care Manager $110; Paralegal $50. State payroll lists her employer as “None Listed.”

Even the signatures close the loop. Across at least three sworn verifications filed in three different matters between 2023 and 2025, the same typo persists in the jurat above Dodick’s signature — certifying she has read the “contacts of the Verified Complaint.” The word is contents. Nobody who signs a certification reads it less carefully than the machine that prints it. FFA template-fraud finding; three captured verified complaints, 2023–2025.

Act VI

The Invisible Officeholder

How does an unlawful seventeen-year tenure survive in plain sight? The first answer is that there is no sight. An April 2026 visibility survey treated Helen Dodick’s public existence as a measurable variable — every documented appearance across twenty-five years, seven channels, and more than twenty news outlets, with absence recorded as rigorously as presence. The totals, for the head of an office holding life-and-death authority over 1,733 people and $74.5 million:

34documented public appearances, 2001–2026 — most of them passive captions and letterheads

2on-record press interviews, ever

0photographs in any news outlet · 0 legislative appearances

1interview declined — the guardianship-abuse series, 2015

Calibrate that against her peers. Other long-tenured New Jersey acting officials run twenty to thirty news articles a year; the state’s least-visible comparable agency heads run five to eight times her rate. Dodick’s rate is roughly one news article every four years — and the two moments she did speak bracket the silence precisely: a 2013 interview, then, in 2015, when the Asbury Park Press turned to an investigative series on guardianship abuse, a declined interview with the same reporter — and essentially nothing again until a written statement forced by the 2025 audit. Visibility survey, Apr. 2026 (Vol. I, njguardianshipabuse.com series) — negative-space method, 22+ outlets swept; survey findings are leads, but they converge with the Governor’s-office OPRA certification and QW ¶ 31C.

Visibility without speaking · the courts channel

Eleven reported New Jersey matters bear her name as attorney or institutional guardian. No reported case shows her personally arguing. No transcript shows her testifying. No deposition names her as deponent.

The speaking is done by others: Tetelman argued Keri (2004); Dykes argued Chandler (2001) and R.R. (2014); Fontana drafted the briefs; Pfoutz signed E.N., Y.M., Mooney.

Hold those names They are the next act.

Her own voice

In this investigation’s entire corpus, her voice exists in exactly two recordings — family status calls from June 2024, machine-transcribed and speaker-diarized. Her first documented appearance is an introduction she does not hear. “That’s Helen Dodick, Andrew,” the family’s lawyer says, and then: “Talk to me, Helen. … You there, Helen? I just — I can’t hear you. Your thing is not working.” Four people spend ninety seconds walking the head of the office through her own microphone. When she finally comes through and the call turns to the money — the family has just shown that her office’s own sworn opening inventory books $400,000 less than the guardian before her recorded — this is how the Acting Public Guardian accounts for the gap:

“I strongly suspect it was, like, an estimation for an inventory — but I will double-check.” Helen C. Dodick, June 10, 2024 status call — diarized ASR transcript (draft; not yet audio-verified)

That double-check is not in the record. Her page on the State’s own website lists a post-office box and a telephone number — no photograph, no biography, no C.V. There is no Wikipedia entry, no LinkedIn, no bar-journal profile. The single confirmed photograph anywhere is a 2015 Facebook post by a third-party organization. The silence is not neglect of public relations. In an office whose wards cannot speak for themselves and whose charter answers to no department, invisibility is the operating condition — the reason the empty frame in the next act is not a design choice but a finding. What she said on those two calls, when she did talk, is scattered through the acts that follow — about the inventory (Act VIII), and about the house (Act XIV).

Act VII

The Inner Circle

The companion question answers itself in the case captions: if the officeholder is silent, who has been standing inside the silence? Twenty-five years of appellate briefs, agency rosters, audit signatures, OPRA productions, and firm announcements yield a closed network, documented here in rings around the empty frame: the internal core that runs the office; the one-way door from the office into private practice; and the private bar around the office — nine-tenths of it tracing to a single Supreme Court caption. Not one of them has ever publicly addressed the acting status of the office.

78+combined person-years, the internal core

2voluntary departures in 25 years — both into private practice in the same field

9/10of the allied bar traces to In re Keri

Ring structure and continuity data: Inner-Circle Continuity analysis, Apr. 2026 (Vol. II, njguardianshipabuse.com series) — network reconstructed from primary records; treated here as a framework, with each card’s facts anchored to the record cited on it.

Ring one · the internal core — 2001 to today

no confirmed photograph
in the public record

Helen C. DodickIn the office’s captions since 2001 · “Acting” Public Guardian since 2009 On the office’s Keri briefs (2004). Seventeen years as “Acting”: no Senate hearing, no testimony, no findable biography. Her disclosure statements list a standing outside practice — Dodick & DeFalco; for 2005–2016 no disclosure statements have been produced at all. 853 A.2d 909 caption; Verified Complaint ¶ 31C; ethics-disclosure scan; FDS gap memo.

JF

Joseph A. FontanaStaff attorney · 2001 → today · 25 years On the briefs in Chandler (2001), Keri (2004), R.R. (2014). Holder, with Dykes, of the 2011 recorded general power of attorney; certifies he is “authorized to act on behalf of” the Acting Public Guardian. No public portrait — only documents. Appellate captions 2001–2014; recorded POA (2011); S-8455 Ex. 4; continuity survey Vol. II.

SD

Suzanne M. DykesStaff attorney · 2001 → today · the office’s voice in court Argued Chandler (Jan. 2001) — the earliest documentary placement of the current core — and R.R. (2014), Martin (2016). Her attorney ID recurs on a dozen-plus guardianship-judgment forms filed by different firms. POA delegate 2011; a fresh POA to her recorded Sept. 6, 2024. “Suzanne Dykes … will take over … temporarily” — October 2023. Still there. Appellate records; captured CN 11988 forms; Monmouth POA 9/6/2024; email record.

**Jonathan A. Pfoutz**Counsel to the Public Guardian · 2013 → today Nine months in the Attorney General’s tort-litigation ranks, then — since 2013 — the occupant of the one counsel seat the Legislature expressly insulated *from* the Attorney General. Signs the office’s appellate briefs (*E.N.* 2017, *Y.M.* 2018, *Mooney* 2024); defends the office against facilities seeking its removal. Act IX traces the pipeline he rode in on. App. Div. captions; pipeline survey Vol. III (lead). Portrait: user-identified (ContactOut/LinkedIn).

K

KorfmannAttorney · Discharge / Deceased Unit Signed the verified complaint swearing the Muska estate “intestate” — while the office held the will (Middlesex 265306); payroll carried the signer under an “EXEMPT-X” coding at the time. Rostered to the unit that computes the office’s final bill on a ward’s death — the unit funded by those bills (Act IX). Middlesex file 265306; NJ payroll data; roster survey Vol. IV (lead).

**Margherita A. Pandolfo**Staff attorney · Hudson filings One of the recurring names on the office’s county-court paper. Hudson Surrogate filings; portrait user-identified 2026.

Twenty-five years of that core have produced exactly two voluntary departures — and neither left the field.
Both now practice, privately, the system they ran.

The door out — where the office’s lawyers go

**Christopher R. Weldon**Regulatory Officer, 2015 → private practice The office’s day-to-day voice in the Romanov guardianship — and the drafter of record on the judgment that installed his own office over her: filed Jan. 3, 2024 on OPG’s letterhead, *“By: Christopher R. Weldon, Esquire,”* after the Surrogate’s counsel told the outgoing guardian to use “the language OPG usually has” (Act VIII). Its ¶13 revoked her power of attorney, voided her advance directive “as to proxy designation” — and bound the office to *“consider the preferences expressed.”* Act IV shows what that duty was worth by September. The office’s one attorney paid from Fund 421 (Act IX), he has since left for his own firm — weldon.law — offering guardianships, probate, and “Life Planning (POA/Advance Directive),” on “more than a decade of public service … over 1,000 guardianship and fiduciary matters statewide.” S-8455 Order & Judgment filed 1/3/2024 (letterhead + ¶13, quoted verbatim); Brophy email 12/18/2023; weldon.law (quoted); Oct. 2024 org chart / Vol. IV. Portrait: own firm bio.

**Kimmo H. Abbasi**Decedent unit → Hill Wallack partner, 2022 The other departure: from the office’s deceased-clients unit to a private partnership retained by the Acting Public Guardian herself — billing the wards’ estates at $300 an hour under the office’s independent-counsel power. His bill, and what happened to it, is Act XIII. hillwallack.com bio; NJ payroll rows; Acts IX & XIII.

Ring two · the private bar around the office — from Keri (2004) to one firm (2025)

Ten outside attorneys recur across the office’s documented case history — and nine of the ten trace to the Keri caption. Two of them you met in Act III: Vanarelli, who argued it, and Sharon Rivenson Mark, who signed two of its briefs and joined MFMC in 2025. Here are the rest of the lineage — and where it consolidated. Then the ring’s two working channels: the door the wards come in through, and the table their houses leave across.

Christine H. O'Donnell — **Christine H. O’Donnell**Public Guardian before the acting era Held the office itself in the 1990s; co-author of the definitive New Jersey guardianship treatise (NJ Practice 45/45A). In February 2025 — the acting era’s twenty-fifth year — she joined MFMC. mfmclaw.com attorneys page (2025); continuity survey Vol. II.

GAL

Conte · BondsMFMC’s guardian-ad-litem seats John A. Conte, Jr. — MFMC partner and recurring court-appointed GAL (Estate of Mooney, 2020); Adrienne M. Bonds — regular GAL appointee, joined MFMC February 2025. One firm now touches the system as predecessor-PG knowledge, adversary counsel, APS counsel, and GAL — four procedural directions at once. Continuity survey Vol. II (lead); mfmclaw.com.

**Linda S. Ershow-Levenberg**Fink Rosner Ershow-Levenberg · argued for the elder bar Argued the NAELA-NJ amicus in *Keri*; State Bar elder-law section past chair; a quarter-century on the CLE faculty that trains the guardianship bar. 853 A.2d 909 caption; continuity survey Vol. II.

PK · DJ

Sheahan Knee · JurkovicThe amicus authors Peggy Sheahan Knee argued the State Bar’s Keri brief; Daniel J. Jurkovic filed the NAELA/Guardianship- Association brief — and turns up in 2020 as a GAL in the same estate as MFMC’s Conte. The briefs ended; the appearances never did. 853 A.2d 909 caption; Estate of Mooney (2020), per continuity survey Vol. II.

**Lauren S. Marinaro**The next generation The only one of the ten who does not trace to *Keri* — incoming president of the elder-law bar chapter whose amicus her firm argued in 2004, and counsel inside the Romanov guardianship for the ward’s adverse family side, two decades later. Continuity survey Vol. II; S-8455 record; portrait: Avvo.

45/45A

The treatiseNJ Practice Series, vols. 45 & 45A The definitive scholarly authority on New Jersey guardianship law — the text courts and practitioners reach for when they interpret Keri — is co-authored by O’Donnell and Rivenson Mark. Since February 2025, both authors practice inside the same firm that provides counsel around the OPG, GALs to its wards, and APS counsel to the county system. Continuity survey Vol. II.

The APS channel — who delivers the wards

**Lawrence N. Meyerson**APS petitioner’s counsel · GAL · court-appointed AIP counsel · MFMC founding partner The Essex petition channel in one résumé: *“attorney for Adult Protective Services of Essex County”* on guardianship petitions; recurring guardian ad litem; and — per county purchase order — court-appointed counsel for an alleged incapacitated person, the seat *opposite* the petition (the Intake act). Petitioner’s counsel at the start of the Romanov matter (2022); the firm the Bergen auditor caught paid twice at the Allimann closing — $10,827.50, later offset (Act XI). Essex CP-0435-2019 recital; PO #437815 / OPRA #16915; S-8455 record; Bergen audit file M#322407; continuity survey Vol. II.

FG

Frank R. GioiaPetitioner’s counsel · Hudson County Social Services “THIS MATTER having been opened to the Court by Frank R. Gioia, Esquire, attorney for the petitioner, Hudson County Social Services” — a Hudson judgment drafted by the office itself (“By: Sharie A. Robinson, Esquire, Associate Counsel”) that erased the ward’s living will outright, Act IV’s flat form. The board petitions; the office drafts; the directive dies in ¶11. In re Hans Oesau, Hudson 301976, filed June 9, 2011 (recorded copy) — recital, drafter block, and ¶11 verified against the page image.

BSS

The county boardsAdult Protective Services — the petition machine Essex APS, by Meyerson. Hudson County Social Services, by Gioia. Adult Protective Services of Monmouth and Middlesex Counties, in the one published test of the door (In re F.M.W.). County welfare agencies, funded through the same State department that houses the office their petitions install — the Intake act walks the door. Recitals and captions per the adjacent cards; In re F.M.W.; Adult Protective Services Act, N.J.S.A. 52:27D-406 et seq.

The petition firms — who brings the guardianship

The board is one route in; the private petition bar is the other. Two firms recur on the instruments that open a guardianship — filed not by the family, and not by the office that ends up holding the ward, but by the hospital or the nursing home that had the person in a bed. Their work is public, and it is one-directional: it establishes the guardianship. Where it goes after that is Act IX.

JH

John G. Hoyle IIIHoyle Law LLC · the hospital petition pipeline When a hospital wants a patient made a ward, this is the name on the petition. The public court-docket index carries sixteen New Jersey guardianship dockets filed by Hoyle Law in a single recent span — every one classified as a guardianship, every one captioned with a hospital system as the petitioner: Riverview Medical Center, Jersey Shore University Medical Center, Ocean University Medical Center, across the Monmouth and Ocean Probate Parts. A single-purpose practice — the facility files, the person becomes a ward, and a guardian is installed at the far end. A Surrogate document filed by Hoyle is a guardianship being opened, never an account being closed. Public court-docket index (Trellis): 16 NJ Probate / guardianship dockets, 2024–2025, petitioners Riverview Medical Center, Jersey Shore University Medical Center, and Ocean University Medical Center (Monmouth & Ocean); Hoyle Law LLC, Monmouth County.

SK

Stephanie M. KayThe Kay Law Firm LLC · the facility’s counsel — bill and petition The long-term-care operator’s lawyer, met first in collections court. The public docket index carries more than two hundred New Jersey suits filed by the Kay firm for nursing-home, assisted-living, and rehabilitation operators — Care One, Atrium, Millennium Healthcare, Ashbrook, Spring Hills, Springpoint — against their own residents and those residents’ estates, for unpaid care. The same firm appears in guardianship-judgment recitals as the facility petitioner’s counsel: the operator owed the bill is the party that asks the court to make the resident a ward. The debt and the guardianship, filed from one desk in Mountainside. Public court-docket index (Trellis): 200+ NJ creditor-collection and breach-of-contract suits for long-term-care operators (Care One, Atrium, Millennium Healthcare, Ashbrook, Spring Hills, Springpoint …) against residents / estates; The Kay Law Firm LLC, 608 Sherwood Parkway, Mountainside (Attorney ID 026401992). Facility-petitioner role per guardianship-judgment recitals.

The sale — who files it, who closes it

**Robert J. Rudy III**Pawar Gilgallon & Rudy, LLC · the office’s real-estate counsel — who files the sale When a ward’s house is sold, someone opens the matter to the court. Across counties and a decade of recorded deeds it is this attorney: *“THIS MATTER, having been opened to the Court by Robert J. Rudy III, Esq. of Pawar Gilgallon & Rudy, LLC, Attorneys for the Office of the Public Guardian.”* He files the sale application, drafts the order the court signs, and prepares the deed — the ward conveying *“by her Guardian, Helen C. Dodick, Acting Public Guardian.”* One example, four years before Romanov and in the same town: Harmony Brown’s house at 2216 Lyde Place, **Scotch Plains** — sold to *Dia Homes, LLC* for $315,000, order filed Jan. 17, 2020. His partner Craig S. Gilgallon files the same way. At the Allimann closing his fee was $2,950 — and the ward’s $5,000 came back six weeks later through his firm’s trust account (Act XI). In re Harmony Brown, Union County — Order filed 1/17/2020 (“opened … by Robert J. Rudy III, Esq.”; sale to Dia Homes, LLC, $315,000, approved); recorded Union deed inst. 322422 (grantor “Harmony Brown … by her Guardian, Helen C. Dodick”). Bergen audit file M#322407 (Rudy $2,950; Gilgallon & Rudy trust check 2258). Portrait: pgrlawyers.com.

CB

Charles V. BoninThe office’s deed counsel — the recent hand The same seat, lately: prepared the deeds conveying two wards’ homes to LLC buyers in two counties (2025–26) — one LLC named for the ward’s own street address. Appears on the Calderon accounting with a $56,500 “Dep. Refund” receipt. Deeds i2026034461 (Essex), 2025008112 (Monmouth); Calderon FFA.

GTS

Guardian Title Services, LLCThe settlement agent — five counties, fourteen years A Nutley family company — not a government office, despite the name — at the settlement table of Public Guardian sales in five-plus counties, 2012 to April 2026, with no visible procurement, rotation, or bid. Act X walks its deeds. Recorded instruments, 2012–2026.

The firms, and what each is retained to do

Strip the names back to functions and the same file moves through four hands, each a different firm retained for one job. Read down the column and the ward’s whole passage is there — from the hospital bed to the closed estate.

One ward’s file · four retained roles

1 · Bring the ward in. Hoyle Law LLC — hospital petitions · The Kay Law Firm LLC — facility collection and petition · Meyerson / MFMC and Frank R. Gioia — APS and county-board petitions.

2 · Speak for the office. Fontana, Dykes, Pfoutz, and (until his departure) Weldon — the office’s own counsel, appearing for the guardian the petition installed.

3 · Sell the house. Pawar Gilgallon & Rudy — files the sale application and drafts the order · Charles V. Bonin — prepares the deed · Guardian Title Services, LLC — settles the closing.

4 · Close the estate. Hill Wallack (Abbasi) and Meyerson Fox & Conte (Hawk) — the outside counsel retained by the office to render the final account on the ward’s death (Act XIII).

Four roles, a short bar, one direction of travel — and, on the sale and closeout lines, firms the office chose and pays from the estate it is accounting for.

Whether that consolidation reflects strategy or merely the gravitational pull of a small bar is a question a documentary record cannot answer. What the record shows is that the concentration exists, that it completed in the acting tenure’s twenty-fifth year — and that no office charged with noticing it ever did. Which raises the last ring.

Act VIII

The Pillars That Didn’t Hold

A guardianship system is held up by named pillars: the county Surrogate who dockets the case and audits the accounting; the bench that signs the judgments; the department that houses the office; the State Auditor who inspects it; the Senate that was supposed to confirm its chief; the Attorney General who can demand to know by what authority. Each pillar had, at some point in seventeen years, both the standing and an occasion to ask the one structural question. Here is each pillar, and what the record shows it did instead. Pillar framing after the njguardianshipabuse.com series; officeholder chronology per the continuity survey Vol. II (leads), anchored to the records cited per card.

The Surrogate pillar, in mechanism — how the paper is kept

Start with the pillar that touches every page of this story, because guardianship runs on paper and the county Surrogate is the paper’s sole custodian. These records are Superior Court records — the Surrogate holds them only as a deputy clerk of that court. Watch what happens to the public’s right of access as it passes through that office:

Six mechanisms · one direction

1 · In person only. Probate and guardianship files are the one class of Superior Court record a member of the public cannot reach through eCourts — and OPRA does not reach the courts at all. To see the paper, you appear at the counter.

2 · No cameras. The Judiciary’s own access rule guarantees free inspection and self-copying (R. 1:38-1; Directive #8-07). At the counter: phones and cameras prohibited. Essex, June 2, 2026 — after 430 photographs over nearly four hours, staff intervened, conceded on the spot that the files were Superior Court records, and banned photography anyway. Terminals with the save-as-PDF function disabled complete the seal.

3 · The $3.00 toll. With self-copying blocked, the only path to a copy is the office’s own — at $3.00 per page (N.J.S.A. 22A:2-30), charged even for a PDF sent by email. The same page from the Superior Court Clerk — a different deputy clerk of the same court — costs about a nickel. An exemplified-copy quote in this record ran $1,456. Five counties apply “one rule” five ways, from free to $42 a page — Middlesex and Ocean deliver complete PDFs free through their portals, proving the toll is a choice.

4 · The degraded free copy. What the free public channel serves is a 1-bit scan — pure black and white, no tonal data, useless for detecting signature compositing or wet-ink-versus-toner. Tonal copies exist — behind the paid channel. And the physical original? “This is a reminder that the court will not respond to emails regarding this case. … You are not currently a party to this case.” (Union Surrogate, March 16, 2026, verbatim, to the ward’s grandson.)

5 · The stripped field. Across counties, the consistently concealed element is the same one: who took the fee. Ocean’s data exports strip the attorney field; Hudson seals the accountings and fee schedules; Middlesex’s search is designed so names don’t surface. Different levers, same missing column.

6 · Clerk, litigant, and gatekeeper at once. When subpoenas finally sought the records of the record-keeper’s own conduct, the Surrogate’s office moved to quash — three times. An office with an interest in a matter is disqualified by statute from performing any duty in it (N.J.S.A. 2B:14-4), with mandatory referral to the Assignment Judge. Instead, the quash order issued over the name of a judge who was neither assigned nor presiding, surfaced undocketed months later, and was docketed retroactively.

And the office at the center understands exactly how this paper regime works — because it files into it. Asked, on a recorded June 2024 call, about a $400,000 gap between the prior guardian’s accounting and the OPG’s own sworn inventory — the gap that later surfaced as the phantom entry and the concealed insurance interest of Act XIV — the Acting Public Guardian answered in her own voice:

The inventory, in her own words · June 10, 2024 (diarized ASR — draft)

“I mean, we’re not forensic accountants, but our staff has reviewed it …”

“So it’s an inventory problem, not an accounting.”

“I strongly suspect it was, like, an estimation for an inventory, but I will double check.”

“We’ve spoken to … the surrogates in the state, and we say, if we don’t have exact accuracy at the time that we file the inventory, do [you] want us to wait till we can clarify … or you want us to just file it—”

On tape, confirmed The family, on the same call: “That’s what you told us last time … you said that it’s probably not a complete accounting and that you just had to file something.”

Read mechanism six and that answer together. The sworn inventory can be an “estimation,” because the office has an understanding with the surrogates that filing something inaccurate now beats filing something accurate later — and the only people who could check are on the other side of the counter, the camera ban, and the three-dollar toll.

The county Surrogates — office by office

Those six mechanisms are not one office’s habit. The Surrogate is a county office — an elected constitutional officer sitting as Deputy Clerk of the Superior Court — and the concealment is administered county by county, each office adding its own lever to the same result: the fee, the file, and the name of who took the money, all kept on the far side of the counter. These are the offices this record actually touches.

**Christopher E. Hudak**Surrogate · Union — the office at the center of this record The office that ran the $3-a-page toll, the camera ban, the “not currently a party” refusal, and moved to quash the subpoenas three times. When the family appeared — as directed, on the appointed day — to file for co-administrator (Oct. 2, 2025), the Surrogate personally refused the filing. The judge, on the record: “I don’t know what happened in the Surrogate’s office.” Verified Complaint ¶ 15(j); S-8455 record; mechanisms 2–6 above; portrait: county swearing-in release.

**Lisa Taylor Brophy**Counsel to the Surrogate · Union The office’s own lawyer. Told the outgoing guardian his proposed judgment would be accepted “as long as you include the language that OPG usually has in their Judgments” (Dec. 18, 2023) — the gatekeeper quoting the house style of the party at the gate. Contemporaneous email record; portrait: county outreach event.

TR

Tilo E. RivasSurrogate · Hudson Elected Hudson County Surrogate; records custodian and Deputy Clerk for the Probate Part. In Hudson the guardianship accountings and fee schedules are sealed — and a records request was denied while the portal logged its status as “Full Release.” The seal and the label point in opposite directions. NJ Courts county-surrogate roster; mechanism 5 above; Hudson OPRA R007070-061826 (the OPRA ledger below).

JM

Jeffrey W. MoranSurrogate · Ocean Elected Ocean County Surrogate. Ocean’s public data export strips the single field that would show who took the fee — the attorney of record — and its sealed guardianship files (“Secure Case”) put the account images out of online reach entirely. Mechanism five and mechanism one, in one office. NJ Courts county-surrogate roster; Ocean public data-export field set; mechanisms 1 & 5 above.

CC

Claribel CortesSurrogate · Middlesex Elected Middlesex County Surrogate. Middlesex delivers complete case PDFs free through its portal — the proof that the three-dollar toll two counties over is a choice, not a cost — and yet builds its search so the names on those files don’t surface. The paper is free; finding whose name is on it is not. NJ Courts county-surrogate roster; Middlesex portal behavior; mechanisms 3 & 5 above.

AK

Alturrick KenneySurrogate · Essex Elected Essex County Surrogate. June 2, 2026: after roughly 430 photographs over nearly four hours, the office conceded on the spot that the files were Superior Court records — and banned photography anyway. The guardianship order behind Purchase Order 437815 (the Intake act) was withheld as “not disclosable.” NJ Courts county-surrogate roster; Essex counter episode 6/2/2026 (mechanism 2); OPRA #16915.

MR

Maureen T. RaischSurrogate · Monmouth — where the petitions land Elected Monmouth County Surrogate. This is the Probate Part that receives the hospital petition book — the Riverview and Jersey Shore guardianship dockets filed by Hoyle Law (Act VII), heard here by Judges Zazzali-Hogan and Acquaviva. The county where the intake bar and the Surrogate’s counter meet. NJ Courts county-surrogate roster; public court-docket index (Trellis), Monmouth Probate guardianship dockets.

**Michael R. Dressler**Surrogate · Bergen — the counter-example The one office in this record where the accounting file doubles as an audit file: its auditor caught the double-paid fee and demanded proof the ward’s money reached the ward (Act XI). The pillar can hold. In this record, it held exactly once. Bergen audit file M#322407; portrait: official county site.

The other pillars — bench, department, division, auditor, Senate, Attorney General

**Hon. Robert J. Mega (Ret.)**Pillar · the bench His facsimile signature appears across the Romanov docket; no wet-ink original has been located. Found on the record (Nov. 3, 2025) that counsel “failed to notify the court of the error.” Retired mid-fight — this portrait is from the biography page of the firm he joined. S-8455 record; wilentz.com attorney bio.

DHS

Velez · ConnollyPillar · the department Jennifer Velez ran DHS for eight years — the longest tenure in state history — across two OPG audits; neither addressed the acting designation. Elizabeth Connolly ran it 2015–18 as Acting Commissioner: the supervisor was acting, the supervisee was acting, and neither addressed the other’s status. Continuity survey Vol. II (lead); audit reports 2010/2013.

**Sarah Adelman**Pillar · the department, 2021–2026 The 2025 State Auditor report — 2,452 deceased clients, $16.9M unresolved — ran up through her department. No DHS document in the public record addresses the acting status of the officeholder beneath her. State Auditor report (Jan. 2025); continuity survey Vol. II (lead); portrait: press photo.

LR

Louise RushPillar · the division (DOAS), 2018 → today Director of the Division of Aging Services — the direct supervisory line above the office. Co-listed as a panelist beside Dodick at a 2026 elder-care event. The official with the clearest day-to-day view of the designation; no public statement about it exists. Continuity survey Vol. II (lead).

OSA

Eells · KaschakPillar · the State Auditor Stephen Eells signed the 2010 and 2013 audits; David Kaschak signed 2025 (missed ward visits, the deceased- client backlog). Three audits measured the office’s money and never its chief’s authority — each “silently incorporates the acting designation as a standing fact.” Audit reports 1998–2025; continuity survey Vol. II.

NS

Nicholas ScutariPillar · the Senate Chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee 2010–2022 — the entire window in which a confirmation hearing for a Public Guardian could have been initiated. None was. The committee has never reviewed the office’s acting status. Continuity survey Vol. II (lead); N.J.S.A. 52:27G-24.

AG

The Attorney GeneralPillar · the office of last legal resort Deputy Attorneys General have appeared as recurring counsel around the office since 2018. In 2026, a formal relator demand asked the Attorney General to bring quo warranto — or decline. The office did neither, by any stated deadline. The silence became the standing (Act XVI). Verified Complaint ¶¶ 15A–15E.

The OPRA record — the pillars, asked in writing

Every claim in this act can be put to a simple test: ask the custodians. The Open Public Records Act reaches the executive side of this story — not the courts (mechanism one), but the Governor, the department, the division, the counties. Between January 2025 and July 2026 the family did exactly that, request by request, and kept every receipt. What came back, custodian by custodian:

The OPRA ledger · answers as certified · 2025–2026

Office of the Governor — the appointment and authorization trail, seven categories (Act V)No responsive records

DHS Human Resources — the Civil-Service justification (CS-21) for the acting designationNot maintained

DHS — the office’s guardianship recordsConfidential

Division of Aging Services — basic administrative records of the office’s own divisionNot maintained

Attorney General — records touching Estate of Nadia Romanov, S-8455Denied

Essex County — the guardianship order behind Purchase Order 437815 (the Intake act)Withheld

Union County Clerk of the Board — Surrogate administrative records, Sept. 2025No response

Hudson County Surrogate — administrative records; the denial logged as “Full Release”Denied

State ethics — the officeholder’s financial disclosure statements, 2005–2016None produced

Read the two halves of that ledger against each other. Where the paper would authorize — the appointment, the Civil-Service justification, the disclosures — the certified answer is that it does not exist. Where the paper would document — the guardianship files, the orders, the administrative records — the answer is that it may not be seen, on confidentiality grounds supplied by the office’s own charter: N.J.S.A. 52:27G-25(f), cited back at the family by the department that houses the office. Eighteen months of certified answers produced nothing that authorized the acting designation and nothing the office holds about its wards — the statute that created the office is the statute that seals it. OPRA request record, 2025–2026 (receipts retained): Governor — 7-item appointment-documentation request of 3/23/2026 + custodian certification of 4/2/2026 (Act V). DHS custodian responses C250774 (CS-21 “not used by DHS HR”; not maintained; 3/2026) and C228980 (guardianship records “confidential pursuant to N.J.S.A. 52:27G-25(f), N.J.S.A. 30:4-24.3, and HIPAA”; 1/22/2025). Division of Aging Services C250716, C250484 (3/2026 — “not maintained”). OAG C251037 (3/2026). Essex County #16915 (closed 7/9/2026 — guardianship order withheld as “not disclosable”; PO 437815 produced). Union County Clerk of the Board UC-865-2025 (acknowledged 9/2/2025; never answered). Hudson County Surrogate R007070-061826 (6/2026 — jurisdictional denial; portal status recorded “Full Release”). NJ ethics FDS production: 2017–2026 produced, 2005–2016 absent.

The custodians, by name — who staffs the wall

A ledger like that can read as bureaucracy — as if “no records” were something a filing system says on its own. It is not. Every stamped answer above was drafted, signed, and sent by a person at a desk, and across eighteen months the record keeps returning to the same two desks: the department’s records custodian, and the division’s. What follows is what the agencies’ own produced papers show those desks doing.

1,007responsive emails located in one morning — April 29, 2026

≈691 MBoffered in exportable form — “results in a pst file”

0replies to that offer anywhere in the produced record

Request #484-2026 · three messages, then silence

Fri., Apr. 24, 2026. The family’s records request arrives at the desk of James Patterson, the department’s OPRA custodian.

Tue., Apr. 28. Patterson forwards it to the department’s own eDiscovery operator — pre-scoped: “Items 8 and 11 are likely to produce the same or similar emails.”

Wed., Apr. 29, 11:36 a.m. The operator answers with six search-statistics screenshots — 1,007 responsive emails, ≈691 MB, located between 9:34 and 11:26 that morning — and one question: “See statistics for the others requested. Let me know if you would like results in a pst file.”

No fourth message The produced chain ends at the offer. The counts went into the response letters; the emails did not. By July, the department’s answer to a renewed request had become: “Your request returned almost 1000 emails that would need to be reviewed … Please narrow your request.”

JP

James PattersonOPRA Custodian · DHS Office of Legal & Regulatory Affairs — the state wall The signature on the state’s answers. His first act in this record is a blanket denial signed January 22, 2025 — the wall was up three weeks before the accounting at the center of this story was even filed. Asked about that denial, he confirmed exactly one meeting held on it before it issued: a Teams meeting with Sarah Walzer and Helen Dodick — the officeholder whose records were being requested. By March 2026 his signed five-item denial accused the requesting family of “an intentional act of bad faith”; his internal note to the IT operator the next day reads, “he’s back.” DHS OPRA responses C228980 (1/22/2025) and the five-item denial of 3/23/2026 (quoted); meeting confirmation per the family’s retained correspondence; internal note and the Apr. 24–29 chain above per the agency’s own OPRA production.

SW

Sarah WalzerAssistant OPRA Custodian · Division of Aging Services — the division’s counter The division-side desk — inside the same chain of command that houses the office. Five requests over her signature, February to September 2025, returned the same three answers: previously requested, not maintained, confidential. By March 2026 the division was answering a request about the office it houses with a jurisdictional shrug: “OPG is in but not of the Division of Aging Services.” She sat in the one meeting held about the blanket denial — with Dodick — and when the family invoked the common-law right of access, the request was routed to Kimmo Abbasi: the office’s outside billing counsel (Act XIII), fielding the public’s records request about his own client. DoAS responses W230679, W231183, W236891, W238812, W239729 (2025) and C250484 / C250716 (3/26/2026, quoted); meeting and routing per the family’s retained correspondence.

Now stand back from the two desks and look at the wall entire. Between January 2025 and July 2026 the family’s requests went to every level of government that touches this office: the Governor’s office, the department, the division, the Attorney General, the state ethics custodian; the county governments of Essex, Union, and Hudson; the Surrogates’ counters of this act. State and county, executive and judicial, the answers come back in only three shapes: it does not exist; it may not be seen; ask someone else. Across the email requests alone, the agencies’ own searches located more than 2,000 responsive records — and the number released can be counted on one hand. One custodian’s denial was logged “Full Release.” Another was preceded by a meeting with the officeholder herself. A third was answered by the office’s own billing lawyer. A wall that uniform — across two levels of government and eighteen months of receipts — stops being a series of decisions and becomes what this act says the pillars became: a single structure, facing one direction.

“For nineteen years, the same people were standing in every position from which inquiry could have come. … The acting designation is not an anomaly within an otherwise rotating system. It is the visible trace of a system that has not rotated.” Inner-circle continuity analysis (Vol. II), April 2026

Act IX

The Pipeline and the Fund

What kind of office did seventeen unsupervised years produce? The State’s own payroll and appropriations records give two structural answers: look at who staffs it, and look at what pays them. This act follows the DAG-pipeline and roster/Fund-421 surveys (Vols. III–IV, Apr. 2026) — payroll-reconstruction figures are leads pending direct pulls; the statutes and the appropriations language are checkable as cited.

The pipeline

The 1985 Act built a wall: the office’s counsel must be independent of the Attorney General — the Legislature understood that litigators and fiduciaries have different reflexes. A 1990 executive order then consolidated agency lawyers under the Attorney General, and a 1994 civil-service ruling created the “Legal Specialist” title — the lateral door through which litigation careers migrate into fiduciary seats. Through that door, by 2025: a Deputy Attorney General who spent ~15 years defending the State against its wards’ civil-rights claims now heads the DHS legal apparatus; two more former DAGs sit beside him as Legal Specialists; and the OPG’s own statutorily-insulated counsel seat has been occupied since 2013 by an alumnus of the Attorney General’s tort-defense ranks — Pfoutz, of Ring One. The seat built to be independent of the Attorney General is staffed from the Attorney General’s office.

GH

Gerard A. HughesDAG ≈15 yrs → head of DHS legal, 2018 A career spent defending the State in civil-commitment and disability-rights litigation — against the institutionalized — then elevated to Assistant Commissioner of the office that supervises DHS legal strategy across every program touching the OPG. Pipeline survey Vol. III (lead); DHS org chart; reported App. Div. captions.

EL

Erick J. LucadamoDAG 2010–16 → OLRA Legal Specialist, 2017 Six years defending DHS in commitment and benefits matters; now supplies certifications in DHS litigation from the inside — advocate turned institutional liaison. Pipeline survey Vol. III (lead); reported captions.

JE

James EspositoDAG 2016–19 → OLRA Legal Specialist, 2022 The same lateral, on a compressed timeline — out of the Division of Law, back in through the DHS legal door three years later. Pipeline survey Vol. III (lead).

JP

Jonathan A. PfoutzOAG tort ranks (~9 mo.) → the OPG counsel seat, 2013 The pipeline’s terminal node: the one attorney slot the Legislature expressly walled off from the Attorney General, occupied for twelve years by an Attorney General alumnus — who uses it to defend the office against removal (Ring One). Pipeline survey Vol. III (lead); In re E.N.; In re Y.M.

And when this case’s subpoenas finally reached toward the court system’s own records, the pipeline ran in reverse — the Attorney General’s Tort Litigation & Judiciary Section appeared for the court administration and moved to quash, asserting privilege over the very classification records at issue, while the county’s lawyers quashed for the Surrogate. The section of the AG’s office that defends the State against liability is the section that showed up to keep the paper closed. Litigators at every door — and at the one door the Legislature marked no litigators, a litigator. Structural-obstruction finding (5/30/2026); Verified Complaint ¶¶ 15A–15D; AOC motion to quash, Jan. 13, 2026.

While the legal layer grew, the care layer vanished. In the Division of Aging Services — the administrative home of an office for elderly wards — the count of employees holding the ward-facing guardianship-services care title has stood at zero since 2020. The division exists, draws appropriations, has an assistant commissioner. It has no one whose job title is caring for a ward.

The fund

Fund 421 · the four-step loop (all public law)

1. N.J.S.A. 52:27G-27 — the office charges its “administrative costs, commissions and fees” against every ward’s income and estate.

2. N.J.S.A. 52:27G-27.1 — the bill becomes a priority lien on all the ward’s real and personal property; the office is exempt from filing fees, and the lien attaches without judicial review.

3. N.J.S.A. 3B:18-13 et seq. — the rates: 6% of income; sliding corpus commissions; “reasonable” expenses, with no external auditor of what is reasonable.

4. The Annual Appropriations Act, account 7530-421-574210: “Receipts from the Office of the Public Guardian for Elderly Adults are appropriated to the Office of the Public Guardian.” The same operative sentence, every year since 1989. Without it, ward-estate receipts would flow to the State’s General Fund. With it, they fund the staff who collect them.

The office, the month the story’s ward died

Reconstruct the office from its own October 2024 organizational chart and the State payroll feed — the month Nadia Romanov died — and the shape is explicit. The units that identify, secure, and extract value from ward estates (Investigations, Property, Client Asset, Trust Finance, Discharge/Deceased) counted 34 state staff plus 21 contractors, about $2.0M in payroll — against 19 care-management staff at $1.54M. All four Public Health Nurse positions: vacant, marked “no recruitment initiated.” Of the office’s attorneys, exactly one is paid from Fund 421 — Christopher Weldon, the counsel of record on Romanov, since departed through the door Act VII documents. And the Discharge/Deceased Unit — the unit that books a ward’s death and computes the office’s final bill — sits on Fund 421 entirely:

The unit that determines what to charge the dead is paid by the dead. Roster & Fund-421 survey (Vol. IV), April 2026 — org chart of Oct. 2024 + PMIS + payroll feed (lead)

Act IX · The Intake

Last on the List, First Through the Door

Everything so far is the machine mid-digestion. Watch instead how a person enters it — because the Legislature wrote down the order it wanted, and the intake runs the order backwards.

The Appellate Division has put the Legislature’s ranking in one sentence: the surrogate decision-makers for an incapacitated person are, “first, the person’s spouse or domestic partner; next, their heirs or friends; and lastly, the Public Guardian.” The next-of-kin preference “must be recognized unless it is shown to the court’s satisfaction that the appointment of next-of-kin would be affirmatively contrary to the best interests” of the ward “in some significant way.” The office of this story is, by design, the last resort. N.J.S.A. 3B:12-25, as stated in In re F.M.W. (App. Div. 2026), quoting In re Roll, 117 N.J. Super. 122, 124 (App. Div. 1971).

The road in runs through a county office. Adult Protective Services — the county provider designated under the Adult Protective Services Act — investigates a report, files the verified guardianship complaint, and recommends the guardian; the court appoints counsel for the alleged incapacitated person; a judgment issues. And APS answers to the same State department in which the Public Guardian’s office sits — an office that, by its own charter, answers to no one in it. The recommender and the recommended share a roof. Adult Protective Services Act, N.J.S.A. 52:27D-406 et seq.; R. 4:86; N.J.S.A. 52:27G-23 (Act IV). Petition-and-recommendation mechanics as recited in In re F.M.W.

The one time an appellate court watched the door

In late 2023, Adult Protective Services of Monmouth and Middlesex Counties received an anonymous referral about a woman the published record calls F.M.W. She lived with her sister — “her only relative,” her caregiver, and the person F.M.W. had chosen for herself: a durable power of attorney, made in 2014, “before F.M.W. became incapacitated,” named the sister as her agent. On June 11, 2024, APS filed for guardianship and recommended the Public Guardian. Court-appointed counsel for F.M.W. — her own, supposedly independent, advocate — “strongly opposed” the sister, recommended that his client’s power of attorney be revoked, and “did not speak directly with any of F.M.W.’s treating physicians.” On September 13, 2024, the court heard the only contested question — who — by telephone. No witness testified. No one was cross-examined. No findings were made. The Public Guardian, last on the Legislature’s list, was appointed over the first person on it.

In re F.M.W., A-0847-24 (App. Div.) · approved for publication Feb. 20, 2026

A guardianship decision “made without evidential basis, without examination and cross-examination of lay and expert witnesses, and without a statement of reasons is untenable in the extreme.”

Reversed — but F.M.W. had died on July 29, 2025, nine months into the appointment, and the appeal was “technically moot.” The panel published anyway: the procedural failures are “‘capable of repetition, yet evading review.’”

Read the mootness holding the way the panel could not write it: wards die faster than appeals run. In the one published case that tested this front door, the test outlived the ward. And the brief defending the appointment was signed not by the Attorney General but by a private firm — Hoyle Law LLC — outside counsel of the kind Act IX’s wall was supposed to keep distinct from the office it serves. In re F.M.W., No. A-0847-24 (App. Div. Feb. 20, 2026) — quotations verbatim from the slip opinion and its caption; the parties are identified by initials under R. 1:38-3(e), and this account preserves that.

Who defends the person the petition runs against?

In F.M.W.’s case, the court-appointed defender sided with the petitioner against his own client’s chosen agent. An Essex County purchase order shows the structural version of the same collapse. One Essex guardianship judgment opens by naming Lawrence N. Meyerson — of Acts VII and XI — as “attorney for Adult Protective Services of Essex County”: petitioner’s counsel. Purchase Order 437815, produced under OPRA, shows the County paying the same attorney $1,750 for service as “Court appointed counsel” in a guardianship matter — the seat that belongs to the alleged incapacitated person’s independent advocate. The firm that petitions to strip a person’s rights is also appointed, county-paid, to defend against the stripping. Asked under OPRA for the underlying guardianship order, the county withheld it. Essex County Purchase Order #437815 (Requisition 454635; service date June 20, 2023), OPRA request #16915 production and closure correspondence (2026); Essex guardianship judgment CP-0435-2019, opening recital; R. 4:86-4(b) (court-appointed counsel for the alleged incapacitated person).

The Legislature built a ranked list and put this office last.
The one court that checked the ranking arrived after the ward was gone.

Act X

The Deeds

A guardianship of the estate ends, sooner or later, in paper — and the most honest paper in this story is recorded at the county clerk. A deed cannot be un-filed. Follow one signature through fourteen years of county land records, and the machine assembles itself: the same grantor, the same settlement agent, and — increasingly — buyers with no faces at all.

One settlement shop has sat at the closing table of Public Guardian sales across at least five counties, from 2012 to a deed recorded in April 2026, with no visible procurement, rotation, or bid.

And at the far end of the pattern, the buyers stop being people. A ward’s home in Newark goes to an LLC formed under the ward’s own street address. A ward’s $736,500 property in Ocean Township goes to another LLC — both deeds prepared by the same OPG transactional counsel. Keri required the proceeds of a ward’s life to flow to “the natural objects of her bounty.” Watch instead what one closing looks like, line by line.

Act XI

One Closing, to the Penny

Lucia Allimann was a retired New Jersey schoolteacher — pension of $656.83 a month — living at 486 Wyndham Road in Teaneck until a guardianship moved her to a nursing home. In 2022, under a court order that initially approved the sale of the wrong house in the wrong county before being quietly amended, her home sold for $450,000. Bergen County is the one county in this record where the accounting file doubles as the Surrogate’s own audit file — so for this single ward, the public file itself shows every dollar. Bergen Surrogate imaged file M#322407 (132 pp., obtained by in-person Surrogate inspection, request routed per R. 1:38-10); dockets P-520-19, P-032-22, P-500-19, P-589-25.

The county auditor, Alan E. Smith, CPA, did his job. His October 14, 2025 memo caught a law firm — Meyerson, Fox, Mancinelli & Conte — paid its $10,827.50 fee twice, once by office check and once at closing, and demanded an offset. And he asked the only question that matters in this entire story:

Bergen County Surrogate · auditor’s memo · Oct. 14, 2025 (p. 77)

Show a check or wire proving the sale proceeds reached “a bank account owned by Ms. Allimann.”

The guardian’s sworn accounting told the court the proceeds were “deposited into the Public Guardian’s trust account for Lucia Allimann.” The audit file’s own hand-traced worksheet identifies the checks that carried her money — a $14,805.24 settlement check and a $5,000 return that surfaced through her lawyers’ trust account six weeks after closing. What appears nowhere in the public file is the thing the auditor actually asked for: an account owned by Lucia Allimann receiving any of it.

The question was still open when the accounting was approved, unopposed, that December — the only notice letter to her only listed relative having come back marked wrong address. She had died the previous March. Note one more line in the closing itself: among the disbursements was $9,927.10 in “Legal fees to Helen S. Dodick, Esq” — the Acting Public Guardian, billed by personal name, inside a ward’s closing. Audit file M#322407: auditor memo p. 77; ALTA worksheet p. 12; Schedule E; order of 4/8/2022 (fees).

Act XI · Weehawken → Edison

One Marriage, Two Wards

Cajetan and Juliet Vaz were married for decades. They owned two buildings in Weehawken — one of them, 12-14 King Avenue, worth $1.7 million and owned free and clear, no mortgage on it at all. In 2023 the Office of the Public Guardian became guardian of them both. Within two years the couple’s real estate was gone — $2.15 million sold — and the money had disappeared into the space between two county courthouses. Guardianship dockets 325734 (Cajetan, CW00265) & 325735 (Juliet, CW04695); incapacity judgments 5/26/2023. Finding cluster, 2026-06-19 → 2026-07-06.

A house in foreclosure was the way in

Only the smaller building, 401 Park Avenue, carried a mortgage in default. Its foreclosure — SWC-F-006605-22 — was filed in June 2022; and by October 2023 the bank’s own lawyers had let it lapse: dismissed for lack of prosecution. That is where it sat when the guardianship took hold. What revived it was not the lender. In September 2024 — as the Public Guardian’s sale of the property was being arranged — the foreclosure was pulled back to life by motion, reinstated, its plaintiff substituted, and then, on April 11, 2025 — five days before the deed to the buyer recorded — voluntarily dismissed. The foreclosure did not drive the sale. It kept time with it. Foreclosure packet SWC-F-006605-22 preserved in full: 14 filings, 6/27/2022 (complaint) → 4/11/2025 (voluntary dismissal), incl. 10/20/2023 dismissal for lack of prosecution and 9/2024 motion to reinstate. 401 Park deed recorded 4/16/2025.

Two buyers, neither of them family

Keri required a ward’s home to pass to “the natural objects of her bounty.” 401 Park went for $450,000 — to TNC Management Group LLC, the developer that had been pressing to take the property under a pre-guardianship contract, and had sued the Vazes to force it; the Office let that suit go to default. 12-14 King — the unmortgaged $1.7 million building — was sold off-market to R&E Investors 180 LLC under an order dated April 1, 2025, five months after the judge who had presided over the case, Jeffrey Jablonski, left the trial bench for the Appellate Division. The buyer promptly re-listed it at $2,399,000 — 41% over what it had just paid. Frontline/TNC v. Vaz, HUD-C-000115-23 (request for entry of default 11/10/2023); recorded Hudson deeds, 401 Park & 12-14 King; King sale order dated 4/1/2025; Jablonski assigned to the Appellate Division eff. 11/7/2024. The King order’s signature line is not yet independently obtained.

The marriage, severed on paper

Tenancy by the entirety is the law’s protection for a married couple’s home: one spouse’s share cannot ordinarily be sold out from under the other. Both shares were conveyed anyway. In July 2024 the two cases were consolidated onto Cajetan’s docket alone; Juliet’s froze, with nothing booked to her. The couple was moved into a single assisted-living facility, Brighton Gardens in Edison — a $478,236 spend-down. Two houses became two beds. Of the $2.15 million, roughly $273,000 ever surfaced in the Guardian’s ward pool; the $1.7 million from the building with no mortgage never appeared there at all. Consolidation order 7/31/2024; deposits booked to Cajetan CW00265 (~$454K), Juliet CW04695 = $0. WF payments/deposits finding, 2026-06-19; facility figure, foreclosure-timing finding, 2026-07-05.

The closing move

Cajetan Vaz died on January 31, 2026. The State recorded his death within four weeks — but his guardianship docket did not: five months later it still gave his date of death as January 1, 1900. His estate was opened not in Hudson, where every dollar of this story had moved, but in Middlesex — because the facility the Office had placed him in made Edison his residence at death. And there the Office of the Public Guardian, appearing only as guardian of his widow Juliet, renounced the right to administer his estate and handed it to a nephew in Virginia. The estate it swore to was small: personal property not over $100,000; real estate — $0. A year earlier it had sold that real estate for $2.15 million. No one is left who must account for the difference: not the Hudson guardianship, which filed no accounting and recorded no death; not the Middlesex estate, whose out-of-state administrator was never told the money had existed. Estate of Cajetan Vaz, Middlesex Surrogate docket 294934 — Letters of Administration to Elton Sayani (Manassas, VA) 4/6/2026; renunciation signed “Helen C. Dodick, Acting Public Guardian,” 3/30/2026; sworn estate: personal ≤ $100,000, real estate $0. Cross-county-gap finding, 2026-06-25.

A married couple, a $1.7 million house owned free and clear, a foreclosure that kept time with the sale, and an estate that swears the real estate was worth nothing. Juliet Vaz is still alive — her half of the marriage’s wealth missing from her own account and from her husband’s estate at once.

Act XII

The Gross-Up

Commissions are the quiet engine. A guardian’s statutory commission is a percentage of the corpus it manages — so the machine has an interest in making the corpus look big. Watch one accounting do it, for a Union County ward named Arturo Calderon, whose Summit house sold in October 2023:

Schedule A — receipt: “24 Russell Place — sale”$565,114.51

Schedule C — one unitemized line: “Closing Costs — Sale of 24 Russell Place”−$565,114.54

Net movement of actual money through the estate−$0.03

Termination commission claimed (2% of $200,000 + 1.5% of $505,578.67)$11,583.68

Same commission computed on what the estate actually kept≈ $1,672

Overcharge from parking the gross in corpus≈ $9,911

The Surrogate’s auditor wrote that the commissions could not be calculated without a yearly breakdown and demanded the missing settlement statement. Counsel never responded. On January 13, 2026, the account was settled “as reported” and the full $22,751.99 in commissions was awarded anyway. One ward, one line item, $9,911 — and the method scales: the same gross-up signature has since been confirmed in other property-sale accountings in the same county. Calderon FFA, Union S-4754, 85 pp., primary-verified; detector cohort: Schaffer Q-6139 (+$2,300), Harris P-7689 (+$1,200), Lewis R-4804 (+$1,073).

Act XIII

The Closer

When a ward dies, the office’s accounting must be “closed” — presented to a court and approved. Meet the man who closes them: Kimmo H. Abbasi — the office’s outside counsel, the only voluntary departure from its legal ranks documented in twenty-five years — and the clearest public specimen of how the interior of the machine and its outside bar are the same people.

His firm biography says

Immediately before Hill Wallack, he was the “lead attorney with the decedent unit” at the NJ Office of the Public Guardian for Elderly Adults.

The State’s payroll data says

KIMMO ABBASI, payroll ID 176897: title “Regulatory Officer 1” — salary ≈ $83,000 — pay records spanning roughly late 2021 to August 2022: about eight to ten months of state service, under a DHS division coding, before the Hill Wallack partnership.

Three conflicts division · title · tenure — the bio and the payroll cannot both be right.

Whatever his title was inside the office, by late 2022 he was outside it — a Hill Wallack partner, retained by the Acting Public Guardian under her statutory power to hire counsel independent of any supervision by the Attorney General, and billed back to the wards’ estates at $300 an hour. A salaried public servant’s year, at that rate, is about 277 billable hours. Then came the Romanov accounting:

Feb. 13, 2025 — sworn Certification of Services, fees through Feb. 10$4,430.00

Oct. 21, 2025 — the same pre-Feb.-10 period, restated$6,960.00 (+57%, retroactive)

Nov. 3, 2025 — total presented at the proof hearing (Ex. 17, unexplained)$31,935.50

Growth of the sworn figure, same estate, same work7.2×

The mechanics are visible inside the filed bill itself: a paralegal’s rate changed from $150 to $175 retroactively; hours were added to pre-existing entries; and one September 22, 2025 line was filed still wearing its scaffolding — “PLEASE REVIEW - NARRATIVE MISSING - YOUR HOURS BILLING TEAM PRIOR TO BILLING.” Backfilling, caught mid-pour, sworn to anyway. S-8455 fee certifications of 2/13/2025, 10/21/2025, and the Nov. 3, 2025 proof-hearing exhibit.

“Mr. Abassi confirmed on the record that he and former counsel for Ms. Balevre, Christine Matus, Esq. failed to notify the court of the error.” The court, on the record — November 3, 2025 [name as spelled in the record]

Five months after that finding, in the middle of the litigation over his own fees, Abbasi’s firm biography added a new credential: Certified Elder Law Attorney, dated April 30, 2026. The certificate is real. What the record shows is simply when he reached for it. Hill Wallack bio (CELA, 4/30/2026). Payroll identity match is near-certain (name + agency + timing) but formally unconfirmed — flagged per the investigation’s own caveat.

Act XIV

The Family That Wrote It Down

Every pattern above was reconstructed from the outside, years later. This one was documented in real time — by a grandson who copied lawyers on every email while his grandmother’s guardianship ran its course. Nadia Romanov, of 2253 Shawnee Path, Scotch Plains, is the ward whose case pried the machine open.

Dec 16, 2022

Her homeowner’s insurance lapses for non-payment. The ~$700,000 house — the estate’s marquee asset — is already being neglected. It will never be properly sold.

Dec 2023

The Surrogate’s counsel instructs the outgoing guardian to draft the judgment installing OPG using “the language OPG usually has in their Judgments.” The order that hands the office its next ward is written to the office’s own template.

Jun 10, 2024

On a recorded status call, the family confronts the office over a $400,000 gap between the prior guardian’s accounting and the OPG’s sworn inventory — the missing TransAmerica account among the differences. The Acting Public Guardian, in her own voice: “We’re not forensic accountants …” “It’s an inventory problem, not an accounting.” And, of the house: “I’m not gonna wait for the approval to clean it out.” (Diarized ASR — draft.) Ten months later, the accounting built on that inventory is vacated.

Oct 16, 2024

Two days before her death, with her condition failing, the court dismisses both pending complaints: “no further action can [be] taken.” The accountability window closes as she dies.

Oct 18, 2024

Nadia Romanov dies. Within four days, a security camera catches the OPG’s investigator at her empty house.

Feb–Apr 2025

The office files its First and Final Accounting: a phantom $64,455.32 inventory entry (a duplicated Ameritrade account, later admitted); a jointly-held $16,132.61 account the court says “should never become one of their accounts”; a concealed $306,158.64 life-insurance interest.

Nov 3–5, 2025

The accounting judgment is vacated. The court finds on the record that counsel “failed to notify the court of the error.” The fee certification has grown 7.2× (Act X).

Jan 28, 2026

“Judge said we can file exceptions.” The fight moves into the open: verified exceptions, in-person file inspections under R. 1:38-10, OPRA requests to every custodian in the chain — and, when the Governor’s office produced nothing, the quo warranto demand of Act XVI.

Nothing in the mailbox was hidden. It was simply not yet legible. The exceptions, the audits, the deeds, and the caption of a twenty-two-year-old Supreme Court case make it legible now.

Act XV

The Ledger of the Dead

A guardianship is supposed to end when the ward dies: account, distribute, close. The State Auditor has now measured this office three times across twenty-seven years — 1998, 2013, 2025 — and found the same failure every time: the dead don’t leave. In 2012 it was 55 estates over $50,000, totaling $16.2 million. By 2024:

2,452 deceased clients still on the books, with open balances of $16,935,741 backlog “ranging from under 1 year to more than 26 years”

One client on the 2013 books had been dead since 1996 and was still carrying a $56,000 inventory balance. Money that stays under the office’s administration earns interest — and by statute, the interest belongs to the office’s own fund. An unclosed estate is not a lapse. Under N.J.S.A. 52:27G-42, it is revenue. State Auditor reports (1998, 2013, Jan. 23, 2025), as pleaded at Verified Complaint ¶¶ 31A–31B.

Act XVI

By What Authority

There is an ancient writ for exactly one question: quo warranto — by what authority do you hold this office? In 2026, a private relator — the grandson — drafted it against the Acting Public Guardian, demanding the answer the Governor’s own records custodian could not produce. It has not yet been filed. What has been served is the step the protocol requires first: a formal demand that the Attorney General bring the action or decline. Every stated deadline passed in silence. The question is written; the silence is the standing.

6 mo.acting tenure the statute allows

≈17 yrsacting tenure in fact

0producible appointment instruments

And here the story closes the loop it opened in Act III. The lawyer who argued In re Keri and won — Donald D. Vanarelli — was appointed, nineteen years later, as Nadia Romanov’s first guardian. Ten days before he moved to hand the ward to the OPG, a $100,000 withdrawal was effected against her life-insurance policy under a power-of-attorney self-designation — a maneuver that bypassed the court-authorization safeguards that Keri, his own case, made mandatory for guardian estate-planning. The doctrine he built for Mildred Keri’s sons was, in the end, not even followed for Nadia Romanov. And the office the writ will name is run by the two lawyers whose names sit beside Tetelman’s on the OPG’s own Keri brief. In re Keri, 853 A.2d 909 (caption); Verified Complaint ¶ 32B; S-8455 record.

The quo warranto complaint is explicit about what it does not attack: not Keri, not substituted judgment, not any court’s power to appoint a guardian. The defect it names is narrower and worse — that the doctrine’s enormous machinery has been operated, for seventeen years, by an office “without any conferring instrument that the responsible state offices can produce,” growing fifteenfold in the fiduciary assets under its control while answering, by its own charter, to no one. Verified Complaint ¶¶ 31F–31G.

Mildred Keri’s sons went to the Supreme Court so that what their mother had would outlive her inside her family. That is what the court blessed: her care paid for, her judges satisfied, her remainder passing to “the natural objects of her bounty.”

In the machine’s version, the ward still ends up at the two-thousand-dollar line.
The difference is where everything else goes.

The estate is subject to disproportionate waste because of the costs of the guardianship. N.J.S.A. 52:27G-25(h) — the harm the Public Guardian was created to stop

Sources & method

In re Keri, 181 N.J. 50, 853 A.2d 909 (2004), rev’g 356 N.J. Super. 170 (App. Div. 2002). All quotations verbatim from the opinion; the counsel roster in Act III verbatim from the published reporter caption.
In re F.M.W., No. A-0847-24 (App. Div. Feb. 20, 2026), approved for publication — all Act IX (Intake) quotations verbatim from the slip opinion and its caption. The parties are identified by initials under R. 1:38-3(e); this narrative preserves the impoundment. With N.J.S.A. 3B:12-25 (guardian priority — Public Guardian last); In re Roll, 117 N.J. Super. 122 (App. Div. 1971); Adult Protective Services Act, N.J.S.A. 52:27D-406 et seq.; R. 4:86.
Public Guardian for Elderly Adults Act, L. 1985, c. 298; N.J.S.A. 52:27G-20 to -42 (purpose, appointment cap, independence, fee-retention, fund/interest, estate lien).
Act IV (Living Ward) instruments and authorities: recorded Bergen County deed-embedded OPG judgments of Oct. 20, 2008 (ward Goldie Jaffe; deed rec. May 11, 2009) and Feb. 19, 2010 (ward Madeline Rutherford; Dodick drafter block), quoted verbatim; NJ Judiciary promulgated guardianship-judgment forms CN 11802 (rev. 02/2017) ¶14 and CN 11988 (Directive #11-21, 2021) ¶13 (njcourts.gov); NJ Advance Directives for Health Care Act, N.J.S.A. 26:2H-53 et seq. (esp. -57, -59, -78); N.J.S.A. 3B:12-56(c); R. 4:86-6(d)(1).
Essex County Purchase Order #437815 (Requisition 454635) with the OPRA request #16915 production and closure correspondence (2026); Essex guardianship judgment CP-0435-2019 (opening recital).
Act IV medical record (the September story): CareOne at the Highlands progress notes for Nadia Romanov, production run 12/13/2023–10/18/2024, obtained by the family’s medical-records request — Social Services notes of 9/13/2024 (A. Kaiser) and 9/14/2024 (R. Adem, R.N.), Nursing note of 9/20/2024 (E. Cinquemani, L.P.N.), quoted verbatim; NJ POLST of 12/8/2023 (verbal order via telephone; “Goals of Care: To be home”; surrogate line “Donald Vanarelli (legal guardian)”); Office of the Public Guardian letters to Dr. Rita Goradia of Oct. 1 and Oct. 3, 2024 (code-status consents; the Oct. 3 letter “By: Suzanne M. Dykes, Esquire,” cc Awilda Martinez); OPG “Expedited Time Report of Nadia Romanov” (Care Management, $110/hr).
Verified Complaint in lieu of prerogative writs (quo warranto), v3.8 (draft) — Dodick tenure chronology (¶¶ 23–31H), Governor’s OPRA certification of April 2, 2026 (¶ 29), State Auditor trajectory 1998/2005/2013/2025 (¶¶ 31A–31G), billing-loop facts (¶¶ 36–38), Surrogate filing refusal (¶ 15(j)), TransAmerica/POA facts (¶ 32B).
N.J. Office of the State Auditor, OPG audits: 1998; 2005 (FY 2002–2004); 2013 (FY 2010–2012); Jan. 23, 2025 (through Sept. 5, 2024).
Bergen County Surrogate imaged file M#322407 (Allimann, P-589-25; 132 pp., incl. auditor A. Smith memo of 10/14/2025 and ALTA worksheets), obtained by in-person Surrogate inspection (request routed per R. 1:38-10).
Recorded instruments: Passaic i2012059181 (2012); Bergen 17-093464 (2017); Monmouth inst 2025008112 (2025); Essex i2026034461 (2026); Hudson Bk 9979/Pg 968 (2026); Union NOS of 4/19/2024; recorded power-of-attorney inventory (34 instruments, 2010–2025, incl. the 2011 general delegation and the Monmouth POA rec. 9/6/2024).
OPG First and Final Accountings and Surrogate audit memos: Calderon (Union S-4754), Romanov (Union S-8455), Allimann (Bergen P-589-25); Muska file (Middlesex 265306).
Order & Judgment Discharging Guardian and Appointing Substitute Guardian, In the Matter of Nadia Romanov, Union County S-8455, FILED Jan. 3, 2024 — drafted on OPG letterhead, “By: Christopher R. Weldon, Esquire, Attorney ID No. 119252015”; ¶13 quoted verbatim in Acts IV and VII (power of attorney revoked; advance directive “voided as to proxy designation, but the Public Guardian shall consider the preferences expressed”).
Judgment of Incapacity and Order Appointing Guardian, In re Hans Oesau, Hudson County 301976, FILED June 9, 2011 (recorded copy; page image verified) — recital “by Frank R. Gioia, Esquire, attorney for the petitioner, Hudson County Social Services”; OPG drafter block “By: Sharie A. Robinson, Esquire, Associate Counsel”; ¶11 living-will revocation (flat form).
Who files the sale (Act VII closing-table card): In re Harmony Brown, Union County — Order FILED Jan. 17, 2020 (James S. LaCorte, Surrogate), opened “by Robert J. Rudy III, Esq. of Pawar Gilgallon & Rudy, LLC, Attorneys for the Office of the Public Guardian … Helen C. Dodick … guardian of Harmony Brown,” ¶1 approving the sale of 2216 Lyde Place, Scotch Plains, to Dia Homes, LLC for $315,000; recorded Union County deed instrument 322422 (recorded 2/24/2020, grantor “Harmony Brown, an Incapacitated Person, by her Guardian, Helen C. Dodick, Esquire, Acting Public Guardian,” Block 3005 Lot 4, consideration $315,000) — both page images verified. Firm: pgrlawyers.com (Pawar Gilgallon & Rudy, LLC; Robert J. Rudy III, attorney ID 002801998).
OPRA request record, 2025–2026 — the family’s requests, custodian responses, and denial correspondence, retained with receipt numbers as cited in Act VIII’s OPRA ledger (Governor / DHS / Division of Aging Services / OAG / Essex / Union / Hudson / ethics); the Governor’s-office certification of April 2, 2026 as pleaded at Verified Complaint ¶ 29.
DHS internal OPRA-processing correspondence, produced to the requestor under OPRA — the request #484-2026 chain of Apr. 24–29, 2026 (custodian forward of 4/28; eDiscovery statistics reply of Wed., Apr. 29, 2026, 11:36 a.m., with six search-statistics screenshots totaling 1,007 items / ≈691 MB, quoted verbatim including the PST-export offer; no acceptance of that offer appears in the produced record); the “almost 1000 emails” narrowing demand (C256866, July 2026); DHS/DoAS response letters C228980 (Jan. 22, 2025), the five-item denial of Mar. 23, 2026 (“intentional act of bad faith”), W230679 / W231183 / W236891 / W238812 / W239729 (2025), C250484 / C250716 (Mar. 26, 2026 — “OPG is in but not of the Division of Aging Services”). Characterizations are limited to what the produced documents state; quotations verbatim.
Public data: NJ payroll (payroll_agency — Abbasi rows; OPG title/“None Listed” employer coding); NJ ethics Financial Disclosure Statements 2017–2026 (OPRA-obtained) and the 2005–2016 absence.
Public web biographies: hillwallack.com (Abbasi; CELA date), mfmclaw.com attorneys page (2025 roster), wilentz.com (Mega), weldon.law (Weldon Law, LLC — “more than a decade of public service … over 1,000 guardianship and fiduciary matters statewide”; practice areas incl. “Life Planning (POA/Advance Directive)”).
Contemporaneous email record, 2022–2026 (Romanov guardianship), quoted snippet-exact.
Recorded family status calls of June 10 and June 21, 2024 (OPG / Meyerson / family): speaker-diarized ASR transcripts (Deepgram nova-3, 2026 runs) from the investigation’s recordings corpus. Speaker attribution for H. Dodick anchored by on-call introduction (“That’s Helen Dodick, Andrew”) and institutional self-references. All call quotations are machine-transcription drafts, not yet audio-verified word-for-word — per the investigation’s transcription-consensus discipline, they are leads until a human listens against the audio; none should leave this document without that step.
Surrogate access record: records-access writ draft (6/21/2026) and structural-obstruction finding (5/30/2026) — the $3.00/page regime (N.J.S.A. 22A:2-30) vs. the Superior Court Clerk’s per-page rate [clerk figure to be confirmed against Directive #03-11 before external use], the Essex camera-ban episode of 6/2/2026 (430 photographs; “Superior Court records” concession), the Union “not a party” email of 3/16/2026 (verbatim), the 1-bit free-channel finding, the attorney-field stripping pattern, and the N.J.S.A. 2B:14-4 clerk-litigant analysis.
Investigative survey series (Perplexity Computer, Apr. 2026, published under njguardianshipabuse.com): Vol. I Visibility Analysis; Vol. II Inner Circle: Continuity of Personnel; Vol. III The DAG-to-OPG Pipeline; Vol. IV Roster & Fund 421. Used as framework and for continuity/visibility/roster figures — marked “(lead)” where not yet independently re-verified; where a survey detail conflicts with a primary record (e.g., who signed which Keri brief), the primary record governs and is what appears above. The site itself was unreachable (HTTP 502) at build time; pillar framing taken from the published volumes.
Appropriations Acts, DHS account 7530-421-574210 (the “receipts … are appropriated to the Office of the Public Guardian” sentence, annually since 1989); NJ Treasury “YourMoney” payroll feed; OPG organizational chart of Oct. 2024 and PMIS records (as reconstructed in Vol. IV — leads).
Portraits: public firm/government bio pages and county press photos, plus user-identified images, per portraits/ and the investigation’s provenance manifest. No confirmed public photograph of the Acting Public Guardian exists in the record; that frame is intentionally empty. Grayscale treatment applied uniformly.

The Acting
Guardian