ABCDE METRO sunday, september 26, 2010 63, 9 a.m. 71, noon 73, 5 p.m. 68, 9 p.m.
Obituaries Antonina Pirozhkova, 101, penned a moving memoir of life with writer Isaac Babel, her common-law husband. C8
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Get the forecast from the Capital Weather Gang and learn about road and transit trouble spots from Dr. Gridlock.
VIRGINIA Sensitive work
Arlington Cemetery officials say they are making progress in identifying and fixing burial mistakes. C4
LAWSUITS CLAIM MAJOR FRAUD
N.Va. buyers among hundreds affected BY TOM JACKMAN
Mark Dain wanted to sell a lot
of real estate, and he wanted to make a lot of money fast, court records show. But he needed customers. And
to attract customers, he needed success stories. So he turned first to his old football coach at Chan- tillyHigh School, DannyMeier.
Dain, a mortgage broker, had
pitched investment opportuni- ties to Meier in the past, but the popular coach had turned them down. Now, Dain had his own company in Woodbridge and a newpitch: Buy a piece of undeveloped
land in North Carolina, not far from the beach, with no money down.No payments for twoyears. Flip it quickly for virtually guar- anteed profit. Meier, now the principal at Robinson Secondary School in Fairfax County, said he talked it over with his wife and this time decided to take the risk. And it paid off big-time. Within months, Dainpresented his old coach with a check for $60,000.Meier hadn’t spent a dime. He still doesn’t
know how it happened. He told his brother, Tommy, the former Herndon football coach, and Dain whipped up a quick profit for him, too. It was 2006, when the phrase
“real estate investment” wasn’t yet an oxymoron. Dozens of Fair- fax schoolteachers and adminis- trators, some Pentagon workers and hundreds of other investors in the D.C. area were soon en- snared in what is being called the biggest real estate scam in North Carolina history. A flurry of law- suits was launched as the value of the vacant properties plummeted from as much as $400,000 to less than $20,000 apiece. Many of those involved in the
alleged scam have declared bank- ruptcy, and the FBI has begun
collecting cooperation agree- ments and guilty pleas from in- side participants, leading all the way to the North Carolina gover- nor’s office. Last month, one Northern Virginia mortgage bro- ker was sentenced to five years in prison for his role. Nearly 500 people left holding
virtually worthless “slivers of un- developed dirt,” as one lawsuit put it, are going after some of America’s biggest banks, includ- ing Bank of America and BB&T, claiming in lawsuits in Virginia and North Carolina that the banks were involved in a racke- teering conspiracy with the sales agents and developers. Loan officers used rigged ap-
fraud continued on C5
ANorth Carolina development has a faux “historical marker,” a clubhouse and infrastructure—but no homes.
This family doesn’t forget ROBERTMCCARTNEY
A fuzzy start for thinking regionally
establishment as it pushes the fragmentedWashington region to cooperatemore to deal with such issues as excessive traffic, inadequate education and imbalanced economic growth. The 2030 Group, led by
A
wealthy, suburban-based developers, wants to promote debate over whether to build a stronger regionwide governance structure — perhaps one that could find new tax revenue needed for roads,Metro and other purposes. The group, created in April,
hosted a workshopMonday where those ideas were kicked around by 36 elite business, government and civic leaders at the University ofMaryland’s College Park campus. Some of the proposals were
fuzzy, and no conclusions were reached. Instead, they achieved “universal agreement for continuing this discussion,” said 2030 Group President Robert Buchanan, a commercial developer based in Gaithersburg. The group deserves applause
for prodding the region to talk seriously about putting some muscle into regional cooperation. But its initiative has stirred some unease among existing institutions seeking to chart the area’s future, including theMetropolitan Washington Council of Governments, the Greater Washington Board of Trade and the Coalition for Smarter Growth. They all sent top representatives to the workshop but don’t necessarily agree with the 2030 Group’s approach or goals. Some are irked because they
worry the group is duplicating work that’s already been done and could be a distraction. In addition, COG and the smart growth coalition have criticized the 2030 Group for being overwhelmingly white andmale and thus not reflecting the region’s diversity. There’s also a subtle but
unmistakable fault line between the 2030 Group and the region’s longtime business and civic organizations over the crucial question of how to invest transportation dollars. The tension arises over what overall strategy the area should pursue in coming decades to absorb the estimated 1.7million new residents expected to come here by the year 2030. (Yes, that’s where the group got its name.) Boiled down, the difference is
over howmuch to rely on building new roads in the outer suburbs to solve the region’s
mccartney continued on C6 new, high-powered
business group is ruffling feathers in the local
BY ANITA KUMAR
richmond—Virginia Gov. Rob- ert F. McDonnell is on track to restore voting rights to more fel- ons than either of his Democratic predecessors—asurprisingdevel- opment for a conservativeRepub- lican who served as a law-and-or- der attorney general. Hehaswonpraise fromAfrican
Americans and civil rights groups for scrapping plans to require es- says as part of felons’ applications and vowing instead to act on each casewithin60days. His administration has ap-
proved780 of 889 applicants—88 percent, according to the Secre- tary of the Commonwealth of Vir- ginia’s Office, which handles the requests. “It was pretty darn fast,” said
James Bailey, regional director of theHamptonRoadsMissingVoter Project, which encourages felons to apply for restored rights. “I give himprops for sticking to what he saidhewas going todo.” Bailey has helped 10 applicants
PHOTOS BY JUANA ARIAS FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
Sylvia Paley Gilbert andNorton Paley enjoy a visit to theWorldWar IIMemorial during the family’sWashington reunion. Gilbert visited the memorial to honor her late husband,Harry Gilbert, who was a member of theU.S. Army Air Forces and a POWinGermany.
A century after their patriarch arrived at Ellis Island, descendants choose Washington for annual reunion BY KATHERINE SHAVER I
t took only minutes for a dozenwomen,menandchil- dren to gather Saturday around Alfred Paley and his cousin, Seymour Paley, as
the two octogenarians began to tell their stories. They told howthematriarch of
the family died in childbirth in Russia before her husband and eight children — the parents, grandparents and great-grand- parents of those listening — set out, one by one, on ships bound for the United States in the early 1900s. They held their audience riveted as they shared more re-
cent stories about how they and others of their generation tran- scended their parents’ grinding povertytoownstores,writebooks and catermeals formovie stars in Miami. As Alfred Paley, 83, explained,
“Someone here lived each part of the story.” The stories have been swapped
every autumn since 1946 inwhat- ever city the Paley family has chosen for its annual reunion. This year they choseWashington. On Saturday, three dozen Paleys ages 4 to 88 gathered at aHoliday Inn in Southwest to celebrate the 100th anniversary of patriarch Morris Paley’s arrival on Ellis Is-
Alfred Paley, one of the oldest surviving Paleys, holds a family photo. reunion continued on C3
get their rights restored since the state’s revamped program went into effect inMay, and he plans to hold a clinic this fall to encourage more to apply and to reassure those who might be worried that theyhave towrite anessay. Under Virginia’s Constitution,
residents convicted of a felony au- tomatically lose the right to vote, serve on a jury or own a gun. The governor canrestore voting rights to those who he thinks have re- deemed themselves. About 300,000 felons in Virginia who have served their time have not hadtheir rights restored. A governor’s restoration of vot-
ing rights is the first step in the process; restoring the rights of gun ownership and jury service is more complex. McDonnell’s Democratic pre-
decessor, Timothy M. Kaine, re- stored the rights of a record 4,402 felons during his term. Before
felon continued on C4 Dissolution of a relationship gets complicated for high-priced divorce attorney
Lawyer sues former client, then agrees to pay him $102,000
BY TOM JACKMAN Glenn C. Lewis is an acknowl-
edged titan of the D.C. area di- vorce bar, a former president of the Virginia Bar Association who boasts that he is the most expen- sive lawyer in the region: $850 an hour.He has an impressive office in the District and an array of
high-profile clients. So it fascinated the Fairfax
County courthouse when Lewis sued one of his former clients for an additional $500,000 in fees and interest, although he’d al- ready been paid $378,000. The fascinating part was that
the client, a lawyer himself, fired back. He hired another former state bar president, Bernard J. DiMuro, who dug through Lew- is’s billing records and hired two more divorce bar giants – includ- ing another former state bar president – as his experts. The experts said Lewis had done a
poor job and didn’t deserve near- ly $900,000 for his work. In Fairfax Circuit Court on
Friday, Lewis capitulated. He agreed to pay his former client more than $102,000, including $25,000 in sanctions imposed on Lewis’s lawyers for defying pre- trial orders. Lewis even failed to show up for his own deposition. Lewis,who for years hosted his
own cable access television show and who was given a lifetime achievement award fromthe Vir- ginia State Bar’s family law sec- tion, remains unrepentant. His final bill for the divorce of Steve
Firestone was $627,000, and he sought an additional $253,000 in interest for the case,which ended in 2004without a trial less than a year fromthe time it was filed. “He owed us more than that,”
Lewis said in an interview last week. “We earned more than that. I feel as strongly today as I did the day we filed [suit], that Mr. Firestone owed every penny of it.” Firestone said, “I thought that
what I paid was egregiously high,” and he stopped paying shortly before his divorce was finalized. Then he received the
lawsuit seeking another
$500,000 five years later. “I was shocked,” Firestone
said. “If hewon,wewere going to be out on the street.” Firestone hired DiMuro, who
doesn’t do divorce law. But DiMuro obtained Lewis’s billing records and the records of the divorce, which he then handed over to Joseph Condo and Robert Shoun, two longtime family law practitioners. Their conclusion: Not only
were Lewis’s bills “flagrantly dis- lewis continued on C4
More Va. felons get rights
restored C EZ SU
JOHNKELLY’SWASHINGTON Is it live or ?
Who’s playing “Colors” on the trumpet heard from the vice president’s house? Answer Man follows the notes to tell the tale of a long-standing Navy tradition. C3
Lure of quick profits snared investors in Carolina land deals
CHUCK LIDDY/THE NEWS & OBSERVER
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