Shakespearean Melodrama in Taos District Court
King Lear Transformed
“How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is
To have a thankless [sister]” (Lear. I.iv.288-89).
Allen v. Northrup
The Sign Man, who defended the First Amendment, despite verbal attacks by talk-show thugs, assaults by the Tow Truck Gang, and who suffered the prejudices of cops and judges, judges who protected the perverse claims of witnesses who perjured themselves in municipal and district court, last year was liberated from ignominy and dubbed a “Taos Living Treasure” by the community, La Gente, the people who most admire Jeff Northrup. They admire him for both his political courage and also for his compassion toward man’s best friends, the animals: “It’s cold tonight, bring your pets inside.” And/or “Gas is cheaper at Smith’s.” Oh yes he has the courage of his convictions and the generosity and loyalty of a lion.
He also trusted and loved his sister Pat (Call her Regan or Goneril if you read Shakespeare’s Lear) and gave her a job with salary and most of the profits from Southside Copies for more than a decade. And he sold her the longtime successful business for $10,000. The business grossed an estimated $250,000. Between siblings, the deal was contingent on her also buying Jack Rabbit Shipping, a twenty-year enterprise Jeff had started lo’ these many years ago.
The price for Jack was $73,000 since Brother Jeff had sold 90% of the stock to one Adam Wheat a few years back for $135,000, $35,000 down, the rest due on a note. But Mr. Wheat defaulted on the $100,000 plus, due to personal problems, and reassigned his shares to his creditor, Jeff, who took back the business and began paying rent to his longtime landlord, Mr. Flores.
Jeff had offered to sell both businesses cheap to Sister Pat, small down and finance the balance. It was a tidy family deal. But, oh, Sister Pat, once she signed on the line for Southside Copies, re-negotiated and signed a new lease with landlord Flores. Then she lowered her offer for Jack Rabbit from $73,000 to, maybe, $25,000. She began pushing Brother Jeff’s buttons and hired attorney Dennis Manzanares to give her the way to do her will. Dennis told her she could lock the doors on Brother Jeff’s Jack Rabbit store. She, not the real landlord, served the Sign Man with an eviction order, changed the locks, called the cops, and obtained a restraining order to keep him off the premises.
Indeed, in the simplest literary language, as Jeff’s advocate, Lee Boothby, said, “She stabbed her brother in the back and stole the kingdom.” Boothby said Allen engaged allegedly, in a form of “civil theft” and “fraud,” and “conversion” of another’s property, when she grabbed the assets and “the good will” of Jack Rabbit, even including the “phone number” (751-1111).
Oh, yes, Allen enlisted two of her three sisters, knowingly or unknowingly in the scheme to undermine Brother Jeff and support the putsch. (Aristotle said you couldn’t have tragedy except among family members and intimates.) In the initial days, after the attorney Dennis Manzanares and Pat Northrup Allen coup, Jeff cried real tears on a friend and former brother-in-law’s couch. Sister Pat cried, too, occasionally in district court but the tears would have been more appropriate while wrestling crocodiles. The corporate attorney sister from Massachusetts, who claimed she tried, “to help” sat with the oldest sister, who sat behind Pat during the trial, a trial really about the alleged “betrayal” of “Brother Jeff by the Three Sisters.”
The fourth sister, call her Cordelia, stayed away. But as Lear says to Cordelia, “Nothing will come of Nothing, speak again” (ibid. I.i.90). She missed the family reunion.
Full disclosure: Pat, Patricia, I like to call her, once told me her mother said, “Men are only good for carrying the luggage.” Her ex-husbands and boyfriends might agree with the analysis of her attitude toward the male of the species. I, too, have seen her teeth but she helped more than she hurt. When you have known someone perhaps not wisely or well, but for more than forty years, you see the pattern that confirms the alleged action. Nobody I know was surprised except Jeff.
When Ms. Allen filed a lawsuit against her brother’s protests against the South Side Copy shop movida, she wanted the court to validate the purchase agreement and collect almost a $1000 in disputed copy fees, while also securing a restraining order to keep the miscreant away from the property. She wanted him “gone from Taos” according to testimony in district court.
Jeff is tough on the outside but mush on the inside when it comes to friends or family. His “heart” easily manipulates him. But the cruelest sister treated him the way the shock jock, Nancy Stapp, did, who on DMC Broadcasting, called Jeff a “pervert.” Pat testified on the stand that Jeff took pictures of “female” employees. With a nod and a wink and much innuendo, she interpreted the videographer’s actions with a twist. Actually the man was documenting the “conversion” of his goods and his good will just as he had video taped the ex-mayor’s alleged violation of the famous fireworks’ ordinance.
Jeff spent, as one of Patricia’s ex-husbands said, “taking care of her for 17 years.” Ms. Allen may have counted on the Sign Man to crack while he considered what he saw as betrayal by his three siblings. Apparently, Jeff mused to himself: “Your old kind [brother] whose frank heart gave all” (ibid. III.iv.21) to you. But homeless and confined to the couches of friends, the Sign Man in his grief stormed upon the mesas and screamed back at the clouds. (For she had leased the shack in which he lived as part of the South Side Copy conversion project: the miscreant was forbidden to visit the premises.)
But telling himself in his grief “that way madness lies” (ibid. III.iv. 22), the Sign Man recovered. Sure his political enemies at DMC and the Baker gang at The Taos News probably toasted Sister Pat for shutting down the unpleasant messages about corruption posted out there in front of the Giant Jack Rabbit.
Then Jeff appeared at Attorney Lee Boothby’s door, saying “I am a Man More sinned against than sinning” (ibid. III.ii.59). The intrepid and brittle Boothby, a tax and contract law attorney, specializes in business disputes and liked the evidence she saw. Throughout the three-day trial Boothby laid down a chain of evidence and cited chapter and verse from the New Mexico statues. When characterizing Allen’s actions, the attorney used sobering terms: “fraud” and “conversion” and “civil theft.” Boothby had filed a “Counterclaim and Third-Party Complaint” against Sister Pat when answering the claims against defendant Jeff Northrup filed last year.
Among other witnesses, attorneys Dennis Manzanares, Dwight Thompson, Scott Sanger, and the sister Cheryl Northrup were called. Ironically, Ms. Allen has been a godsend to the legal community. So far, according to the evidence, Ms. Allen has paid brother Jeff some $10,000 for two businesses, estimated to gross somewhere near a half million dollars, businesses that paid the way for the brother and sister to live in Taos for two decades.
By the end of the three-day bench trial, the patient and even-tempered Judge McElroy said he would make a decision in a month or so and limit himself to the evidence and the rule of law. He advised the parties to settle lest both be disappointed in his decision.
Boothby and Northrup want both businesses back plus punitive damages, a few hundred thousand dollars while Allen’s newest attorney, Mr. Key of Albuquerque, suggested there was no evidence against Ms. Allen and the case should be dismissed. McElroy likened the case to King Solomon’s decision wherein two women appeared before the legendary lawgiver and both claimed to be the mother of a child. The King called for his sword and said he would split the baby in half. The real mother screamed in pain and said, “no,” give “her” the child. Then the King knew who the rightful mother was.
McElroy said he didn’t want to split up the baby (the business). For Ms. Allen has apparently reconfigured her shipping and copy business as “9 to 5” and moved from the back to the front of the building while sub-leasing portions of the Flores commercial structure. Allen’s attorney primarily blamed Brother Jeff for being short-tempered and inactive while ignoring Secretary of State guidelines for small corporations. In other words, he blamed the victim for his own downfall. Some have blamed Lear similarly. It’s sometimes a mistake to love your sisters or daughters.
Some might say the three sisters, who have been watching their brother boil in the courtroom pot, remind them of the Witches in Macbeth. But if you reread Lear in terms of the structure of the plot and character I dare say this tragedy applies. Though there was no murder, the death of familial love occurred. Even there the only victim was the brother, who believed his sisters loved him. Therein lies the tragedy played out here as melodrama.
By getting his day in court in front of an honest judge, regardless of the final decision, Jeff won if not the battle, the war. As Lear, in the end, says, “It is a chance which does redeem all sorrows that I have ever felt” (ibid V.iii. 267). As my old friend Saki was fond of saying (per Sir Walter Scott), “What a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.” And as Eliot said,”April is the cruelest month.”