Parole program pushed for money, families say
| • | A request for money: Follow the money trail from one Fresh Start resident's family members to the organization |
By Jim Dooley
Advertiser Staff Writer
E.G. "Curly" Ayers knew better than anyone else that his son had a troubled life.
Alan Ayers had been in and out of jail for relatively petty crimes such as credit-card theft and forgery. An alcoholic with a crack cocaine addiction, he also suffers from a bipolar mental illness, but his life has had bright spots, too, with stints as a professional golfer.
Clifford Clark said $3,000 a month went to addressing "special needs."
So when Alan Ayers had a chance to be freed from jail in October 1999 and placed into Fresh Start Inc., a Waipahu structured living facility, Curly Ayers paid what program director Ron Barker asked: an $1,800 entry fee and $1,800 for each of the next three months his son was in the facility.
Alan Ayers, 41, walked out of the program in January 2000, overdosing on drugs and ending up back in prison. By May 2000, he was allowed to re-enter Fresh Start and Barker required a $3,600 processing fee, according to Curly Ayers and his secretary, Sherry Maloney, who signed his checks.
Barker also said he would be charging $3,600 monthly rent, but Curly Ayers balked, so the amount was lowered to $1,800 payments for each of the following two months.
But Alan Ayers left the program early again, violating probation on July 30, 2000. His father asked Barker to find his son and have him arrested.
Barker did so and, two months later, sent Curly Ayers a bill for $5,000.
"As you know," Barker wrote, "I have had to do considerable work on Alan's situation. Please consider this Fresh Start Inc.'s invoice for $5,000.00 for services rendered." Barker said he wanted the money the next day.
"Please take care of this today," Barker wrote. "I would appreciate it very much."
Curly Ayers said he was shocked. Barker had not detailed what the $5,000 was for. Ayers instead sent a check for $500. Between October 1999 and October 2000, Ayers had paid $14,900 to Fresh Start for five months in the program. Barker was also collecting $375 in monthly welfare benefits Alan Ayers received, according to Alan Ayers.
Barker also tried to get Curly Ayers to invest, lend or donate a $100,000 down payment for the purchase of Fresh Start's $1.5 million Pupu'ole Place property.
"There was no way I was going to get involved in that," Curly Ayers said.
"The whole system stinks, if you ask me," said Ayers, 78, a wealthy retired California businessman. "The courts say that you have to go into a program like this. People like Barker get you at your most vulnerable. It's pay up or else."
Ayers was one of six former Fresh Start residents or their family members who told The Advertiser that Barker requested large amounts of money to enter or stay in the program and threatened to ask probation or paroling authorities to send residents back to jail or prison if they did not pay what he requested.
A seventh person said that she was accepted into Fresh Start but that Barker harassed her brother and elderly father for $10,000 to pay for her treatment, even though Fresh Start is not licensed as a drug- or alcohol-treatment facility. The state attorney general's office is investigating at least two of these claims, including that of a corporate attorney whose son said she paid $20,000 to keep him in Fresh Start and out of prison.
Barker and his wife, Norma Jean, who is running the facility in her husband's absence until questions about the program's practices are resolved, did not respond to telephone calls and a faxed list of questions from The Advertiser last week. Ron Barker said recently he was stepping aside as head of the program while several state agencies investigate Fresh Start.
Cites unnamed agency
In previous correspondence with The Advertiser, he said he had documentation that would clear him of all allegations and said one state agency, which he didn't name, has determined that Fresh Start had not misused its money.
"The whole system stinks. ... It's pay up or else," said Alan Ayers.
He did not directly respond to previous questions about allegations by former residents that he demanded extra money to keep them in his program.
"Your sources seem to mostly consist of convicted felons who are actively abusing alcohol or drugs and who have gone back to prison for committing violations of further crimes and abusing alcohol and drugs," he wrote.
Fresh Start has told the state paroling authority that it now charges residents a one-time nonrefundable $600 processing fee to cover the costs of interviewing and assessing a potential resident and $360 monthly rent.
But many residents say the bill has been far costlier.
Clifford Clark, a Halawa prison inmate, said his mother paid $20,000 after Barker threatened to terminate him from Fresh Start in 2000 and recommend that he be sent back to prison for violating the terms of his parole. During the years, Clark has been convicted of first-degree assault, first-degree forgery, car theft and terroristic threatening.
"(Barker) said, 'For $20,000 we can fix this, but right now you're in violation,' " Clark said.
Clark's mother, a corporate attorney in Michigan, sent a $20,000 check by overnight express delivery and Clark was allowed to stay in Fresh Start, according to Clark and Ron Ford, a former Fresh Start executive who runs another structured living program that competes with Barker for prison parolees, probationers and individuals with substance abuse problems.
Barker, Ford and others who run such programs have the ultimate say over who gets in and who gets kicked out if residents violate regulations, such as abusing alcohol or drugs. A call to a parole or probation officer can mean a quick trip back to jail or prison.
"I left Fresh Start because I didn't want to compromise my ethics any more," said Ford, who operates the Victory Ohana program. "So much bad stuff went on there. So many nice people got hurt."
Clark's mother filed a complaint about Barker and Fresh Start with the attorney general's office along with a copy of the $20,000 check, according to Clark and Ford. Clark's mother did not return a call for comment.
Clark said his mother paid $1,800 to enroll him in Fresh Start in 1999, then $1,800 a month in rent. Clark said his $350 monthly welfare checks were also going to Fresh Start during the entire time he was enrolled there.
Back to prison, then out
Clark left Fresh Start without permission after four months, violating the conditions of his parole. He was arrested and sent back to prison, earning parole again only because Barker agreed to take him back into the program.
"No treatment. ... All they cared about was money," said Andrea Hunter.
"He started charging (my mother) $3,000 a month after that, because he said I had 'special needs,'" Clark said.
Clark walked out of the program again in early 2000 because, by his account, he had been falsely accused of using drugs, but Barker agreed to take him back again if his mother paid the $20,000. After the sum was paid, Clark was readmitted but eventually kicked out.
A Hawai'i woman whose son was at Fresh Start with Clifford Clark said she, too, had to pay substantial money to Barker. She said she paid $10,000 to get her son paroled to Fresh Start and about $20,000 to keep him there after Barker threatened to terminate him for rules violations.
Part of the money went to a lawyer who Ron Barker said should represent her son before the parole board. The woman asked that she and her son not be identified because she is embarrassed by her son's criminal history and the money she paid to Fresh Start, where she said he was never rehabilitated.
"My son's drug problem devastated our family," she said. "Fresh Start didn't do anything except cost us a lot more money."
She said she has not been contacted by the attorney general's office.
Moses Kamealoha of Nanakuli said his son Moses Jr. was in Fresh Start for nearly six months two years ago.
The elder Kamealoha said that Ron and Norma Jean Barker "told me in order for my son to stay there, my wife and I had to pay $200-a-month rent," in addition to the $350 monthly welfare benefits that were paid to Fresh Start on his son's behalf.
"We said it was very difficult for us to pay, and we asked if it was possible to work out a payment plan," Kamealoha said. "They said if you don't pay $200 a month, he's out."
When his son found out that Kamealoha was paying extra, he told his father to stop.
"When my son found out we were paying $200 a month, too, he said don't pay. I said I want you to stay in the program and get better," said Kamealoha, who continued to pay the extra amount. Kamealoha said he spoke to the state attorney general's office after first contacting The Advertiser.
A Kailua woman said she was required to pay $500 a month to keep her son in Fresh Start. She said she did not want to be identified because her son's drug problem had taken a terrible financial and emotional toll on her.
She said Barker gave her an ultimatum. "With me, it was either I pay or my son going to have to go to jail," she said.
She and her son, who was also paying rent to Fresh Start with welfare benefits, recently demanded a refund of the money she had paid Fresh Start. Norma Jean Barker personally delivered a check for about $1,700 last week after determining that the mother had not agreed in writing beforehand to pay for services provided her son, the Kailua woman said.
Another Fresh Start resident lasted only a month in the program in late 2000. Andrea Hunter said her boyfriend paid $600 to enroll her in Fresh Start after she was convicted on a drug count. Within three days, she was thrown out after meeting with the boyfriend on an escorted visit to see her doctor.
"I wasn't supposed to do that," Hunter said. "It was against the rules. Ron Barker told me, 'You need to leave. You've got to go.' "
Her boyfriend, who asked not to be identified because he doesn't want to be associated with the program, said Norma Jean Barker called him and told him Hunter would be terminated from the program unless he came up with an extra $1,200.
"I paid it with my credit card," he said. "Otherwise she was going to prison."
About three weeks later, Hunter said, she was terminated again.
"I had nowhere to go," she said. "I was so scared. I went back on the street, back to drugs, and I ran from the law for seven months. Then I got picked up on a warrant and went to prison."
Hunter said she was later paroled to a Windward O'ahu drug treatment program called Hina Mauka. She completed the program and recently celebrated "my first anniversary of being clean and sober," she said.
She's an Air Force veteran and now plans to return to school and become a professional counselor to help beat substance abuse.
"Drugs cost me my family, my career and almost my life," said Hunter, who has spoken to the attorney general's office after first contacting The Advertiser.
She said she got no help from Fresh Start.
"There was no treatment, no program, just humiliation and intimidation and fear," Hunter said. "All they cared about was money."
One woman didn't even get into the program, but she said that when Ron Barker interviewed her in prison for possible entry into Fresh Start, he asked her what medications she was on and requested emergency family contact numbers, which she provided.
The Hawai'i woman is a recovering alcoholic and asked that her name not be used because she's working and doesn't want her employer to know about her past. She was scheduled to enter the program in 2000 but learned that Barker had called her father and brother in Southern California requesting $10,000 for alcohol treatment, a service that Fresh Start is not licensed to provide.
"My family was already very upset with me, and this angered them more because they thought I was in on it," she said. "I was appalled. My father was quite ill at the time and passed away last June."
Her brother, reached in California, confirmed his sister's story.
"(Barker) called four or five times, pestering my father, who was close to 80 at the time," he said.
The brother said he spoke to Barker but never paid the money and his sister never entered the program. She said she complained to her parole officer and the state paroling authority about the demand for money but never heard back. She said she has not spoken to the attorney general's office.
In her letter to the paroling authority, she said she would "never enter a program or deal with people who acted in such an unprofessional and scheming manner."
The woman said she entered an in-house treatment program at the Women's Community Correctional Center and was paroled five months later. She's still on parole but is sober and holding down a job.
But she is convinced that the bad experience she had with Fresh Start further damaged the fragile relationship she had with her family.
"I was never to have a relationship with my father before his death, and am still at odds with one of my brothers," she said.
Reach Jim Dooley at jdooley@honoluluadvertiser.com or 535-2447.
