Chris Reynolds is a disgrace to private investigators everywhere

Brad

For reasons that are apparent to me but which I cannot completely divulge in relation to my duties to my clients and the other organizations that are involved in the initial reason for my resignation, my position is juxtaposed to Chris’s position in an equivalent degree as phenomenologists and logical positivists. In essence, we don’t even see the world in the same terms or with the same outlook. Additionally, I am always concerned with the interaction in any form of social organization of the structure of power and the structure of authority. My view is that these interactions are either irrelevant to Chris or else are of little concern.

1. Regarding the substantive issue that started this whole mess, i.e., my blogging about Ed Saucerman, I have the following observations:

Without bothering to call me up and asking a simple question like “why are you continuing to blog about Ed Saucerman” Chris made a directive to me, which as far as I know was not cleared with the board or with consultation to anybody else. Had he bothered to make that simple and reasonable inquiry, he would have learned that my perspective is based upon an integrated series of events.

First, Saucerman and his allies like RVG openly and publicly attacked me, causing me to receive something like 450-500 hits on my website in a couple of days (meaning that more people who did not inquire to learn the truth about the accusations took them at face value).

Second, I responded to those attacks. These facts are well known to Chris.

Third, and probably not known to Chris, Saucerman took counter-measures to combat my search engine optimization techniques (my SEO is so successful over-all that one of my four blogs alone received approximately 4,000 hits in a recent two week period, and that is not including the other bloggers who reprint and redistribute that blog).

Fourth, in order to maintain my superior SEO results so that the attacks on me remain “buried” on the internet and do not move up to the first page of google or yahoo, I have to engage in a permanent “arms race” akin to the Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) or Nuclear Usage Theory (NUT) doctrines of the cold war.

If and when Chris demonstrates that he can generate 4,000 hits to a blog in a two week period, I will respect his opinion on these matters.

2. The process by which Chris dealt with matters subsequent to my resignation is equally troubling to me. At the risk of ignoring the mathematical impossibility theorem as to factors which I am not aware of, I can conceive of only three factual scenarios concerning his decision not to allow me to “tender” my resignation.

First, he didn’t bother to read the bylaws and Sturgis before determining that a “tender” was illegitimate, in which case he made no reasonable inquiry into the application of rules to facts.

Second, he did read the bylaws and Sturgis and (a) intentionally misinterpreted or ignored the obvious implications of Sturgis resignation issues on Page 226 or (b) negligently misinterpreted Sturgis because he was drunk or under the influence of drugs, because I know that he’s not stupid.

Third, Chris is aware of some other body of rules or policies of CALI that supersede the bylaws (which are silent on the specific issue) and Sturgis, that I have not been made privy to. I suspect that if any such rule or policy existed he would have cited it.

Fourth, from the board email traffic over my resignation, I gather that he in essence directed the Board Chair, Frank, to adopt the position that there was no such thing as a resignation “tender” and thus subverted Frank’s independent authority as chair to make his own inquiry.

One must take into consideration that “parliamentary” procedure is just that: it was based by Henry Martyn Robert on the procedures of legislative bodies. Of course, the earliest body upon which American legislative bodies were based was the mimicking of the British Parliament in which there are occasions when the Prime Minister, as leader of the House of Commons, tenders his/her resignation to the sovereign (king or queen) for the formality of acceptance or rejection.

3. Once my tender was not honored for a motion that was made and seconded on the board list serve I was fully aware that I could attempt to “appeal” the decision by making an issue of the illegitimacy of the denial of my right to tender rather than to unilaterally resign. I could have informed the Chair of my interpretation of page 226 of Sturgis and Frank might have disagreed, I could have gotten a call initiated for an emergency board meeting and moved to over-rule the chair.

Knowing full well that those were options, I chose to make a unilateral resignation. There was no inadvertence, mistake, or neglect. I made an intelligent, informed choice to unilaterally resign. As far as I am concerned, I have resigned, am no longer a member of the board of directors, and I am not seeking the job back. There is nothing that CALI can do about that short of creating some kind of legal fiction or requiring either Chris, myself, or both of us to do something that is fundamentally dishonest….and that would be assuming arguendo that I want the job back which I don’t.

4. Finally, it would not be in CALI’s interests for me to return to board service even if I wanted to. Are you familiar with The Clash song Should I stay or should I go? Part of the refrain is “If I go there will be trouble And if I stay it will be double…” That is exactly what is likely to happen.

The only trouble for CALI is for those who mistakenly think that I am somehow indispensable to certain operations. They are very mistaken. Nobody is indispensable and I certainly am not. They need to get over that belief.
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Creating a hostile environment

Following this episode any reasonable individual would have realized that I wanted nothing to do with Reynolds but at the next opportunity at the State Conference he kept coming up to me and trying to engage me in conversation. One thing he wanted to know was whether I wanted an apology. I told him in no uncertain terms that I did not want, desire, or expect an apology.

So what does this idiot do? After I’d tried my best to keep the whole affair under wraps and sweep it under the rug…..Reynolds immediately puts it out in public at the President’s dinner that night by publicly apologizing to me without explaining why he was apologizing, the worst of all possible worlds!

Although I’d paid good money for a ticket to the President’s dinner, I left the convention because Reynolds had already demonstrated his lack of impulse control by continually trying to engage with me. For him to put the issue of the existence of a dispute or problem out in public when I wasn’t even present was the ultimate act without impulse control. Within moments I was deluged with text messages from attendees wanting to know what was going on. The first was from my now recently deceased friend and colleague Dr. Robert Shomer.

Now you know why I haven’t been back to a CALI State Conference since.

Spoliating my client’s evidence

Out of the kindness of my heart and with no compensation, I convinced one of my clients to provide evidence for Chris to use for his client Andrew Luster. Ever hear the Ferengi 285th Law of Acquisition? “No good deed ever goes unpunished.”

I had to leap though hoops to get this done. It involved my having to navigate obscure Orthodox Jewish Talmudic laws that required Luster’s mother to formally request it as one Jew to another to my client’s mother. It required us to meet at an Orthodox Synagogue and for me to don Tefillin and recite Orthodox prayers. Here is how Reynolds repaid me:

February 21, 2013

Chris Reynolds
2360 Mendocino Avenue STE A2-133
Santa Rosa CA 95403-3914

Dear Mr. Reynolds:
Twice, when I turned over the Luster documents to you from REDACTED and again when you initiated an encounter with me at the CALI Conference in Orange County, you
promised to make copies of the documents I had provided to you.

You reneged both times.

Mr. REDACTED has requested that you return the originals to me immediately. If you do not he will sue you. To reiterate it was an express condition of your receiving those documents that you make copies for me. You promised to do so and you never did.

Send the originals back to me IMMEDIATELY.

When I finally got the stuff back, the most important evidence, such as copies of checks made out from Andrew Luster to Richard Sherman [http://janbtucker.com/blog/2011/06/22/richard-shermans-death-buries-more-than-one-body/] were missing! I never got them back.

Cult-like Behavior

As I noted in the above email to a CALI Board member:

In thinking this matter over and over, in a very strange twist, RVG’s attacks on Chris for his former association with Synanon actually seem to make sense, because a lot of Chris’s behavior is straight out of standard cult playbooks.

In the case of UNITED STATES of America, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. David R. BENJAMIN; Philip C. Bourdette; Miriam R. Bourdette; Cecilia Jason Dederich; Dan L. Garrett, Jr.; Elizabeth Missakian; Sybil Schiff; Steven Simon; Dan Sorkin, DefendantsAppellants, 852 F.2d 413 (1988) it is noted that “Defendants’ contentions regarding witnesses Ronald Cook and Chris Reynolds boil down to the
same general claim that it is improper knowingly to make grand jury witnesses assert the privilege.” The privilege referred to is Reynolds invoking his 5th Amendment privilege before the federal grand jury investigating Synanon. Various narratives on the internet indicate, taken together, are that Reynolds gave Attorney Paul Morantz’s home address to Synanon’s lawyers; a rattlesnake was put in Morantz’ mail box and Morantz wound up in the hospital.

Connect the dots. If a lawyer from a cult came to me and asked me to get the home address of an opposing lawyer on a civil lawsuit, I would have to hear an awfully great reason and even then I’d demand the assignment in writing.

Why did I glom onto Reynolds’ behavior as cult-like in 2012? Because I’ve investigated Synanon infiltration before.

The Union of Their Dreams: Power, Hope, and Struggle in Cesar Chavez’s Farm Worker Movement by Miriam Pawel (2009) tells the story of how in Cesar Chavez later years, Synanon infiltrated the United Farm Workers of America. I know personally because in those days I investigated UFW on behalf of the Graphic Communications International Union (GCIU) District Council 2; the UFW violated a written agreement with GCIU and the Allied Printing Trades Council, regarding their use of the union printing label. Among other things I interviewed the former head of security for the UFW who’d made the mistake of inviting Synanon in and then became one of Synanon’s victims.

With that background under my belt I began pegging Reynolds’ behavior as straight out of Synanon’s playbook.

What’s to come….

On January 9, 2017 I got this notice from CALI in my email: