Bio
Born September 1, 1960 to Ben and Blanche Robertson, in Mansfield, Louisiana. I lived at my grandmother’s for the first six weeks of my life, then my father snuck out the house and tucked me and my beautiful 18-year-old mother in the sidecar of his Panhead Harley and took off to another pipeline job in Oklahoma. I ate the dust of Route 66 for the first year of my life in that sidecar and they were PROUD of it. My crib – as they liked to brag – was the bottom drawer of a dresser with a pillow for a mattress. Truly, I have no idea how they survived my grandmother’s wrath. But it all worked out, because by the time I was 3, we were in Holland and my daddy is now in the Pipeliner’s Hall of Fame for the job he did in engineering a pipeline to drop off the side of a barge.
We moved across Europe like rich gypsies and I remember a childhood of foreign tongues and an ever-changing array of strangers, 5-star hotels, museums and castle ruins, home-schooled by tutors. We traveled Europe, the Middle East, South America. I was more at home in an airport than our actual 4-bedroom house in Houston, Texas. We were rarely anywhere more than three months. Riding the Hovercraft back and forth across the English Channel so often it was a drag, even that first glimpse of the white cliffs of Dover became boring. By the time I was 17, I’d lived in seventeen countries and 28 of these Continental United States. Spoiled isn’t even near the word for what I was.
In-between all the glamour of being expatriates, we’d go home to family in Louisiana and Arkansas. Even as a child I was struck by the sharp poverty my mother came from. I firmly believe it was sitting in those church pews with that hard-scrabble kin, then being pummeled by jealous cousins, every minute in between the adults being around, that’s who made me the hardnose I am today. On my father’s side, at the grandmother’s house I was snuck away from at 3 in the morning, there I found kindness. It is she who I try to be like. She was proud to be the first woman to work in the post office in my hometown. It’s from her I get my belief I can do anything that needs doing, no matter who’s standing in my way or how dirty the job.
She was instrumental in keeping my family together when my mother was brutally raped in Birmingham, England. It was an inside job. The maid’s boyfriend was supposed to sneak in and steal her jewelry and wallet. He nearly killed her. The maid came in early that morning and had taken me and my one-year-old brother downtown to the shops. At lunch she made a phone call and then took us on a double-decker bus, straight up to the top deck, then at the next stop, without a word, just got off and walked away. Even at 8, I was able to keep the panic down, collected my toddler brother, got off that bus, crossed the street, remembered the right bus # home, and got off at the right street, found my way the several blocks back to the townhouse rented only two weeks earlier.
Walking into that destroyed, blood-smeared house to find my nearly-unconscious mother sitting naked in the corner in a fetal position, that was the moment I grew up. I saved her life because calmness had got me back there in time. I remember thinking that as I waited with her, holding her cold hands, looking her straight in the eye, forcing my strength into her fading selfhood. Once the ambulance took her away, I walked up to the only female cop on the scene and said “I know who did this. The maid.”
When we got the call soon after saying that the man had been caught, my father, for some reason only known to him, took me with him; he left my brother with a sitter, but took me with him to the police station. Mama was still in intensive care. I remember him parking our company truck in front of the police station, where there was no parking space, just wide grey cement steps to climb. As I got out, Dad reached in the back of the truck and brought out an ax like the Paul Bunyan-kind. I remember thinking, “Now who does that?” As soon as we entered the police station, there was a thrilling wave of screaming cops detaining him. A nice lady cop took me away for cream cakes and tea.
Still, I never forgot the sight of him, going up those steps. Now I am grateful he took me. I understand the ax was a symbolic protest of his outrage. I wish I could have had an outlet for the grief I felt for my suddenly silent family. My mother couldn’t be left alone EVER again. Like literally. He had to hire maids to stay with her constantly. Since very young I’d been an equestrian, but now I rode horses to escape watching as the most lovely woman I’ve known slipped quietly into a whiskey bottle. It was my grandmother who came to live with us for those terrible first few months. She who encouraged my steely determination to never let another person’s madness (or my intense sadness over it) stop forward progress.
But it was my clever father who drilled into my head that we were different from other people. Stronger. Tougher. For one thing, we’re American-born Scottish Travellers. And we were often in Scotland, due to the development of North Sea, so I quickly self-identified with these fierce people. Blood calls to blood. Always. ALWAYS. My best memory of my daddy was when I was ten and he unexpectedly took the time out of his workday to take me up to the cave where our ancestor, Robert the Bruce, stayed that famous night when he watched the spider make her web over and over again. Scotland was saved because of the resolute efforts of that spider inspiring the King to not give up. Unbeknownst to my father, he anointed me that day for the destiny I now see clear as a bell. Who can do what I can? Who has seen both sides of poverty like I have? Who else could survive a political Hades (1998-2001) like I have, un-crushed?
Not only the sense of having royal blood, a poetry all its own, my wonderful father used Scotland to give me roots and an ancient heritage. In those wild mountains, I must have ridden three hundred stable-for-hire ponies. The most magnificent landscape any imaginative child could want, the smell of heather and the salt ever-present in the air. Our family roamed all over but dad’s work inevitably brought us back to Scotland.
I came to believe young that restless feet came by way of our DNA. When we passed the gypsy Vardos, still a visible crowd back in the U.K. of the 60’s, my dad would tell me I was damn lucky to have had an ancestor strong enough to survive being run out of Scotland back in the day and because of that brave soul, I got to grow up as American. Mmmmmmm, I’d think, staring back at children my age, grubby, sharp-boned and hungry-looking, but openly happy and living in the most amazing way. I wanted to teletransport into their wagons. Instantly.
Being an American was a big theme with Dad, education-wise. I was only five when we got stopped at the Berlin border crossing and detained for several hours because my mother had a wad of dollar bills in the bottom of her purse and it somehow turned into smuggling. I remember it very clearly. It was dark when they let us go. We weren’t allowed in, to my relief. Even that young, I could see government oppression was not a good thing to be near. As we drove off, my father slams on the brakes, stops right there in the middle of the road and gets me out of the car, leaving Mama open-mouthed and yanks me back to the Wall we’d just left. Makes me stand in front of him. I was slightly worried about the guns pointed at us. He shakes me a little, by the shoulders, and tilts my head up to see the top, where the barbed wire was. I remember the night mist in front of the spotlights. He leans into my ear and tells me, “America is better than this. We would never do this.” I have been imprinted with Freedom better than most.
1976, still moving around the world, following the pipelines being built, my dad was locked in a jail on a trumped-up antiquities charge in Urfa, Turkey on the Syrian border, it was my grandmother who hounded the State Dept, day and night, until he was finally released. Sophisticated at 15, thankful to be a seasoned adventurer. I’d been raised to look a situation in the eye and grapple it. Those three months in a tiny Turkish village, guarding my already-fragile mother and terrified younger brother made me a person who knows she is capable of anything.
Straight from three months in a Turkish cell, my dad flew us to another job, this one for nine months in a 5-star resort in Santa Marta, Colombia. I met Van Morrison there. He was the tamest of who passed through there. Jet set discovering the jungle. White sand beaches. That sense of cultural whiplash of coming out of a Turkish desert to this glamour never left me. I learned to SEE the third-world, be interested by it, admiring of the resilience of the human race. Of course, this was long before the Narco wars destroyed the pastoral land I knew for a short time. During this timeframe, my mother took very ill with pancreatitis and I had to fly with her to Bogota. My father couldn’t leave the job site and my poor brother had to stay with hotel maids all day. It was touch-and-go for awhile. Those six weeks at the Catholic hospital were tedious, and while I was helped by nuns to care for her, it was they who also encouraged me to get out of the sickroom every afternoon and walk that exotic city. My admiration for South America only grew more when I flew into Quito, Equador again to care for my mother for a couple of months while my father went on a job deeper into the countryside. While there, I took a short day trip to the Amazon river and put my feet in (quickly). I’d wanted to go see the Galapagos but it was further away so I opted for that river ride. I love saying I have been on the Amazon. Ever the expatriate.
My mother finally passed from pneumonia in Argentina when I was twenty; she was only 39. Took me years to realize that she’d died in my arms in England when I was eight. Her body just lived a bit longer. The difficulty we had in getting her remains back to the States makes me know what essential work an Embassy staff does for this country…although I will always resent how little the State Department did for my family in Turkey. As President, I will work tirelessly to create a special unit to support families of captured Americans overseas.
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A foolish first marriage at 17, escapism at its best, a much-older man who belonged to one of the wealthiest families in Vera Cruz, Mexico led me to another seemingly-glamourous life, mostly racing boats and of course, he had the boats (bought in my name) loaded to the gills with guns. Same old tired story, to be honest. One thing led to another. A dramatic multi-car ATF arrest then four years as a fugitive, rich but a fugitive nonetheless, the marriage crumbled under the weight of my anger and I returned with my four-year-old daughter to Houston and turned myself in, because life without one’s country is just not any kind of real life. I was facing 18 years on multiple Federal counts of gun-running and fugitive fleeing but thankful to God, the Holy Ghost and the Living Christ in Heaven, the charges were dropped everything except aiding and abetting a felon (my ex-husband). I was given 3 years probation and haven’t been in trouble since. That is the story of how I survived the fall-out of Kiki Camerena’s murder. I was 5 blocks away the day he was taken. My ex-husband ran a money exchange on the main drag in Puerto Vallarta 1982 -1985. He fed at the edge of Caro Quintero’s pond. Ex is still wanted by the ATF for gun charges. Caro – and a dozen men like him – came to the parties we went to. He came to my house. He dangled my child on his knee. He really didn’t stand out that much, to be honest. Everyone was dangerous back then. I was dangerous back then.
From my 7 years living in Mexico, I learned to speak Spanish and also how complex Latin politics are, as well as how much people south of the border love their countries like we love ours. But now you can see why I think I bring a certain backbone to what I describe doing here…
However, it was a shock to my system when I came back to Houston in 1985, turned myself in, I never expected to have my first brush with American-style corruption to come out of the Justice Department’s office of all places. I had already spent most of my adult life at this point dealing with bribing Mexican border officials and cajoling Federales to look the other way while I drove by with one more flashy car and boat that never managed to get back across the border. I enjoyed constant travel, servants, villas, and limos. Truth is walking away from that gilded cage was easy because a cage is still a cage.
The Federal Prosecutor who had tried to throw the book at me had been outraged at my light sentence, especially since my still-wanted ex-husband had taken off for Morocco (of all places). He actually stood up and yelled at the judge when he sentenced me without prison time. Creep followed me out to the elevator and held open the door, growled at me: “I am going to make you pay. Just watch.” A few days later, nearly $4000 vanished out my bank account. I went down to the bank, I was ushered into the vice-president’s office and twenty minutes later, talking to two Secret Service men explaining how I am not a money launderer. We argued for three-and-a-half hours. I didn’t get arrested but neither did I get that money back. After that, I couldn’t open a bank account because I am on a “list”. To this day, I have to bank through my husband. I get alerts (and extra scrutiny) when I go apply for a Driver’s License. The people at the Social Security office double-take, literally, when they read my info. I know its flagged and I have NO idea to this day what it says.
While on my three years’ Federal Probation, I got fired from job after job after job, without cause or even a warning. From 1985 to 1991, I worked at National-chain bookstores, which is a pretty simple job without any real conflict zones. I’d be there three, four months, then a tight-faced manager would hand me my coat and send me on my way. It became obvious what was going on. While on Probation, to cover what was happening with the pattern of firings (which you know my probation officer would have told me was my fault, how could it NOT be?). I went back to school to study psychology but only managed to acquire school loan debt. I sank into poverty and yes, depression. I went on food stamps and got welfare for my kids because I couldn’t “keep a job”. By 1991, I’d had four children, three in diapers, and found myself living in an Austin trailer park, without electricity with another man who hated me.
The saving grace of my life has been God who led me to a band of midwives in Austin who helped me find where I left my dignity and self-respect and invited me into their company. I had my youngest daughter at home alone, on purpose. I was never the same. I left the dust of that era long behind me, but I am here to tell you, I know what it is to be a single mother and every day of my Presidency will be spent building a system to FULLY support what is humanity’s most important task: raising children.
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At the age of 27, sitting in an empty movie theatre with a bottle of wine, escaping from a hot Texas afternoon and the misery in my household, pretty much feeling sorry for myself, I was watching the Glenn Close classic: Dangerous Liaisons, I had an epiphany. If I didn’t stop lying, I was going to end up just like the woman on the screen. Right there, that moment, I sat the wine bottle on the floor, put my head down and wept for forgiveness. It was a lot easier for God to forgive me than for me to have forgiven myself. Ain’t that the way it’s got to be, though?
The first person I stopped lying to was myself and I got out of that physically-abusive and brain-deadening relationship by writing my father a 30-page letter telling him the truth about my reality. He was in Africa at the time so it was a long wait. His reply got back to me about two weeks before my youngest daughter was born. He sent $5000 in American Express Traveler’s Checks and told me to move my trailer way out in the country, so far that fool wouldn’t bother to drive. He was right. Get 60 miles away from a pissed-off man and he generally finds someone else to mess with.
I didn’t take into account that the ex would acquire a wife who couldn’t have her own children and she had become enamored with my two toddler boys. There was a kidnapping attempt Aug 30, 1992, and I fled the area in a purple Cadallic, two white wolves, a $100 bill, and four young children. I exchanged my electronics at Target, mere days from the receipts expiring, for a huge tent, air mattresses, sleeping bags and a camp stove. Of course, I sent an S.O.S. to my dad in Africa but without an address, what could I do until he returned a few months later? Well, I found refuge, I found peace, I found joy, I found outright pleasure for the first time in the State Park system of the State of Texas. I discovered what it was to be a happy mother.
And what a revolution that caused in my heart. I wanted to keep doing whatever it was that made my heart sing and the look on my children’s face so open and free. I had, in effect, come back home. I was back on the road. August 31, 1992. The day before my 32nd birthday. The most amazing scenery, big playgrounds for the kids to enjoy hours instead of a few minutes, there was electric and water at the campsite, hot showers and toilets I didn’t have to clean. Finally, I was able to feed the kids all month long, instead of that dreaded last-week-of-the-month shortages. My entire day could be devoted to my kids, like I’d wanted to happen once I had started home-schooling my older daughter in 1990. All this on a Welfare check and foodstamps. My living costs dropped to about 20% of what I was paying for before. Like a miracle, I could LIVE.
The above half of my biography was written in honor of my father on the day he died; the next half is (mostly) the prologue from my first book: Collected Letters from the Abyss
Christmas 1997 my husband & I inadvertently kicked over a rock, exposing the bloated underbelly of the massive machine that runs San Francisco.
A machine whose reach far exceeds the citizens’ deepest fear.
During these nearly twenty savage years on the losing end of a prima facie case of municipal racketeering, the work of every day has been to utterly reject the role of victim, but rather to draw ourselves up as an opponent. An opponent they never saw coming. An opponent as cold and as ruthless as the machine we were facing down.
Our entire world disappeared into a political bermuda triangle as direct, documented and measurable consequence to our audacious act of (successfully) suing a too-popular City employee (who now finds himself under God’s mysterious grace & mercy, dying December 2005 as the result of a tragic, seemingly simple, motorcycle wreck that led to a ten month coma), his union and their sacred cow charity fundraising arm, the San Francisco Firefighter’s Toy Program for nothing less than theft of U.S. mail, among other things, radiating from the Fox2 broadcast that they, the Toy Program, had arranged to air our plight with a blown engine on the 32’ retrofitted 1978 black Bluebird school bus that was our unusual vacation home. We were here purely as tourists, all the way from a south Louisiana bayou, on our dream honeymoon trip: Highway 1, Malibu to Seattle with plans to stop in San Francisco for a private wedding in Golden Gate Park. The marriage license we used at City Hall on 14 Nov 1997 clearly states that we were visitors from Louisiana.
Eight days later I had the misfortune to meet John Voelker and my life would never be what it was before that man laid eyes on me and mine. What began as an extended coastal vacation in an unusual vacation home, our perfect little honeymoon cottage-on-wheels, my own modern gypsy wagon, instead that schoolbus would become our Alamo.
I did warn everyone involved that my paternal grandmother was the first woman to work in the post office of my hometown Mansfield, Louisiana. But in the end, our lawsuit (Mayon & Mayon v I.A.F.F. local #798/John Voelker/SFFD Toy Program #300155 filed 28 Dec 1998 in the Superior Court of San Francisco was settled out of court during 6/12 July 1999) was a piece of legal arrogance that cost us everything we thought we were protecting.
My husband, who in September of that year (1997) had been diagnosed with advanced liver disease from chronic Hep. C, whose obvious need to return to our family outside Lafayette, Louisiana was rather the repetitive point of the entire Fox2 newscast(s), ended up installing a new (used) engine purchased 17 Jan 1998 @ Kragens off Mission Street, using hand tools and a rented hoist, me his only (very inexperienced) assistant, working under three blue tarps to keep out the fierce El Nino storms. It took two months to do the job that a shop would do in under three days.
Greg simply refused to let me lose my beloved bus, which I had found behind the tiny General Store on Belle River, a place so remote as to not even be on most maps and where our son, Merlin, was born 8 March 1996, at home on his paternal grandfather’s land that is mostly water and all alligator. When I first saw my bus, it was sunk to its rims in swamp mud and didn’t run for the lack of a lifter, sitting there draped in cobwebs, shrouded in several years of dust, just waiting for me to push it from my daydreams into reality.
To say I was restless on the bayou would be an understatement. The two and a half years before the baby was born were spent in a whirlwind tour of the deep South, Texas, Oklahoma, on thru the grasslands to the Nebraska border, chased Jesse James’ ghost all over the Missouri breaks, and followed the Trail of Tears teaching our (then) four kids history, geography and civics firsthand, home schooling (as is our legal right in our home state of Louisiana) with Mother Nature providing a most excellent classroom. From the blue grasses of Kentucky through the mountains of the Carolinas, we followed the sun down to the Florida panhandle, living weeks on end in the backcountry, primitive camping (e.g. tents only) and hiking in dozens of National Forests, Parks and Seashores followed by a luxurious week or two in a motel.
This West Coast bridal trip was my husband’s indulgence of my girlhood fantasy of an “essential” life that revolves around and treads lightly in Nature. Too much Thoreau too young I suppose. I have always been a gypsy. I have always traveled. Roots versus horizons, that was my childhood motto, oft-quoted to those unpleasant adults who criticized my unusual upbringing. My entire life I’ve traveled like they do in magazines. Or wish they did. By the time I was seventeen I’d lived in 17 countries and 28 of these United States, thanks to a pipelining daddy and my late mother who wouldn’t stay home like the other oilfield wives.
Then there was my brief, disastrous, first marriage in the 70’s to a member of Mexico’s then-fledgling & highly popular speedboat racing team, Coatzymoto, giving me a lifestyle that involved literally hundreds of road & water trips between Miami & Houston and Tampico & Veracruz, Mexico.
But now – as a woman who knows her mind – my own husband has never minded my nomadic ways, which of course makes me devoted to him. From the start, the bus was my dream. A dream I’d had one afternoon on a Houston freeway when I was a girl of 13, seeing a dozen hippie buses pass – I’d wanted one ever since – so, yes, of course, I am conscious of what a joy it is to be the wife of a man who can accept her true nature.
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Camping in the Ozarks 1993
My in-laws thought my choice of a birthing gift eccentric, to say the least, and even as Greg and his father built in beds and a simple kitchen, while his mother carried our four-month-old Merlin in her arms around & around the backyard, I knew that the secret plan was to take me on a long, hard trip and get back home in time to have our little girl, time enough to convince me to pick out a piece of river and let him, with his own hands because he could, build me a cypress house with deep wrap-around porches and plant a big flower garden to keep bees.
Greg never saw the bus as anything more than a way to live on his own land while he built a “real” house. But I figured the memories of this Western tour, not to mention the Southern one we’d just completed, would be jarred by the sight of that school bus parked behind the barn, with a full tank of gas, that would be enough to lure him back to Route 66 once he got this house-building business out of his system. That was my plan.
Leaving Louisiana 14 August 1996
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The schoolbus was a modern-day Vardo and every bit as fun to live in as they look like they are from the outside. After a few weeks in Santa Fe, another glorious spot on earth, we made our way across the desert, arriving in Malibu exhausted, broke, dusty and out of oxygen. While Greg went in to arrange a Western Union wire to be sent from his parents, I sat in the doorway of the schoolbus, the kids still sound asleep inside, sun just dawning a kaleidoscope of pink and orange, and I breathed in the salty, damp air along with the satisfaction of knowing we had done the impossible: made it to the West Coast in an old school bus. It’s a hell of a ride, let me tell you! Just then, a surfer walked by, barefoot, bare-shirted, board under his arm, and stopped and took in the long length of the bus and let out a low whistle, then said “Wow, man.” He pulled out a crumpled up $20 bill and handed it me and pulled a joint the other pocket, handed to me and went on his way. Greg just barely missed the sight of that, but nonetheless, he thoroughly laughed when I handed it to him and said, “I could like California.” Oh, how much I came to regret those words.
We lived on the beaches for the winter of 1996 and the first half of 1997. I literally had no idea that our schoolbus was hated like it was. All I saw was my own perspective. And yeah, the haters were well-hidden by the happy tourists and their cameras. I missed the xenophobia altogether until we got to San Francisco. Once we went from 101 onto the actual old Highway One, I knew I had died and gone to camper heaven. San Simeon. Morro Bay. Half Moon Rock. Port Avila. Monterrey. Santa Cruz.
Well, we got in a little more than a year; highlights of the trip were the weeks in Santa Fe before the first snow followed by the blissful four months we lived on the beach @ San Simeon, watching the birth of seal pups. I drank my morning tea on the steps of my bus watching the sun climb behind Hearst Castle, that site of legendary wealth while my life was luxuriously simple. Unlike most, I had achieved my American dream.
That was the fall of 1996 and the summer of 1997. To lose it at the hands of a fat jaded fireman, who with one phone call brought in a political machine simply because he could, that alone would have been unacceptable from the beginning of this civil rights horror story December 1997. But to have suffered such a blatant violation to our God-given human rights here in a City that markets itself as the most diverse & tolerant in the nation.
Merlin, at 12 on Ocean Beach in San Francisco, who grew up not in the woods as planned, but on the frontline of a civil war:
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By the fall of 1997, shortly after our arrival in San Francisco, Greg became extremely fatigued and then suffered a seizure that led to the diagnoses of Hep. C with liver damage. Not helping were the hard-living ways from his oil rig days those years before I came along nor the snakebite from a cottonmouth in an Ozark creek the summer after we fell in love.
Our first weeks in San Francisco were touch-and-go. Greg was altogether bedridden and wracked with pain. The little street alongside Golden Gate Park in Haight Ashbury, a block from the U.C.S.F. hospital, became our hospice. The heavily treed park was our refuge and a way to convince ourselves we were still living in Nature. For the children, this was literally their first real exposure to a city. Their then-15-year-old half-sister, Serenity, took them to all the sights trying to distract them from their father’s illness.
All the children, even our 18-month-old baby Merlin, looked to me for their cue on how to cope with this sudden sorrow that was living with us. I can only thank God that I am a Christian. So with the prospect of a long widowhood howling down my neck, I did what I do best – I reached for a future that nobody but I could see.
“Without faith, it is impossible to please God” I told the children as we orchestrated a guerilla wedding that cost us nothing but soul effort. Even my gothic choice of wedding theme, el Dia de los Muertos, with Halloween skeletons as a primary decoration and the traditional sugar skulls instead of wedding cake, was proof of our belief, as husband & wife, that Jesus Christ our Blessed Saviour waits by the grave to comfort & strengthen us for that last journey to Him. Knowing that Greg could die at any time during the wedding preparations was simply what had to be faced.
Life does indeed become more precious in the face of death.
Even as Greg was trying to get me to see “reality”, even as he gave me sound advice on how to take care of the bus without him, in every spare minute, I sat by his sickbed sewing my wedding gown. All I could think about was the baby girl I wanted (still want) with every fiber of my being and filament of my soul. I simply wasn’t letting him go. I prayed ceaselessly, as the Bible tells us to do. Otherwise dumb with fear, encased in a grief that never let up night or day, every stitch was hope. The dress became a physical representation of my faith in Jesus Christ to heal the dying.
“Do not be afraid,” Christ said to the man who had just been told that his daughter was dead, “Just believe.”
For Greg, it was a mute challenge watching me bent over a cloud of black tulle, miles and miles of it stitched into a black satin lace-up corset from Frederick’s of Hollywood. Gold ivy stitched up into the skirt. A fur-collared cloak of black & gold Chantilly lace. Rows and rows of red roses filched from the Park sat drying along the back window. At his feet, the gown grew, an unmistakable testimony to the art of reaching for life. For love.
The only thing I ever really said about it all was that if he wasn’t well by the time I finished this gown, I would sew a matching one in white so big that he would have to marry me in a New Orleans cathedral for it to fit in. Yes, I cried a river of tears, soaked the skirt more than once, but before it even dried, I was back to threading a needle, sewing prayers and promises into every seam, determined to please God with a perfect faith, forcing myself to cast away every image but the one of me in my husband’s arms wearing this black & gold confection of a gown for one last dance on Haight Street. And we did. Which is another story in another book altogether.
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A few days later, somewhat recovered from what turned out to a most revolutionary wedding night, thanks to the S.F.P.D.’s stopping the dusk ceremony literally at the altar, which was simply our favorite tree near the Carousel, telling us “Mayor Brown wasn’t having any more gatherings of the homeless in his park” (as I said, another book altogether) we said goodbye to the road and turned east, calling our family to say that we’d be home in time for the baby’s 2nd Christmas. But by the time we reached the Bay Bridge, our clutch began to slip so severely that we took the last exit, crippling off into a bleak port known as China Basin.
We found ourselves in an urban badland, something approaching the movie “Escape from New York” once dark fell. Barbed wire. Empty warehouses where the homeless go and no one bothers them. Drug dealers 24/7. Broken streetlights where prostitutes stood waiting for the steady stream of Mercedes, Lexus and Cadillac customers. Used condoms and hypodermic needles littered everywhere. In other words, the exact opposite of the lifestyle we had, for years, actively been structuring for our family. We scrambled to find a mechanic and get the funds ready to pay for what should have been a simple clutch job.
Barely a week after our wedding, mere hours into a ghetto life we had no idea was just beginning, I met John Voelker when I went to the Firehouse Toy Program looking for toys for our bored, cooped-up kids. He immediately offered the use of the firehouse showers and laundry room, gave me the “contents of his wallet” ($30), and sent out for a boxed Safeway Thanksgiving dinner for the holidays that weekend. He then led the children to the upstairs of the firehouse and gave them each a big black plastic bag and, every inch Santa, told them to pick what they wanted. He also invited my oldest child, Serenity, then 16, to be a full-time position as a volunteer at the Toy Program. Greg was adamantly against it; he detested the lewd atmosphere behind-the-scenes at the Firehouse as well as the prolific alcohol consumption, but I was lulled into the fact that it was firefighters that she’d be around, and so I let her. To say the least, that was the biggest mistake I ever made in my life. One I continue to pay for nine and half years later.
Since the events of 21 December 1997 thru 13 February 1998 are under legal settlement, I am muzzled as to what I can say about that era; indeed, our attorney cautioned us that all that can be said is that the settlement exists, who the defendants are, and the civil claims listed under #300155 to be Conversion, Accounting, Common Count, Imposition of Constructive Trust, Negligence, Fraud & Deceit.
But what I will say is that Greg and I did exactly what we said on Fox2News that we were going to do, which was replace the bus engine that unexpectedly blew up 18 December 1997, incidentally Greg’s 46th birthday. While we struggled to replace the engine ourselves, refusing so much as an electrical cord from the firehouse (by then things were openly hostile with the union and the mutual verbal assaults – as they call them in California- were near daily), the children were cozy and snug in a Christmas wonderland, playing with the dozens of toys the firefighters had showered on them throughout the Christmas season. The bus was parked alongside the property line of the Firehouse until 17 March 1998 when we were towed to a street diagonal.
Then came a summer of sabotage that ravaged Greg’s health in a way that the colds of winter hadn’t. We persevered and on 28th June 1998, a full seven months since we took that fateful exit, we got the bus running. Oh yes, it was a delicious moment, watching our opponents stand in the driveway of their firehouse watching us drive away, against all odds. War is fought to be won but victories come at odd intervals and from unexpected quarters. I have learned to see them like medals of valor and endurance. But medals alone can’t win a war. Or save a family. That first winter in the City’s custody (1998-1999) we’d joke about knowing how old Geronimo felt when he pushed his chair away from the dirty white man’s bargaining table, saying only that his people would “endeavor to persevere”. He then went home and declared war. On America. He already knew what we were learning that long bitter season, that people like us cannot surrender freedom without first declaring war.
On 10 July 1998, a mere thirteen days after we moved the bus out of plain view, the City made their first overt move by filing for legal but not physical care and custody of our children. We would inform our opponents that we have absolutely no respect for that judicial firewall usually enjoyed in these so-called family law matters. No cloak of confidentiality can be worn by those with dirty hands. That is what this manuscript intends to establish, beyond a shadow of a doubt: the identity of those who acted with impunity because they knew no one was scrutinizing them and the public would never see what was being done. More importantly, what my blog exists to show, with regular instant updates, is exactly what the appropriate Federal & State government agencies are, or are not, able to do.
It is the unwritten but oft-spoken rule that parents on trial for their right-to-parent do not have automatic and full access to every piece of paper with their name or their child’s name on it. For example, at the end of the second trial (there were 3 in three years), after finding me guilty (again) of 13 counts of child neglect, the court ordered that I undergo an in-depth psych evaluation “to see if she can even follow a program”. I was forced to comply and spent approximately fifteen hours, at great expense, with a psychotherapist over a several day period. Upon receiving said evaluation, the court ordered in writing that it be sealed and for my public defender not to disseminate any of it’s contents to me. Same for the psych evaluations of our children. Something about protecting their privacy (“from whom?” I asked).
This is how it works: you are presented with the charges against your parenting habits & abilities about five minutes before you walk into the courtroom. Of course, that’s to throw you off, because you’re already nervous just being there. If you insist, you will be allowed to skim the Petition that the judge has on his desk, but don’t expect that you will be given your own copy to take home to calmly read and investigate or bring a rebuttal the next time court convenes. If you are assertive enough, you will be allowed to look at the social worker’s report that is the foundation for said petition. You can yell, beat the table, kick it even (I did) but you will not, I repeat, you will not get your own copy. I promise you that you’ll never see a third of the poison-filled reports that the judge sees. You’ll certainly not get the treasure trove we have: work logs, memos, notes from meetings, faxes, letters, and photos that made up our paper handcuffs, in place from 10 July 1998 to 11 June 2001.
This lack of access seemed downright un-sporting, rather like being thrown blindfolded, with one arm tied behind your back, into a boxing ring where you know several gorillas are waiting for you. Worse, you know that this is going to keep happening month after month until the judge decides you are properly submissive to authority. Naturally, the no-paper-to-the-defendants rule was the very first rule we broke. The City’s attorneys should have realized that they aren’t the only ones who can intimidate. They just get a regular paycheck for doing it.
When confronted with the most obvious Constitutional problems in their proceedings such as no ability to compel witnesses; no trial by a jury of your peers; no right to confront your accuser; no right to be informed about the nature and cause of the accusation; no right to go to the press about your case without punitive retaliation; no right to insist that warrants can only be issued on probable cause; no double jeopardy protections (it was most aggravating to keep being charged with the same behavior in each petition even though that behavior had ceased — so as to make you appear a scofflaw to the appeals court); no right to a speedy trial; no ability to fire one’s public defender if he’s making no effort whatsoever to defend (e.g. due process), the family law officials inform you that since family law is neither criminal nor civil, it is not covered by the Constitution.
Say what?
To quote Sir Winston Churchill in the Birth of Britain
“The jury system (as established by Henry II) has come
to stand for all we mean by English justice, because so
long as a case has to be scrutinized by twelve honest
men, defendant and plaintiff alike have a safeguard
from arbitrary perversion of the law. It is this which
distinguishes the law administrated in English courts
from Continental legal systems based on Roman law.”
“It was in these fateful and formative years (circa 1189) that
English-speaking peoples began to devise methods of
determining legal disputes which survive in substance
to this day. A man can only be accused of a civil or
criminal offense which is clearly defined and known to the law
The judge is an umpire. He adjudicates on such evidence
as the parties choose to produce. Witnesses must testify
in public and on oath. They are examined and cross-
examined, not by the judge, but by the litigants themselves
or their legally qualified and privately hired representatives.
The truth of their testimony is weighed not by the judge
but by twelve men good & true, and it is only when this
jury has determined the facts that the judge is empowered
to impose sentence, punishment, or penalty according to
the law. All might seem very obvious, even a platitude,
until one contemplates the alternative system which still
dominates a large portion of the world. Under Roman law,
and systems derived from it, a trial in those turbulent
centuries, and in some countries even today, is often an
inquisition. The judge makes an inquiry into the civil wrong
or the public crime, and such investigation is largely in secret.
The suspect can be interrogated in private. He
must answer all questions put to him. His right to be
represented by a legal advisor is restricted. The witnesses
against him can testify in secret and in his absence. And only
when these processes have been accomplished is the accusation
or charge against him formulated and published. Thus often
arises secret intimidation, enforced confessions, torture, and
blackmailed pleas of guilty. These sinister dangers were
extinguished from the Common Law of England more than
six centuries ago.”
Pp 161-164
How is it possible in the freest country in the world, with a living Constitution, how did Family Law Courts manage to organize themselves under Roman Law? More to the point, how has no one tried to stop this social Gestapo loose in our country?
This is not done in the better interests of the child. The entire process is structured to shred the family. If the municipality intended to protect the child, it would gather it’s faith-based organizations & its’ massive ability to improve the child’s physical environment in a way that would ease the family’s burden while gently supervising them in a way that nurtures the mother and empowers her to mother. This whole setting of the array of social worker/judge/therapist is nothing but an industry that thrives on numbers, the more kids at risk, the more (unsupervised) money the office gets. For crying out loud, they get an adoption quota improvement bonus from the federal government. Recent expose-style editorials in the San Francisco Chronicle suggest that the local CPS has a proportionally higher ratio of children (especially high are African-American placements) than any other city in California.
After you read this manuscript, Gentle Reader, you are going to know, definitively, that this agency has no problem with perjury in court petitions, spreading misinformation as a pattern, terroristic threat, suppression & tampering of information.
I wasn’t the only one. How many other mothers out there lost custody on the basis of lies? How would they ever know? Their “lawyers” aren’t going to tell them. Part of the industry. Social worker doesn’t have to tell you a damn thing and can just keep asking the judge for more months of your life to remain under her jurisdiction. For the better interests of the children? Try no accountability. When the worker gets questioned about anything out of order, all they have to do is claim too big a caseload. A caseload they over-hype. The only way this industry works is if the parents agree to go along with the flow of things.
Once you start swimming against the current, building obstacles & registering protests to the City’s carte blanche attitude, all the while insisting on a few of your more basic civil liberties, you’d be amazed at how the Machine recoils in furious outrage and then shoots itself in the foot. As chapter 15 will show.
From that first futile attempt 26 April 1998 to report S.F.F.D. to S.F.P.D. we were in a dead stranglehold with a then-ruthless City Attorney, Louise Renne. This woman, a mother & a grandmother, saw no moral violence in using innocent young country-bred children as pawns in a high-stakes he said-she said political poker game. Okay, but how did the lawyer in her see no extreme conflict with her role as (then) sole legal counsel for all department heads blending so seamlessly with her sworn duty to the City Charter to investigate the ethics allegations against any City employee? Later on, we would discover the identity of her deputies in charge of CPS prosecutions: Katherine Feinstein, who went onto to become a presiding judge of the Superior Court of San Francisco and is the daughter of Dianne Feinstein, and Kamala Harris (now a senator who is apparently being tout as the Great Hope of the Democratic Party post-Trump). Well, that’s the value of a chain conspiracy, that even after the original actor has left the stage, the structure that his intent, through the actions of others working on his behalf created, that structure stands firm without his actual presence.
This manuscript, for all its tongue-in-cheek presentation as a “brief to that Royal High Court of Public Opinion”, is first and foremost a private citizen’s demand to Congress, requesting that the Government Accountability Office (a.k.a. General Accounting Office)investigate my conclusion that the City & County of San Francisco received federal money to fraudulently take custody of our family in order to affect the outcome of our civil action against the firefighters’ union.
After all, Congress has the power to establish post offices, per the Constitution. That tells me that they have the authority to actually enquire why the City & County of San Francisco did not investigate the allegations that their all-too-popular employees threw away our mail from Fox2 News viewers. Certainly the fact that the settlement even exists would present as prima facie evidence to any grand jury that the City should have at least given the appearance that they investigated what we alleged. Instead, we were prosecuted.
We hold sufficient documentation to establish beyond any reasonable doubt that the City Attorney’s Office violated our right to travel in order to affect Diversity of Jurisdiction (e.g. when a citizen of one state sues a citizen of another state it automatically goes into Federal court, provided all plaintiffs reside in another state or states apart from the defendants). By their bringing our children into a fiercely disputed custody fight for three years (10 July 1998 to 11 June 2001), using them like political hostages the City ensured that the only place our grievance against the I.A.F.F. local #798 (that reads to all as Democrat cash cow) would be heard was in a machine-stocked State court. Here I am nothing but gypsy living in a school bus, which in San Francisco is an outlawed lifestyle. Now, Gentle Reader, compare that to what a Baton Rouge jury would think about anything that the son and daughter-in-law of a wealthy Louisiana land-owning retired vice-president of Mobile Oil had to say about West Coast liberals and the U.S. mail.
March 2004 the City confidently replied to my pro per allegations in Federal court (#CV04-00243MHP) that because it made no money in this matter, it couldn’t be held accountable in a racketeering claim. Sorry, but that’s a shallow definition of the R.I.C.O. act: it is meant to encompass the threat that the victim’s financial interests are under, if state or foreign borders are crossed by engaging in a plan to “diminish or eliminate competition”. The City Attorney’s office saved the firefighters’ union plenty by ensuring that we remained in this 7 x 7 square mile civil penitentiary until nearly every statue of limitation ran out. Of course, the R.I.C.O. act provides a generous ten years to bring charges, not to mention triple damages & enforcement abilities that supersede any other set of laws: CPS deserves at the very least to go under a federal jurisdictional order and the social workers who contaminated our files should have every case they ever wrote even one report on, re-examined.
The City used certain social workers in their Children’s Protective Services like a private army to ensure that we couldn’t legally leave with the children and that if we did manage to leave, our good family name would be so smeared that no realistic person would ever approach a courtroom. Social worker after social worker would lie, nearly three dozen easily documented lies. That, more than anything else, leaves the City holding the bag for a dead man.
July 1999 we took the union’s first offer of $6000 (oops, did I just break the settlement? Don’t think I bloody care anymore.) as it included a mutual stay away order. Somehow I thought that was going to help stop the bureaucratic witch-hunt going on at City Hall. April 1999 I’d had a miscarriage and was frantic to leave behind the hostility we had ignited with our foolish lawsuit. I was more than ready to admit I had bitten off more than I could chew. I was desperate to get back to the peace of a bayou so I could get pregnant again before it was too late. Neither would happen, not the leaving nor the baby. Signing that stupid stupid stupid piece of paper was like pouring gasoline on a smoldering hatred.
From the Catechism of Our Catholic Church (2297)
Kidnapping & hostage-taking bring on a reign of terror; they subject their victims to intolerable pressure. Terrorism which uses physical or moral violence to extract confessions, punish the guilty, frighten opponents, or satisfy hatred is contrary to respect for human dignity.
It is my small, personal and battle-weary opinion that it was the actual identity of Louise Renne’s with her underlings-in-charge of the City’s 4000 plus poor, abused and neglected children. It was her sheer social status, her stratospheric ambitions and sterling political pedigree that which would eventually come to sway the outcome of this entire matter. Who she was kept every local attorney I thought to approach (from Angela Alioto to Tony Serra) at bay because who wants to cross swords with such a rising star so early in her career? And certainly not for a Louisiana swamp gypsy who refused to move off a big ugly, black, outlawed school bus and into one of San Francisco’s lovely projects. It was who she was that drove me into that foolish dreadful status of the self-represented (only in the C.P.S. litigation; the litigation for the theft of our mail and the sabotage of our bus was represented by traditional counsel).
What was I to do? Quit because I had come to realize that I was completely out of my league? No thank you, not after I had finally gotten my hands on two brown paper sacks full to the top of trial documents (even though they had been delivered intentionally mixed up & took more than three months to put painstakingly back in order) and not after two years of seeing perjury-filled petitions fly by, month after month.
Even as I sat down to study the law, I knew that within those piles of dusty books were more rules than I would ever remember even if I understood them at all. But here I was, in a deep dark place where I’d been cast without warning or consent. All I knew was that I had better come up swimming or it would be the children who would drown in the lonely chaos of separate foster homes. And I’d have to go through my days & nights knowing it would be my ineptness that had consigned them to such a miserable existence. I would die. From the minute I lost my babies, I wouldn’t be alive.
You see, once I’d actually managed to extract myself from Mexico and put my life back together, all I ever wanted was the chance to be was a country wife and mother. It was difficult enough to deal with being forced against our will to live in an ultra-liberal city, to be denied the right-to-travel on the basis of perjury and suppression. But to lose the children to foster care as well? I don’t think so.
When my husband realized that I possessed a near-photographic memory for the written word, that I had been in total recall of the tangle of lies I’d been spotting in the papers I was briefly allowed to read in court, he refused to let me turn into a jailhouse lawyer. He, my only true conselegrie, and well-schooled in the old Edwin Edwards way of doing things, counseled me that no one in authority (S.F.P.D., F.B.I., the 9th circuit, et al) would do anything for me. I was hardheaded enough to beat my head repeatedly against all those glass ceilings. My devastation over their playing Pontius Pilate was excruciating for him to witness. It is one thing to be a cynic yourself but to watch someone as innocent as I was, getting her heart broke, by the Department of Justice, is something else altogether. It took a man with a blue-steel core to guide me through this political swamp. After all, it was he that was being attacked in more ways than one. To his credit, he kept on taking everything they dished out. He clamped one hand over my mouth while using the other to hold my head into his shoulder while I weep ceaselessly, bitterly over our ruined freedoms. But mostly he taught me how to use my continued silence like a pressure cooker. It was the only power I had, that and to write and write and write until it was second nature, until it was first nature. Thus he kept at me until I stopped seeing a myriad of criminal indictments & lawsuits. He beat into my brain, with a sledgehammer I think, that no mere court could ever sit in judgment of people as powerful as these – only the People could, the little guy can, nobody else. Reach him and you’ll have done what nobody else can. He made me put on blinders.
And so after awhile, I forgot to worry about how on earth was my meager education – 2 ½ years @ Houston Community College upon returning from Mexico studying early childhood psychology with a minor in, of all the silly things, sculpture; worse still, I dropped out in 1989 to move to Austin, Texas to study midwifery – how on earth was that ever going to stand up against the real education of the daughter of California’s senior Senator, Katherine Feinstein, with her own family law practice and a former police commissioner, who is now–sitting as a local judge 2nd in command & on the new panel @ judicial performance, appointed by Governor Grey Davis early 2000 – illegitimate decisions made on her watch were on 8 March 1999 and 20 December 1999 were perfect bookends to our cursed settlement with I.A.F.F. local #798, signed 6/12 July 1999. There is a single source of information (SF Weekly mid-Sept 2000) that the woman who filled Judge Feinstein’s position at the City Attorney’s office is not only the ex-mistress of then-Mayor Willie Brown now sitting in her own right as the District Attorney, then California’s top gun, and now its junior senator. It certainly calls in question her two task forces with close ties to C.P.S. “sex crimes & other violence against children” and an “early intervention for children of domestic violence”. But then again, maybe not. This is San Francisco where the citizen seems able to eat anything their public servants dish up. Here the bar is set high for what constitutes a crime. What stinks smells just fine. A law is not always the law and the will of the voter is a floating currency. Wrong can be right and even good for you.
What Mayor Brown never caught and should have, being the “brilliant West Coast strategist” that everyone claims he (I don’t see it personally, my untrained legal mind having thoroughly tracked his City Attorneys’ patterns of coercion to support a popular employee’s extortion, while managing, proper as they call it, to keep the children in our custody): I was born mere miles from the shack Willie grew up in, but on the right side of the Sabine River, the Louisiana side. And I am a woman and a generation younger. Because you see, they raise us all like him back home, to out think, out smart, out shoot, out shift & be just as outrageous as it takes to get the job done, but get it done no matter the cost. And so we did.
Three dirty trials in three years, we spent forty brutal months in a private petty paper war, to gain that hard-won trophy that is the foundation for the enclosed manuscript Collected Letters from Abyss. Its cost-effective release over the internet via my brand-new instant-mass-view format is intended not only to establish ever-so-firmly our right to free press but simultaneously petitions the Federal government for redress of a protracted grievance against the City & County of San Francisco. No doubt, Mayor Brown & his City Attorney, Louise Renne, were too busy gloating on things like my felony status – surely enough to sway the average San Francisco citizen into ignoring their violations of our Constitutional rights, because after all everybody knows that convicted felons have less rights than anyone else, especially in California – so let me go and ahead and disclose now, just to get it over with. From 1982 to 1985, my ex-husband was on the run from A.T.F. on gun smuggling charges (all those boats had extra cargo in their hulls, but as the country’s popular and easily recognized racing team captain). Later, we lived in Puerto Vallarta and I ran my own French bakery/café. In May 1985, I returned to Houston with a four-year-old daughter and turned myself in, because I missed my country far, far more than I thought I would. The multiple charges were dropped and I was convicted of aiding & abetting a felon (e.g. my first husband) and successfully served three years of Federal probation. Greg has an equally colorful past, all debts paid to society thirty years ago. However, he sees no reason to play show-and-tell over things long dead. Now, wasn’t that easy? Took the gunpowder right out of the City’s slander. I still believe as I did in Mexico, that the only gun control that works is another gun. It’s nothing I am ashamed of. It’s who I was then. It’s not who I am now, praise God, the Holy Ghost & Jesus Christ.
INTRODUCTION
It’s two in the afternoon on 8 July 2003 and I’m on the 13th floor of the Philip Burton Federal Building, punching the elevator button over and over trying to make it hurry so I can get away from the bland-faced FBI agent, Kevin Finley, who had just royally insulted my intelligence by telling me to be sure to come back if something else violent happened, particularly if it involved officials. That there might be a slender thread that would tie this all up. I told him I’d be sure to drag the body in. But I was already standing up and gathering my papers to leave, because I know the first rule of Law: if they make you cry, or worse yell, then they win by default.
As I stood at the elevator, the agent slides into my peripheral to ask what I know he had been told to get at. “Mrs. Mayon, why are you doing this, what do you expect to get out of this, why don’t you just let go and try to get on with your life?” Mercifully the elevator arrived and my answer didn’t even require me to hold the door “When I was five years old, my daddy stood me in front of the Berlin Wall and told me that this could never ever happen in America. Americans wouldn’t allow it. But it did happen, I am telling you it did, right here in San Francisco. Instead of cement and barbed wire, they used paper to stop us from traveling. Paper you won’t even look at.” It was a cold woman who could handle the look he gave. And give one right back as the elevator doors slide close.
By now, Gentle Reader, I don’t have to tell you that I rode that elevator down dry-eyed. By the time I walked out the Federal Building, I had conceived this manuscript as a petition to the only court open to me, that Royal High Court of Public Opinion.
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Or if you are a member of Barnes and Noble, they picked up my self-published books the day before my birthday 2017 (without me asking, thank you very much): https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/ramona+mayon
My 2011 Research paper FREE DOWNLOAD
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Here is where research turns into Action.
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