House of DeWolff: A True Story of Corruption, Kidnapping, and Conspiracy in the Justice System

By Joseph Waiksnis

Joseph hopes to start a new life for himself after he finally, tearfully reunites with his immigrant grandfather after twenty years and inherits a house from him. As he works hard to fix the property, however, he draws the ire of local authorities who covet his home. Escalating harassment climaxes with a shocking act of police brutality under cover of darkness and trumped-up charges for Joseph, kicking off a saga of repeated injustices, attorney betrayals, and even an attempted double murder across three states and almost thirty years. Finished as the corrupt systems that tried cover up these crimes begin to crumble, House of DeWolff combines a vivid retelling of his story with documentation of the entire case to bring the truth to light. This true to life work reveals Joseph's family history, the kidnapping that changed his life, the miscarriages of justice that plague him and his family, and his continued struggle for relief and vindication.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Joseph Waiksnis
• Release date: Sep 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9780997741438

Joseph Waiksnis

Born at St. Albans Naval Hospital in Queens, New York, the sea has figured strongly in Joseph Waiksnis’s life and heritage. He has spent the years working to get his story out and to improve himself as best he can despite the pressure, earning his EPA 608 certification. Between fighting for his and his family’s good name, he lives with his parents and son on Long Island, NY. You can learn more about him as his story unfolds on social media.

Book preview

House of DeWolff

A True Story of Corruption, Kidnapping, and Conspiracy in the Justice System

By

Joseph Charles Waiksnis

Copyright 2020 by Joseph Charles Waiksnis.

All rights reserved.

First Edition: October 2016

Book Cover Design by ebooklaunch.com

ISBN: 978-0-9977414-3-8

Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Introduction

Most nightmares have a beginning and an end. Whether you experience them subconsciously, in the deepest of sleep, or consciously as you live through the hours, days, or even months of harrowing events, you tell yourself you can and will survive this bad dream. This too shall pass, you tell yourself. You keep faith in reality or in yourself, a friend, or a loved one. Perhaps you pray. At some point, you look forward to the day when the nightmare will be over and happiness and harmony are restored.

Sometimes, though, nightmares endure. They keep recurring. You find that a situation in your life is not so easily resolved.

In my own life, my nightmare has all but taken over. Once a respected, stable, family man, today I am a single father forced to live under constant harassment. To some degree, I write this to try to afford myself some respite from the ongoing drama.

Our legal system can be like a snare; once you are entangled, it is very difficult to get out. You are less and less presumed innocent with every brush with the courts. The system becomes more and more punitive toward you; fees and penalties escalate, even if your initial offense was relatively minor or even non-existent.

For example, if you have ever failed to appear in court for some reason, a bench warrant will be issued for your arrest. Your problem might have been a traffic violation, but if you fail to appear in court, you are suddenly considered a fugitive from the law. Things get very serious very fast. You may then experience a version of what I went through and am going through—the snare of the legal system. Often a person is unaware that the bench warrant has been issued. It happens with the almost automatic bang of a judge’s gavel, and you may not even know it occurred until the next time you are pulled over. Then, suddenly, you are carted off to jail. The police and courts tend to get pretty draconian about such things.

There are many reasons why a well-intentioned, otherwise law-abiding citizen might miss a court date. Yet if you do, you may very quickly be relegated to the fearsome status of being a fugitive from justice, which means whatever your legal problem was in the first place, you’ve got additional charges and a bench warrant to deal with now. Also, if they find you, you are going straight to jail.

Detectives may come to your last known address. Your relatives may wake up one fine day to find their front and back yards swarming with officers of the law, detectives ringing their doorbell and standing there with a photo of you. You may have to go through the embarrassment of trying to explain to your neighbors why your house became the center of a dragnet. The police act as if you were a dangerous criminal by standing around points of exit, just waiting to apprehend the escaping you. They may be brusque with your relatives and seem to doubt their veracity when they say they don’t know where you are. They stiffly warn your relatives that if they are harboring a fugitive from justice, they are going to be in big legal trouble too.

It is not a pretty scene. I know because I have been there, and my family has been there, in this kind and other kinds of legal snafus that never seem to get straightened out but haunt your days, nights, footsteps, and finances for years on end. A small legal difficulty can snowball from a minor incident until you find yourself in prison.

So many lawyers these days advise their clients just to plead guilty to a lesser charge to get out of the legal snare. Yes, American citizens are being encouraged to give up their right to a fair trial to plead guilty to crimes they did not commit just to get out of the grasp of the justice system.

My legal nightmare started in 1993. In 1993 I was declared guilty of a crime I did not commit. Prior to the conviction, I was brutally apprehended and held in police custody without any reference to the basic procedures of law.

As a result of this arrest, I was later forced to relocate and to give up a valuable property I had inherited from my maternal grandfather, located in a small Pennsylvania town. The home built upon that property was coveted by the people responsible for my persecution and was, I believe, a key part of why I was targeted in the first place.

It is difficult to imagine that the authorities of a small town would persecute a man for a piece of land in the United States. Home ownership and property rights are part of the American Dream. Voting rights were originally based on property ownership. The lyrics of the second verse of The Star-Spangled Banner speak about people’s rights to stand between their loved homes and the war’s desolation. The right to private property was a key part of our democracy. Protecting one’s home and property is, it seems to me, a basic American right.

Yet people coveted my property, and the upshot of it is that to this day, although I am an ordinary, hardworking, law-abiding citizen, I am treated like a criminal. My own experience exposes the corruption that can and does exist in the very system designed and pledged to protect this country's citizens—me and my family, and you and yours.

I know we would all like to believe that our justice system has the best intentions toward citizens and that our police officers don’t abuse their power. How we all wish this were so. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, I’m going to say that we have the worst justice system in the world—unless you count all the others. That backhanded compliment is not saying much, though, in what is supposed to be the land of the free and the home of the brave.

My story spans such a long time period and such a range of prosecutorial efforts against me that I honestly find it hard to believe myself. I might chalk it up to a bad dream, if it were not for the evidence, the cold, hard facts, that stand before me every minute. If it were not for the truth I know, I might think all this was impossible.

Much of my story comes down to money. My family's persecution has been fueled by monetary greed. We have, perhaps, been targeted with such furious persistence because we are of limited means—we cannot fight fire with fire; we cannot fight back at the highest level. Thus, we are perhaps ready targets for a system more powerful and with more resources than we have. I think we all know that he who hires the best lawyer wins, and hiring the best lawyer takes big bucks—bigger bucks than I or my family had.

The monetary greed part, I suppose, is not unusual. It has been part of the human condition for a long time. Yet this is America, the land of the free, where we suppose truth and justice should prevail in our justice system. Yet I was falsely arrested, threatened, roughed up, extradited, and pulled before countless courts to defend myself against charges that were not only trumped up, as they say, but were downright false and which escalated punitively as time went on. That is all part of the nightmare I am living.

I address myself to those seeking justice. I call to all people for whom justice, truth, and freedom are fundamental human rights.

I am not a professional writer. I never went to law school. I understand the justice system from the perspective of one of its victims, not one of its educated advocates. Yet, with the help of ordinary people, I have been able to tell my story, and I hope it will be instructive for others. All the documentation, photos, and evidence are on my website.

For those who believe that every policeman and figure of authority in the justice system is trustworthy, I offer two instructive examples of legal corruption. In recent years, the ex-police chief of Suffolk County, New York, one James Burke, has pled guilty to violating a citizen’s rights and conspiring to obstruct justice over it. Burke spent 46 months behind bars for his brutal treatment of a young man who broke into Burke’s police car and stole a bunch of pornography and sex toys Burke had there. When he caught the perpetrator, Burke beat him and made death threats. Why did he do this? Possibly because Burke didn’t want anyone to know about his porn habit. So he abused his power and authority to intimidate this poor, hapless person—a detainee who had certain rights, no matter what he had done—and then tried to obstruct justice to keep it from being discovered. The judge described Burke as a dictator whose actions involved the whole police department. (Please see http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/27/nyregion/james-burke-ex-suffolk-county-police-chief-guilty-plea.html) As such, the entire police department and district attorney’s office came under investigation too, leading to the convictions of former DA Thomas Spota and former anti-corruption czar Christopher McPartland for conspiracy, obstruction of justice, witness tampering, and accessories to the deprivation of civil rights. After much delay, Spota and McPartland were each sentenced to five years in federal prison.

In the wake of these revelations, another development has been uncovered in neighboring Nassau County: nine whole cases that have been sealed from the public record without any given reason, together dubbed the secret docket, that show a callous lack of regard for civil liberties on the part of Nassau’s authorities. My case in Suffolk has received similar treatment, so I have had my suspicions raised by the Newsday report on these cases, and Suffolk Deputy County Chief Clerk Chris Como’s denials that a similar docket exists in Suffolk in spite of my experience.

So it does happen. Police and other representatives of the law sometimes abuse their power. Personally, even I find it hard to believe, even now, that in the United States the police sometimes can operate as if we are in a dictatorship, as if ours was a regime that condones violence against other human beings and interference with the basic freedoms of the citizens of the nation. Yet that sorry reality is confirmed by my story, among so many others.

I come forward now after years of work and a light at the end of the tunnel for the unjustly treated. The downfall of Spota – who as DA quietly kept his thumb on my case and countless others like it – has given me the breathing room and spotlight to finally bring my story to my fellow citizens after countless attempts over the years. We are also in a time where the ways in which the brutality, callousness, and corruption the legal system has wrought in particular on our nation’s most disadvantaged and discriminated against denizens, Black and indigenous, are finally getting the attention they deserve. To a significant extent my tale is like theirs, those who are more likely to suffer indignities like these and worse. I hope that telling my story can help them find justice and peace too.

Although names and details have been changed or omitted, the following events are my true story, starting in small town America and detailing the abuse of power by local authorities that ensnared my life and my freedom in an ever larger and more strangling net of incompetence, corruption, and bureaucratic callousness as I fought to clear my name of a crime of which I was not guilty.

Welcome to my nightmare.

Chapter One

Even as a young boy, my grandfather, Johannes Reinier DeWolff, dreamed of being a sailor. After finishing eight years of grammar school in Holland, at the young age of 14, he apprenticed as a deck boy on board the German built 20,000-ton triple screw luxury liner SS Reliance, which was owned at the time by Hamburg American Lines. It was 1925. When the ship docked in New York, John met his parents, who had emigrated from Holland the following year, and visited them in their home—one of the many brownstones that shaped the Brooklyn skyline. Then he would head back to the ship.

John and his younger sister Josephine, in Holland, date unknown. Shades of things to come: He was wearing a sailor suit!

Letter address to John from his parents on his maiden voyage to America John DeWolff Deck boy SS Reliance Pier 86 dated October 28 1925

Letters to my grandfather while he was serving on the SS Reliance in the Caribbean

In one of the ironies of life, two of the few letters my family has from that time period in our family’s history are dated February 28th and March 9th. These two dates were to figure prominently in the life of my grandfather’s descendant—me. On February 28th, many years later, I left my grandfather’s home, never to return, and on March 9th I was abducted by the police in what was the beginning of my bizarre, Herculean struggle with the justice system.

John’s father, my great grandfather, Joseph DeWolff, was an electrical engineer in Holland by trade, and he managed to get a job at Con Edison as a chief engineer. Having a good paying job and job security, the DeWolff family bought their first house in Baisley Park, Queens, New York. They lived only three doors away from my future grandmother, Regina Popko. Regina and John became good friends and started dating in the early ‘30s during his visits to his parents. One day, upon docking in New York, my future grandfather jumped ship, giving up his life at sea so he could stay with his love, Regina. They married in 1937.

Photo to the left: my grandfather John lived with his parents and his younger siblings in their new home in Baisley Park. Photo to the right: my grandmother lived three houses down on the same block.

John and Regina DeWolff, my grandparents

My grandmother and grandfather shared a love story that started in the 1930s and, even after separation and divorce, only ended upon John’s death in 1988.

They honeymooned in upstate New York, traveling in their new sedan to Niagara Falls and Seneca Lake, where my grandfather fell in love with the countryside. He would yearn to return there later.

My mother, Veronica, was born to the couple in November of 1939, not long after John and Regina bought their first house in Jamaica, New York. Because of the Depression, work was hard to find, but John was able to find a job in Long Island City working for the Silvercup Bread Company maintaining their fleet of vehicles.

My grandfather holding my mother, and a shot of their first home.

John always had his eyes and ears open for opportunities to earn a better living. Because of this, my grandfather was able to find a better job as a carpenter’s apprentice sometime in 1940, but he had to travel out of state, sometimes as far away as Maine, working on big commercial projects. Sometimes he was away from home for as long as two months at a time. That must have put a strain on their marriage, although he sent a lot of money home to pay the bills. What was more, John entered a trade school around this time to learn steel plate printing; this would enable him to become a jeweler later in life.

Once World War II started, my grandfather’s number came up from the Selective Service Board of Registration. John was visited at his home by two immigration officers who gave him two choices: join the United States Armed Forces or be deported. It didn’t matter that John had married a U.S. citizen and had a child. This was war, and the country needed him.

Because of his background with ocean-going vessels, John joined the United States Navy; he was inducted on May 23, 1944. To his surprise, he was sent to the lovely Seneca Lake area where he and my grandmother had gone on their honeymoon. This time, however, he was going to be staying at the newly built Sampson Naval Training Station for basic training. At the same time John became a naturalized citizen of the United States.

After completing basic training John headed back home on leave to spend some time with his wife and daughter before heading on to Davisville Naval Construction Battalion Center on Rhode Island.

John with his family, his fellow servicemen, and alone in his uniform.

John received special training by joining the 3rd U.S. Navy Construction Battalion, with Construction Battalion often called CB. They are often fondly called the Seabees, and in WWII, they were known as The Fighting Seabees.

In 1945 my grandfather took part in one of the bloodiest assaults of the entire war: the Battle of Okinawa. It was the largest amphibious assault in the Pacific theater, lasting some eighty-two days. To strengthen his resolve, he always carried his Navy-issued Bible, family photos, and a lock of my mother’s hair.

John received the Asiatic Pacific Ribbon, the American Theatre Ribbon, Expert Rifleman, Victory Medal, and an Honorable Discharge after the war. He was very proud of his record of service, and it entitled him to further his education under the GI Bill.

John DeWolff, my grandfather, in proud service to his country, 1945

Chapter Two

Times were hard on the home front, though; bills were adding up, and the mortgage was overdue on my grandparents’ house. The bank foreclosed, and while John was away fighting the war, Regina and my mother had to move in with her parents. So much separation, plus the new living situation, must have put even more strain on my grandparents’ relationship. Unfortunately, my grandmother met another man, Bill, with whom she became friends and, over time, more than friends. There are many such wartime stories. While my grandfather did not receive the infamous Dear John letter while he was serving in the navy, in fact, his wife had met someone else with whom she was more compatible.

When he returned after the war, the couple had no place to stay together, so they stayed with their respective parents while they figured out what to do. John remembered how much he had loved the area near Seneca Lake. In 1946 John headed upstate to the Finger Lakes Region and got a job with the Corning Glass Works in Corning, New York, not far from Seneca Lake. He had a few navy buddies in Pennsylvania, near the New York State line, so he was able to stay there inexpensively in the town of Oliverville, Pennsylvania. He was hoping to build a house so that Regina would join him there, but it did not happen. Regina wanted a separation.

I’ve mentioned that they were rather incompatible. My grandfather was a perpetual joker, and my grandmother was a serious, responsible woman. In fact, my grandfather was passed up for a Good Conduct medal in the armed forces, probably because of this jokester mentality. They realized they were very poorly matched sometime after the war, and certainly the long separation they had when John was away working and during the war cannot have been easy. There were