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By Root 1071 0

my bond license during our two-year noncompete agreement. Since I had no license, several complaints were filed with the Hawaii Department of Insurance. There were lots of people who needed my service and who had already paid me in advance to oversee their bail and bond. When I was forced out of business, many of those people lost a lot of their collateral in bail forfeiture. What this boiled down to was that the cosigners were losing everything because the people they were backing had skipped out on their bail and I couldn’t go after any of them. This was a rare opportunity where they could run with no threat of the Dog tracking them down. Nonetheless, my company still had to pay the insurer for the full value of the bond. During that two-year period, that meant liquidating my collateral to make good on the money owed. I hated doing it, but I was left with no choice.

Most of the complaints were settled outside the system. As for the other complaints, my problems started when the Department of Insurance began sending me notification letters at the wrong address. The notices went to an address I hadn’t operated out of for five years. The strange part was that prior to my deal with Heath, I always received letters from the department at my current address with no problem at all. It was my legal address on every document filed with the state. It made no sense that they didn’t try to reach me through my correct address.

I was patiently waiting for the two-year noncompete Heath made me sign, as part of our deal, to run out so I could get back to work in Hawaii and start all over again. That would have been the perfect plan had it not been for those complaints I never received. The problem wasn’t the complaints, but my failure to answer. That was an automatic suspension of my license. If I didn’t adhere to all of the rules and regulations, I was in danger of losing my rights as a bondsman.

I called the Hawaii Department of Insurance to make sure they had a correct mailing address so I could deal with any outstanding issues. The next letter I received arrived on December 27, 1997, informing me that my license was in jeopardy for failure to respond to the complaints. The hearing was set for October 29—two whole months prior to receiving the notification. In my absence, the commissioner had revoked my license for five years. The penalty for not answering a complaint is generally a thirty-day suspension and a five-hundred-dollar fine. The revocation of my license for five years was extreme and unfair.

Nobody in the bond business gets sanctioned as harshly as I did. I was also deprived of my due process under the law because I am entitled to get notice of a hearing before it takes place, not after they’ve already made a decision. It was very difficult to get people to listen to me. I knocked on every door imaginable, until finally one lawyer, Howard Glickstein, agreed that I had been robbed of my basic rights. He told me that it would be an incredible long shot, but I knew we had to go for it anyway. There was nothing left to lose.

It took eleven years of perseverance and fighting, but Beth and I fought my case all the way to the Hawaii Supreme Court, until we were finally able to show a panel of judges all of the clerical errors that were made leading up to my revocation. Finally, in late 2008, our lawyer was victorious. The judge ruled in our favor, saying the corporate division of insurance was wrong. He said the state was required to reinstate my license exactly as it was when they revoked it. The only problem with that ruling was that when they revoked it, I had already surrendered my license in my deal with Heath and moved to Colorado to wait out the two-year noncompete period. So, in essence, the state revoked a license that had already been surrendered.

The reason it took so long to win the case was because it was extremely technical. The laws in Hawaii had changed since I first lost my license back in 1997. Initially, the best compromise the state would agree to was allowing me to take the license exam again. That wasn