By Tim Rohr
After Bob Klitzkie notified Michael Borja, the then-Director of the Department of Land Management ("DLM") of what Bob called "a source of great mischief" regarding the clearly doctored certificates of title (CTs) for The Yona Property (RMS) in his letter of December 23, 2015, Borja, on January 20, 2016, replied to Klitzkie:
In a follow-up to your referenced letter, I have consulted with the Department of Land Management’s legal counsel and with the Attorney General of Guam regarding a remedy to correct a certificate of title in which a memorial had been entered in error. Based on their advice and in accordance with Title 29, Guam Code Annotated §29195, a person of interest or the registrar is required to petition the court to correct a certificate of title.
Accordingly, the department, specifically the Ex Officio Registrar of Titles, has prepared and forwarded a petition and other associated documents to the Office of the Attorney General of Guam with the instructions for the petition to be filed in the Superior Court of Guam in an effort to correct the certificates of title mentioned in your letter.
So, Bob thought all was well. 1) The Attorney General, Elizabeth Barrett-Anderson (at the time), had advised Borja on the correct judicial proceeding required to correct a CT pursuant to Guam law. 2) Borja, the Director of DLM, had confirmed to Klitzkie that he had already sent the required documents to the Attorney General to initiate the judicial proceeding.
I remember Bob being very satisfied and confident that the matter would be properly addressed and with the utmost expediency. Before going further, it may help to know why Bob was pursuing this.
After more than a year of dealing with Apuron and the Neocats playing a devious shell game with "who owns The Yona Property?," the publication of a false CT on the front page of the church newspaper, a CT only recently drafted and authorized by the highest authority in the Government of Guam, whose duty it was to protect and preserve land titles, wasn't just another suspicious move by the Neocats, it was a threat to anyone and everyone who trusted DLM to protect their interest in their own properties. In other words, if someone in DLM could be made to falsify a land title to the benefit of a particular party, then this could happen to anyone. It was very serious business, and Bob was going to get to the bottom of it, because at the "bottom of it," as Bob knew, was "the source of great mischief," i.e. Corruption - with a capital C.
However, after Borja promising January 20, 2016 letter to Klitzkie. Borja went silent. A month went by. Bob decided to meet Borja and find out what was going on. Bob met with Borja and DLM's legal counsel, Kristan Finney, a Deputy Attorney General, on Monday, February 16. At the meeting, Bob learned that no action had been taken to advance the judicial proceeding, including the failure to send the "required documents" to the Attorney General, as Borja's January 20 letter had stated.
The next day, Bob memorialized the meeting in a long letter to Borja, which, at the outset, includes a reference to the sudden appearance of a new actor in this title drama, "counsel for the Archdiocese of Agana."
This letter will serve to memorialize Monday’s conference concerning the captioned matter attended by yourself, your counsel, Kristan K. Finney, Esq., and the undersigned. Learned counsel informed that she had contacted and had been working with counsel for the Archdiocese of Agana…for about two weeks, but had not had a chance to “sit down with her to see what could be worked out.”…Your counsel opined that she needed to “sit down with” counsel for the Archdiocese of Agana…to “see what she had.” Your counsel opined that if “something can be worked out, the matter would go much smoother,” but that she had to “work with” counsel for the Archdiocese of Agana…before a petition could be filed.
Per what was already revealed in Part 1, Bob learned that the new actor, the "counsel for the Archdiocese of Agana," was Attorney Jackie Terlaje, whose fingerprints had been all over the title issue since at least November 19, 2015, when Bob, through FOIA'd documents, found a DLM document showing that Jackie (along with Bertha Evangelista of Title Guaranty) had paid for the erroeneous CTs with a personal check.
(Just a reminder. The CTs were erroneous because they did not include the Declaration of Deed of Restriction that Apuron had filed in 2011, a document that was at the root of the controversy.)
Bob was rightly perplexed. Borja's letter of January 20 had assured him that, per the Attorney General, the only way to correct the CTs was through a judicial proceeding, i.e., the matter had to go to court. But now, after a month of silence, Bob is told that the AG (Finney was a Deputy AG) was "working something out" with Jackie Terlaje, an arch-Neocat, and per Bob's FOIA'd documents, the one person's name attached to "the source of great mischief" more than anyone else's.
In addition to finding the record of payment showing Terlaje's payment for the original 4 erroneous CTs, the ones which left out the controversial Deed Restriction, Bob also found an email from DLM addressed to Terlaje, with a copy of 4 CTs which had been illicitly "corrected:" Andrew Santos, the then Deputy Registar of Titles, and the DLM official who had originated the first set of erroneous titles, had hand written in the Deed Restriction and sent them to Jackie.
So, after Bob thinks he has gotten things on the right track, Jackie shows up again and is "working something out" with Finney, the Deputy AG. What possibly could be "worked out," when, per the AG, the law clearly required a judicial proceeding? We would find out after another month of waiting.
On March 31, 2016, the then-Attorney General, Elizabeth Barrett-Anderson, wrote to DLM Director, Michael Borja:
As described in your December 29, 2015, request to our Office to initiate a petition for correction of the CTs, the original issuance of the documents was defective because the Department did not correctly memorialize a recorded instrument affecting the property within the CTs. The Department had attempted to correct the CTs administratively but failed to notate the recorded instrument accurately.
Upon review, it was determined that, in the absence of agreement by the title holder and under the facts known at that time, proceeding to court for judicial correction pursuant to 21 GCA § 29195 was the proper course of action. Assistant Attorney General Kristan Finney was instructed to prepare draft pleadings for review.
Okay. All is well and good so far. But then Barrett-Anderson says this (emphasis added):
Shortly thereafter, our Office was contacted by Counsel for the title holder informing us that there was no objection to your Department making the necessary corrections and administratively inscribing the property memorialization to each of the CTs. This process is permitted under 21 GCA § 29160.
There being no further purpose for initiating judicial proceedings for correction of the CTs, in the interest of judicial economy and based on agreement of the title holder, I concurred in the administrative resolution, which was effectuated on March 15, 2016.
She did it! Jackie did it. She got the AG to skip the judicial proceeding (which would have outed them all in the process) and got the CTs corrected "administratively," i.e., "in-house." There would be no court proceeding, no stories in the media, no outing of what Apuron and the Neocats tried to do. But how did she do this?
Barrett-Anderson did not elaborate on just what sort of "process was permitted under 21 GCA § 29160," the very section of the law Barrett-Anderson had referred to earlier when she advised Borja that the only way to correct the erroneous CTs was via a judicial proceeding, only that an administrative correction was "permitted." So, what was permitted?
Here is the pertinent part of 21 GCA § 29160 (emphasis added):
No new certificate of title shall be entered and no memorandum shall be made upon any certificate of title by the registrar in pursuance of any deed or other voluntary instrument, unless the owner's duplicate certificate of title is presented with such instrument…
In other words, if the owner has a CT with the correct information, upon presentation to the registrar, a new certificate duplicating the original presented by the owner can be issued.
We will never know whether the owner (Apuron) presented CTs with the correct information, since all of this was conducted "administratively" behind closed doors. However, if we can take Barrett-Anderson at her word, and that the correction was permitted by law if the title holder presented a "duplicate certificate," then the only thing left to believe is that Apuron had the CTs with the Deed Restriction set forth in the memorial section, because that is what finally emerged as the corrected CT.
So, if Apuron already had the correct CTs, why did he order new CTs in October 2015?
There is only one answer:
BECAUSE HE NEEDED CTs THAT DID NOT SHOW THE DEED RESTRICTION.
And that is what Jackie paid for on 11/19/15.
One more thing
Now, there's one more thing. Could it all have been an error, and nobody noticed it until it was printed in the Umatuna on November 29, 2015?
I'll leave that up to you to decide. But what we do know, and have a record of, is that the original erroneous CTs, the ones produced and authorized by Andrew Santos, the Deputy Registrar of Titles, on October 30, 2015, were, according to the DLM CT Sign-out Logbook, retrieved from DLM and paid for on 11/19/15.
As already mentioned, Jackie was one of the payers. One would think that someone who shared in a $768 payment would at least want to know they got what they paid for. Also, as "counsel for the title holder," as she was referred to by the AG, it would have been her duty to inspect the titles, especially since one of the titles was going to be published on the front page of the Umatuna for the purposes of PROVING that Apuron had not deeded the property to the Neocats (RMS).
In any event, Jackie at least had access to the CTs and the ability to inspect them between 11/19/15, when they were retrieved from DLM, and 11/29/15, when one of the CTs was published in the Umatuna. Unless Jackie is a really poor attorney (and she's not), we have to assume that Jackie knew the CTs were missing the memorial showing the Deed Restriction.
But let's just say (for fun) that she, being such a busy attorney, didn't know, and only became aware of the missing memorial after one of the CTs was published in the Umatuna on 11/29/15. Then, if that were true, this should have warranted an immediate call to Andrew Santos, the Deputy Registrar, who signed the CTs sans the memorial. However, according to Andrew Santos, he did not receive a call from Jackie until December 14, 2015.
I am copying here a portion of the chapter in my book, which tells this part of the story:
On Deccember 14, 2015, Bob Klitzkie and I, unannounced, dropped by the office of a certain Mr. Andrew D. Santos. Santos was the Deputy Registrar of Titles at the Government of Guam Department of Land Management. Bob and I dropped in on Mr. Santos because it was Andrew Santos’ signature on the erroneous CT that Apuron and the Neocats had published in the Umatuna on November 29, 2015.
Probably because Bob Klitizkie was with me, Mr. Santos appeared to be immediately nervous. As previously noted, Bob was an attorney, a pro-tem judge, and a former senator. He was also, at 6’4”, physically imposing. More than all of the above, though, Bob was well known in Guam for being “no-nonsense,” and he didn’t spend any time on niceties with Mr. Santos.
Bob asked Santos if he had seen the CT printed in the Umatuna. Santos said that he had, and that he had noticed “something was wrong” (his words). Santos then pointed to copies of the four titles (four lots comprise the Yona Property) on his desk and said he was in the process of correcting them.
I asked Santos who asked him to correct the titles. At this point, because Santos had just told Bob that he had noticed “something was wrong” when he saw the Umatuna at Mass two weeks earlier, Santos could have answered: “Nobody. I saw the error, and I’m correcting it.” But instead, when I asked who asked him to correct the titles, Santos answered, “Law offices.” Naturally, I replied, “Law offices who?” Santos answered that he couldn’t recall which Law office, just that it was “Law offices.” I then asked, “Law office of Jackie Terlaje?” Santos replied, “I think so.”
Actually, Santos "knew so." After Bob FOIA'd docs from DLM, Bob found an email from an employee in the Land Records Division of DLM addressed to Jackie Terlaje. The email stated:
"Hafa Adai, Attorney Terlaje, per Andrew Santos, DLM, please see attached titles."
The email was dated Dec. 15, 2015, one day after Bob and I dropped in on Santos.
The question still remains, though, what prompted Jackie to contact Andrew Santos and ask that the titles be "corrected?" Bob and I didn't drop in on Santos until December 14, 2015, which was on or about the same day that Santos said he was contacted by "Law offices." This was more than two weeks after the brazen publication of the false CT in the Umatuna. So it wasn't our investigation that prompted Jackie's sudden rush to fix the CTs.
"...the erstwhile church leaders...continue their charade that the multimillion-dollar property in Yona still belongs to the archdiocese. A copy of a certificate of title was posted to support this claim."
Up until this letter, no one had said anything about the CT published in the Umatuna. The average Catholic still could not believe that their own bishop would lie to them.
In fact, a lot of Catholics were lying to them, and still are.
