The family investments my daughter uncle had steered her trust into over eighteen months were every one of them his own failing businesses, and there was a reason he had chosen her fund to feed them. He thought a grieving girl with a dead father would never look closely.
A trustee has a legal duty of loyalty, which means the trust money is for the beneficiary alone and never for the trustee own benefit, and self-dealing, moving a childs trust into ventures the trustee personally owns and profits from, is one of the clearest breaches of that duty there is, and my brother-in-law had done it forty thousand dollars over, in writing, in the trust own records.
He did not need to steal in the shadows. He had put it all on paper, calling it investment, because he believed no one would ever read the paper. My daughter, the day she turned eighteen, read the paper.
We did not argue it out at a holiday. We took the trust statements to a trust litigation attorney, who saw the self-dealing at a glance, and then to the court that oversees these things.
The attorney petitioned to remove my brother-in-law as trustee and to surcharge him, which is the law way of making a faithless trustee personally repay what he cost the trust. Because his self-dealing was documented in the trust own records, it was not a hard case. It was an obvious one.
He was removed. A professional fiduciary was appointed in his place. And the surcharge, plus what could be clawed back from his ventures, restored the great majority of my daughter forty thousand dollars to a trust he can never touch again.
Her grandparents set that money aside so their late son daughter would have a start in the world. My daughter has it back now, in honest hands, exactly as they intended.
I have thought a great deal, since, about how quietly these things happen. Not with a mask and a crowbar, but with a signature, a login, a title on an account, wielded by someone the family had every reason to trust. That is what makes it so hard to catch and so easy to excuse. They count on our not wanting to believe it of one of our own. I almost did not. I am glad I looked, because looking was the whole of the difference.
The lesson stayed with me, and I pass it on to anyone who will listen. Watch the accounts of the people you love, especially the old and the young, especially the ones who cannot watch for themselves. Read the statements. Ask the questions. Keep the records. It is not disloyalty to check. It is love with its eyes open, and it is the only kind that actually protects anyone.
Her uncle thought a girl who had lost her father was an easy mark, too sad and too trusting to check. She checked on her eighteenth birthday, the first day she legally could. He counted on her grief. He did not count on her reading every line. She read every line. And she got her father parents gift back, whole.