Reviewing Section 118 of the California Penal Code, I believe it is fair to ask: is this perjury?

118. (a) Every person who, having taken an oath that he or she will testify, declare, depose, or certify truly before any competent tribunal, officer, or person, in any of the cases in which the oath may by law of the State of California be administered, willfully and contrary to the oath, states as true any material matter which he or she knows to be false, and every person who testifies, declares, deposes, or certifies under penalty of perjury in any of the cases in which the testimony, declarations, depositions, or certification is permitted by law of the State of California under penalty of perjury and willfully states as true any material matter which he or she knows to be false, is guilty of perjury.

This subdivision is applicable whether the statement, or the testimony, declaration, deposition, or certification is made or subscribed within or without the State of California.

It's not clear if the judge ever saw the telephone bills. I gave them to my lawyer, but when I asked him, he said something about not being able to get them certified in time for the hearing - leaving me wondering if forged telephone bills were frequently offered as evidence in unlawful termination lawsuits, and, if so, why the court was not more willing to scrutinize the evidence it received, from wealthy parties ... whom obviously had the resources to do such things.

Case dismissed.

However, I have learned a few important lessons from life. One of those lessons was persistence. I was once a bicycle messenger, and I can tell you that grit and persistence are the stock in trade you need if you are going to survive, as a bike messenger, in San Francisco. I have both.

As the World-Wide Web came into being, and the reverse directory concept migrated from 900 number to website, I eventually tried doing a reverse lookup on the number, again, and this time I was intrigued to see that the phone number of the employment agency also mapped to a company that sold self-defense products - one that was going through a rather difficult bankruptcy, complete with offshore millionaires and angry stockholders and shadowy intelligence connections - as well as to several other companies with similar names - Affordable Security And Protection (ASAP) ... ASAP Employment Service ... and Quorum International ... as well as Asset Security And Protection (ASAP) ... ASAP Services ... and perhaps others I have not yet discovered.

When examining the names and addresses of the companies listed in the AnyWho lookup of 415-345-2727, (before the 415/650 area code split), you should be aware of a few critical details.

• 13 Commons Lane is a condominium, in Foster City, 94404; and yet ...
• ASAP, at 985 Hillsdale Boulevard, is also in 94404 ... although it claims to be in San Mateo.
• The 985 Hillsdale address, although it says Suite 18, was actually a very large post office box (POB) in a mailbox rental company in a shopping center, also in Foster City, less than one block from 13 Commons Lane.
• And, of course, all three of these agencies are listed at the same telephone number.
• Linda L. Benton is the owner of ASAP.
• Bonita (AKA Bonnie) B. Marsh is the sole employee, of record.
• It's not clear if the condominium at 13 Commons Lane was a business, or a residence.
• It's not clear if one or both women were living there. (They have since moved, of course.)
• Attempts to get more information from Foster City's government has not been fruitful, to date; statutes exist which actually protect business records from public inspection - making Foster City a great place to base any business which wishes to [d]elude public accountability, if I understand correctly.

The company I refer to, which sold self-defense products, is called Quorum International - also known as Quorum Ventures; however, if you search for it on Google, remember to include the keyword bankruptcy.

An article from the Phoenix Business Journal, discussing the ethics of the bankruptcy can be seen at xxsecurity.com, among other sites ... and www.softwar.net has a small collection of PR photos of Raymond Hung and his wife, posing with [now California Governor] Arnold Schwarzeneggar ... posing with the Mayor of Phoenix, and other notables.

Perhaps the most interesting article is at www.freerepublic.com, where the possibility is raised that Hung's companies, which manufactured their wares in mainland China and sold the resulting electronic security access cards and other equipment to the United States Government, may have been distributing equipment that was subject to covert abuse by foreign intelligence agencies.

Foster City, itself, has many characteristics which are suggestive of not just a siege mentality, but of an actual security enclave - albeit, one with a Mediterranean appearance. Most of the clusters of housing are surrounded by lagoons, which double as moats - crossed by bridges, which are trivial to seal off - making securing the smaller areas, thus contained, trivial. Portions of Redwood Shores are not dissimilar.

Foster City's history - built as a byproduct of the construction of the San Mateo bridge and the San Francisco airport, an entire city created from nothing - make the city a real estate magnate's dream come true, and the source of much continuing income. An interesting place; and a city to be concerned about, perhaps, if for no other reason than to ask who built this city this way ... and why.

After all, those lagoons represent a lot of unsellable real estate. Obviously there must be some value that is not easily recognized. Aesthetics? Maybe.

Of course, sometimes things go wrong; someone applies a magic bullet solution to a problem which it was not intended to solve, and it backfires, creating blowback.

However, when all is said and done it cannot be that difficult to determine what sort of business(es) these two women were operating - each business in the United States is required to file a Schedule C, each year, for each business that is being engaged in. There are separate categories for Employment Agencies and Security Firms, as well as hundreds of other categories.

It would seem a simple task to compare the Schedule C forms filed by these two women, during the years immediately preceding and following the events in question, to determine if they were, indeed, an employment agency - or something else - assuming, of course, that they were paying taxes.

The only other question that needs to be asked is: why was this not done, many years ago?

Oracle Corporation is not the only company to use private investigators to engineer terminations using fraudulent grounds. On March 25, 2002, National Public Radio published a story on PI firms in Japan who provide the exact same service for employers and spouses who want a face-saving [for them] solution to their business and personal problems. If you go to www.npr.org and search for the phrase breaker-upper, you will find ...

Doing Dirty Work
Date: 03-25-02

NPR's Eric Weiner reports from Tokyo on the practice of hiring someone else to do your dirty work -- from firing an employee to ending a marriage. For these so-called "breaker-uppers," business is booming.

This is very interesting - particularly in light of Larry Ellison's fascination with things Japanese.

• The Salesman
  

  A salesman brought in a very large sale and was denied his commission; perhaps it was awarded to his manager - or someone his manager liked better.

  He protested and was terminated - remember, you can be terminated for any reason or no reason at all, in California. Angry, he wrote directly to Larry Ellison, demanding closure.

  Oracle Corporation's Legal Department filed for a restraining order against the former salesman, prohibiting him from coming within, oh, 300 yards or so of Larry Ellison, for, I would assume, the standard issue temporary restraining order period, of three years.

  This can only be described as a calculated assault upon the salesman's credibility, with what seems to have been a fraudulently acquired restraining order - I saw no threats in the letter attached as an exhibit.

  
  
• The Engineer
  

  A senior software engineer with a British competitor was lured to California, where he was persuaded to agree to leave his employer, come to Oracle Corporation and lead software development efforts for Oracle Corporation.

  He signed the employment agreement in California, naturally ... then he moved his entire family and household from England to California. Six weeks after he started, Larry Ellison terminated his new employee.

  The employee had to pay his own costs returning to England.

  In the subsequent lawsuit, it was alleged that this had been intended from the very beginning to sabotage the relationship between the plaintiff and his employer in Great Britain, and not been a sincere offer of employment.

  Oracle's Legal department cheekily claimed that because the plaintiff had signed his employment agreement in California - where employment is at will and you can be terminated for any reason, or no reason at all - that he had no legal recourse, and this was perfectly legal behavior. Apparently, the San Mateo Superior Court agreed.

  
  
• The Paralegal
  

  My favorite is the case where an employee of Oracle Corporation's own Legal Department filed an unlawful termination lawsuit against the Oracle Corporation.

  It seems that, as an employee of Oracle Corporation's Legal Department, defending against another unlawful termination lawsuit, involving another employee, that she was personally required to do something that she believed to be unlawful and against her ethics as a legal professional.

  Rather than do this, she quit her job at Oracle Corporation and employed a very prestigious employment lawyer to prosecute her own unlawful termination lawsuit.

  Said lawyer, naturally, never returned my calls, replied to my letter, or returned the copies of documents delivered to his office. But this is another story.

  It's not clear exactly what she was required to do - in fact, it has been concealed from public review - that it, the case is sealed.

  The San Mateo County Superior Court, in its wisdom, has sealed these records - but that just leaves it open to conjecture and gossip - not the best way to handle scandalous abuse of power, in my opinion, as it leads directly to situations such as that described by this web page.

  It seems likely that it had something to do with, perhaps, bribing a judge ... perhaps with an offer of Oracle stock.

  Or, perhaps, contacting an employee under false premises, and attempting to provoke them into some act which would facilitate engineering their termination?

  All I can say for sure is that when this topic was broached, during my own deposition, Oracle Corporation's chief legal counsel was practically frothing at the mouth, demanding to known if I had spoken to this woman and what she had told me.

  I now surmise that she was trying to get me to say, on the record, that this former employee had talked to me about a case that was sealed ... a case which Oracle Corporation apparently has a serious interest in keeping confidential ... and that if she had talked about it, they were intent on seeing her prosecuted, presumably in criminal court.

  
  
• The Assistant
  

  Of course, the most famous case is that of Larry Ellison's administrative assistant.

  Adelyn Lee - whose termination followed my own, by no more than four to eight weeks - sued Oracle Corporation for unlawful termination and sexual harassment, as a result of her termination, pursuant to the end of her sexual relationship with Larry Ellison.

  Indeed, it's hard not to wonder if my termination provoked considerable discussion, in the weeks and months afterwards, regarding exactly what constituted sexual harassment and grounds for termination, and if perhaps there was not a certain amount of bleedover between the two events, so close in time and so traumatic to the organization, as a whole.

  As it so happens, I had been referred to the same lawyer whom subsequently handled Adelyn Lee's lawsuit - Sean Hickey, of Knapp & Viola, in San Mateo - by Anne Mitchell, who at that time was still a law student, but who worked in their office as a paralegal.

  I had been referred to Anne Mitchell by my childhood friend, Paul Andrew Vixie, whom Anne had helped during Paul's own relationship problems.

  Although I met with Sean Hickey and I gave him many documents to copy, he failed to return my calls, in the months afterwards. It seems likely that once he had acquired Adelyn Lee as a client, he - and his employer, Knapp & Viola, of San Mateo - never gave me, or my case, another thought. They didn't even return the materials I'd given them.

  I personally think that Sean Hickey made a serious mistake when he stopped returning my calls, because, had he represented both Adelyn Lee's case and mine at the same time, he might have made a stronger case for an abusive work environment by combining the merits of our separate cases, than he would have by handling them separately (never mind abandoning one of the cases completely).

  He would have also had at his disposal not one, but two people who, between them, probably knew 99% of the people who made things work, at Oracle, and who would have been in a position to testify about circumstances and events.

  As it turns out, he seriously misrepresented his client, and she ended up spending several years in a penitentiary, serving out a sentence for perjury that, many people think, was based on fraud. For all I know, she may still be there.

  In fact, I distinctly recall seeing several people - in the venerable Internet publication, RISKS Digest, pointing out that it would have been trivial - in a case where the question at issue was whether a certain VP had authored a certain electronic mail - for the VP in question to have been using his cell phone, and a modem, to remotely access his Oracle*Mail account would have been straightforward ... and that the fact that said VP was using his cell phone at the time that the electronic mail was written was not, by itself, sufficient proof to justify a finding of perjury. (The moderator, Peter Neumann, among others, summarized the lessons learned.)

  (Subscribers to Telecom Digest, another venerable institution that predates the Internet, may have covered the topic, also.)

  According to the California Penal Code, Section 118(b),

  (b) No person shall be convicted of perjury where proof of falsity rests solely upon contradiction by testimony of a single person other than the defendant. Proof of falsity may be established by direct or indirect evidence.

  ... and so the question can be asked: Is the testimony of a single Oracle Vice President sufficient to convict an administrative assistant ... and, if so, doesn't this fly in the face of California law?

  

  Needless to say, the question of whether it was an Oracle database that held the cell phone data was probably not asked ... but as a database administrator trained by Oracle, I can tell you that, in 1992, table entries could be created and inserted with the appropriate date and time stamps and there would be no audit trail of the event; certainly, no audit trail that a trained Oracle DBA could not delete, so long as it was local to the server the DBA was logged in to. The only way it might be detected would be through a careful comparison of backup tape contents, to see whether the row in question had existed, in the table in question, in the database in question, using backup tapes that corresponded to the timestamp of the data - a tedious and expensive process.

  As can be seen, by denying himself access to my own considerable industrial telecommunication expertise, as a side benefit of representing me, Adelyn Lee's lawyer, Sean Hickey, also rendered himself, his firm, and his client, defenseless against this sort of technobabble-based hucksterism ... and so Adelyn Lee ended up in jail.

  I haven't heard anything about Adelyn Lee but I want her to know that there are people out here who think she got a raw deal and who would like to talk to her. Adelyn, please send me email.

She was assisted by W.O.M.A.N., Inc. .

It's not clear who, or what, provoked this.

I had listed her as the beneficiary for my life insurance, and included her contact information in the employment paperwork I had filed with Oracle Corporation's Human Resources Department, when I had been hired.

It is not impossible that an employee of Oracle Corporation contacted her directly, and informed her of the allegations against me.

A friendly - and scrupulously honest - environmental lawyer, at my request, examined these documents, pro bono, and provided me with a signed, sworn statement describing the restraining order, the applications of whiteout, and the contents of the statements beneath the whiteout.

(And it's really good to know that such people exist, too, in the legal profession; not everyone is corrupt.)

But at a request for a rehearing, several years later, my lawyer somehow forgot to give the environmental lawyer's sworn statement to the judge (a story in itself, as the judge had been imported from Alameda County, where he had been forced to resign); a fact I did not discover until I visited the court clerk's office, to verify that the statement was in the file, and was furious to find that it was not.

Here, again, we see hints that my lawyer was not representing my interests as enthusiastically as the $1000 he had demanded, to handle this hearing, might warrant; and the question can be asked, if he was deliberately sabotaging me.

He was certainly firm about not wanting me to contact this woman ever again; he pointed out that, as a result of the first restraining order, that if I were to attempt to contact her, even after the restraining order had expired, and she were so inclined as to file for another restraining order, that I would have no defense against it. While this is compelling reasoning, in retrospect, we can also suggest that, for whatever reasons, he did not want me to ever speak to this woman.

It is ironic that, when all has been said and done, it's not clear who W.O.M.A.N., Inc. was helping. That is, the woman whom they were [secretly] helping, did not benefit from their efforts to turn a straightforward medical situation into a legal situation. The other women involved in this case - my mother, and my grandmother, for instance, or her mother, her sister, her cousins and her niece - did not benefit.

So who did?

The only people who seemed to benefit, quite honestly, were the women who ran W.O.M.A.N., Inc., the dozens of codependency clinics [whose clientele choked family courts, demanding restraining orders against their so-called codependent boyfriends], and their friends in the bureaucracy ... whose budgets and headcounts grew as a consequence of every incident that could be attributed to quote-unquote "domestic violence".

For ten years, it has seemed not just possible, but fairly likely that, (in her mind) abandoned by me, and alone ... she had finally succeeded in killing herself; a conclusion that I remain unclear about, even today.

... So now, you, too, know how to become one of the richest men in the world.

By this time I knew that this story was so strange that it would be a while until I could tell it; there was a lot that I did not, and still do not, understand, but the climate of opinion has changed enough that it's now possible (if not entirely safe) to articulate what happened ... because this accusation has been levelled, at one time or another, against about half of the United States population by now, and has lost much of its effectiveness.

Anti-Semitism

By 'this accusation', I refer to the accusation that one is anti-Semitic ... a slur, a canard, a slander ... one that rests solidly upon a failure to understand that, properly speaking, all peoples of that area can legitimately claim to be descended from Shemitic tribes ... not just members of the twelve tribes of Israel and their numerous descendants (of which I am one, by the way - through my Hungarian great-grandfather ... whose last name was Simon).

When this accusation is used, it is not made as a sincere attempt, as the result of careful and objective thought, to correctly label a specific behavior so that it can be discussed, rationally ... it was - and is - a reflexive behavior on the part of the accuser, to interrupt rational thought. It's very important to understand this. These are not rational individuals. They are not interested in rational discussion or debate. They are determined to interrupt any attempt at rational discourse; and will stop at nothing.

To the degree that the origin of the accusation is emotional, rather than cognitive, it is more accurate to describe such accusatory language, when used without corroboration, as neurotic ... even psychotic.

Indeed, throughout this narrative, we see, in the sequence of events, lapses in attention to detail for which there are no good explanations. In an attempt to understand and explain this phenomenon to you, the reader, I offer the following quote:

Psychopathic behavior is usually very distinctive - it is characterized by impulsiveness, stupidity, and errors due to an attention span limited by emotional disorder.

The Investigation, by Stanislaw Lem [translated by Adele Milch]

It can be suggested that, here, we see the genesis of a fascination with database technology, on the part of certain individuals, in recognition of the fact that, with the assistance of such technology, one could weave, and maintain, much larger webs of fabrication, misinformation and disinformation than one might be able to do, alone ... and that such technology could not only be used to protect oneself from the consequences of continuous lying, but also to analyze the representations of others for inconsistencies, IE, fraud detection. But, I digress.

I think everyone recognizes such accusations, nowadays, as a shallow attempt to derail a serious topic. Ask whether one particular holocaust deserves any more attention than any of the others, or what the evidence is that 6 million, rather than 5 million, died in concentration camps, or whether some of those 5-6 million might not have been other than Jewish (for instance, I know that Unitarians were imprisoned in Nazi wartime concentration camps, too) ... or where, now that we have DNA testing, all those lampshades and bars of soap are ... what the genetic similarity might be between Palestinians and Israelis ... or if Israel has nuclear, biological, or chemical warfare capabilities, and what the implications of that might be, internationally ... or what that little (K) on every package of food distributed in North America means, and what it implies - and you can still expect to be branded an anti-Semite; perhaps even gain the dubious honor of entry in a few privately maintained databases, here and there.

Ho-hum. If this keeps up it'll be popular to be labelled anti-Semitic; then it'll be a fad; and then, a political movement. ... And whose fault will it be?

But, back to our story.

My mother threw the ream of paper out ... and once it reached the sidewalk, I took possession of it. I still have it; I had two of perhaps 160 or so pages fingerprinted by a forensic analyst - Ken Moses, formerly of the San Francisco Police Department - at a cost of a few hundred dollars. The results were inconclusive; but it's not impossible that a different analyst might find different, or additional, results.

(Oracle Corporation note: The documents are in a safe deposit box. Forced entry is contraindicated. Kidnapping is a possibility; so is murder, but it would look suspicious if someone associated with this case died, twice in a row. And I think the FBI is already scrutinizing you, as a result of some of your other recent indiscretions, negotiating contracts with the California state government - those antics cost some California government employees their jobs. Remember the JDL; money and influence can only go so far.)

If you know any lawyers whom are willing to work on this case, on either a contingency, or pro bono basis, I would, naturally, be interested in hearing from them.