Chapter 4:
Aloha with Lee
This is not Lee Slater’s first appearance on this website.
Since 2003, Slater’s reputation has become further tarnished by her continued support and association with former Hawaii-based Cambodian adoption facilitator, now convicted felon Lauryn Galindo.
Slater’s website is a free website, hosted on Yahoo!/Geocities. Most agencies, like Building Blocks, either own their own domain names or have a third party purchase the domain name for them.
The only contact information is an email and a telephone number at: (808) 988-7674. No street address listed for contact info.
Slater claims to have four adoption programs. Two – Azerbaijan and Cambodia are closed (yet Slater only makes mention of this under Cambodia). The other two, Kazakhstan and Ukraine, are still open. For Ukraine Slater does not specify that the adoption is an independent adoption. She also has not updated the Ukrainian section to reflect the fact the final processing can now take place in Kiev instead of Warsaw, Poland.
All together, the website is slipshod, unprofessional and uninformative.
We were able to search the Hawaii Secretary of State’s businesses online to find out more about Lee Slater Adoption Services.
Lee Slater Adoption Services Corporation was incorporated in the State of Hawaii on May 30, 2001 as a FOR PROFIT organization. Its mailing address is 2621 East Manoa Road, Honolulu. Only two officers are listed. Lee Slater and Alton Slater. We do not know what relation Alton is to Lee.
Yet another FOR PROFIT venture from a true humanitarian adoption provider.
Another FOR PROFIT organization called Lee Slater Adoption Services, was incorporated on Feb. 2, 2001. However, that was cancelled on Feb. 1, 2002. The address for this organization was the same as Lee Slater Adoption Services Corporation.
An Slater email Denise forwarded on to Janet listed Slater’s telephone number. We searched the number on Google. The number is listed to World Family Hawaii Foundation, located at 2970 East Manoa Road in Honolulu. Does Lee Slater own both 2621 and 2970 East Manoa Road?
A contact who lives in Hawaii told us East Manoa Road was near the University of Hawaii’s campus. It was not an extravagant location.
It is true Lee Slater has been involved with the World Family Foundation for years. The World Family Foundation is a humanitarian organization, allegedly helping people in Cambodia. It is listed in Hawaii as “Master Name for a Foreign Nonprofit Corporation – Nevada”. A search on Nevada’s business database confirmed this. Lee Slater and a Daniel C. Susott are listed in Nevada (with Nevada addresses) as World Family Foundation’s Officers.
In a photo copied from the World Family Foundation picture gallery, we found this group shot, taken in 1990. Good friends Galindo and Slater are shown.
After founding and participating in World Family and opening her own for-profit child facilitation service, Lee Slater was Director of Hawaii International Child’s Cambodian Program from 1994 to at least 2001.
Slater was on HIC’s website under “Staff”in March 2000:
Lee Slater – Director of Cambodian Program
Ms. Slater has been with HIC since 1994. She came to us from World Family Foundation with which
she still has ties. A former attorney, Lee is the proud grandmother of Maddie from Cambodia. Lee was
responsible for establishing HIC’s Cambodia program, started and run by long-time HIC friend Lauryn
Galindo.
Today, there is no mention of Lee Slater, Lauryn Galindo or Cambodia on HIC’s website. Wonder why?
For Slater, there was more money to be made on her own than as HIC’s Cambodian Program Director.
We do not know what qualifications Ms. Slater has to be a facilitator; being a grandmother to an adopted Cambodian child is not a qualification. Nor is being a former attorney in an unknown branch of law.
We found an investigative article from the May 29, 2000 edition of the Phnom Penh Post. It revealed instances of baby selling in a village near Phnom Penh. One example given was of an orphanage “manager” offering a poor widowed woman with two other children $100 for her infant daughter. The manager promised if the baby was adopted by foreigners, the foreigners would send money back to the birth mother. In this instance, the birth mother came back to the orphanage and worked out a payment plan to keep her child.
Lee Slater is quoted in this article:
Lee Slater, the director of Hawaii International Child’s Cambodia program…said: “We know of no circumstances that would lend credence to either
the ‘buying’ or ‘selling’ of babies. If we had we would not engage in such a program. Hawaii International Child is a long established agency that
has been doing international adoptions since 1975. We have been doing adoptions in Cambodia for the last three years without a hint of scandal
as to the improper handling of the placing of children into orphanages.”
In April 2004 Lee Slater is named in connection to Cambodian adoption. She was trolled by a newspaper reporter from London’s Daily Mail. The reporter, whose article ran in the April 10, 2004 edition of the paper, stated she posed as a prospective British adoptive parent who was married, childless and rejected for adoption by the British social services department.
Slater took the bait and responded. Although she was placing children from Kazakhstan and Georgia, she told the woman Cambodia might be a better fit for she and her husband. Slater wrote that her Cambodian connection was “very reliable and knowledgeable.” He would arrange for the couple’s transportation, the child’s birth certificate and passport, their orphanage donation fee. All of this for quoted fees – including Slater’s facilitation fee. She made it look so simple.
Since the reporter was not really looking to adopt a child, she declined Slater’s services.
In July 2004 Lee Slater and Hawaii International Child are mentioned in an article which ran in The Garden Island, a local Kauai newspaper. The article centered around a civil lawsuit filed against Lauryn Galindo, Lynn Devin, Dr. Nancy W. Hendrie and Lee Slater. A Hawaii woman had adopted a very sick Cambodian girl and was suing on the grounds of fraud. As soon as the article ran, Slater’s telephone number was disconnected and changed.
We do not know if Denise Hubbard knew of the lawsuit filed by the woman in Hawaii. But we do know Hubbard knows Lauryn Galindo. She should know better than to fob her clients off on persons so closely associated with incarcerated visa-fraud specialists (scroll down).
Anything for the placement, no matter where the children and babies were coming from. Even if they were bought from poor birthmothers.
Is it any wonder Hubbard and her sister-in-law kept fobbing everything off on Slater with Janet’s adoption? This would be laughable in any other business. But this is no joke — it’s the reality in international adoption.