Chapter
Forty
Signed and Sealed ...
But Not Delivered
With still no resolution, we again wrote Rick Marco on Aug. 28 with our questions, expressing some disappointment as to having to find out after the fact that he and Denise were in Bulgaria.
Daniel brought up several other issues, such as whether we could (as an AIAA client previously had) take Anguel out of the orphanage at a certain point whether he had been issued his passport or not.
We also asked how much more money we would owe Valery and Vladimir in Bulgaria, seeing as we had never been offered the chance to use our “refund” from Cyril’s adoption for Anguel’s adoption expenses with BBAS.
There’s a word for this in accounting: “stranded costs.” It was never more appropriate.
By Aug. 28, we had a hard-copy letter, sent out by Richard J. Marco, Jr.’s secretary. The response was that we would owe $3,500 — and did not mention any other fees owed to BBAS, Valeri or any other entity, save the US consulate’s office in Sofia and cash for Anguel’s medical exam.
We were also told that it would not be possible for us to take Anguel from the Mother and Child Home in Burgas, like the AIAA client had.
Yet again we were
slammed on at least spending some time alone with Anguel. Why was the AIAA
client allowed that privilege?
Interestingly, we later learned that Dr. Sabrutova was in New York City during that same period, meeting with Spence-Chapin and its clients.
Spence-Chapin used Charity for their Bulgarian adoptions, and we were told that it was unusual for Spence-Chapin to have orphanage directors visit. We found that out later on through a Spence-Chapin client who adopted from Burgas as well.
What was the good Dr. Sabrutova up to? Did Denise and Valeri know that Dr. Sabrutova was chatting up her orphanage to Upper East Side PAPs during a Spence-Chapin adoption seminar?
This could have been the reason Daniel and
I were denied the opportunity to take Anguel from the orphanage early.
But, it was now time to act. With Denise and Rick out and about scouring the Bulgarian orphanage system for more children to sell, it was time to mix it up with the entities at the office. We had remained silent long enough.
On Aug. 31 we contacted both Rick Marco’s secretary and Building Blocks directly. An actual human being and not an answering machine picked up the telephone at BBAS’s “offices” and said "Building Blocks. This is Debbie. How may I help you?"
We
hadn’t known about a “Debbie” working for BBAS. When was she
suckered in to work for this “organization”?
I started off nicely enough, but by the end I was speaking in a “menacing fashion.” I said, “This is Elizabeth Case, one of your Bulgaria clients. We need some information on our son. Do you know who we are?”
She said that she had never heard of us before. Then I let her have it full force. “You know, the ones with THE DEAD BABY IN RUSSIA?” It seemed to refresh her recollection.
She was professional, I’ll give her that. Yet I didn't care if I hurt her feelings by speaking to her the way I did. She had better get used to it if she were going to work for Denise.
She may have actually learned something useful from working for Denise. According to their website at the time, she began working for BBAS in the spring of 2000 as an “Administrative Assistant/Consultant”. Denise billed her in September 2001 as having “more than 15 years of administration background to our staff …the mother of six …[her] eagerness to help others and her love for children motivates her to assist families and children in need.”
She left BBAS by early 2002, possibly January or February. From BBAS she went to work for EAC and was mentioned in EAC’s glossy brochure under their Guatemalan program. We learned the following about Debbie Bollinger from the EAC case worker who contacted us in May 2004:
Debbie B. worked with Denise to supplement the adoption from Guatemala. She came to EAC about 2 (or maybe 3, I am not too sure now) years ago wanting to see how things worked on the "other side". She helped get our Guatemala program off the ground. She left our agency last fall to pursue a totally different career. (You can get burned out easily working in International Adoption). She was an extremely professional person with high organizational skills and attention to detail. And because of having adopted from Guatemala, she was very passionate about what she was doing.
As of this writing, we do not know Debbie Bollinger’s whereabouts or what her “totally different career” is. One wonders if her career change had anything to do with what she might have seen or witnessed at BBAS.
Debbie called us back and, lo and behold, told us that we were to get a telephone call back on the subject from Gary Hubbard, Denise’s husband.
Sure enough, Gary Hubbard, called us back. Since New York is a single-party consent state, we taped the telephone conversation.
Daniel was the one to speak with him. Interesting that we now had Gary Hubbard to contend with. I wonder if he liked having to clean up his wife’s dirty work with angry clients while she gallivanted around Bulgaria?
How far into this agency was his involvement anyway? At one point BBAS listed him as the vice president of the board in its filings with the state, and the minutes of those meetings we have been able to obtain duly note his almost regular attendance, but Denise has never mentioned him anywhere else as having anything to do with the agency.
Gary Hubbard told Daniel that he talked with Denise and Rick in Bulgaria, and the court decree and Angel’s birth certificate were being sent to us by Rick Marco’s office via certified U.S. mail.
In fact, if we called them, this could be sent to us via fax as well. Mr. Hubbard was professional, as was Daniel.
So we did. Mr. Marco’s secretary was very polite and helpful, expressing surprise that the letter itself had not yet arrived at its destination (in fact, it took several days more to do so).
She faxed us 13 pages in two separate
transmissions, as well as the Aug. 28 letter from her boss explaining that we
owed $3,500 in Bulgaria and that we couldn’t take Angel out of the orphanage
before his passport had been issued. There was no mention whatsoever of the FRUA
post.
The court decree and birth certificate, it turns out, had been dated July 12, 17 days before we were informed that they had even been issued.
I can’t tell you how happy we were to receive those documents. There was a small picture of Anguel on them — his passport photo, the first really new visual representation we’d seen of him since March, which felt like a million years ago by this point.
His original birth certificate was included. On it were his birthparents’ names.
How sad. I began to cry looking at them.
Did these people know that their son was being adopted by us in far-off America? Had they hoped that would be their child’s final destination when they placed him in the orphanage?
I had names now to match the face of the child they had created. Our son, Paul
Anguel Case.
As we read the translation of the court decree, something not quite right stood out.
It had to do with Dr. Sabrutova’s evaluation of Anguel, and particularly his status and health: