No trial, at least today, for mayor’s daughter
November 17, 2008 at 2:20 pm by Mara Shalhoup in NewsUPDATE: Case settled.
Mayor Shirley Franklin’s daughter Kai Franklin Graham, who is being sued in federal bankruptcy court by the bonding company that bailed out her then-husband in 2004, was supposed to go on trial this morning. But when I showed up at the courtroom, it was empty and dark.
A call to the judge’s chambers didn’t help. The assistant who answered the phone said she couldn’t give me any information, other than, “There is no court today.” Kinda weird, huh?
Free At Last Bail Bonds filed suit against Graham in 2005 to recover $185,000 that the company lost after her then-husband, major cocaine trafficker Tremayne “Kiki” Graham, cut his ankle monitor and went on the run. While Tremayne Graham was a fugitive, his wife filed for bankruptcy in an attempt to avoid having to repay his bond. She also filed for divorce, on the grounds that Tremayne Graham had abandoned her and left her destitute.
But after Tremayne Graham was captured in California, two of his codefendants testified that he’d stayed in regular contact with his wife while on the run, and that he sent her tens of thousands of dollars.
In December 2007, Kai Franklin Graham pleaded guilty to spending $14,000 on 14 postal money orders in an attempt to evade federal detection. (If any of the monery orders totaled more than $3,000 $2,000 apiece, the IRS would have automatically flagged it.) Graham purchased the money orders, which she used to pay her mortgage, in the weeks after her husband’s disappearance. She was sentenced to three years of probation for “structuring financial payments.”
Through her attorney, Graham has denied that the cash for the money orders came from her then-husband. She also has insisted that she had no contact with him after he jumped bond.
Free At Last claims that Kai Franklin Graham misled authorities about her financial situation and her knowledge of her then-husband’s whereabouts, and therefore shouldn’t be allowed to receive bankruptcy protection.
Neither Graham’s attorney, James Dearing, nor Free At Last’s attorney, Leon Jones, returned my calls regarding the trial scheduled for this morning.
The last two documents filed in connection to Free At Last’s lawsuit were a pretrial order that outlined the basics of the case, and an order that set the trial date for today [PDF].
The order setting the trial date states:
“If the parties determine that, by reason of settlement or other good cause, the case should not be tried … counsel are directed to notify the Court immediately in order that the time set aside for the instant trial may be assigned to other litigants.”
But nothing in the court record indicates a settlement had been reached or the trial had to be postponed. Typically, both of those actions would be reflected in the record.
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