State's deadbeat dads owe $3 bil.
Deadbeat parents owe $3 billion in Illinois alone, $100 billion nationwide. When parents refuse to honor child support, their kids pay. And so do you.
April 8, 2007
BY ABDON M. PALLASCH apallasch@suntimes.com
When her ex-husband stopped paying child support, Rebecca Saban lost her Palos Park home and had to move to Downstate Pekin to find a house in her price range. Working day and night, she still could not afford simple pleasures, even the $12 to take her daughters to a local swimming pool.
Her ex claimed to be homeless and rarely employed, but when he took the girls for weekends they'd stay in five-star hotels, she said. And when Saban, 47, begged him for money to pay bills, she said he'd take a roll of hundreds out of his pocket and peel off a few.
» Click to enlarge image
Rebecca Saban (with Erica, left, and Andi) said that although her ex pleads poverty, he was able to take the girls to Jamaica.
(Rich Hein/Sun-Times)
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Marilyn Townsend, of Palos Hills, and her kids are owed $142,000. With her are children (from left) Katie, 15; Kristin, 13, and Stephen, 17. The feds tracked down Ralph Townsend in Tennessee.
(Jon Sall/Sun-Times)
PHOTO GALLERY
• Deadbeat dads
RELATED STORIES
• Official site: Ill. Child Support Enforcement
"We were on food stamps," she said. "I never took them swimming the entire summer. . . . I told him, 'If you could just give me enough to take the kids swimming. ...' He said, 'Oh, I'll take them swimming.' He took them to Jamaica!"
Mark Saban, 49, owes his ex-wife and their 10- and 12-year-old daughters $228,000 in child support, making him the second-worst deadbeat dad in Illinois, according to state records examined by the Chicago Sun-Times.
The No. 1 deadbeat dad is Carl Douglas of Chicago, who owes $367,000 in child support to his ex-wife and daughters in the northwest suburbs, records show.
Jail gets their attention
Deadbeat parents owe $3 billion in Illinois and $100 billion nationwide. At least 20 dads owe more than $100,000 in Illinois.
Some parents who owe money have fled and can't be found. Prosecutors and state officials have powerful tools to try to get deadbeat dads: They can confiscate paychecks, bank accounts and income tax refunds. They can block renewals of passports. In some states, including Illinois, they can stop renewals of driver's licenses.
Putting a deadbeat parent in jail seems to have the most immediate effect.
Rebecca Saban got to keep her ex-husband's $3,000 bond after he was booked into jail years ago for not paying child support.
But when a deadbeat dad makes it his mission not to work or to have no traceable income or assets, kids can suffer.
Divorce lawyers joke that high-earning husbands come down with "AIDS" after a divorce -- "Acquired Income Deficiency Syndrome."
Mark Saban hasn't paid his wife anything this year, and little in past years. But she still lets him take their daughters for periodic weekends. "Some people tell me I'm crazy, but I don't believe in using kids as pawns for money," Rebecca Saban said. "Child support is a separate issue from visitation."
Illinois' child support office has not been able to do much for her. Once, the agency found a bank account of Mark Saban's and confiscated the $25,000 in it. That was enough for her to make the down payment on her Pekin house. Another time the agency seized his $952 U.S. income tax refund.
Mark Saban said he lost his $2 million-a-year electrical contracting company in a series of court cases after he tried to expose an arson allegedly set by a business rival. "I've had my constitutional rights taken away for exposing injustice in the Chicago area, stripping me of my assets, leaving me homeless," he said.
Since the trip to Jamaica with his daughters years ago, he lives a modest lifestyle, he said, staying at hotels with pools only when an employer puts him up at one.
"I help my children out every way that I possibly can," Mark Saban said, adding that he's staying at a low-price motel in Downstate Monticello. "I'm looking for food for myself every third or fourth day."
'Say Goodbye to Mommy'
It was 15 years ago when Linn Roche's husband came home, ripped out the phone cords, punched her in front of their three young daughters and said, "Say 'Goodbye' to Mommy," according to Roche and police reports. "Thank God a neighbor heard that and called the police," said Roche, 49. Charges against her husband, who could not be reached for comment, were dropped.
Her ex, John T. Walsh, 51, left town and now owes $182,000 in child support, making him the state's No. 3 deadbeat dad.
A records check shows he might be in Colorado.
Illinois' child support enforcement office has been of little help, Roche said.
However, the National Child Support Enforcement Association gave that office and director Pam Compton Lowry an award last year for "most improved" in the nation. It has certainly helped some moms, such as Marilyn Townsend of Palos Hills.
Feds catch deadbeat dad
Federal agents tracked her ex -- the state's 8th-worst-offender, Ralph Townsend -- to a Tennessee trailer where he had everything in his girlfriend's name, said Assistant U.S. Attorney Julie Ruder. Last month a judge allowed Ralph Townsend, a 48-year-old former hospital administrator, to move to California for a $40-an-hour hospital job so he can better repay $142,000 in overdue child support.
Marilyn Townsend described raising her three kids without a father as "an emotionally difficult thing for a child, [having] to see their friends have vacations and all the things that come with having a two-parent household with parents who love them."
His side of the story
Roche wonders why the feds don't go to Colorado to hunt her ex as they did with Marilyn Townsend's.
"One question is: 'Has the state exhausted all the means that they have?' " said Margot Bean, commissioner of the federal Office of Child Support Enforcement.
Deadbeat parents don't only cheat their kids. Taxpayers must fund Lowry's $180 million-a-year office of 1,500 employees tracking deadbeat dads in Illinois.
Carl Douglas, 50, was moving up the ladder at Allstate before s divorce in 2001. The divorce made him too ill to work, he said. He lost his $150,000-a-year job and hasn't made more than $14,000 a year since, he said.
He complains it took him six years to get the courts and then the state to lower his child support. Meantime, they suspended his state insurance license. "How can I make money to pay child support when they pull my insurance license?" he asked.
The state suspended his license after years of not paying, Lowry said. "People end up on that Web site [of deadbeat dads] because they are the most egregious child-support evaders," Lowry said.
Douglas' ex-wife survived seven rough years trying to provide a normal life for her daughters without help from her ex. One of her daughters will start college this fall.
"You learn that you can do a lot of things with macaroni and cheese," she said.
WHAT WELL-KNOWN CHICAGO DEADBEATS OWE
$68,000
Kahil El'Zabar, an internationally renowned jazz percussionist and composer, was named a 2004 ''Chicagoan of the Year'' by the Chicago Tribune even though he owed child support for his 9-year-old son in Mississippi until Cook County prosecutors made him start paying this summer. ''There have been many times when we did not have food because I had to pay an electricity or utility bill," said ex-girlfriend Getty Israel. El'Zabar's Web site says he has six children.
$4,400
Larry Hightower, a North Chicago alderman, was ordered to pay up after falling 66 weeks behind in support payments -- though he drives a Mercedes coupe and a Lincoln Navigator. Hightower, who chairs the North Chicago council's finance committee, told the News Sun, ''This is not a public matter. . . . It has no business in the public eye.''
DEADBEATS AREN'T ALWAYS MEN . . .
$68,964
That's the amount deadbeat mom Sheila Koek owes ex-husband Lloyd Ploense. Ploense has been forced to comply with a court order that he allow his children to stay with Koek for a month every summer. Neither Koek, nor Areva Williams, Illinois' No. 1 deadbeat mom ($71,943) could be reached for comment. Williams' last known address was on the South Side, Koek's was Simi Valley, Calif.
