Podcast Transcript:
Paul Edelstein:
Hello. Welcome to Pulling Back the Legal Curtain, I am your host Paul Edelstein, I’ll have my partner Glenn Faegenburg with me most of the time. This podcast is for all of you out there who have ever read about a court case, seen a court case, been involved in a court case, went to court, thought about court and wondered, what the hell is going on in courts? It seems like every day we have these kinds of questions that get asked then, so on this podcast, we will pull back the curtain on the mystery that sometimes surrounds the court and what happens there, and hopefully give you some answers, some interesting, some humorous, some surprising. Stick with us on Pulling Back the Legal Curtain.
Back here with Shareiff. Shareiff, you really are every man on the street, man, you just tell it like it is, right?
Shareiff Council:
Yes, sir.
Paul Edelstein:
I’ve never been worried about you giving it to me straight, which is good. But you know what? I want to ask you a question as a clerk. We talked earlier that I was a clerk first for my father, so I did everything that you did, and I think that was good training for being a lawyer to know all that kind of stuff, right? So I’m going to ask you a question, I’m going to ask, but you could think about it because I’m going to tell you mine. What is the wackiest thing that happened to you? Wackiest clerk story. Now I’m going to tell you mine first, but you could think about your, look at you making faces already. You want to go for it?
Shareiff Council:
Because I have the craziest, you know this, the crazy.
Paul Edelstein:
You want mine or you want to go yours first?
Shareiff Council:
Go yours first. Always name-dropping.
Paul Edelstein:
Just leave out names, don’t leave-
Shareiff Council:
All right.
Paul Edelstein:
Name-drop all day, you can get me sued.
Shareiff Council:
All right, that’s another act.
Paul Edelstein:
Dude, you know there’s a confidentiality between lawyers. What are you doing?
Shareiff Council:
No, I’m talking. Go ahead.
Paul Edelstein:
All right. Damn, yours is going to be funny.
Shareiff Council:
Listen, RA. I was going to say RA, and you think about that.
Paul Edelstein:
Yeah, exactly. A matter of P, you know that one. I’m going to tell you mine, because I was thinking when I was going to talk to you, I’m like, “You know what? I remember a funny…” So when I was a baby lawyer, my father Saul, I know you know my dad really well, all right? So he was a really famous divorce lawyer back in the day. I got two good ones, right? But this one’s the clean one, all right? I’ll give you the dirty one some other time. He wanted me to serve a client, a husband with a complaint. I know you’ve process served a million times. He’s like, “Go serve this guy. You’ll make a hundred bucks or whatever, 75 bucks. Get this guy, he’s right in Brooklyn right near where you live. You got to hit him with a complaint.”
But this guy was avoiding serves. So I’m trying to get him, and I freaking can’t get him and I’m like, “What?” And now I’m embarrassed, because my dad’s like, “Dude, this is a no-brainer. He lives right over here in Brooklyn. Just get his apartment, just drop and he doesn’t have to take it. You could just drop it at his feet.” All that kind of stuff. He’s like, “Just get him.” So now I can’t get the guy, and I’m embarrassed to go back to my dad and be like, “I failed.” I was a kid. I don’t even know if I was a lawyer, might’ve been law school. But I was a clerk. So I’m like, “I can’t get.” Well, I had this girlfriend. Was really cute. See now, I’m getting myself in trouble.
Shareiff Council:
I’m about to say, hold on.
Paul Edelstein:
I had this blonde girlfriend. Actually, she went on to be a freaking in-house lawyer, brilliant. That’s why we weren’t together anymore, she was way too smart for me. She got rid of me. But back then I was dating her and I’m like, “You know what? You got to come with me.” She’s like, “What?” “Trust me, I need your help to serve this guy.” So we go to this guy’s apartment building, we scope out the door. It was easy for me to get in the front door without somebody letting me in, because I’m white.
Shareiff Council:
See, that would’ve been easy, right.
Paul Edelstein:
Nobody was scared that we were going to do anything, and my girlfriend was also white. So we get in there, and we go up to the guy’s floor and I don’t know, 18th floor, somewhere up on there. I know which door it is, right, but I already know this guy’s avoiding service. He’s not going to open the door. This is the days before Amazon is knocking on your door every two seconds I guess.
Shareiff Council:
Right.
Paul Edelstein:
I go up to the front door, and I take my girlfriend and we ring the bell, and I put her in front of the peephole.
Shareiff Council:
Obviously, he opens the door up.
Paul Edelstein:
The guy opened the door in few seconds. Hey, look. And I’m right there, “Here you go. Thank you, sir.”
Shareiff Council:
And then what did he do? He went crazy, right?
Paul Edelstein:
He laughed like he knew he got-
Shareiff Council:
All right, got me, good one.
Paul Edelstein:
All right, you got me, whatever, and that was that. That was a good one, right?
Shareiff Council:
That’s a good one. I have a similar story about doing the process serving, serving process. So remember the Wright case?
Paul Edelstein:
You said you wanted to make that, mention names, man. You talking about the Wrong case?
Shareiff Council:
The Wrong case.
Paul Edelstein:
Oh yeah, I remember that one. Yeah.
Shareiff Council:
Okay.
Paul Edelstein:
I remember Wrong. Go ahead.
Shareiff Council:
Yeah, so boom. So anyway, I had to serve someone. I have to, you know what?
Paul Edelstein:
You can’t mention it. Just make up a name, dude.
Shareiff Council:
Okay, let me see. All right, so, but I have to give the context of the case, what happened so they can have the-
Paul Edelstein:
That you could do, as long as you’re not connecting.
Shareiff Council:
Okay. All right, so we had a case where our client was a bouncer at a club, right? He was a bouncer at a club, and a fight broke out, right? In a certain section of.
Paul Edelstein:
You’re talking about this celebrity girl.
Shareiff Council:
This, because, you want to?
Paul Edelstein:
I don’t care about her, she owes us a million dollars, owes my client a million bucks.
Shareiff Council:
That’s what I’m trying to say.
Paul Edelstein:
All right.
Shareiff Council:
This was one of the wildest experiences that I’ve had. Probably the wildest experience that I’ve had as a clerk doing this. No one has ever done this to me.
Paul Edelstein:
All right, wait. So wait, now you got to give the context.
Shareiff Council:
Got to.
Paul Edelstein:
Yeah, because you could mention her name, right? So wait, because she was the defendant, she’s not on the line.
Shareiff Council:
Defendant, yeah, no, not our client.
Paul Edelstein:
All right. And this was a public case, right, she slashed.
Shareiff Council:
All right, boom, okay so what happened-
Paul Edelstein:
Good buddy of mine.
Shareiff Council:
Yeah, right. I know, right. All right, so.
Paul Edelstein:
Rashidah Ali.
Shareiff Council:
Okay, he said it.
Paul Edelstein:
I don’t care, she who?
Shareiff Council:
So I had to serve Rashidah Ali, and if you don’t know who she is, she is a reality star, she’s been on multiple reality TV shows.
Paul Edelstein:
Is she still a star?
Shareiff Council:
I don’t know, I mean I-
Paul Edelstein:
I’m going to send you out.
Shareiff Council:
Looking for her.
Paul Edelstein:
Out looking for her again.
Shareiff Council:
She’s best friends with Nicki Minaj or something right now, seriously. You got to see this, crazy. Anyway, yeah. Again, our client was the bouncer in the club. Fight broke out in the club. Our client ended up with the laceration across his face, right? That’s a good way to put it, big, crazy scar across his face.
Paul Edelstein:
Yeah.
Shareiff Council:
So we had to serve her the complaint. She became the defendant in the case, we had to serve her the complaint. We tried to serve her. We did by mail at first. We did it every which and way we could. We tried home service, we tried mail, out of state service, every single way we could try to serve her, we could not catch her because just avoid the service, avoid the service. She has to appeal in the criminal court for the slashing of our client. We come with a plan. Yo. First, we come with the plan, hold on. Let me go over here and try to serve her. Wait, can we even serve her in court? That was the thing too, can we serve her in court? We looked it up. Oh, you can serve in court. I mean, it’s not the best place to do it, but you can do it. It’s not illegal.
Paul Edelstein:
Right.
Shareiff Council:
It counts as serving. Okay, cool. So I rushed out to the court. Get to the courthouse. She in the back of the court, in the courtroom. Call her up. Her lawyer doesn’t show up, so now they have to adjourn her case. So they call her up, so now I know who she is, because honestly, at the time I wasn’t really into reality TV. I didn’t really know who she was, you know what I mean? I knew kind of what she did, I didn’t know exactly who she was. And plus, these females, they be changing their hair, because again, remember the picture that we had of her? She had long hair, and when I saw her, she had short hair. Shorter than mine so I was really thrown off. I’m like, “Is this even her?” Anyway, confirm that it’s her. Confirm that it’s her.
Now, she’s walking out of the courtroom. So now I’m like, “You know what, let me try to do this in the courtroom where it’s a little bit more, I got witnesses and stuff,” so maybe she may not make a scene because I know she is definitely serve her so maybe she won’t make a scene. So I approach her nicely, “Excuse me, Ms. Ali, how you doing? Hate to do this to you, but hey, I have some paperwork for you.” She looks at the paperwork. “Oh, put it here. Oh, I’m not taking that. I’m not taking that.” She calls her friend, because her lawyer’s not here. So she calls her friend, her friend comes over to where we stand at. “Oh no, no, no, we can’t take that. We can’t take that. We’re going to wait till the lawyer come.”
Okay, now I get it. One, we’re about to break for lunch. I know your lawyer’s not coming, okay? We’re about to break for lunch. You had a nine o’clock appearance. Your lawyer’s not here. You didn’t even have the name of your lawyer so you either don’t have a lawyer, or your lawyer’s just not showing up, one or the other but she’s not coming. So I know they were trying to dip. So whatever, they wound up leaving out the side of the courthouse, and the whole time I’m in the courthouse, I’m following them in the courthouse. You have to be in the courthouse but there’s an upstairs so I follow them from the upstairs to the downstairs to the side. They’re really avoiding, basically running out the courthouse. So we make out the courthouse, she’s running down the block and I’m screaming, “Ms. Ali, Ms. Ali. Please don’t do this to me, just take the paper,” because again, like you just said, I don’t want to come back and tell you I couldn’t get her. You know what I mean?
So I’m like, “Yo, I got to get her.” She flags the cab. She’s about to get in the cab. I take the paper and I go… And I just toss the paper. Didn’t hit her, the paper didn’t touch anybody but the floor of the cab. It fell right in the cab. I don’t know why I did that. She got off the car and yo, the wrath of a Black woman, yo. Yo. She went berserk. “Oh, you [ 00:10:21], you don’t ever,” She was so crazy. She got the police involved. Police came like, “What do you want us to do? He’s serving papers. Take the papers, call your lawyer.” Police like, “What do you really want us to do?” Yo, she went off, and I was scared. I’m not going to lie. I was scared. I was scared.
Paul Edelstein:
She’s scary.
Shareiff Council:
She is very scary. She is very scary.
Paul Edelstein:
Well, you knew she slashed my client, who’s also my buddy.
Shareiff Council:
That was one thing, and I don’t mean no offense, but she’s a big girl. She’s big, I don’t know how to describe it, big. She’s tall, she’s big.
Paul Edelstein:
Shareiff, I’m so glad you brought Rashidah Ali up because when we get off this call, we’ll pull that judgment.
Shareiff Council:
I’m about to say. Then she got, listen.
Paul Edelstein:
I’m sending you back out there, man.
Shareiff Council:
No, I don’t want to have to face her again. And then after all of that, she tried to deny service.
Paul Edelstein:
Yeah, she denied service.
Shareiff Council:
Which she lost in the
Paul Edelstein:
And then you know she ultimately lost. We won the case, but she never paid.
Shareiff Council:
She still.
Paul Edelstein:
Hid her money.
Shareiff Council:
Hopefully this does go viral. Someone sees her, tag her, and then we can catch her.
Paul Edelstein:
That’s right, #RashidahAli.
Shareiff Council:
Hashtag.
Paul Edelstein:
Owes me a million bucks. Tell you what, Shareiff, let’s record this right now. I’m going to send you out there again. I’m going to pull the judgment right we get off this call because the judgment’s 20 years.
Shareiff Council:
Go together.
Paul Edelstein:
20 years, and she moved bank accounts, moved from state.
Shareiff Council:
Everything.
Paul Edelstein:
Went to Georgia. I remember we chased her around for a while, and then I figured, man, she had her five minutes of fame and she’s gone. But now you’re telling me she’s friends with Nicki Minaj?
Shareiff Council:
Yeah.
Paul Edelstein:
All right, well. That’s enough for me. We’re going to find where she is and you’re going to show up again.
Shareiff Council:
I get her.
Paul Edelstein:
This time with a judgment. You know what? You won’t even have to face her, we just got to find her bank account. Episode two.
Shareiff Council:
Episode two. Tune back in.
Paul Edelstein:
Right. Because you know what, we don’t go away. That judgment, it’s good for 20 years.
Shareiff Council:
I know.
Paul Edelstein:
Let’s go find Rashidah.
Shareiff Council:
#FindRashidahAli.
Paul Edelstein:
Anybody that watches this that knows her, we’re going to give you a reward, man. No, Shareiff, we’re going to give you 10% anything we collect from this girl.
Shareiff Council:
That’s funny.
Paul Edelstein:
I’ma get her. All right.
Shareiff Council:
Somebody going to turn her in for that money.
Paul Edelstein:
That’s right. Anybody out there, we’ll give you a couple points also. Get her, find her. All right. Don’t worry, we’ll make good on it. Shareiff, I ever not made good on anything I say?
Shareiff Council:
Always, always, always make good. Always make good-
Paul Edelstein:
Yeah.
Shareiff Council:
Makes good on his word, 100%.
Paul Edelstein:
We’re out of here then for today. That was fun.
Shareiff Council:
Till next week.
Paul Edelstein:
All right.
Shareiff Council:
I’m coming back. Listen, we’re going to make me a special up there, okay?
Paul Edelstein:
Yeah. You should be special guest, man. You’re more fun than these lawyers I talk to. No, that was cool.
Thanks for joining us on Pulling Back the Legal Curtain with Paul and Glenn, because we get so many questions over so many years about what goes on behind the legal curtain in the legal world. We tried to put this together so that it would be entertaining, and interesting, and hopefully educational. If you liked it, come join us again, or visit our website at edelsteinslaw.com. Either way, we’re always going to be here, in front of and behind the legal curtain doing the only thing that we know how to do, which is proceed. Take care.
You can find The Edelsteins Faegenburg & Brown Law firm on LinkedIn.