Well, the interwoven lives of Kathleen Willey, Dan Gecker, and Lou Salomonsky, which many have forgotten, is complex and fascinating and will certainly be the talk of the town if Dan Gecker becomes the Democratic nominee for state senate to run for the open seat being vacated by John Watkins.
Salon.com ran a great article documenting the relationship between the three. Check some of it out below but for full effect, read the entire article. It will be interesting to see if Salomonsky is a key financial backer of Gecker.
On October 15, Ed Willey went to Kathy with a confession: He had illicitly “borrowed” $200,000 from the escrow account of two clients, a brother and sister named Anthony Lanasa and Josie Abbott. Caught with both hands in the cookie jar, Ed had promised to repay the money in a matter of weeks if they would avoid reporting him to the state bar committee – but he needed Kathy’s signature on the contract. Reluctantly, she signed.
On Nov. 29, 1993 – the same day Willey later said she was groped by President Clinton when she went to seek his advice – Ed Willey shot himself.
Suddenly, all of the Willeys’ long-simmering financial crises boiled over. Kathy’s name was on that contract with her husband’s embezzlement victims. Legally, the aggrieved brother and sister were poised to take Kathy’s house, to attach that life insurance policy and, perhaps, to secure far more of her assets as damages in a lawsuit. Kathy, who had arranged to sell her home and already had her eye on another in one of Richmond’s up-market suburbs, was instead in danger of losing every dime.
Rescue came from Ed Willey’s old friend Lou Salomonsky. Salomonsky and another politically connected Richmond attorney, Daniel Gecker, moved with astonishing speed to protect the Willey family’s remaining assets from both the Lanasa-Abbott lawsuit and the IRS. Salomonsky declines to comment on the Willey bankruptcy, saying only that “I was a protector of the children, after their father’s death, and of her.”
That is the background of what was going on with Willey, but keep reading to see all the shenanigans that went on as a result of steps taken by Salomonsky and Gecker to protect Willey.
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