从2012年以来，这两货就是一直捐钱给共和党的，包括2016年捐款给川普大选 What's True Over the past 20 years, Mark McCloskey has made political contributions to both Democratic and Republican political campaigns. Between 2004 and 2012, FEC records show he donated to Democratic candidates, and more recently McCloskey has donated to a few Democrats on the local level. What's False However, the majority of McCloskey's political donations since 2012 have gone to Republicans, including many contributions to U.S. President Donald Trump's 2016 campaign. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mark-mccloskey-donate-democrats/
从2012年以来，这两货就是一直捐钱给共和党的，包括2016年捐款给川普大选 What's True Over the past 20 years, Mark McCloskey has made political contributions to both Democratic and Republican political campaigns. Between 2004 and 2012, FEC records show he donated to Democratic candidates, and more recently McCloskey has donated to a few Democrats on the local level. What's False However, the majority of McCloskey's political donations since 2012 have gone to Republicans, including many contributions to U.S. President Donald Trump's 2016 campaign. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mark-mccloskey-donate-democrats/ dukenyc125 发表于 2020-07-18 16:45
川黑拿这臭不可闻的Snope想证明啥呢？你自己贴的不是说的很清楚吗 Over the past 20 years, Mark McCloskey has made political contributions to both Democratic and Republican political campaigns. Between 2004 and 2012, FEC records show he donated to Democratic candidates, and more recently McCloskey has donated to a few Democrats on the local level. 他们以前捐了多少钱给民主党了？
川黑拿这臭不可闻的Snope想证明啥呢？你自己贴的不是说的很清楚吗 Over the past 20 years, Mark McCloskey has made political contributions to both Democratic and Republican political campaigns. Between 2004 and 2012, FEC records show he donated to Democratic candidates, and more recently McCloskey has donated to a few Democrats on the local level. 他们以前捐了多少钱给民主党了？ xqhbh 发表于 2020-07-18 16:56
川黑拿这臭不可闻的Snope想证明啥呢？你自己贴的不是说的很清楚吗Over the past 20 years, Mark McCloskey has made political contributions to both Democratic and Republican political campaigns. Between 2004 and 2012, FEC records show he donated to Democratic candidates, and more recently McCloskey has donated to a few Democrats on the local level.他们以前捐了多少钱给民主党了？ xqhbh 发表于 7/18/2020 4:56:19 PM
这人本来就是Trump supporter. 以前在republican和demo之前摇摆 According to the FEC, Mark McCloskey of the viral video made 20 contributions between October 2016 and February 2017 to the Republican National Committee or Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Those are his most recent campaign contributions. So, based on the pattern of their recent campaign contributions, it’s wrong to say the couple are Democrats. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/jul/01/viral-image/fact-checking-claim-about-who-couple-who-pointed-g/ 小王子的玫瑰花 发表于 2020-07-18 19:34
ST. LOUIS — When Black Lives Matter protesters marched up Kingshighway on June 28 and turned through an iron gate into the magnificent private street of Portland Place, they encountered a couple who have for years, nearly constantly, sued other people and ordered people off their property. Personal-injury attorneys Mark and Patricia McCloskey became instant national figures when they intercepted protesters marching past their marble-faced palazzo at One Portland Place, aimed guns at them and demanded they get out. Americans saw the story they wanted to see. Some saw respected professionals fearing for their safety, reasonably exercising their Second Amendment rights to defend their home from violent trespassers. Others saw an overwrought, older affluent couple, recklessly pointing their weapons and asserting their white privilege. But public records and interviews reveal a fuller picture than emerged two weeks ago. They show the McCloskeys are almost always in conflict with others, typically over control of private property, what people can do on that property, and whose job it is to make sure they do it.
They filed a lawsuit in 1988 to obtain their house, a castle built for Adolphus Busch’s daughter and her husband during St. Louis’ brief run as a world-class city in the early 20th century. At the McCloskeys’ property in Franklin County, they have sued neighbors for making changes to a gravel road and twice in just over two years evicted tenants from a modular home on their property. Mark McCloskey sued a former employer for wrongful termination and his sister, father and his father’s caretaker for defamation. The McCloskeys have filed at least two “quiet title” suits asserting squatter’s rights on land they’ve occupied openly and hostilely — their terms — and claimed as their own. In an ongoing suit against Portland Place trustees in 2017, the McCloskeys say they are entitled to a 1,143-square-foot triangle of lawn in front of property that is set aside as common ground in the neighborhood’s indenture. It was that patch of green protesters saw when they filed through the gate. Mark McCloskey said in an affidavit that he has defended the patch before by pointing a gun at a neighbor who had tried to cut through it.
This court record shows the McCloskeys challenged a Portland Place resident “at gun point” who they said encroached on their property. The McCloskeys have filed many other lawsuits. They sued a man who sold them a Maserati they claimed was supposed to come with a box of hard-to-find parts. In one trip to the courthouse in November 1996, Mark McCloskey filed two lawsuits, one against a dog breeder whom he said sold him a German shepherd without papers and the other against the Central West End Association for using a photo of their house in a brochure for a house tour after the McCloskeys had told them not to. “I guess we were saving gas,” he would quip in a deposition in another case about why he filed two lawsuits at once. Mark McCloskey has run off trustees trying to make repairs to the wall surrounding his property, insisting that he and his wife own it. In 2013, he destroyed bee hives placed just outside of the mansion’s northern wall by the neighboring Jewish Central Reform Congregation and left a note saying he did it, and if the mess wasn’t cleaned up quickly he would seek a restraining order and attorneys fees. The congregation had planned to harvest the honey and pick apples from trees on its property for Rosh Hashanah.
Mark McCloskey left this note after he destroyed bee hives placed just outside of the mansion’s northern wall by the neighboring Jewish Central Reform Congregation. “The children were crying in school,” Rabbi Susan Talve said. “It was part of our curriculum.” Moreover, the McCloskeys have constantly sought to force their neighborhood trustees to maintain the exclusivity of Portland Place, accusing them of selectively enforcing the written rules for living in the neighborhood, known as the trust agreement. They filed a lawsuit in St. Louis circuit court to try to force the trustees to enforce the neighborhood rules as written. The McCloskeys dismissed the claim, but the judge would not let them refile an amended version because it “failed to allege a justiciable controversy.” The McCloskeys appealed all the way to the state Supreme Court to try to make the judge allow them to refile their case, but the effort failed. One of the rules prohibited unmarried people from living together. Several neighbors said it was because the McCloskeys didn’t want gay couples living on the block. The trustees voted to impeach Patricia McCloskey as a trustee in 1992 when she fought an effort to change the trust indenture, accusing her of being anti-gay.
Mark McCloskey clarified in a deposition much later that the trust agreement barred unmarried people living together, regardless of their sexuality. “Certain people on Portland Place, for political reasons, wanted to make it a gay issue,” he said. The former Portland Place trustee who was ordered off the trustee property said he had nothing good to say about the couple. “They’ve always been part of the problem, never part of the solution,” Robert Dolgin said. Albert Watkins, a lawyer representing the couple, questioned the relevance of any story delving into the McCloskeys’ litigation history and asked the newspaper to submit written questions. The Post-Dispatch sent questions; Watkins didn’t answer them. Watkins invited a reporter to come to his office to view a document in which McCloskey discussed his litigation history but said a reporter could not have a copy nor take notes from it. Watkins later declined to allow a reporter to interview his clients under the newspaper’s condition that the interview be recorded.
Ownership and entitlement By filing so many lawsuits, the McCloskeys opened a large window onto their values and ambitions. Their lawsuits center on obtaining land, keeping people off of it, and forcing people to follow rules or make good on agreements. Sometimes the suits are about collecting damages for harm done to them. Mark McCloskey’s first taste of ownership may have been on his 20th birthday, in 1976. A card from his parents, Bruce and Lois “Carol” McCloskey, would much later become an exhibit in a lawsuit against his father and his father's trust.
On his 20th birthday, in 1976, Mark McCloskey received this birthday card from his parents. The card said: “You are now the sole & only owner of 5 acres of the Phelps County Farm. Papers to follow. This is on the river — Luck! Happy Birthday! Mom + Dad.” It would later become an exhibit in a lawsuit over property. The card said: “You are now the sole & only owner of 5 acres of the Phelps County Farm. Papers to follow. This is on the river — Luck! Happy Birthday! Mom + Dad.” He also got a small box of earth from the family’s 240-acre property to make it official. His parents divorced in 1985. Bruce McCloskey never filed proper documents with Phelps County to transfer the title. When Mark McCloskey inquired with the Phelps County assessor in 1997, he got a letter indicating that what his father had filed was “not a legal conveyance of land.”
Mark McCloskey would not let real estate slip through his fingers again. In a May 2019 deposition in his ongoing lawsuit against Portland Place trustees, he explained how he and his wife came to own their home: through a lawsuit. The couple met when they were at Southern Methodist University law school. After graduating in 1985, his first job was with a law firm in Dallas. They moved back to St. Louis in 1986. He got a job at Thompson Mitchell, now known as Thompson Coburn. He testified his mother obtained his childhood home in Country Life Acres in the divorce. He and his wife acquired it from her when she couldn’t afford to take care of it. “When we first moved up to town, I drove Pattie through Portland and Westmoreland, and I said, ‘You know, any time you’d like to, we can flip the country house out at Country Life Acres and buy a big townhouse here,’” he testified. “And she said, ‘OK, let’s do it now.’” Mark McCloskey said his tax lawyer at the Lewis Rice law firm told him One Portland Place had just been sold. “I said, ‘I don’t think it’s been sold. I would have heard about it.’”
The mansion had fallen into disrepair. The prior owner had heated it by using 48 kerosene heaters, according to a 2018 St. Louis Magazine feature that profiled the McCloskeys’ long and expensive restoration.
McCloskey testified they bid on the house and signed a deal that would give them “right of last look” at any other contracts. He got a call indicating they could buy the house if they got the cash together by the next morning, but then found out Lewis Rice had arranged to sell it to someone else. “I get to my office at about 4 o’clock in the morning. Pattie and I draft a lawsuit and file it when the courthouse opens, the (temporary restraining order) to prevent the sale. We set up a table at wherever Lewis and Rice was in those days and served every partner on the way in and served the president of Boatmen’s Bank when he went to work the next day.” They ended up settling with the other buyer for an undisclosed amount and bought One Portland Place for $595,000, according to city property records.
The afternoon he sued Lewis Rice, he said, he got called into the managing partner’s office at Thompson Mitchell. The partners were not happy he had sued Lewis Rice. “He said, ‘We’re going to ask for your resignation,’” McCloskey recalled. He filed a lawsuit against Thompson Mitchell for wrongful termination. One of the partners was Thomas Eagleton, a Democrat who had just returned to St. Louis after three terms in the U.S. Senate. “I figured I’d sue him first,” McCloskey testified. “I thought it would be fun.” But he said the courts “didn’t think much” of his claim. He dismissed the suit against Thompson Mitchell in 1990. A judge dismissed the Lewis Rice suit the following year for lack of prosecution. The couple’s possession of their mansion was “a fun story,” he testified. “I tell it frequently, usually with … a little more detail and more humor.” Family struggle Mark McCloskey’s relationship with his family deteriorated. He would claim years later that his father, starting in 1989, “became obsessed” with the idea that his son had become wealthy by “swindling” the assets his mother got in the divorce. He says the idea was put there by his sister, Patricia Richards, of Virginia. In 1994, Mark McCloskey wrote a letter to his father about his “niggardly attitude” toward the 5 acres in Phelps County he had promised in the birthday card. “The property is essentially worthless, it just struck me as bizarre that you would deny the existence of such a gift …,” he wrote. “I spent several months of my life living out of a tent and building a log cabin there.”
Mark McCloskey wrote a letter to his father about the five acres in Phelps County he had promised in 1976. The letter, written in 1994, became part of a subsequent court record. His father largely wrote him out of the will in 2008, sparking a family feud that would last eight years. In March 2013, in Phelps County, Mark McCloskey sued his father and his father’s trust over the gift. The birthday card and earth, he claimed, were sufficient title because they met the legal definition of “livery of seisin,” a ceremony performed in medieval England for the conveyance of land.
In 2016, a special judge ruled against him, writing that “Exhibit 1 attached to the petition is a birthday card, not a deed” and that it was too late to claim ownership of part of the farm. The archaic legal claim, the judge ruled “does not operate as a matter of law to transfer title to real property.” Mark McCloskey filed a defamation case against his father and sister in 2011, dismissed it in 2012, and refiled it in 2013. By the time of the final filing, Bruce McCloskey was living in a memory care unit in Ballwin; he died in 2014. Mark McCloskey said his sister had spread rumors that he had held their mother hostage on Portland Place, denied her medical care, made her sleep on an iron cot soaked in urine, and plied her with alcohol until she died. He also said she claimed he was connected to organized crime, had tried to arrange for a contract killing of his sister, and had stolen 42 pounds of gold from his father. He claimed his elderly father believed these things because he had lost his faculties, and repeated the falsehoods in public, damaging his reputation. He claimed the will was based on “insane delusions” and his sister’s undue influence.
Patricia Richards declined to comment. He made similar allegations against his father’s longtime caretaker in a separate defamation suit, which he later dismissed. Weeks after Bruce McCloskey’s death, Patricia McCloskey sent a letter to the law firm handling his estate stating that any attempt to distribute the inheritance would likely be challenged in court. Mark McCloskey dismissed the defamation case, but he sued his sister and his two brothers and their father’s trust again in 2016, accusing all of them of “tortious interference” for pressing their father to cut him out of an inheritance. The siblings settled with their father’s trust paying Mark McCloskey $400,000, with all of them agreeing to drop all claims and never have contact with Mark McCloskey again. Trouble on Portland The lawsuit between the McCloskeys and the Portland trustees was the latest flare-up in a fight that has been going on almost since they moved in.
In 2002, the Portland Place Association sued to foreclose on the McCloskeys’ house because they were refusing to pay dues. Mark McCloskey would later say in a deposition that he and his wife had refused because the trustees “weren’t doing something, which was their obligation under the Trust Agreement.” The lawyer questioning him asked: Was it possible the issue was the trustees were allowing a gay couple to live there? Mark McCloskey said he didn’t know. “I know there has been an ongoing issue about the definition of single family in Missouri law, and that the (agreement) calling for exclusively single family residences wouldn’t allow, technically, unmarried heterosexual people to live on Portland Place. … I know that certain people on Portland Place, for political purposes, wanted to make it a gay issue.” While taking a deposition of Portland Place trustee Daniel Ladenberger on Jan. 17, 2019, Mark McCloskey insisted it wasn’t up to trustees to decide what rules to enforce. Rules can’t be changed without 75% of the voters approving, he said.
“Do you recognize that part of the duty of a trustee is to protect the rights of the minority; to enforce the trust agreement even if a majority but less than 75% of the people would like to do away with those provisions … even if it’s only 26% of the people who wish to have a provision enforced?” After the McCloskeys bought their home on Portland Place, they built a 10-foot wall closing it off from Kingshighway, replacing a wall that would have allowed people to come through. In 2004, Dolgin wrote the McCloskeys a letter noting it had come to the trustees’ attention that the McCloskeys had hired a contractor to do tuck pointing on the wall. “No individual resident is authorized to do work on Portland Place property without the permission of the trustees,” Dolgin wrote. Mark McCloskey responded that he would no more ask permission to perform work on the wall than he would on his house. “Before you glibly throw around such statements in the future, produce some authority to verify it or be prepared to spend Portland Place Association money in defending a suit for slander of title. This isn’t a game, and we aren’t children.”
Watkins, the lawyer representing the couple, is a friend of theirs and former neighbor who sued the Portland Place trustees in 2010 with a claim that he had tried to get them to take down a sick oak tree which later fell and damaged his property. Watkins lost and was ordered to pay the trustees court costs of $52,000. A rocky road The McCloskeys own a large property in Franklin County and have had conflicts with neighbors who access their homes by a gravel road cutting across the McCloskeys’ acreage. In 2013, Mark McCloskey saw a gravel truck on the road preparing to “grade and ditch” the road, and the couple, without notice to their neighbors, sought and obtained a temporary restraining order against them in Franklin County circuit court. One of the defendants produced records of an easement indicating they could use the road. A legal battle dragged on for nearly two years, with one of the neighbors racking up $70,000 in legal bills and $9,000 in surveying costs.
That neighbor asked for sanctions against the McCloskeys for “committing a fraud” with their claim. The case settled with all parties paying their own costs. In 2019, the McCloskeys sued another neighbor with a squatter’s rights claim to 0.41 acres that were fenced off incorrectly and had been maintained by McCloskey and previous owners even though they did not have a legal title to it. “The Parcel has been continuously possessed by the Plaintiffs and their predecessors in title for a period far in excess of 10 years and such possession has been, in fact, hostile, actual, open and notorious, exclusive, and continuous,” the McCloskeys claimed. The suit is pending. The McCloskeys also evicted two tenants from a modular home on their property in a period of just over two years. The first, a single woman with three children and her boyfriend, had lived there six months in January 2018 when the McCloskeys filed for eviction, claiming one rent check had bounced. The woman moved out and did not appear in court, and the McCloskeys got a $6,247 default judgment against the couple, which included attorneys fees and rent for the remaining months of the lease.
In an interview with the Post-Dispatch, the tenant denied she had missed a rent payment. She said she had showed up in court for the eviction hearing and that Mark McCloskey told her she had no chance of winning, so she left. She said she had no idea she owed them that much. The second tenant signed a lease for $950 per month last November, and failed to pay rent in April and May. The McCloskeys filed an eviction suit on May 12 and Mark McCloskey filed an affidavit stating that he was not barred by federal law from evicting someone during the COVID-19 pandemic because the unit was not part of a federal housing rental program. The tenant did not appear in court. A judge gave her until July 1 to clear out, and the McCloskeys got an $8,299 judgment against her for attorneys fees and the remainder of the lease. A ruined life While that tenant was clearing out, the McCloskeys had their encounter with protesters. “My life has been ruined,” Mark McCloskey told CNN host Chris Cuomo two days later, as he defended his actions.
On June 28, about 200 protesters filled the Maryland-Kingshighway intersection, chanting, “This is what community looks like … this is what democracy looks like.” The group moved south to Lindell Boulevard and filled the intersection for several more minutes. “If we don’t get it, shut it down!” The protest moved north on Kingshighway again. At Portland Place, protester Derk Brown’s live feed shows he is one of the first protesters to pass through the iron gate held open by protester Tory Russell. Although the McCloskeys have displayed photos of a crumpled gate as evidence the protesters broke it down, the feed shows the gate is intact. It was not clear when it was damaged. The first few protesters who enter the private neighborhood swerve away from the McCloskey house to walk in the street. Immediately, Brown’s feed captures Mark McCloskey under a massive portico on the east side of his mansion. “Hey!” he can be heard shouting. “Private neighborhood! Get the hell out of my neighborhood!”
None of the protesters are on his property — even the disputed triangle. Brown zooms in on McCloskey, who is wearing a pink Brooks Brothers polo shirt, and narrates: “Y’all see? On my live feed … he got his rifle.” Mark McCloskey shouts, “Get out! Get out! Get out! Private property!” A chant builds: “Whose streets? Our streets!” Moments later, Patricia McCloskey can be seen in her front yard in her bare feet with a silver handgun, waving it at the protesters. “We’re gonna move, calm down!” someone yells. “Put that gun away,” someone else yells. She comes closer to Brown, pointing the gun left and right. “Go!” she yells. “Go!” One of the protesters yells, “We got kids in here! We got children!” A chant builds: “Eat the rich!” She keeps pointing the gun.
“Why are you threatening?” someone asks. “You need to calm down!” someone else says. “Put your goddamn gun down!” someone yells. “You’re a coward, bitch!” a woman yells. “Nobody wants to hurt you,” another woman yells. About 13 minutes go by with the McCloskeys on their front lawn in bare feet and protesters mocking them or asking them why they are threatening them with weapons. The protest moves on to its destination: Mayor Lyda Krewson’s house. Patricia McCloskey would later tell Fox News host Sean Hannity that protesters said “they were going to kill us … going to burn down the house, that they were going to be living in our house after I was dead. They pointed to different rooms and said that’s gonna be my bedroom, that’s gonna to be the living room and I’m gonna be taking a shower in that room ….”
Mark McCloskey said the flyer for the “riot” suggested that in addition to marching to Krewson’s house, marchers were planning “a special surprise — something extra.” “That something extra was us,” Mark McCloskey said.
ST. LOUIS — When Black Lives Matter protesters marched up Kingshighway on June 28 and turned through an iron gate into the magnificent private street of Portland Place, they encountered a couple who have for years, nearly constantly, sued other people and ordered people off their property. Personal-injury attorneys Mark and Patricia McCloskey became instant national figures when they intercepted protesters marching past their marble-faced palazzo at One Portland Place, aimed guns at them and demanded they get out. Americans saw the story they wanted to see. Some saw respected professionals fearing for their safety, reasonably exercising their Second Amendment rights to defend their home from violent trespassers. Others saw an overwrought, older affluent couple, recklessly pointing their weapons and asserting their white privilege. But public records and interviews reveal a fuller picture than emerged two weeks ago. They show the McCloskeys are almost always in conflict with others, typically over control of private property, what people can do on that property, and whose job it is to make sure they do it.
They filed a lawsuit in 1988 to obtain their house, a castle built for Adolphus Busch’s daughter and her husband during St. Louis’ brief run as a world-class city in the early 20th century. At the McCloskeys’ property in Franklin County, they have sued neighbors for making changes to a gravel road and twice in just over two years evicted tenants from a modular home on their property. Mark McCloskey sued a former employer for wrongful termination and his sister, father and his father’s caretaker for defamation. The McCloskeys have filed at least two “quiet title” suits asserting squatter’s rights on land they’ve occupied openly and hostilely — their terms — and claimed as their own. In an ongoing suit against Portland Place trustees in 2017, the McCloskeys say they are entitled to a 1,143-square-foot triangle of lawn in front of property that is set aside as common ground in the neighborhood’s indenture. It was that patch of green protesters saw when they filed through the gate. Mark McCloskey said in an affidavit that he has defended the patch before by pointing a gun at a neighbor who had tried to cut through it.
This court record shows the McCloskeys challenged a Portland Place resident “at gun point” who they said encroached on their property. The McCloskeys have filed many other lawsuits. They sued a man who sold them a Maserati they claimed was supposed to come with a box of hard-to-find parts. In one trip to the courthouse in November 1996, Mark McCloskey filed two lawsuits, one against a dog breeder whom he said sold him a German shepherd without papers and the other against the Central West End Association for using a photo of their house in a brochure for a house tour after the McCloskeys had told them not to. “I guess we were saving gas,” he would quip in a deposition in another case about why he filed two lawsuits at once. Mark McCloskey has run off trustees trying to make repairs to the wall surrounding his property, insisting that he and his wife own it. In 2013, he destroyed bee hives placed just outside of the mansion’s northern wall by the neighboring Jewish Central Reform Congregation and left a note saying he did it, and if the mess wasn’t cleaned up quickly he would seek a restraining order and attorneys fees. The congregation had planned to harvest the honey and pick apples from trees on its property for Rosh Hashanah.
Mark McCloskey left this note after he destroyed bee hives placed just outside of the mansion’s northern wall by the neighboring Jewish Central Reform Congregation. “The children were crying in school,” Rabbi Susan Talve said. “It was part of our curriculum.” Moreover, the McCloskeys have constantly sought to force their neighborhood trustees to maintain the exclusivity of Portland Place, accusing them of selectively enforcing the written rules for living in the neighborhood, known as the trust agreement. They filed a lawsuit in St. Louis circuit court to try to force the trustees to enforce the neighborhood rules as written. The McCloskeys dismissed the claim, but the judge would not let them refile an amended version because it “failed to allege a justiciable controversy.” The McCloskeys appealed all the way to the state Supreme Court to try to make the judge allow them to refile their case, but the effort failed. One of the rules prohibited unmarried people from living together. Several neighbors said it was because the McCloskeys didn’t want gay couples living on the block. The trustees voted to impeach Patricia McCloskey as a trustee in 1992 when she fought an effort to change the trust indenture, accusing her of being anti-gay.
Mark McCloskey clarified in a deposition much later that the trust agreement barred unmarried people living together, regardless of their sexuality. “Certain people on Portland Place, for political reasons, wanted to make it a gay issue,” he said. The former Portland Place trustee who was ordered off the trustee property said he had nothing good to say about the couple. “They’ve always been part of the problem, never part of the solution,” Robert Dolgin said. Albert Watkins, a lawyer representing the couple, questioned the relevance of any story delving into the McCloskeys’ litigation history and asked the newspaper to submit written questions. The Post-Dispatch sent questions; Watkins didn’t answer them. Watkins invited a reporter to come to his office to view a document in which McCloskey discussed his litigation history but said a reporter could not have a copy nor take notes from it. Watkins later declined to allow a reporter to interview his clients under the newspaper’s condition that the interview be recorded.
Ownership and entitlement By filing so many lawsuits, the McCloskeys opened a large window onto their values and ambitions. Their lawsuits center on obtaining land, keeping people off of it, and forcing people to follow rules or make good on agreements. Sometimes the suits are about collecting damages for harm done to them. Mark McCloskey’s first taste of ownership may have been on his 20th birthday, in 1976. A card from his parents, Bruce and Lois “Carol” McCloskey, would much later become an exhibit in a lawsuit against his father and his father's trust.
On his 20th birthday, in 1976, Mark McCloskey received this birthday card from his parents. The card said: “You are now the sole & only owner of 5 acres of the Phelps County Farm. Papers to follow. This is on the river — Luck! Happy Birthday! Mom + Dad.” It would later become an exhibit in a lawsuit over property. The card said: “You are now the sole & only owner of 5 acres of the Phelps County Farm. Papers to follow. This is on the river — Luck! Happy Birthday! Mom + Dad.” He also got a small box of earth from the family’s 240-acre property to make it official. His parents divorced in 1985. Bruce McCloskey never filed proper documents with Phelps County to transfer the title. When Mark McCloskey inquired with the Phelps County assessor in 1997, he got a letter indicating that what his father had filed was “not a legal conveyance of land.”
Mark McCloskey would not let real estate slip through his fingers again. In a May 2019 deposition in his ongoing lawsuit against Portland Place trustees, he explained how he and his wife came to own their home: through a lawsuit. The couple met when they were at Southern Methodist University law school. After graduating in 1985, his first job was with a law firm in Dallas. They moved back to St. Louis in 1986. He got a job at Thompson Mitchell, now known as Thompson Coburn. He testified his mother obtained his childhood home in Country Life Acres in the divorce. He and his wife acquired it from her when she couldn’t afford to take care of it. “When we first moved up to town, I drove Pattie through Portland and Westmoreland, and I said, ‘You know, any time you’d like to, we can flip the country house out at Country Life Acres and buy a big townhouse here,’” he testified. “And she said, ‘OK, let’s do it now.’” Mark McCloskey said his tax lawyer at the Lewis Rice law firm told him One Portland Place had just been sold. “I said, ‘I don’t think it’s been sold. I would have heard about it.’”
The mansion had fallen into disrepair. The prior owner had heated it by using 48 kerosene heaters, according to a 2018 St. Louis Magazine feature that profiled the McCloskeys’ long and expensive restoration.
McCloskey testified they bid on the house and signed a deal that would give them “right of last look” at any other contracts. He got a call indicating they could buy the house if they got the cash together by the next morning, but then found out Lewis Rice had arranged to sell it to someone else. “I get to my office at about 4 o’clock in the morning. Pattie and I draft a lawsuit and file it when the courthouse opens, the (temporary restraining order) to prevent the sale. We set up a table at wherever Lewis and Rice was in those days and served every partner on the way in and served the president of Boatmen’s Bank when he went to work the next day.” They ended up settling with the other buyer for an undisclosed amount and bought One Portland Place for $595,000, according to city property records.
The afternoon he sued Lewis Rice, he said, he got called into the managing partner’s office at Thompson Mitchell. The partners were not happy he had sued Lewis Rice. “He said, ‘We’re going to ask for your resignation,’” McCloskey recalled. He filed a lawsuit against Thompson Mitchell for wrongful termination. One of the partners was Thomas Eagleton, a Democrat who had just returned to St. Louis after three terms in the U.S. Senate. “I figured I’d sue him first,” McCloskey testified. “I thought it would be fun.” But he said the courts “didn’t think much” of his claim. He dismissed the suit against Thompson Mitchell in 1990. A judge dismissed the Lewis Rice suit the following year for lack of prosecution. The couple’s possession of their mansion was “a fun story,” he testified. “I tell it frequently, usually with … a little more detail and more humor.” Family struggle Mark McCloskey’s relationship with his family deteriorated. He would claim years later that his father, starting in 1989, “became obsessed” with the idea that his son had become wealthy by “swindling” the assets his mother got in the divorce. He says the idea was put there by his sister, Patricia Richards, of Virginia. In 1994, Mark McCloskey wrote a letter to his father about his “niggardly attitude” toward the 5 acres in Phelps County he had promised in the birthday card. “The property is essentially worthless, it just struck me as bizarre that you would deny the existence of such a gift …,” he wrote. “I spent several months of my life living out of a tent and building a log cabin there.”
Mark McCloskey wrote a letter to his father about the five acres in Phelps County he had promised in 1976. The letter, written in 1994, became part of a subsequent court record. His father largely wrote him out of the will in 2008, sparking a family feud that would last eight years. In March 2013, in Phelps County, Mark McCloskey sued his father and his father’s trust over the gift. The birthday card and earth, he claimed, were sufficient title because they met the legal definition of “livery of seisin,” a ceremony performed in medieval England for the conveyance of land.
In 2016, a special judge ruled against him, writing that “Exhibit 1 attached to the petition is a birthday card, not a deed” and that it was too late to claim ownership of part of the farm. The archaic legal claim, the judge ruled “does not operate as a matter of law to transfer title to real property.” Mark McCloskey filed a defamation case against his father and sister in 2011, dismissed it in 2012, and refiled it in 2013. By the time of the final filing, Bruce McCloskey was living in a memory care unit in Ballwin; he died in 2014. Mark McCloskey said his sister had spread rumors that he had held their mother hostage on Portland Place, denied her medical care, made her sleep on an iron cot soaked in urine, and plied her with alcohol until she died. He also said she claimed he was connected to organized crime, had tried to arrange for a contract killing of his sister, and had stolen 42 pounds of gold from his father. He claimed his elderly father believed these things because he had lost his faculties, and repeated the falsehoods in public, damaging his reputation. He claimed the will was based on “insane delusions” and his sister’s undue influence.
Patricia Richards declined to comment. He made similar allegations against his father’s longtime caretaker in a separate defamation suit, which he later dismissed. Weeks after Bruce McCloskey’s death, Patricia McCloskey sent a letter to the law firm handling his estate stating that any attempt to distribute the inheritance would likely be challenged in court. Mark McCloskey dismissed the defamation case, but he sued his sister and his two brothers and their father’s trust again in 2016, accusing all of them of “tortious interference” for pressing their father to cut him out of an inheritance. The siblings settled with their father’s trust paying Mark McCloskey $400,000, with all of them agreeing to drop all claims and never have contact with Mark McCloskey again. Trouble on Portland The lawsuit between the McCloskeys and the Portland trustees was the latest flare-up in a fight that has been going on almost since they moved in.
In 2002, the Portland Place Association sued to foreclose on the McCloskeys’ house because they were refusing to pay dues. Mark McCloskey would later say in a deposition that he and his wife had refused because the trustees “weren’t doing something, which was their obligation under the Trust Agreement.” The lawyer questioning him asked: Was it possible the issue was the trustees were allowing a gay couple to live there? Mark McCloskey said he didn’t know. “I know there has been an ongoing issue about the definition of single family in Missouri law, and that the (agreement) calling for exclusively single family residences wouldn’t allow, technically, unmarried heterosexual people to live on Portland Place. … I know that certain people on Portland Place, for political purposes, wanted to make it a gay issue.” While taking a deposition of Portland Place trustee Daniel Ladenberger on Jan. 17, 2019, Mark McCloskey insisted it wasn’t up to trustees to decide what rules to enforce. Rules can’t be changed without 75% of the voters approving, he said.
“Do you recognize that part of the duty of a trustee is to protect the rights of the minority; to enforce the trust agreement even if a majority but less than 75% of the people would like to do away with those provisions … even if it’s only 26% of the people who wish to have a provision enforced?” After the McCloskeys bought their home on Portland Place, they built a 10-foot wall closing it off from Kingshighway, replacing a wall that would have allowed people to come through. In 2004, Dolgin wrote the McCloskeys a letter noting it had come to the trustees’ attention that the McCloskeys had hired a contractor to do tuck pointing on the wall. “No individual resident is authorized to do work on Portland Place property without the permission of the trustees,” Dolgin wrote. Mark McCloskey responded that he would no more ask permission to perform work on the wall than he would on his house. “Before you glibly throw around such statements in the future, produce some authority to verify it or be prepared to spend Portland Place Association money in defending a suit for slander of title. This isn’t a game, and we aren’t children.”
Watkins, the lawyer representing the couple, is a friend of theirs and former neighbor who sued the Portland Place trustees in 2010 with a claim that he had tried to get them to take down a sick oak tree which later fell and damaged his property. Watkins lost and was ordered to pay the trustees court costs of $52,000. A rocky road The McCloskeys own a large property in Franklin County and have had conflicts with neighbors who access their homes by a gravel road cutting across the McCloskeys’ acreage. In 2013, Mark McCloskey saw a gravel truck on the road preparing to “grade and ditch” the road, and the couple, without notice to their neighbors, sought and obtained a temporary restraining order against them in Franklin County circuit court. One of the defendants produced records of an easement indicating they could use the road. A legal battle dragged on for nearly two years, with one of the neighbors racking up $70,000 in legal bills and $9,000 in surveying costs.
That neighbor asked for sanctions against the McCloskeys for “committing a fraud” with their claim. The case settled with all parties paying their own costs. In 2019, the McCloskeys sued another neighbor with a squatter’s rights claim to 0.41 acres that were fenced off incorrectly and had been maintained by McCloskey and previous owners even though they did not have a legal title to it. “The Parcel has been continuously possessed by the Plaintiffs and their predecessors in title for a period far in excess of 10 years and such possession has been, in fact, hostile, actual, open and notorious, exclusive, and continuous,” the McCloskeys claimed. The suit is pending. The McCloskeys also evicted two tenants from a modular home on their property in a period of just over two years. The first, a single woman with three children and her boyfriend, had lived there six months in January 2018 when the McCloskeys filed for eviction, claiming one rent check had bounced. The woman moved out and did not appear in court, and the McCloskeys got a $6,247 default judgment against the couple, which included attorneys fees and rent for the remaining months of the lease.
In an interview with the Post-Dispatch, the tenant denied she had missed a rent payment. She said she had showed up in court for the eviction hearing and that Mark McCloskey told her she had no chance of winning, so she left. She said she had no idea she owed them that much. The second tenant signed a lease for $950 per month last November, and failed to pay rent in April and May. The McCloskeys filed an eviction suit on May 12 and Mark McCloskey filed an affidavit stating that he was not barred by federal law from evicting someone during the COVID-19 pandemic because the unit was not part of a federal housing rental program. The tenant did not appear in court. A judge gave her until July 1 to clear out, and the McCloskeys got an $8,299 judgment against her for attorneys fees and the remainder of the lease. A ruined life While that tenant was clearing out, the McCloskeys had their encounter with protesters. “My life has been ruined,” Mark McCloskey told CNN host Chris Cuomo two days later, as he defended his actions.
On June 28, about 200 protesters filled the Maryland-Kingshighway intersection, chanting, “This is what community looks like … this is what democracy looks like.” The group moved south to Lindell Boulevard and filled the intersection for several more minutes. “If we don’t get it, shut it down!” The protest moved north on Kingshighway again. At Portland Place, protester Derk Brown’s live feed shows he is one of the first protesters to pass through the iron gate held open by protester Tory Russell. Although the McCloskeys have displayed photos of a crumpled gate as evidence the protesters broke it down, the feed shows the gate is intact. It was not clear when it was damaged. The first few protesters who enter the private neighborhood swerve away from the McCloskey house to walk in the street. Immediately, Brown’s feed captures Mark McCloskey under a massive portico on the east side of his mansion. “Hey!” he can be heard shouting. “Private neighborhood! Get the hell out of my neighborhood!”
None of the protesters are on his property — even the disputed triangle. Brown zooms in on McCloskey, who is wearing a pink Brooks Brothers polo shirt, and narrates: “Y’all see? On my live feed … he got his rifle.” Mark McCloskey shouts, “Get out! Get out! Get out! Private property!” A chant builds: “Whose streets? Our streets!” Moments later, Patricia McCloskey can be seen in her front yard in her bare feet with a silver handgun, waving it at the protesters. “We’re gonna move, calm down!” someone yells. “Put that gun away,” someone else yells. She comes closer to Brown, pointing the gun left and right. “Go!” she yells. “Go!” One of the protesters yells, “We got kids in here! We got children!” A chant builds: “Eat the rich!” She keeps pointing the gun.
“Why are you threatening?” someone asks. “You need to calm down!” someone else says. “Put your goddamn gun down!” someone yells. “You’re a coward, bitch!” a woman yells. “Nobody wants to hurt you,” another woman yells. About 13 minutes go by with the McCloskeys on their front lawn in bare feet and protesters mocking them or asking them why they are threatening them with weapons. The protest moves on to its destination: Mayor Lyda Krewson’s house. Patricia McCloskey would later tell Fox News host Sean Hannity that protesters said “they were going to kill us … going to burn down the house, that they were going to be living in our house after I was dead. They pointed to different rooms and said that’s gonna be my bedroom, that’s gonna to be the living room and I’m gonna be taking a shower in that room ….”
Mark McCloskey said the flyer for the “riot” suggested that in addition to marching to Krewson’s house, marchers were planning “a special surprise — something extra.” “That something extra was us,” Mark McCloskey said.
你没看懂我的意思。正是因为华人以前没有两边下注，大部分一直稳定投的主党，所以主党take us for granted而和党根本懒得来争取华裔乃至亚裔，所以主党拼命搞AA而和党鼓吹Chinese Virus。如果都持独立派立场，让两党都感觉争取华人有希望，那才能最大化华人利益。这也意味着如果这次大选有20%到30%原本投主党的华人转投和党，华人处境反而会有改善。所以谁要投川普，我绝对不拦着，虽然我不喜欢他。当然，更理想的情况是绝大部分华人作为一个整体根据两党政策投票，每次大选哪个党对华人好就集体转向哪个党，可惜这需要华人有很好的组织，而现在华人一盘散沙，根本做不到。
Leo Terrell: The Democratic Party left me https://video.foxnews.com/v/6172294542001#sp=show-clips
至少算不上是共和党。
川黑拿这臭不可闻的Snope想证明啥呢？你自己贴的不是说的很清楚吗 Over the past 20 years, Mark McCloskey has made political contributions to both Democratic and Republican political campaigns. Between 2004 and 2012, FEC records show he donated to Democratic candidates, and more recently McCloskey has donated to a few Democrats on the local level.
他们以前捐了多少钱给民主党了？
Zan.
大家别忘了Trump本人当年就是给民主党捐大钱的人物。当年他和克林顿夫妇关系那么好就是因为他组织人给克氏捐了钱。因为法律限制，以前每个人可以合法捐献的金额是有限的，所以就有大头目暗示手下通通给某党某人捐钱的情况。
https://ballotpedia.org/History_of_Donald_Trump%27s_political_donations
哈哈哈我原文说的是弃🐷党投和党 你非自己总结成弃暗投明这个词 你要说自己党派暗 我也拦不住你
MM啊 怪不得你支持民主党呢。思维方式都一样的。看不见房间里的大象，却只拿放大镜抠一些小细节。 民主党16年输了的时候就不接受教训，不想想为什么输了民意，反而越来越变本加厉。 你觉得在这里抠几个字眼就能让华人上大部分人都扭转三观吗？抹黑川普也没有用，我们本来就知道川普不是什么完美领袖，但是华人上支持他的还这么多，为什么？ 是盲目的个人崇拜吗？大家都三观不正吗？是因为三观正常的人实在太反感现在越来越极端的左派风气了。奥巴马任期之前谁对民主党有这么大意见？一个为少数民族说话，为穷人说话的党派，为POC说话的党派，有什么理由反对？我不知道别人，我自己一直就挺支持LGBTQ，也支持为少数民族发声。就算其他政见不同大家也都和睦相处。奥巴马上台的时候也曾经很为美国骄傲，觉得能够选出第一任非裔总统真的是让人骄傲自豪啊的高度开放文明啊。但是奥巴马8年开始给大家带来了什么样的生活？但是那时候也没有这么多人这么痛恨民主党。但是这几年肉眼可见的主党控制的大城市越来越垃圾，交的税变成了懒人们手里的食品券和毒品，流浪汉吸毒人员挤满了市中心，暴力事件层出不穷，恋童癖越来越嚣张，孩子在学校里被培养混乱的性别意识，甚至教给孩子肛交，主流电视台开始随便扭曲改写新闻事实，开始走上了给人民洗脑的道路。今年的BLM烧杀抢掠以及后续一系列的让人瞠目结舌的骚操作让大家都已经达到三观的极限了。如果一个政党是真的给大家带来越来越好，越来越文明先进的生活，我们大部分人有什么理由不支持？我们华人都是people of color，华人上的99%也都受过高等教育，都不是不讲理的人，但是我们都有眼睛，大家都能看出来民主党是想带领大家走一条怎么样的倒退道路。我们辛辛苦苦来美国是为了什么，是为了过上这样倒退的生活吗？
抠字眼真的没有用，自省才是正路。
我说奇怪怎么没看到这人说的话，一看早就拉黑了
yes
YES
奇怪的是我拉黑了她，没看到她的其他的帖子，却看到了25楼，难道这个也有漏网之鱼？
这些左派还是真正有理想有道德底线的，看到不对劲想法就会发生变化，川普以前不也是民主党的大金主吗？现在还死忠民主党的要么就是利益共同体，要么就是实在蠢的没边了。
嘿，nymag下课的andrew sullivan还说，虽然自己对极左不满，但是一定会反trump，投biden。 那就没办法了。求仁得仁。
他是civil rights律师。这次因为defund police而walkaway
According to the FEC, Mark McCloskey of the viral video made 20 contributions between October 2016 and February 2017 to the Republican National Committee or Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Those are his most recent campaign contributions.
So, based on the pattern of their recent campaign contributions, it’s wrong to say the couple are Democrats.
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/jul/01/viral-image/fact-checking-claim-about-who-couple-who-pointed-g/
讲的真好。昨天跟亲戚家的猪党促拥者聊天，在列举了一系例猪党的恶行之后，加了一句希望猪党今年可以大输。本以为亲戚会反驳，没想到他悲伤地说了一句你不是第一个讲这句话的人了，现在的猪党确实不是以前那个了。所以可以的话，大家还是要多影响身边的人。
查了一下，没有那么多次。有好多是重复entry。但是他们是注册的民主党，2016给trump捐款了。 也就是说今年终于出柜了。
那他们还为啥支持猪党？
有证明他们是注册民主党的链接吗？
世界大同，大爱无疆多诱人多好听。亲戚是这边长大的，猪党这一套骗骗他们还是可以的。另外也是为反对Trump而反对。
https://www.thecourierdaily.com/mark-patricia-mccloskey-st-louis-couple-gun-video/21866/ one of many. This was reported when the news just broke. Also, most of the civil rights lawyers are democrats.
很多都是父母 祖父母辈就开始支持主党了 一代代信仰下来的 家里人的影响很大 以前都是说主党是for the poor or the little people… 共和党是for the rich 或者说主党是for 努力工作的蓝领阶层 共和党是罪恶的大资产阶级 所以很多人并不是支持Lgbtq 人权啥的 只是还一直以为主党是为了小人物维护正义 为老百姓说话的那一派 虽然现在有所松动 还是还都盼着拜登上台能扭转局面
他们很多可能根本不明白主党背后是被什么样的极左组织和反美大佬绑架了
我觉得好多人就是没想明白。 我有个朋友就说怕trump会将来persecute中国人。 我说persecute什么人都是不对的，那么为什么你觉得08persecute他的政治敌人就可以，但是你将来不能被persecute。 逻辑有问题。
确实是 好多支持主党的都是精致的利己主义者 只想自己的那点小算盘
就是逻辑不清楚。我觉得利己没问题，但是原则要consistent.
好像并没有提供实质性证据，只是说 A few people claimed that the couple is registered Democrats。我Google了也没有找到。只想能找到，以后跟人辩论的时候能拿出实质性证据。
那又怎样，商人捐钱买保护不是常态吗，某金 是那对夫妻敛财的工具，川普如果没有做过，那对夫妻可能早就被投进监狱几千次了，他们应该感到幸运。男娼女卖的夫妻，女的生别人的孩子，男的乐当爹再加外嫖，最恶的一对
道理是这样的。看看75%的亚裔投给民主党，人家都take it for granted了，亚裔就是可以随便捏的软柿子，限制你们亚裔入学就业怎么了，你们还不是要投我民主党？
这些反trump，能不能说说到底你支持谁？大凡trump的事，不少人都上蹿下跳的各种黑和反。黑一个人太简单，无论是啥，黑粉总能找到各种角度和维度去黑，这个太cheap。
能不能让哥了解下到底你的政治主张是啥？你到底支持谁？说出来不丢人。
这种策略在主党回归正常之前，不可取。
Personal-injury attorneys Mark and Patricia McCloskey became instant national figures when they intercepted protesters marching past their marble-faced palazzo at One Portland Place, aimed guns at them and demanded they get out.
Americans saw the story they wanted to see. Some saw respected professionals fearing for their safety, reasonably exercising their Second Amendment rights to defend their home from violent trespassers. Others saw an overwrought, older affluent couple, recklessly pointing their weapons and asserting their white privilege.
But public records and interviews reveal a fuller picture than emerged two weeks ago. They show the McCloskeys are almost always in conflict with others, typically over control of private property, what people can do on that property, and whose job it is to make sure they do it.
They filed a lawsuit in 1988 to obtain their house, a castle built for Adolphus Busch’s daughter and her husband during St. Louis’ brief run as a world-class city in the early 20th century. At the McCloskeys’ property in Franklin County, they have sued neighbors for making changes to a gravel road and twice in just over two years evicted tenants from a modular home on their property. Mark McCloskey sued a former employer for wrongful termination and his sister, father and his father’s caretaker for defamation.
The McCloskeys have filed at least two “quiet title” suits asserting squatter’s rights on land they’ve occupied openly and hostilely — their terms — and claimed as their own. In an ongoing suit against Portland Place trustees in 2017, the McCloskeys say they are entitled to a 1,143-square-foot triangle of lawn in front of property that is set aside as common ground in the neighborhood’s indenture.
It was that patch of green protesters saw when they filed through the gate. Mark McCloskey said in an affidavit that he has defended the patch before by pointing a gun at a neighbor who had tried to cut through it.
This court record shows the McCloskeys challenged a Portland Place resident “at gun point” who they said encroached on their property. The McCloskeys have filed many other lawsuits. They sued a man who sold them a Maserati they claimed was supposed to come with a box of hard-to-find parts. In one trip to the courthouse in November 1996, Mark McCloskey filed two lawsuits, one against a dog breeder whom he said sold him a German shepherd without papers and the other against the Central West End Association for using a photo of their house in a brochure for a house tour after the McCloskeys had told them not to.
“I guess we were saving gas,” he would quip in a deposition in another case about why he filed two lawsuits at once.
Mark McCloskey has run off trustees trying to make repairs to the wall surrounding his property, insisting that he and his wife own it. In 2013, he destroyed bee hives placed just outside of the mansion’s northern wall by the neighboring Jewish Central Reform Congregation and left a note saying he did it, and if the mess wasn’t cleaned up quickly he would seek a restraining order and attorneys fees. The congregation had planned to harvest the honey and pick apples from trees on its property for Rosh Hashanah.
Mark McCloskey left this note after he destroyed bee hives placed just outside of the mansion’s northern wall by the neighboring Jewish Central Reform Congregation. “The children were crying in school,” Rabbi Susan Talve said. “It was part of our curriculum.”
Moreover, the McCloskeys have constantly sought to force their neighborhood trustees to maintain the exclusivity of Portland Place, accusing them of selectively enforcing the written rules for living in the neighborhood, known as the trust agreement.
They filed a lawsuit in St. Louis circuit court to try to force the trustees to enforce the neighborhood rules as written. The McCloskeys dismissed the claim, but the judge would not let them refile an amended version because it “failed to allege a justiciable controversy.”
The McCloskeys appealed all the way to the state Supreme Court to try to make the judge allow them to refile their case, but the effort failed.
One of the rules prohibited unmarried people from living together. Several neighbors said it was because the McCloskeys didn’t want gay couples living on the block. The trustees voted to impeach Patricia McCloskey as a trustee in 1992 when she fought an effort to change the trust indenture, accusing her of being anti-gay.
Mark McCloskey clarified in a deposition much later that the trust agreement barred unmarried people living together, regardless of their sexuality.
“Certain people on Portland Place, for political reasons, wanted to make it a gay issue,” he said.
The former Portland Place trustee who was ordered off the trustee property said he had nothing good to say about the couple. “They’ve always been part of the problem, never part of the solution,” Robert Dolgin said.
Albert Watkins, a lawyer representing the couple, questioned the relevance of any story delving into the McCloskeys’ litigation history and asked the newspaper to submit written questions. The Post-Dispatch sent questions; Watkins didn’t answer them. Watkins invited a reporter to come to his office to view a document in which McCloskey discussed his litigation history but said a reporter could not have a copy nor take notes from it. Watkins later declined to allow a reporter to interview his clients under the newspaper’s condition that the interview be recorded.
Ownership and entitlement By filing so many lawsuits, the McCloskeys opened a large window onto their values and ambitions. Their lawsuits center on obtaining land, keeping people off of it, and forcing people to follow rules or make good on agreements. Sometimes the suits are about collecting damages for harm done to them.
Mark McCloskey’s first taste of ownership may have been on his 20th birthday, in 1976. A card from his parents, Bruce and Lois “Carol” McCloskey, would much later become an exhibit in a lawsuit against his father and his father's trust.
On his 20th birthday, in 1976, Mark McCloskey received this birthday card from his parents. The card said: “You are now the sole & only owner of 5 acres of the Phelps County Farm. Papers to follow. This is on the river — Luck! Happy Birthday! Mom + Dad.” It would later become an exhibit in a lawsuit over property. The card said: “You are now the sole & only owner of 5 acres of the Phelps County Farm. Papers to follow. This is on the river — Luck! Happy Birthday! Mom + Dad.”
He also got a small box of earth from the family’s 240-acre property to make it official.
His parents divorced in 1985. Bruce McCloskey never filed proper documents with Phelps County to transfer the title. When Mark McCloskey inquired with the Phelps County assessor in 1997, he got a letter indicating that what his father had filed was “not a legal conveyance of land.”
Mark McCloskey would not let real estate slip through his fingers again.
In a May 2019 deposition in his ongoing lawsuit against Portland Place trustees, he explained how he and his wife came to own their home: through a lawsuit.
The couple met when they were at Southern Methodist University law school. After graduating in 1985, his first job was with a law firm in Dallas. They moved back to St. Louis in 1986. He got a job at Thompson Mitchell, now known as Thompson Coburn. He testified his mother obtained his childhood home in Country Life Acres in the divorce. He and his wife acquired it from her when she couldn’t afford to take care of it.
“When we first moved up to town, I drove Pattie through Portland and Westmoreland, and I said, ‘You know, any time you’d like to, we can flip the country house out at Country Life Acres and buy a big townhouse here,’” he testified. “And she said, ‘OK, let’s do it now.’”
Mark McCloskey said his tax lawyer at the Lewis Rice law firm told him One Portland Place had just been sold. “I said, ‘I don’t think it’s been sold. I would have heard about it.’”
The mansion had fallen into disrepair. The prior owner had heated it by using 48 kerosene heaters, according to a 2018 St. Louis Magazine feature that profiled the McCloskeys’ long and expensive restoration.
McCloskey testified they bid on the house and signed a deal that would give them “right of last look” at any other contracts. He got a call indicating they could buy the house if they got the cash together by the next morning, but then found out Lewis Rice had arranged to sell it to someone else.
“I get to my office at about 4 o’clock in the morning. Pattie and I draft a lawsuit and file it when the courthouse opens, the (temporary restraining order) to prevent the sale. We set up a table at wherever Lewis and Rice was in those days and served every partner on the way in and served the president of Boatmen’s Bank when he went to work the next day.” They ended up settling with the other buyer for an undisclosed amount and bought One Portland Place for $595,000, according to city property records.
The afternoon he sued Lewis Rice, he said, he got called into the managing partner’s office at Thompson Mitchell. The partners were not happy he had sued Lewis Rice.
“He said, ‘We’re going to ask for your resignation,’” McCloskey recalled.
He filed a lawsuit against Thompson Mitchell for wrongful termination. One of the partners was Thomas Eagleton, a Democrat who had just returned to St. Louis after three terms in the U.S. Senate.
“I figured I’d sue him first,” McCloskey testified. “I thought it would be fun.”
But he said the courts “didn’t think much” of his claim. He dismissed the suit against Thompson Mitchell in 1990. A judge dismissed the Lewis Rice suit the following year for lack of prosecution.
The couple’s possession of their mansion was “a fun story,” he testified. “I tell it frequently, usually with … a little more detail and more humor.”
Family struggle
Mark McCloskey’s relationship with his family deteriorated. He would claim years later that his father, starting in 1989, “became obsessed” with the idea that his son had become wealthy by “swindling” the assets his mother got in the divorce. He says the idea was put there by his sister, Patricia Richards, of Virginia. In 1994, Mark McCloskey wrote a letter to his father about his “niggardly attitude” toward the 5 acres in Phelps County he had promised in the birthday card.
“The property is essentially worthless, it just struck me as bizarre that you would deny the existence of such a gift …,” he wrote. “I spent several months of my life living out of a tent and building a log cabin there.”
Mark McCloskey wrote a letter to his father about the five acres in Phelps County he had promised in 1976. The letter, written in 1994, became part of a subsequent court record. His father largely wrote him out of the will in 2008, sparking a family feud that would last eight years.
In March 2013, in Phelps County, Mark McCloskey sued his father and his father’s trust over the gift. The birthday card and earth, he claimed, were sufficient title because they met the legal definition of “livery of seisin,” a ceremony performed in medieval England for the conveyance of land.
In 2016, a special judge ruled against him, writing that “Exhibit 1 attached to the petition is a birthday card, not a deed” and that it was too late to claim ownership of part of the farm. The archaic legal claim, the judge ruled “does not operate as a matter of law to transfer title to real property.”
Mark McCloskey filed a defamation case against his father and sister in 2011, dismissed it in 2012, and refiled it in 2013. By the time of the final filing, Bruce McCloskey was living in a memory care unit in Ballwin; he died in 2014.
Mark McCloskey said his sister had spread rumors that he had held their mother hostage on Portland Place, denied her medical care, made her sleep on an iron cot soaked in urine, and plied her with alcohol until she died. He also said she claimed he was connected to organized crime, had tried to arrange for a contract killing of his sister, and had stolen 42 pounds of gold from his father.
He claimed his elderly father believed these things because he had lost his faculties, and repeated the falsehoods in public, damaging his reputation. He claimed the will was based on “insane delusions” and his sister’s undue influence.
Patricia Richards declined to comment.
He made similar allegations against his father’s longtime caretaker in a separate defamation suit, which he later dismissed.
Weeks after Bruce McCloskey’s death, Patricia McCloskey sent a letter to the law firm handling his estate stating that any attempt to distribute the inheritance would likely be challenged in court.
Mark McCloskey dismissed the defamation case, but he sued his sister and his two brothers and their father’s trust again in 2016, accusing all of them of “tortious interference” for pressing their father to cut him out of an inheritance.
The siblings settled with their father’s trust paying Mark McCloskey $400,000, with all of them agreeing to drop all claims and never have contact with Mark McCloskey again.
Trouble on Portland The lawsuit between the McCloskeys and the Portland trustees was the latest flare-up in a fight that has been going on almost since they moved in.
In 2002, the Portland Place Association sued to foreclose on the McCloskeys’ house because they were refusing to pay dues. Mark McCloskey would later say in a deposition that he and his wife had refused because the trustees “weren’t doing something, which was their obligation under the Trust Agreement.”
The lawyer questioning him asked: Was it possible the issue was the trustees were allowing a gay couple to live there?
Mark McCloskey said he didn’t know. “I know there has been an ongoing issue about the definition of single family in Missouri law, and that the (agreement) calling for exclusively single family residences wouldn’t allow, technically, unmarried heterosexual people to live on Portland Place. … I know that certain people on Portland Place, for political purposes, wanted to make it a gay issue.”
While taking a deposition of Portland Place trustee Daniel Ladenberger on Jan. 17, 2019, Mark McCloskey insisted it wasn’t up to trustees to decide what rules to enforce. Rules can’t be changed without 75% of the voters approving, he said.
“Do you recognize that part of the duty of a trustee is to protect the rights of the minority; to enforce the trust agreement even if a majority but less than 75% of the people would like to do away with those provisions … even if it’s only 26% of the people who wish to have a provision enforced?” After the McCloskeys bought their home on Portland Place, they built a 10-foot wall closing it off from Kingshighway, replacing a wall that would have allowed people to come through. In 2004, Dolgin wrote the McCloskeys a letter noting it had come to the trustees’ attention that the McCloskeys had hired a contractor to do tuck pointing on the wall.
“No individual resident is authorized to do work on Portland Place property without the permission of the trustees,” Dolgin wrote.
Mark McCloskey responded that he would no more ask permission to perform work on the wall than he would on his house. “Before you glibly throw around such statements in the future, produce some authority to verify it or be prepared to spend Portland Place Association money in defending a suit for slander of title. This isn’t a game, and we aren’t children.”
Watkins, the lawyer representing the couple, is a friend of theirs and former neighbor who sued the Portland Place trustees in 2010 with a claim that he had tried to get them to take down a sick oak tree which later fell and damaged his property. Watkins lost and was ordered to pay the trustees court costs of $52,000.
A rocky road The McCloskeys own a large property in Franklin County and have had conflicts with neighbors who access their homes by a gravel road cutting across the McCloskeys’ acreage. In 2013, Mark McCloskey saw a gravel truck on the road preparing to “grade and ditch” the road, and the couple, without notice to their neighbors, sought and obtained a temporary restraining order against them in Franklin County circuit court.
One of the defendants produced records of an easement indicating they could use the road. A legal battle dragged on for nearly two years, with one of the neighbors racking up $70,000 in legal bills and $9,000 in surveying costs.
That neighbor asked for sanctions against the McCloskeys for “committing a fraud” with their claim. The case settled with all parties paying their own costs.
In 2019, the McCloskeys sued another neighbor with a squatter’s rights claim to 0.41 acres that were fenced off incorrectly and had been maintained by McCloskey and previous owners even though they did not have a legal title to it.
“The Parcel has been continuously possessed by the Plaintiffs and their predecessors in title for a period far in excess of 10 years and such possession has been, in fact, hostile, actual, open and notorious, exclusive, and continuous,” the McCloskeys claimed. The suit is pending.
The McCloskeys also evicted two tenants from a modular home on their property in a period of just over two years. The first, a single woman with three children and her boyfriend, had lived there six months in January 2018 when the McCloskeys filed for eviction, claiming one rent check had bounced. The woman moved out and did not appear in court, and the McCloskeys got a $6,247 default judgment against the couple, which included attorneys fees and rent for the remaining months of the lease.
In an interview with the Post-Dispatch, the tenant denied she had missed a rent payment. She said she had showed up in court for the eviction hearing and that Mark McCloskey told her she had no chance of winning, so she left. She said she had no idea she owed them that much.
The second tenant signed a lease for $950 per month last November, and failed to pay rent in April and May. The McCloskeys filed an eviction suit on May 12 and Mark McCloskey filed an affidavit stating that he was not barred by federal law from evicting someone during the COVID-19 pandemic because the unit was not part of a federal housing rental program.
The tenant did not appear in court. A judge gave her until July 1 to clear out, and the McCloskeys got an $8,299 judgment against her for attorneys fees and the remainder of the lease.
A ruined life While that tenant was clearing out, the McCloskeys had their encounter with protesters. “My life has been ruined,” Mark McCloskey told CNN host Chris Cuomo two days later, as he defended his actions.
On June 28, about 200 protesters filled the Maryland-Kingshighway intersection, chanting, “This is what community looks like … this is what democracy looks like.”
The group moved south to Lindell Boulevard and filled the intersection for several more minutes. “If we don’t get it, shut it down!” The protest moved north on Kingshighway again. At Portland Place, protester Derk Brown’s live feed shows he is one of the first protesters to pass through the iron gate held open by protester Tory Russell.
Although the McCloskeys have displayed photos of a crumpled gate as evidence the protesters broke it down, the feed shows the gate is intact. It was not clear when it was damaged.
The first few protesters who enter the private neighborhood swerve away from the McCloskey house to walk in the street.
Immediately, Brown’s feed captures Mark McCloskey under a massive portico on the east side of his mansion. “Hey!” he can be heard shouting. “Private neighborhood! Get the hell out of my neighborhood!”
None of the protesters are on his property — even the disputed triangle.
Brown zooms in on McCloskey, who is wearing a pink Brooks Brothers polo shirt, and narrates: “Y’all see? On my live feed … he got his rifle.”
Mark McCloskey shouts, “Get out! Get out! Get out! Private property!”
A chant builds: “Whose streets? Our streets!”
Moments later, Patricia McCloskey can be seen in her front yard in her bare feet with a silver handgun, waving it at the protesters. “We’re gonna move, calm down!” someone yells.
“Put that gun away,” someone else yells.
She comes closer to Brown, pointing the gun left and right. “Go!” she yells. “Go!”
One of the protesters yells, “We got kids in here! We got children!”
A chant builds: “Eat the rich!” She keeps pointing the gun.
“Why are you threatening?” someone asks.
“You need to calm down!” someone else says.
“Put your goddamn gun down!” someone yells.
“You’re a coward, bitch!” a woman yells.
“Nobody wants to hurt you,” another woman yells.
About 13 minutes go by with the McCloskeys on their front lawn in bare feet and protesters mocking them or asking them why they are threatening them with weapons.
The protest moves on to its destination: Mayor Lyda Krewson’s house.
Patricia McCloskey would later tell Fox News host Sean Hannity that protesters said “they were going to kill us … going to burn down the house, that they were going to be living in our house after I was dead. They pointed to different rooms and said that’s gonna be my bedroom, that’s gonna to be the living room and I’m gonna be taking a shower in that room ….”
Mark McCloskey said the flyer for the “riot” suggested that in addition to marching to Krewson’s house, marchers were planning “a special surprise — something extra.”
“That something extra was us,” Mark McCloskey said.
没错，同意。
在美国，特别是今年，就不要来讨论中国的中庸之道了。那是在中国，大家经历、诉求都差不多的情况下，中庸有时候是最好的选择。在美国，你稍微稍微读下新闻，我是指美国新闻，tv和twitter，不是微信上的那种，你就会发现blm，猪党得寸进尺，如果你这个时候中庸，只能把你自己的底裤都输掉。
如果还没想明白，看看加州最近的动态。中庸在这种情况下，还不如直接跪，直接去舔。为啥？因为现在不发声音的全部被当作racist，这个可不是我说的，因为这个就是blm的观点！！！！
是呀。
这篇文章有点意思。
首先，一个人如果不讨人喜欢，愿意和邻居有争执，不nice，难道就不能用2nd amendment保护自己了么？floyd还是罪犯，现在不照样被当作英雄么？
其次，这篇文档就充分暴露了这些所谓媒体的嘴脸，和自己价值观不一样，你不服从我，我就抹黑你？这个想谁？ccp呀！！！只不过还没有ccp的手段，不能让你嫖娼，不能跨省你。
最后，让这些媒体和猪党都去死吧！！！以前玩这些，可能大家还会信。今年再玩这些就只能让大家看看你能多low。
就是想让美国成为shithole呗
是啊！在🐷党的加州，看看 Fremont华裔女 市长，人革命小将直接上门写 Asians silent is violence. 还沉默呢，做人的权利都快被主党的打手 blm 剥夺了！
华人的中庸和奴性就是培养 CCP 和加州民主党的沃土！
我觉得他们算出柜的吧。他2016捐款trump所以今年也不是incremental votes.但是出柜的结果就是有些swing voters会让他们或者他们的例子说服。
好贴顶一下，说得好！
他肯定不是妹妹。专业的吧。我也早屏蔽了他。
这裹脚布一样又臭又长的长篇大论说这夫妇以前怎样，和这次他们合理defend自己的property然后被左派疯狂bully的事实有任何关系吗？
NYC 那个警察头子不是跪了都被打得头破血流嘛。
either 没有脑 or 屁股坐歪
拜登是喷了巧克力香味的大便
换了你， 你挑哪样啊？
你没看懂我的意思。正是因为华人以前没有两边下注，大部分一直稳定投的主党，所以主党take us for granted而和党根本懒得来争取华裔乃至亚裔，所以主党拼命搞AA而和党鼓吹Chinese Virus。如果都持独立派立场，让两党都感觉争取华人有希望，那才能最大化华人利益。这也意味着如果这次大选有20%到30%原本投主党的华人转投和党，华人处境反而会有改善。所以谁要投川普，我绝对不拦着，虽然我不喜欢他。当然，更理想的情况是绝大部分华人作为一个整体根据两党政策投票，每次大选哪个党对华人好就集体转向哪个党，可惜这需要华人有很好的组织，而现在华人一盘散沙，根本做不到。
哈哈，因为这文章是当地报纸一群犹太记者挖出来的呀。
这个比喻太赞了。我以前就形容过什么东西是镀了金的狗屎。
同感。希望大选过后这些带任务的会少些
Frederick Douglass多年就说过，越容易被鞭打的人就会受到更多的鞭打。
说的真好，赞
好。。法轮功的文风啊。。。几千万人退党之类。同一个文宣写出来的吗？
我周围也知道一个类似的人，老民主党了，但今年要支持川普