LA Weekly, CA
Oct 10 2013
How a Brother and Sister Took L.A.’s Russian Immigrant Community on a Wild Ride
By Joseph Tsidulko Thursday, Oct 10 2013
On a quiet, sycamore-lined street in Reseda in the sprawling San
Fernando Valley, Shura Rafaelov, a 65-year-old immigrant from the
former Soviet republic of Uzbekistan, runs a small day care in her
home. Rafaelov’s house bustles with the pleasant clamor of a dozen
children of Russian heritage, from infants rocking in cribs to
5-year-olds jumping on play sets under the shade of a towering fig.
Rafaelov, slight of build and olive-skinned, is warm, soft-spoken and
exceedingly gentle. She beams as she describes how she cares for and
educates those kids.
But her cheery tone evaporates when she recounts certain events of the
past five years. In December 2004, Rafaelov placed ads in some
Russian-language newspapers promoting her services or, as she says,
“looking for children.” Soon after, she got a call from a
desperate-sounding woman seeking work.
Rafaelov didn’t need anyone, and besides, the state strictly regulates
day care employees. But there was something about the timbre of the
woman’s voice, the urgency of her plea for work ‘ any kind of work ‘
that invoked Rafaelov’s sympathy.
An educated woman who was a pharmacist in Uzbekistan, Rafaelov knows
the struggles of a new immigrant with poor language skills and an
underappreciated professional background. She told the woman, Zina,
she could come over and help clean her house.
Just before Christmas, a tall and unkempt woman in her late 40s
arrived at the gate of Rafaelov Day Care. For seven hours, Rafaelov
and Zina dusted, mopped floors, did laundry and put away toys, books,
musical instruments and booster seats. While Rafaelov prepared lunch,
Zina mostly sipped tea and spoke of living with her brother in squalid
conditions, sleeping on the floor because they could not afford a
mattress.
She had to ride the bus everywhere. Her legs hurt.
“I felt sorry for her,” Rafaelov says. “How was I supposed to know who
or what she was?”
Rafaelov paid the woman $60. She felt good that she’d helped a fellow immigrant.
That seemingly innocuous interaction, nearly a decade ago, launched a
legal saga that has consumed Rafaelov, caused her untold grief and
strained the financial resources of her modest business. When she
recalls the details now, her breathing grows labored.
Almost four years after that December day, Rafaelov was home alone
when her doorbell rang. A man and a woman were at her gate, each
carrying a suitcase. The woman asked Rafaelov if she remembered her.
At first, she did not. It was Zina. Zina told Rafaelov they wanted to
move into her house.
Rafaelov was taken aback but thought that it might be some dire
emergency. She asked how long they might need to stay; Zina answered
along the lines of, “It will be as long as it will be.”
But Rafaelov did not know the tall man, and beyond that, everyone who
lives in her home must be fingerprinted by authorities, because of the
day care business. Rafaelov told Zina she didn’t have the room; Zina
coolly replied she knew the house was plenty big. Rafaelov started to
shut the gate, but the stranger put his foot against the jamb, a
menacing action.
“If you are going to be a hooligan, then I am going to call the
police,” Rafaelov says she warned them. At this, Zina launched a
barrage of threats and anti-Semitic slurs, Rafaelov tells L.A. Weekly.
Zina finished her rant by calling the kindly grandmother of six a
“prostitutka.”
When they left, Zina promised Rafaelov she wouldn’t forget her a second time.
But Rafaelov largely did forget. Some two years later, when she
received a short letter in August 2010 from a “Zina Dolenko”
requesting “a copy of the records pertaining to my work in the
Rafaelov’s Day Care,” she ignored it ‘ as far as she knew, she says,
she’d had no such employee. A few months later, Rafaelov received a
complaint filed by Zina Dolenko with the California Labor
Commissioner.
It accused her of serious wage violations against her one-day cleaning lady.
When Rafaelov visited the California Department of Industrial
Relations’ drab Division of Labor Standards Enforcement office on Van
Nuys Boulevard, an official advised her to talk to Zina Dolenko ‘ the
“plaintiff” ‘ and attempt to informally resolve things to avoid a
hearing. Sitting with Zina in a conference room, she says the woman
recounted her work for Rafaelov ‘ with curious discrepancies.
Dolenko, she says, claimed she’d spent two days cleaning, and each day
worked nine and a half hours ‘ above the legal limit at which overtime
kicks in. Rafaelov says Dolenko also alleged she’d worked for her in
December of 2008, not 2004, freshening her claim by four years,
putting it within California’s statute of limitations.
Watching this unscrupulous woman at work, Rafaelov thought she
probably shouldn’t be surprised if Zina Dolenko demanded a couple
hundred dollars.
Dolenko claimed $8 in regular wages, $36 in overtime, a stiff
statutory $750 penalty against Rafaelov for ignoring the request to
provide records to an “employee,” costly waiting-time penalties for
deficiencies in Zina’s “final paycheck” ‘ and two years of interest on
all of that.
Zina wanted $3,500 to drop her case.
“I couldn’t believe it!” Rafaelov says today, defiantly. “I said, ‘I
won’t give you 3 ½ cents!’?”
A few weeks later, Rafaelov got a call from Igor Zadov, owner of Dvin
Market, a small Russian deli on Sherman Way. Zadov asked his longtime
customer an unexpected question: “What’s your last name?”
She told him it was Rafaelov, and he asked: “Are you also having a
problem with Zina?” Zadov had seen the name “Shura Rafaelov” on a
docket at the Van Nuys Boulevard state labor office and thought it
might be his customer.
Back in 2007, Zadov tells L.A. Weekly, he had hired Zina through an ad
in the L.A.-based Russian newspaper Kurier; she’d mostly sold salads
and deli meats behind his counter. She was a terrible employee, Zadov
says, often late or a no-show, usually rude to customers, and lasted
only two months.
Three years later, Zadov got a letter from Zina Dolenko requesting her
employment records. He says he only vaguely remembered employing her,
and like Rafaelov, he ignored the letter ‘ it didn’t seem official, he
says, and admits his bookkeeping was shoddy then. He, too, soon
received a complaint filed by Zina Dolenko with the Labor
Commissioner. It accused him of a slew of violations, including unpaid
overtime and failure to pay minimum wage.
So Zadov dug from his files a copy of a California driver’s license
identifying his former employee as Zina “Doljenko.” Whether Doljenko
or Dolenko, he tells the Weekly, she was skewing the dates, saying she
worked at Dvin in 2009 ‘ but it had been 2007.
Rafaelov and Zadov shared their troubles with many in the
Russian-speaking network in the Valley and Los Angeles. They learned
they had a lot of company.
Rafaelov heard from the owner of Barin, a Tarzana Russian-cuisine
restaurant that features a dance show, who’d paid Zina rather than
fight a costly and unpleasant battle. So had a West Hollywood tailor
specializing in bridal alterations, Luba’s Tailoring. But the owner of
popular Stolichnaya Bakery in West Hollywood and Bazaar Market in
Tarzana, they learned, had decided to fight Zina ‘ who used her third,
and most common, last-name variant, “Dolzhenko,” to accuse them of
wage violations, according to documents obtained by the Weekly.
In time, these hardworking immigrants would learn more about Zina
Dolenko/Doljenko/Dolzhenko and the tall man who accompanied her to
hearings at the labor office and frightened Shura Rafaelov by sticking
his foot in her doorjamb years earlier. He turned out to be Zina’s
explosive younger brother, Gennady. And his own penchant for suing
mom-and-pop businesses founded by Russian immigrants eclipsed that of
his sister.
The Dolzhenkos are shrouded in mystery. Former employers and opposing
counsel offer hard-to-believe anecdotes about them, and bits of
biographical data are scattered through case files shelved in clerks’
offices where they have sued people in Burbank, Glendale, downtown,
Van Nuys, Chatsworth, West Los Angeles and Santa Monica.
Those bits reveal that Gennady was born, educated and worked in
Kyrgyzstan before arriving here in June 2004 ‘ a lucky winner of the
limited U.S. “diversity immigrant visa,” or green card lottery,
randomly awarded each year. Only about 200 were chosen from Kyrgyzstan
the year Gennady got a spot.
Gennady Dolzhenko appears to have filed his first American lawsuit in
2005, when as a renter in Van Nuys he claimed housing code violations
against Bluebird Investments, which managed the property from which he
was evicted. Gennady sued and Bluebird settled; thus an American
career was born. (Gennady and Zina Dolzhenko did not respond to
several email requests for comment from L.A. Weekly, sent to addresses
they gave the courts.)
About two weeks after suing Bluebird, and a year after he failed his
driving test at the Department of Motor Vehicles in Winnetka, Gennady
boldly sued the DMV.
Letters he and Zina wrote to high-ranking DMV officials blamed the
agency for causing Gennady to “lead a miserable life without a car”
and preventing him from getting a job.
The DMV drolly advised Dolzhenko to simply retake the test. He argued
that the examiner who tested him “was not emotionally steady.” Gennady
wrote: “The score sheet looks disgusting because of an examiner’s
dirty and sloppy marks.”
Gennady failed to shake an eye-popping $25,000 in damages from the state.
Four years later he sued Fry’s Electronics in Burbank for failing to
stock a television converter box the store advertised online, causing
him, he claimed in court documents, to be “deprived of television
entertainment for almost two years.”
But mostly, the Weekly has found, in hundreds of pages of court and
state Labor Commissioner documents, Gennady sues small
electronic-repair shops whose Russian and Armenian owners hire him as
an act of kindness toward a Russian-speaker desperate for work. Using
the L.A. County Superior Court as his unwitting abettor and hamstrung
state officials as witnesses, he taps a fear harbored by those who
once lived in the Communist bloc ‘ that of being falsely accused
before government authorities ‘ to try to squeeze money from them.
Court records and witness interviews reveal that Zina finds her
brother jobs, drafts and serves his legal documents, and advocates as
his court-approved Russian interpreter.
With Zina’s aid, Gennady Dolzhenko has filed nearly 30 legal actions,
including appeals and petitions for writs. She has pursued at least
nine claims of her own.
“They picked a great state in which to do it,” says Kimberly Stone,
president of the Civil Justice Association of California, a Sacramento
group that lobbies for judicial reform. The Dolzhenkos’ lawsuits,
Stone says, are a case study illustrating why California is ranked the
nation’s No. 1 “Judicial Hellhole” ‘ an ignominious designation by the
American Tort Reform Association, which compares the fairness of the
50 states’ civil justice systems.
Business owners like Rafaelov and Zadov, who refuse to pay to settle
the siblings’ allegations of employment wrongdoing, must fight two
savvy litigants who can disrupt their businesses and lives for years.
The Dolzhenkos incur no serious costs. They always appear pro per ‘
acting as their own attorneys ‘ and claim financial hardship to get
their filing fees waived by judges who are unaware of their history.
Stone, whose group successfully backed AB 2274 to strengthen
California’s vexatious-litigant law, explains that because L.A.
Superior Court judges, according to records, waived the $435 court
filing fee in all of Gennady Dolzhenko’s cases, taxpayers effectively
subsidized his abuse of the system. The system “basically encourages
litigation and makes it difficult for defendants who are in the right
to extricate themselves,” Stone says.
Zina’s prolific legal writing is characterized by jargon, gibberish
and repetitive citations of case law and statutes, infused with
personal attacks: “Defendant Rafaelov demonstrates her despicable
nature providing fraudulent statements with the purpose to defame
plaintiff and to ruin plaintiff’s reputation,” one declaration reads.
According to several of their Russian-speaking targets interviewed by
the Weekly, they are masters at creating acrimonious, hostile ordeals.
Their eight-year litigation history is marked by repeated outbursts in
court, troubling threats against business owners and their lawyers ‘
even courtroom tirades against judges and court personnel, which are
repeatedly forgiven by Los Angeles judges.
At the Van Nuys courthouse, bailiffs have walked Gennady Dolzhenko out
of a courtroom about half a dozen times because of his standout
belligerence toward court clerks and court staff, according to
Sheriff’s Lt. Ken Talianko, who runs security there.
The pair might have continued this way indefinitely if Gennady hadn’t
sued the Armenian owner of a well-established audio, video and medical
devices repair shop in Montebello.
Eric Boyajian, founder of Digitron Electronics, got a call in 2010
from a friend who said a Russian-speaking brother and sister were in
his office ‘ desperate for work. In a cross-complaint Boyajian filed
much later against Dolzhenko, which was obtained by the Weekly,
Boyajian noted that he didn’t need another worker but felt a kinship
and decided to hire Gennady.
Boyajian stated, “He was going through a rough time in his life and
claimed that he was about to be evicted from the hotel he was staying
in if he didn’t earn some money.”
Boyajian was sad to see an engineer “in an apparently desperate
situation,” having faced something similar when he arrived here in the
1980s with an engineering degree.
But Dolzhenko immediately proved “surprisingly incompetent,” damaging
expensive electronic-testing equipment he claimed he knew how to use,
Boyajian wrote.
Yet the Montebello shop owner afforded him second and third chances.
Gennady boasted an engineering degree from a respected Soviet
technical university in Kyrgyzstan but never produced a diploma. When
he was repeatedly late due to “bus delays,” Boyajian arranged a
carpool for him. When Dolzhenko said “he and his sister were homeless
and sleeping in the airport,” Boyajian loaned him $500 rent money.
The documents show that Boyajian finally accepted that Dolzhenko was
trouble and fired him. In 2011, Dolzhenko sued, accusing Boyajian of
inflicting severe emotional distress by firing him to avoid paying
$146 in wages. Dolzhenko’s demand: $170,896 in damages.
The hefty lawsuit would become a turning point.
Repair-store owner Eric Boyajian knew a lawyer he could really trust:
his son, James. (Both Boyajians have refused to comment on their
case.)
James Boyajian, fresh out of Indiana University Law School, went all
out for his dad. The newly minted attorney exhaustively researched
Dolzhenko’s voluminous legal history and alerted the judge hearing the
suit to other cases Gennady had filed under various aliases.
“For seven years and counting, he has attacked generous people, job
creators, lawyers and judges with endless lawsuits, labor actions,
writs of mandate and appeals,” James Boyajian wrote to L.A. Superior
Court Judge James Dunn in asking Dunn to place an unusual restriction
‘ that of “vexatious litigant” ‘ on Dolzhenko’s ability to sue, thus
“putting an end to this madness.”
It’s hard to count the lawsuits the brother and sister have filed, or
the money they have reaped, because of their tactic of misspelling
their foreign names and the number of complaints that their targets
agreed to settle before being sued. But through documents and
interviews, the Weekly found that Zina followed a parallel track to
her brother’s, targeting mostly delis, bakeries and tailor shops.
In April 2006, Zina tried for a seamstress job advertised in Panorama,
an indispensable weekly for many in L.A.’s Russian community. Luba
Levina, owner of Luba’s Tailoring, stated later in a declaration to
the Labor Commissioner’s office, written in support of Shura
Rafaelov’s upcoming hearing and obtained by the Weekly, that she
administered a sewing test and then, as a favor, drove Zina home. She
did not, however, hire Zina.
Levina, who couldn’t be reached for this story, wrote in her
declaration, “She went thru [sic] the roof and started cursing me with
profanities, used anti-Semitic slurs and threatened to destroy my
business by calling my clients.”
Zina later appeared with a large man at Luba’s Tailoring, demanding
money and threatening reprisals, Levina wrote. Then, “My main client
called and informed me that somebody called Zina called him and put a
lot of dirt on me and my business.”
When she received a complaint filed by Zina with the Labor
Commissioner, “I paid [her] requested amount because I did not want to
lose my business,” Levina said.
Golden Key, a Russian deli in Van Nuys, hired Zina in January 2007 as
a clerk, firing her a week later. In May of that year, Zina worked six
days in Bazaar Market in Tarzana and was soon fired. International
Market and Deli in Encino brought her aboard in November 2009; she
lasted only a few days.
They all eventually heard from Zina in the form of a complaint from
the California Labor Commissioner’s office ‘ as did the owner of
Stolichnaya Bakery, Anatoly Rekechenetsky, who opened his bustling,
widely known bakery 17 years ago in the heart of West Hollywood.
Tucked beside Whole Foods in a strip mall at the corner of Santa
Monica Boulevard and Fairfax, Stolichnaya is a go-to spot for
traditional Eastern European pastries or a warm loaf of Russian rye.
Zina, who worked there briefly, targeted him using the name Zina
Dolzhenko in April 2007, first with the Labor Commissioner, then in
Superior Court. Rekechenetsky told the Weekly he decided to fight
back.
He explained the vulnerability of L.A.’s Russian-speaking business
owners simply: “We don’t speak very good English and we don’t know how
this system works. But they know very well how it works,” he says of
the Dolzhenkos.
The vast California Department of Industrial Relations, it seems,
could do nothing more than present a forum for the abuse to continue,
legally and technically unequipped to avert what Dolzhenko was doing.
The department has no process in place to flag or prevent suspicious,
or repetitive, labor actions by a person who continually files
complaints with the Labor Commissioner’s office. There is no such
mandate under California law.
Instead, “Each case is evaluated on a case-by-case basis,” says Greg
Siggins, a spokesman for the Department of Industrial Relations. An
extraordinary number of filings doesn’t prompt an investigation.
“There is no policy in place regarding the filing of frivolous wage
claims,” he says.
With the state of California lacking the tools to notice or prevent
abuse, Russian immigrant Mark Volper started to figure it out on his
own. A Moscow native who runs California Worker Advocates, he
represented Rafaelov and Zadov at hearings and was the first to
compile Zina’s history of claims against mom-and-pop businesses.
Volper also was the first to realize that Zina continually altered her
last name, which he calls “the scam Zina and Gennady perfected and
then spread to the Superior Court.”
At one point, Volper felt he had to petition for a restraining order
against Zina’s brother. Judge Leland B. Harris denied the request.
Volper believes Zina is the brains and Gennady is the engine, capable
of bouncing back after each acrimonious case. Their combined court
winnings and settlements have not been large ‘ the Weekly calculates
perhaps no more than $20,000 between them, but it is hard to know ‘
yet the fear and grief they have spread is extensive, Volper says.
Their teamwork and aggression was on display in 2006, when Gennady
Dolzhenko tangled with Valley Temps after he scored poorly on tests
for a position as a factory assembler. Valley Temps closed his file
after he sent “rude, condescending and threatening” communications,
according to court documents.
Gennady then sued Valley Temps for “national origin discrimination.”
As the case heated up, Zina Dolzhenko suddenly appeared at the
downtown offices of Squire Sanders, one of the world’s largest law
firms. Thomas T. Liu, an attorney handling the Valley Temps case, says
Zina snuck past building security, made it to the firm’s 31st-floor
offices, and demanded to see him. “She refused to leave and created a
ruckus,” Liu says. Security escorted Zina out.
Attorney Martin Trupiano, who later represented the temp agency, tells
the Weekly, “They never argue substantive issues ‘ it’s just always
procedural or just ad hominem attacks. They know some companies will
pay a nuisance amount to make them go away.”
He’s still fighting to collect attorney fees awarded by Judge Richard
Adler in Van Nuys.
Five years after that case, in June 2011, Gennady sued Studio Lodge
Hotel on Vanowen Street in North Hollywood, where he lived during the
summer of 2010. For that case, he transposed an “l” and an “h” to come
up with the name “Dolhzenko.” His 88-page complaint accused the hotel
proprietors of wrongful eviction and not refunding a key deposit,
among other things.
Stephen Flaherty, who represented Studio Lodge, tells the Weekly: “He
was told at the outset that it’s not an apartment, he had to move out
at the end of 28 days. When it came time to leave, he refused.”
Dolzhenko was forcibly evicted but returned the next day and reclaimed
the same room, which he vandalized.
Flaherty became the target of the siblings’ wrath. “Defendant’s
75-year-old attorney Flaherty demonstrates his despicable nature,”
reads one motion challenging Studio Lodge’s account. Flaherty “does
not remember what he had for breakfast a couple of hours ago.”
No attorney has ever managed to depose the evasive Dolzhenko under
oath, but Flaherty thought he might be the first. Cornered by a legal
order, Gennady reported to a deposition room but “immediately started
a fight with the translator,” Flaherty says. Then, claiming that the
stenographer’s recording device violated his rights, Gennady angrily
stormed out, Flaherty says.
Vagan Arutyunyan, an Armenian who owns Stone Electronics, a small
repair shop sitting on a busy corner of Beverly Boulevard on the edge
of the Fairfax District, knew none of this when he met Gennady in
2010. Zina had called Arutyunyan’s shop, saying her brother was a
skilled electronics repairman in need of a job.
Arutyunyan wasn’t hiring but gave Gennady, a fellow immigrant, a
chance. After Gennady broke several expensive pieces of equipment, the
repair shop owner gave him $300 and sent him on his way.
A week later, Arutyunyan returned from vacation to find Gennady
outside his shop, and they argued. “He told me, ‘You’ll see what I can
do to you,’?” Arutyunyan tells the Weekly.
Gennady filed a $40,000 lawsuit against him, which Arutyunyan’s
attorney, Rosie Barmakszian, got dismissed ‘ but under harrowing
conditions.
During court appearances, Barmakszian tells the Weekly, she asked
security officers for an escort to her car because Zina attempted to
stage physical confrontations with her. Among other things, Zina would
stand behind the courtroom doors, then claim she was struck when the
lawyer went through, Barmakszian says.
Arutyunyan, who fought the siblings for more than a year, says he
thinks about Zina and Gennady every time he lights up.
“I had finally quit smoking. This guy made me start again,” he says, a
pack of American Spirits in hand. “Shouldn’t this be illegal?”
Some Russian-speaking business owners who fled the injustices of
Eastern Europe agree they are easy targets ‘ they struggle with
English, don’t understand their legal protections and sometimes ignore
mail they don’t understand.
“They try to screw us because we don’t take these things seriously.
Our mentality is different,” Rekechenetsky, of Stolichnaya Bakery,
says of himself and his peers.
In exploiting this attitude, Zina and Gennady follow a pattern:
repeated attempts to re-litigate already rendered decisions, motions
intended to delay proceedings and multiple, meritless lawsuits ‘
elements of what California calls a “vexatious litigant.” A person can
be designated a vexatious litigant, though this is rare, to stop
malicious lawsuits and spare innocent, often little-guy, victims.
James Boyajian argued before Judge Dunn last year, on his father’s
behalf, that those were the hallmarks of Gennady
Dol – zhenko/Dolshenko/Dolhzenko’s many cases.
In documents obtained by the Weekly, Gennady fought back by calling
James Boyajian a “despicable, lying and indecent specimen” and a
“loathsome and nasty person.” Zina accused him of striking her with a
stack of papers. The siblings threatened to report Boyajian to the Bar
Association, the DA and even the police.
In a six-page letter, Gennady called the attorney “shockingly
incompetent, unknowledgeable and absolutely illiterate in law.”
Beneath red capital letters that read: “THIS IS A WARNING,” Gennady
continued: “The games you play over phone demonstrate that you still
did not get out of childhood.”
But in October 2012, Dunn declared Gennady Dolzhenko a vexatious
litigant, warning Gennady that a Sheriff’s deputy would escort him out
of court if he didn’t stop arguing. Soon after, Judge Donna Goldstein,
hearing the Studio Lodge case in Burbank, made the same declaration.
The California Vexatious Litigant List has 1,600 names on it ‘ a
rogue’s gallery of outrageous, often predatory people. As a new
member, if Gennady wants to sue, he first must post a $15,000 bond.
Many of his victims say he won’t risk the cash, if he has it.
It remains to be seen if this blow to her brother’s activities will slow Zina’s.
After losing to Rafaelov Day Care in the Labor Commissioner’s office,
she sued Shura Rafaelov anew in Superior Court. During a raucous
hearing last year, Judge Elizabeth Lippitt stopped the proceedings
several times because the histrionic Zina was “extremely disruptive.”
“Plaintiff refused to follow basic rules of courtesy and courtroom
procedure by consistently interrupting the court and her witness with
leading questions,” Lippitt wrote, noting that she reprimanded Zina
for disobeying her order to stop speaking Russian to witnesses. The
Weekly has found no judge in the records who has punished Zina beyond
a simple reprimand.
Zina didn’t return after a lunch break, then appealed Lippitt’s
adverse ruling, stating, “Judge Lippitt’s face expressed hatred and
malice.” An appellate panel rejected her effort.
After three years of angst ‘ stemming from a day she did a good turn
for an immigrant like herself ‘ Rafaelov is no longer a defendant but
hasn’t found peace. Her friend, deli owner Igor Zadov, recently sold
Dvin Market. For him, Zina is still very much a part of his life, not
unlike an illness that cannot be cured. He’s due in court in January ‘
to again prove that he didn’t shirk California wage laws.
“Four years have gone by and I’m still paying lawyers for this,” Zadov
says, almost lightly, as if he’s the butt of a bad joke. “She won’t
stop. She’s made it very clear to me, she’ll never stop.”