Little Victory - One the

Little Victory - One the most sordid of the cockroaches behind the abandoned fridge in America's basement is the so-called "Children of the Underground" - a group based in Georgia that helps women who've lost custody cases to abduct their children and flee the country. They do this by smearing the other parent (almost invariably the father) with trumped up accusations of child abuse. These charges are invariably false - but since such cases are in effect considered "guilty until proven innocent", the fathers involved generally spend all of their money and energy fighting the spurious allegations, and have nothing left with which to try to find their children, who disappear into a well-financed worldwide network of safe houses and covers.

This organization was featured in a 1998 episode of Dateline NBC - including footage of a woman, Bonnie Rubenstein, who had kidnapped her son after losing a custody case (because she was a demonstrable nutbar).

Good news from this vicious little front - the boy has been recovered, and the "mother" arrested, in Florida. The father was quite a wealthy guy - he spent over a quarter-million in lawyer's fees, to say nothing of investigators.

He still has enough money left to sue the group's organizer, Faye Yager.

More as events warrant.