Victim Compensation

Orange County pastor Ralph A. Wilkerson has agreed to answer questions about a former associate accused of raising more than $160 million from evangelical Christians in an elaborate international investment fraud, Wilkerson's attorney said. Wilkerson, 77, was criticized last month by a court-appointed receiver who said the pastor had failed to help recover assets that would benefit people left destitute by the alleged scam run by Gregory E. Setser, an Inland Empire-based entrepreneur.

Kenneth Feinberg, who oversaw victim compensation funds after the Virginia Tech shootings, the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and to those connected to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, is being asked to become involved in the money collected after a shooting at a movie theater in Aurora, Colo. The shooting prompted more than $5 million in donations. Feinberg, who was hired this week to deal with compensation claims stemming from the Jerry Sandusky child sex-abuse scandal at Penn State, will meet on Friday with Colorado state and charity officials to discuss a role in resolving disputes, it was reported by a variety of media outlets.

Kevin Green, a Tustin man who was wrongly convicted of raping his pregnant wife and causing the death of their unborn daughter 20 years ago, on Tuesday settled a wrongful-death lawsuit filed by his ex-wife, who continued to hold him partially responsible for the crime. The settlement brings closure to a two-decade-long legal ordeal for Green, who was set free in 1996 after authorities linked the crime to another man.

Actor John Malkovich is seeking to recover $2.3 million from an account he had with the securities firm of Bernard Madoff, who conducted the biggest Ponzi scheme in U.S. history. Irving Picard, the trustee liquidating Madoff's firm, in August approved a claim for $670,000 for the actor's pension plan and trust, more than $1.5 million short of the value of the securities in Malkovich's account listed on his November 2008 final statement, attorneys for the actor said in a filing Thursday in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in New York.

To Alvin Richards of Carmichael, Calif., the offer from Leland Industries seemed to be worth making a $6,000 investment. At the time, the Interior Department was holding monthly lotteries to award oil and gas leases on some of its land at nominal fees. Anyone could apply, and Leland was offering--for a fee--to help Richards do just that.

Manville Corp. has agreed to make additional payments of as much as $520 million over seven years to the trust set up to benefit asbestos victims. A comprehensive settlement disclosed Monday also will revamp the way claims are paid, giving priority to the most gravely ill. The plan is meant to settle about 150,000 pending claims by people injured by Manville-produced asbestos.

Two members of a Bell Gardens family who said police beat them at a Halloween costume party in 2005 have been awarded a $4.5-million civil rights judgment, their attorneys said Monday.

In a strong bipartisan signal, House Armed Services Committee members warned the Reagan Administration on Thursday that it faces stiff obstacles in selling Congress on the idea of compensating families of the victims of last month's downing of an Iranian airliner.

Traditional alliances are taking a beating in the smoking wars. Filial piety is too. Consider the latest assault on Big Tobacco--a multibillion-dollar suit against cigarette makers by the Manville Personal Injury Settlement Trust. The trust, which was spawned by the 1982 bankruptcy of asbestos giant Johns Manville Corp., compensates workers for the asbestos-related diseases that drove Manville to seek bankruptcy protection.

Since the macabre facts at a Santa Fe Springs cemetery came to light more than six years ago, the pain and anger felt by relatives and others, who thought their loved ones were in a safe resting place, has only grown with time. First, there was the outrage when it was discovered that workers at Paradise Memorial Park dug up old graves to resell the plots, sometimes stacking six or seven bodies in a single grave.

It was a stakeout gone bad, featuring jumpy police officers, human traffickers, a roughed-up federal agent, and a multimillion-dollar twist of an ending. Sergio Lopez, an undercover U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent, was tracking smugglers in October 2006 when Chula Vista police officers pulled him over. These were dangerous times in the San Diego suburb. A Mexican gang had been kidnapping residents, sometimes by posing as law enforcement officers. "What . . . are you doing speeding through my city?"

The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department agreed Friday to pay almost $1 million to a sergeant who claimed the department retaliated against him after he ran against Sheriff Lee Baca in the 2002 elections and criticized Baca's management of healthcare in county jails, a sheriff's spokesman said. The settlement was reached shortly after a federal jury found the department liable for retaliation in a lawsuit brought by Sgt. Patrick Gomez, 51. Gomez said he was passed up for promotions and targeted for an internal inquiry because he was critical of Baca in the run-up to the election, in which he and another sergeant waged campaigns against the incumbent sheriff.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday let stand a record $83-million judgment in favor of a San Diego County woman who was paralyzed when her Ford Explorer rolled over and its roof partially collapsed. The justices rejected an appeal from lawyers for Ford Motor Co., who argued that the punitive damages were unfair and unconstitutional because the design of the sport utility vehicle met all the government and industry safety standards. The jury had been told, however, that Ford could have strengthened the roof and possibly avoided such a catastrophic accident had it spent an extra $20 per vehicle.

Two men who contend PepsiCo Inc. stole their idea to sell bottled water sued the snack- and drink-maker in Wisconsin and won a $1.26-billion judgment last month after the company didn't respond. PepsiCo, which calls the accusation "dubious," says it didn't know about the lawsuit until almost a week after the court granted the award without a trial. The company wants the court to toss out the ruling, known as a default judgment, or at least give PepsiCo a chance to fight the accusation.

A last-minute rush by investors, including one who drove from Mexico to Dallas to beat the July 2 deadline, pushed the final number of claims in the Bernard L. Madoff fraud to more than 15,000, officials said Friday. They e-mailed, mailed and walked their claims to a central processing office in Dallas and the New York office of Irving Picard, the trustee appointed by the federal Bankruptcy Court to recover assets for distribution to defrauded investors.

Hundreds of Californians, many of them elderly and nearly broke, are pressing legislators for help in getting compensation for some of the money they lost in a Ponzi scheme run by confessed swindler Bernard Madoff. They're asking lawmakers to change state laws so they can get refunds of past taxes paid on income from Madoff that they might never have received. "I've been victimized once by Mr. Madoff.

An Orange County Superior Court judge ruled Wednesday that an evangelical preacher had conned an heiress out of nearly $500,000 and ordered him to repay the money plus $250,000 in punitive damages. Mel Tari, 48, of Dana Point, an evangelist and author of several Christian books, must repay Christine Kline, 41, of Denver for the small fortune she signed over to him. Kline, who had inherited Capital Printing Co.

Three years after Swiss banks became the target of a worldwide furor over their business dealings with Nazi Germany, major American car companies find themselves embroiled in a similar debate. Like the Swiss banks, the U.S. car companies have vigorously denied that they assisted the Nazi war machine or significantly profited from the use of forced labor at their German subsidiaries during World War II.

The Serbian government confirmed it has paid $900,000 in compensation to the family of an American who was badly beaten, allegedly by a Serb. Government official Slobodan Homen said the money was paid to the family of Bryan Steinhauer, 22, who was allegedly assaulted by his Serbian classmate Miladin Kovacevic during a barroom brawl in upstate New York in May and left in a coma. Kovacevic, a 22-year-old former basketball player at Binghamton University, jumped bail and fled the U.S. a month later with emergency travel documents provided by Serbian diplomats in New York.