Michael Schiavo's Lawyer: An Oddball - (author calls Felos "creepy;" "poisonous evil!")

BTTT. Follow the money...

It is hard to believe there are freepers who defend the Michael Schiavo freak show. Bobby Blake, yeah, OK. But Schiavo is a ghoul, and his lawyer makes ghouls look like Muppets.

Is Felos a Scientologist?

Felos may have schizophrenia -- voices in his head that he is unable to understand as his own thoughts.

Schizophrenia is characterized by profound disruption in cognition and emotion, affecting the most fundamental human attributes: language, thought, perception, affect, and sense of self. The array of symptoms, while wide ranging, frequently includes psychotic manifestations, such as hearing internal voices or experiencing other sensations not connected to an obvious source (hallucinations) and assigning unusual significance or meaning to normal events or holding fixed false personal beliefs (delusions). No single symptom is definitive for diagnosis; rather, the diagnosis encompasses a pattern of signs and symptoms, in conjunction with impaired occupational or social functioning.
(Source: schizophrenia.com)

Felos, as described by his own words, meets the criteria! Except "impaired occupational or social functioning" which is of course only because because of where he works and the current evil death-industry there.

Many FReepers who defend Schiavo have put their own family members to death. Their guilty consciences impel them to attempt to rationalize and justify.

But murder is murder, and that's all there is to it. Sometimes it IS just that simple.

I wonder what they can possibly like about Michael Schiavo unless they are associates or hold the same views.

A million dollars---or two---isn't sufficient to explain the relentless determination of Schiavo, Felos and Greer. There are other possibilities---and one can explore them at http://www.theempirejournal.com/

http://www.theempirejournal.com/

Thank you so much for the link, Graymatter. I've just gone to that site and the number of cogent articles is impressive. It is an excellent source for all those who would like to read more about the Schiavo case and aftermath.

Thanks again!

Char :)

I expect you are correct. When it hits close to home, priciples go out the window. Whether it is freepers defending their job feeling up grandma at the airport, or the bent cop defending property siezure, or cutting off liquids to a sick person.

You are most welcome, Charlite. :)

Felos isn't an oddball. He's a nutcase.

You know I spent so much time on this case, all the connections in the hospice, the Medicaid, the sealing of the guardian's financial records by Felos after parents brought a case against his guardianship because he got the money...he stopped all therapy, no more outside...let infections fester (ordered no antibiotics)...nada. The fact that according to two Florida statues a patient must be terminally ill(6 months or less to live), to be admitted to a hospice facility. Of course, Felos was on the board of directors...as well as Mary Lebayak (also of the Euthanasia Society of America). No record found...I was directly in the database...not even a forged or tweaked one. The facts on the 990's on campaign contributions by Felos to Judge Greer, the first one day after the ruling of Feeding Tubes as extraordinary means (which was supposed to apply to those after that date not before, as it was written). The three different accounts of how he found her and when...the money shuffed to his brother and sister in law...along with Jodi Centonze's (fiancee)insurance business. MSchiavo also was given a job at the prison by the sheriff (now retired) in the infirmary...you guessed it, friend of Greer's (also gave lots to Greer...also as an aside, whose daughter works at the police station, hence the quick warning that Jeb was on the way to the hospice to take her out). I could write all day. Empire Journal, Blogs for Terri and lots of us lost blogs, info and computers on this...and I will gladly lose the same. I posted a couple weeks ago about MSchiavo here in NY shopping his book...you shouldn't be surprised. See this is proof positive that the pro-life core doesn't kill...cause you know if there was anyone on the line-up...it was him...as soon as he prepared to take that tube out.

I still can't believe, we sat here and let this happen. Someone STARVED TO DEATH for 13 days in America...while this guy was saying she was peaceful. Whether you know it or not...you have seen evil, and evil went to 12 states as soon as Terri flatlined to get this through other states.

Time to wake up.

"Felos isn't an oddball. He's a nutcase."

You think Felos is bad? You should check out the senior partner at his firm...

I can well believe that.

I defend Michael Schiavo.

I'd like to ask what you think of Felos? I'm truly interested.

"Felos exudes a different moral odor than his client, and I wasn't the only one who noticed. He wasn't just morally wrong; he was creepy. One has the nagging feeling that he represents a more hidden and poisonous evil."

I have a sneaking suspicion many, many lawyers exude this same "moral odor".

I think he did his job.

This kind of rhetoric, describing people you disagree with as CREEPY is so beneath the Conservative movement. Almost childish. This is a serious debate this nation must embark on, name calling will not help it.

It's not that we disagree with him that's causing us to call him creepy.

It's that the guy is, well, weird and freakish and creepy.

I think he did his job.

He did. But he seems to have "issues". I wondered your opinion of some of his odd statements in his book. I've not read it but there were excerpts on Amazon for a long time. And there are some of the same excerpts in this article. I've read other stories that contained more statements. I don't think he has a firm grip on reality.

Excuse me?

So Felos is creepy to a lot of us.

Not sure why that bothers you so much.

Would you oppose me also saying Dean is nutty?

I think it's immature and says more about you than about him.

Felos, as described by his own words, meets the criteria! Except "impaired occupational or social functioning"

Felos likes to "talk" to microphones and to cameras and to comatose people.

He is an actor/director who calls all the shots, and doesn't really have to participate in the "give-and-take" of social functioning.

I'd love to be a fly-on-the-wall during "conversations" between Felos and Schiavo.

I think he did his job.

Assassins hired by the mob are only doing a "job," too.

Reminds me of the time that I found a nice rental home through a newspaper ad. A real estate agent (who was introduced to me by an acquaintance) lied to our future landlord, telling him that she had told me about his rental home and, therefore, I owed her money.

The acquaintance then told me that that the real estate agent was only doing her job. He insisted that she was providing a useful service to humanity.

I like to look at the results of people's actions...if someone is killed or ripped off, the "job" is akin to those performed by criminals.

bookmarked. A mole away from FR wants my opinion of Felos. Yeah, like I want to be the next person in court opposing the ACLU, the Atheists of Fla, the Scientologists and w/Felos personally looking into my eyes.

The newsmax article speaks for itself. Good rule of thumb is to NEVER VOTE for any politician from PINELLAS COUNTY for state or national office.

NEVER. They are imbeds for the groups named above even gop'rs.

I think it's immature and says more about you than about him.

Felos is a Scientologist - a cult member - and, for Felos, this is only just the just beginning of his perversion. He is a full-on death-cultist. If he did not find a release for his perversion in this case, he might very well be a serial rapist/killer/necrophile.

It is hardly "immature" to call out such evil. That you should think otherwise says a great deal about you.

You must be confused, perhaps you should read the title of this thread.

It's perfectly ok to use descriptive terms to describe someone.

Felos IS creepy, looks creepy, talks creepy, and acts creepy.

It's ok though, your words on the Terri threads have told us more about you than we ever wanted to know could exist in another human being.

SO tell me, what do you know about me from the Terri threads?

Your posts, at least on the Terri threads, leave a distinctly putrid smell in my nostrils.

Crisis Magazine published the entire article on Felos by Benjamin Walker.

Portrait of a Spiritual Killer: George Felos, in His Own Words

By Benjamin D. Wiker

I don’t believe I have some kind of extraordinary spiritual sense, but something alerted me the very first time I saw George Felos, the lawyer responsible for killing Terri Schiavo: Something is deeply wrong with this man. Very deep, and very wrong.

I had no such spiritual warning on the radar in viewing Michael Schiavo. He looked like the kind of man who could kill his wife. And he did. On March 31, 2005, he successfully starved and dehydrated Terri Schindler Schiavo to death. Cold-blooded murder, but entirely transparent.

Michael was one of those intensely jealous, intensely violent types. In February 1990, Terri collapsed at home when oxygen was cut off to her brain. Michael claimed she had a potassium imbalance. A neurologist later testified that she had suffered a neck injury, the kind you get when someone tries to strangle you. To this day, doctors do not agree on the real cause of her collapse. Nevertheless, Michael was able to win a big medical malpractice court settlement—$1.5 million—vowing he needed the money to care for his beloved and now-damaged wife. As soon as he got the money, he began to try to kill her by depriving her of all medical treatment and rehabilitation. He finally finished her off with the death-camp treatment: no food, no water.

Cold-blooded murder, sanctioned by the state of Florida, watched by millions. Horrible; but again, quite transparent. Michael wanted the money. His wife, Terri, had to die for him to get it. And so he hired a “right-to-die” expert, lawyer George Felos.

Felos exudes a different moral odor than his client, and I wasn’t the only one who noticed. He wasn’t just morally wrong; he was creepy. One has the nagging feeling that he represents a more hidden and poisonous evil.

His words were foul enough. The continual cheerful chanting of “death process,” “peaceful,” and “beautiful” during Terri’s final torture. The chastisement of Rev. Frank Pavone, who had the dignity and courage to describe the death of Terri with blunt accuracy: “This is a killing.” Tsk-tsk, cooed Felos. “Instead of words of reconciliation, words of healing or words of compassion, which you might expect from a spiritual person,” Felos retorted in an unctuous scold, “he used it [i.e., press coverage] to drive his ideological agenda.”

But this was only the bubbling up of something fouler still. His looks, his voice, his clothes, his mannerisms—all set off a profound danger signal. Not being able to ignore my spiritual alarm, I was forced to yield to its signal and look more closely at Felos. I bought his book and think I now understand the inner alarm. Reading it, I am convinced that he represents an entirely new and even more dangerous aspect of the euthanasia movement—the spiritual killer.

Commentators on the Schiavo case—at least those not favoring euthanasia—offered some of the more bizarre tidbits from Felos’s revealing book, Litigation as Spiritual Practice (Blue Dolphin, 2002), most often the episode where he reports speaking through his stomach to Mrs. Browning, a seemingly unresponsive woman in a nursing home. This noiseless communication—quite noisy on a “spiritual” level, as Felos reports her screaming at the top of her spiritual lungs—convinced him that Mrs. Browning wanted to escape from her body. He happily took on the case, thereby launching his right-to-die career.

But that well-traveled vignette isn’t enough to understand either the full strangeness of Felos or his dedication to having people legally killed. While all is not revealed in his book, it is now clear to me that who George Felos is and what he does are completely entwined.

Who Is George Felos?

He grew up in New York. His family was Greek Orthodox, his family life “less than idyllic.” Looking back over his early years, he notes with pity, “I unconsciously blamed myself for permitting myself to be abused, as I believed I was, as a child.”

It is hard to know what to make of this cryptic statement. Abused in what way? Physically? Sexually? Emotionally? Whatever happened, Felos clings throughout the book to self-pity like a child to a favorite blanket. Over and over, as a kind of mantra, he confides to the reader that his life is haunted by an inner voice, “You are unworthy of love,” “You’re not good enough.”

Despite these feelings, Felos followed in his lawyer-father’s footsteps. After graduation from law school and a “spiritual awakening,” he got married and decided to bum around on a Greek island with his new wife for several months. When he returned to the states, his family had moved to Florida, where the young Felos would eventually join his father in a law firm.

In Florida, Felos’s marriage soon unwound. Or perhaps it was never wound to begin with. One is forced to conjecture, not only to piece together his character, but also because he is so effusively—even embarrassingly—self-revealing. According to Felos, the marriage was never “very stable,” and so for quite some time they couldn’t decide whether to have a child. After seven years they did, but only after Felos “heard the soul of my yet-to-be conceived child emphatically shout: ‘I’m ready to be born…will you stop this fooling around!’” Yet-to-be-conceived child? Speaking from where?

That brings us to Felos’s spiritual awakening. Leaving the Orthodox religion behind, Felos had become fascinated with the theory and practice of Yoga, the Hindu mental and physical practice of meditation meant to free souls from the cycle of reincarnation so they can happily reunite with the universal spirit. His yet-to-be-conceived boy was waiting, rather impatiently, in the chute to be born once again.

Unfortunately, at the end of the chute was the none-too-happy domestic situation of Felos and his wife. As Felos drills into the reader, his marriage was never more than lukewarm. With a completely straight literary face, he informs the reader, “I had been a platinum husband and father.”

He loved and supported his oh-so-selfish wife, he confides, but “to her, I seemed unattractive, sexually unexciting, balding, boring, and just not enough fun to be with.” The only time his wife seemed mildly enticed was the night before he argued his landmark right-to-die case in front of the Florida Supreme Court. “This was one of the very few times, if not the only time, I can truly say my wife was enamored with me. I suppose power and success really are potent aphrodisiacs—as my spouse had made particularly evident our previous night at the Governor’s Inn.” In regard to his son, Felos notes that “having been betrayed as a child,” he thought “being the perfect father would somehow purge the misdeeds of my parents.”

Despite his momentary success fighting for the right to die, his wife dumps him, a “self-induced” tragedy. “She reflected back to me my inner torment of self-rejection and lack of self-worth. My long-held negative patterns, beliefs, and feelings about myself grew progressively more difficult to tolerate. There were times I wished I were dead, it felt so unbearable being with myself.”

According to Felos, his wife actually did wish that he were dead, a feeling he was alerted to through a kind of “cosmic telepathy” as he traveled home one day on an airplane. Felos’s response: anger.

Angry enough to kill his wife. After a post-separation meeting, “I was on fire, fueled by thoughts of bludgeoning and tearing her apart. If she were there at that moment I thought I would kill her—happily destroy her.”

Angry enough to kill himself. Days and nights of shrieking into a pillow and crying. “I saw myself on the cold terrazzo floor of the kitchen with the side of my throat cut and blood gushing from my carotid artery. I watched the hot red blood darken as it adjusted to the cool of the terrazzo.”

Meditation on Death

He did neither, but immersed himself more fervently in Yoga instead. This brought about a strange resolution by appeal to reincarnation. Yoga adherents believe that a human being consists of prakrti and purusha. Prakrti is a person’s body, mind, and self—the realm of illusion. Purusha is the soul, blissfully pure and empty consciousness—the realm of reality, of God-consciousness without self. If a person clings to the realm of illusion during life, his soul is condemned to reenter another body after death.

In one of his many “visions,” Felos saw “our souls [i.e., his soul and his wife’s soul] prior to this incarnation discussing what each needed to learn in this birth, and in compassion and love for each other agree to take this journey.” His marriage from hell, as he likens it, was actually prearranged as a kind of self-inflicted purgation. He could then accept the “death of [his] marriage” precisely because the hell had all been for the good: spiritual awakening.

Awakened to what? All life, for a devotee of Yoga, is a kind of “conscious dying,” an ongoing attempt to detach oneself from the illusory grasp of the body, the mind, and self-consciousness, and fall back into the only reality, “Universal Consciousness,” “God-realization.” Yogic meditation aims at just the kind of detachment that one will experience at death, and death itself is a kind of blessed release from the captivity of bodily illusion. Felos was therefore able to transform—dare we say sublimate?—his desire to kill his wife and himself into a spiritual practice that aims at death.

Small wonder, then, that Felos is fascinated with death—for us, strangely, creepily fascinated; for him, properly and wondrously transfixed. Felos’s great baptism into Yoga occurred at the “Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health,” housed in a former Jesuit novice house. His description of his spiritual experiences at Kripalu reads uncannily like the peyote-induced drug travels of Carlos Castaneda that made for popular reading some decades ago.

Peyote-induced or not, Kripalu burned into him the notion that spirituality and death should be happily entwined. On the plane home, he reports, “I pulled from my carry-on the book from the Kripalu Shop on conscious dying. Written by a meditation teacher active in hospice work, it described the enormous potential for spiritual awakening, both for the patient and the caregiver, which sometimes is realized during the death process.” Hospice work? Hmmm.

This book (perhaps by Stephen Levine) proved foundational in Felos’s fascination with death and with his new-found desire for hospice work, a sordid marriage that would frame his activities as lawyer for Michael Schiavo that ended in the murder at the Florida hospice.

“Our death—the permanent separation of our spirit, our consciousness, from the body—if experienced with awareness, can provide the opportunity to dispel the greatest of illusions: that we are this body.” This unholy connection between spirituality and death-seeking is unveiled in his reading on the plane back from Kripalu. “The author [of the book on conscious dying] goes on to describe how meditation and spiritual practice is the process of dying—the means by which we extinguish our ego and body identification and realize we are the expression and manifestation of the Divine…. I deeply connected with the message of this book, and as I gazed out the window upon the clouds and surface below, I felt death move a bit closer.”

Self-divinization and death became a lovely obsession for Felos. As he noted later, “I was fascinated by the proposition that clarity and spiritual focus at the time of death held great possibilities for Self-realization.” On yet another plane ride, he ruminates dreamily, “I wonder what it would be like to die right now?” He reports that his karmic, cosmic powers actually caused the plane’s automatic pilot to go haywire and turn the plane into a nosedive. Luckily, he stops wondering just in time. “Be careful what you think,” an inner voice then warns him. “You are more powerful than you realize.” Humbled “by God’s admonishment,” he snuggled back into his seat, all aglow for the rest of the ride.

Small wonder that George Felos took so much pleasure in trying to get Mrs. Browning’s feeding tube removed in the early 1990s. He simply believes he’s liberating souls confusedly clinging to bodies—bodies that are mere pit-stops between incarnations.

Speaking to the incognizant Mrs. Browning through his stomach—via “soul speak,” as he calls it—he informed her, “Mrs. Browning, it’s okay to leave your body. There is no reason to stay in this body [emphasis added]. It is all right to die now.” Before the case came to court, Mrs. Browning actually did die, but Felos carried on, establishing the fateful decision that ordinary feeding should be considered medical treatment, and therefore feeding tubes can be removed.

For Felos, it’s an act of liberation, and hence an act of love. He’s merely sending a poor entrapped soul off, either to drop into the fathomless pool of God-consciousness—the ultimate escape from body-entrapment—or to be reincarnated into another body to try for realization again.

The Real George Felos

If we might pause for a moment to sketch a brief psychological profile of the man, I believe it would look something like this: George Felos seems defined by insatiable self-pity and an equally insatiable desire for affirmation. Whatever its unpleasant causes, it drives his wife (whatever her shortcomings) batty, as even he admits. The seething anger at his wife and himself—bubbling violently enough to bring him to the cusp of murder and self-murder—takes him by surprise, upsetting his own portrait of himself as a calm, compassionate, sensitive, Birkenstocking, 1980s guy—a guy who would not make the same mistakes as his father. Having jettisoned Christianity, he has no recourse to a doctrine of sin and therefore cannot understand the faults and failings of his parents, his wife, or himself.

Yoga provided a way out. It appealed to the very American—very Eighties—tendency toward self-absorption and profundity without depth. It reconciled his self-loathing with his thirst for affirmation, offering the simultaneous salve of self-extinction and self-divinization. Even more insidious, it dissolved the deepest questions of human guilt and the mystery of sin and evil in the ebb and flow of reincarnation. No matter what one did, or what one failed to do—be it his parents, his wife, himself, or Michael Schiavo—all could be explained as the result of a previous cosmic prearrangement, and all could be rectified by the spiritual practice of detachment. Such detachment is really a kind of union with God and surges with the transformative power of cosmic love. “If our minds are fixed upon the refined vibrations of the Divine, we will generate thoughts of love, compassion, and abundance, and perceive ways and ideas to manifest in the world these higher thoughts.”

Helping Michael Schiavo kill his wife was one of those “higher thoughts.” Felos’s devotion to the right-to-die movement is, in fact, one long meditation on death and the spiritual joy of conscious dying.

With all Felos’s continual talk about holiness and love, one is surprised to find a certain callousness and taint of turpitude in his treatment of the Schiavo case. Apparently his quest for holiness has enough wiggle room that Felos was able to engage in less-than-honest practices on behalf of his client and his cause. For example, Felos failed to report that he was chairman of the board of the hospice where Terri Schiavo was moved. By law, only those certified with half a year to live can enter a hospice and receive Medicaid. Terri was not terminal but lived there for about six years. How did she get in? Behind the scenes, Felos—in complicity with the now-infamous Judge Greer—smuggled Terri in anyway and fraudulently finagled Medicaid into paying for it (thereby saving his client’s jury-award money).

Nor again did Felos seem bothered that X-rays taken of Terri’s body showed multiple fractures. Obviously, she had suffered much damage at somebody else’s hands, and Michael was the prime suspect. But, as with his own marriage, Michael and Terri had no doubt agreed before this latest reincarnation—after some discussion, of course—that just such a marriage would be mutually beneficial in bringing about their ultimate release from the illusions of their respective bodies, minds, and self-consciousnesses.

Laying aside such ripples in his karma, we can now see why Terri’s death by starvation and dehydration was not, for Felos, murder, but a “process.” After all, since our bodies are an illusion, then “pain and suffering [are] an illusion.” Indeed, as Felos discovers while trying to meditate away a headache, “in piercing the heart of pain we find bliss.” In meditation, Felos explains, because we realize that we are not our body, we can “watch” our pain in a state of detachment. If we foolishly attach ourselves to our bodies with our mind, then we are drawn into the illusion. We then experience pain as real, rather than watch it as a detached, peaceful observer. That’s why he was so peaceful and detached as he watched Terri slowly, painfully wither.

That very same detachment, Felos assures the reader, allows him to rise above the mere pedestrian and illusory distinction between good and evil. “As the duality of mind creates pain,” waxes Felos, “so we could make the same argument for right and wrong. As Hamlet proclaimed, ‘There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.’” One can see why Felos’s spirituality made him so effective in the Schiavo case, untethered as he was by petty notions of good and evil.

Terri Schiavo died on March 31, 2005, at 9:05 A.M. A bit over four hours later—no doubt after intense grieving on his part—Michael Schiavo filed a petition with Judge Greer for administration of her estate as sole beneficiary. Before her death, Michael had protested his innocence on Larry King Live and elsewhere, claiming that the settlement money had been all but used up, leaving him only about $25,000. As it turns out, given the behind-the-scenes financial shenanigans with Felos, there was about $1 million in the account, perhaps $2 million depending upon how well the investments did since 1993. Felos received a little over a half-million for his efforts. Not bad wages for a spiritual killer.

http://www.crisismagazine.com/feature2.htm

Thanks for the ping.