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Cox earns kudos for strong efforts to crack down on deadbeat parents

By Laura Berman / The Detroit News

Mike Cox, the nuts and bolts state attorney general, is throwing deadbeat parents in the slammer and collecting back child support.

Over the last year, his office has locked up wealthy businessmen, a Grosse Pointe neurologist, a middleweight boxer — subjecting high-income child support evaders to maximum humiliation and pressure.

Cox, who was at one time a single father with custody of his eldest daughter, promised to do this simple, straightforward collections work when he ran for state attorney general in the fall of 2000.

In terms of professional prestige, collections do not top the legal ladder. Collecting unpaid bills is not the kind of work that brilliant young people go to Harvard or the University of Michigan Law School to learn how to do. It’s the legal equivalent of playing repo man.

And yet, unglamorous and unintellectual as it may be, Cox’s child support collections program is effective, and in its way, both groundbreaking and creative. It’s making a substantive difference in the lives of people, some of them women who were in desperate situations they deemed virtually hopeless. (About 90 percent of the prosecutions so far have been against men.)

These women tell the kind of stories reporters long have heard about the ineptitude and inaction of the Friend of the Court. “Yeah, lady, the system is broken,” was about all one might say in response.

So there is a certain visceral appeal to listening to Joan Arguine, a 62-year-old legal secretary who now lives in Toledo, Ohio, describe how she spent 24 years trying to get her ex-husband’s child support order enforced.

When it was first handed down, she was a 38-year-old woman with a 4-year-old son living in Monroe County. It was 1979 when a judge ordered her ex-husband, Leo Arguine, a sheet metal-worker with his own business, to pay $50 a week.

He didn’t pay. But Joan — who quit a 15-year job as an EKG technician only weeks before her husband split for California — didn’t relent. She pursued her ex, and dogged the officials at the Monroe County Friend of the Court’s office for more than two decades.

After Cox vowed to prosecute child support evaders as felons, she called. And last July, the state Attorney General’s Office tracked down her ex-husband in Guadalupe County, Texas, and arrested him. He posted bond 10 days later and he left the state. In November, he was arrested again — this time in Florida. Confronted with evidence of property and a recent Texas property sale, he agreed to a $55,000 settlement of the $68,000 he owed.

“This is a godsend to me,” Joan says. (A call to Leo Arguine’s attorney in Florida was not returned.)

Cox has created a division that includes seven lawyers and 14 investigators to enforce child support cases. But because the federal government reimburses the state two-thirds of the cost of collection, he insists the effort is cost-effective.

Last week, the Association for Children for Enforcement of Support — a child-advocacy group — announced it would honor Cox for treating nonsupport cases as serious crimes. That’s not surprising: Cox has used energy and creativity to re-invent Michigan’s child support enforcement system. If that gets him glowing headlines, he deserves them.

You're right. He deserves every glowing headline printed:

After Cox vowed to prosecute child support evaders as felons, she called. And last July, the state Attorney General’s Office tracked down her ex-husband in Guadalupe County, Texas, and arrested him. He posted bond 10 days later and he left the state. In November, he was arrested again — this time in Florida. Confronted with evidence of property and a recent Texas property sale, he agreed to a $55,000 settlement of the $68,000 he owed.

“This is a godsend to me,” Joan says. (A call to Leo Arguine’s attorney in Florida was not returned.)

Cox has created a division that includes seven lawyers and 14 investigators to enforce child support cases. But because the federal government reimburses the state two-thirds of the cost of collection, he insists the effort is cost-effective.

Last week, the Association for Children for Enforcement of Support — a child-advocacy group — announced it would honor Cox for treating nonsupport cases as serious crimes. That’s not surprising: Cox has used energy and creativity to re-invent Michigan’s child support enforcement system. If that gets him glowing headlines, he deserves them.