Carl Maxey: A Fighting Life

14. Ruth Coe's Greek Tragedy

into Maxey’s office in 1984 and handed him $5,000 to represent her in her divorce suit against the well-known local pediatrician Dr. Marashi . That $5,000 had come from a generous benefactor: Steve Danzig, the husband of Sherry Danzig, Dr. Marashi’s newest girlfriend. The spurned spouses had teamed up to get revenge on the doctor. The second episode came when Dr. Marashi yanked $103,000 from his bank account and gave it to his father, he said, as repayment for medical school. Judge John A. Schultheis, presiding over the case, was livid about this for two reasons: first, he had previously ordered that the bank account be frozen until the divorce was resolved, and second , he discovered that the money had not gone directly to the doctor’s father, but to a secret Swiss bank account. The money was untraceable from that point on. Maxey declared that the truth was obvious: the doctor spirited the money away to keep his wife from getting her due.An irate Schultheis ordered Dr. Marashi to return the money. When the doctor said he couldn’t, because his father had already used it to pay off creditors in his native Iran, the judge tossed the doctor into jail for thirty days for contempt of court. The judge also warned the doctor that if that money wasn’t back in thirty days, he’d slap him in jail for another five months. Meanwhile, Dr. Marashi’s wife told the court that she had not received “a single penny” of the $2,370 monthly child support her husband had been ordered to pay. So the judge ordered the doctor’s Mercedes to be sold for $50,000 and the money placed in the trust account that Maxey was holding to pay Sharon’s bills. These financial details were especially titillating to the people of Spokane, considering that Dr. Marashi had been Spokane County’s top public health officer four years earlier and had complained that he wasn’t paid sufficiently . The county commissioners had given him a $22,000 raise to $46,000 a year, which made him the highest paid person on the county payroll—and the job was only part-time. He still had his private pediatrics practice. The titillation was heightened by the doctor’s allegations that his wife was “mentally unstable.” Sharon’s mother came to her defense in court, saying that Dr. Marashi had never seen Sharon’s “true self.” Her mother claimed that “he has dominated her their entire 202 the maxey temper married life and treated her as a Persian wife instead of an American woman. I feel he is upset because for the first time during their marriage Sharon is standing up to him.” In the drama’s third episode, a month later, the judge made good on his word and slapped the doctor with another five months of jail time on the contempt charges. Dr. Marashi told the judge that there was no way to get the money back from Iran. Meanwhile, no bank would loan him the money because he was a jailed physician whose patients were “bailing out,” as his attorney put it. The judge was unmoved . “If this isn’t contemptuous attitude or conduct, I don’t know what in God’s name is,” he said. “You can apologize, but you did it,” Maxey lectured the doctor in court, twisting the knife a little harder. “[This was] an act that can’t be undone.” The doctor had been allowed out on work release during the first month, but now he was ordered into the Spokane County Jail without work release. Two months later, the judge finally relented and let Dr. Marashi out of jail. The money was still missing, but the judge finally concluded it was “irretrievable.” The cash had gone through Iranian black market moneychangers who would be “put in front of a firing squad,” if they admitted they had handled the money, said the doctor’s attorney. “Marashi, looking frail, wept when Schultheis said he could go free,” wrote Richard Wagoner in the Spokesman-Review. Yet that didn’t save Dr. Marashi from enduring the soap opera’s final episode: his federal trial three years later on five counts of tax evasion. This trial was a direct result of that nasty divorce case, because the star witness against him was his ex-wife Sharon. She was granted immunity from prosecution in exchange for giving details about his tax...