Bogus gift ruined dreams

"In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king." -- Desiderius Erasmus, 1500

Try this 60-second test tonight:

Find a dark, quiet room. Turn off the lights, the television and other distractions. Then find your way to a chair. Sit down, close your eyes tightly and spend, by your best guess, just one minute in the dark.

Pretty scary, huh? Seemed a lot longer than 60 seconds, didn't it?

Imagine a day full of dark minutes -- 1,440 of them -- filled with little things like walking around your home, going to the bathroom, finding something to wear, cooking a meal, combing your hair.

Imagine a year full of such minutes -- 525,600 of them -- filled with little things like going to the supermarket, the bank or, if you're really lucky, a job.

Imagine, if you possibly can, 55 years of such minutes -- 28,980,000 of them -- filled with all the little things that make up a lifetime.

Welcome to the world of Evelyn Fleet.

It wasn't always a dark world for Fleet, executive director of Active Blind and Visually Impaired of Nevada, the impoverished nonprofit charitable organization whose board members dreamt of what a promised $5.1 million donation could do for the sightless.

She once was a 19-year-old college sophomore majoring in art -- the study and appreciation of visual creations. Then came the disease that robbed her of her sight: glaucoma.

"I learned pretty fast I had to work very hard to be accepted by society," says Fleet, whose frail stature belies a steely constitution, surprising athleticism and fierce sense of independence.

She switched her major to psychology and became a counselor for State Services for the Blind in California, training the sightless to compete in the work force with those who can see.

She retired after 30 years with the state due to a staggering workload and to care for her mother, who suffered from Alzheimer's disease.

Part of her role with the California agency was to conduct psychological evaluations of blind clients to help place them in appropriate jobs. But nothing in her training or experience prepared her to evaluate the likes of Anil Gupta and Shruti Misra.

They are the husband-and-wife team whose $5.1 million donation to Active Blind turned out to be bogus. They didn't tell Fleet or other Active Blind directors that the "donation" -- comprised of old railroad bonds and quit-claim deeds to unpatented mining claims -- were worthless.

And, perhaps mindful of Erasmus' words, they failed to read aloud all the documents they had the blind woman sign. They especially did not relay the sentences that would have raised a red flag for Fleet, the ones acknowledging the bonds "have no monetary value," for instance.

"If he had read that part of the contract, every board member would have rejected it," Fleet says. Of course, the board had only Gupta's word and the inability to comprehend how someone could dupe the blind.

"I feel so bad that I couldn't see through this," Fleet says.

"The money got us so excited because it is important to get training workshops started. We don't encourage sheltered workshops because we think people without vision can compete in the workplace."

Active Blind aspires to create a training center where the sightless could learn the things others take for granted.

"Most of the blind will require assistance in areas such as proper grooming, dress code, resume writing," Fleet wrote in an open letter stating Active Blind's mission. "Employer interviews can be very threatening to those who haven't experienced them. The clients need assistance in job-seeking skills. These are areas a training facility can offer them.

"This project can be a success," the letter continued. "It can make those of us who are tax consumers today tax payers of the future."

According to Fleet, that desire to be independent isn't widely understood.

"Society's attitude seems to be, 'We're paying for the blind to be comfortable, so why don't they stay home and be comfortable?' But that isn't what life is about," she says.

"If the blind were strong enough, we would stand up and demand our place in society. This would have been a small start for us here in Southern Nevada."

Active Blind, whose board meets periodically in Fleet's little Las Vegas apartment, has no facilities and no funds, other than the sum of $7-per-year annual donations from a few dozen members and occasional contributions.

Disheartened by the dashed hopes of Gupta and Misra's so-called donation, she contemplates resigning from the charity she founded.

"But maybe I want too much," says Fleet. "Maybe there are too many things I just haven't been able to achieve and they'll never come to pass."

archive