i L i n d

You may be thinking, “Oh, no, not more about Miske’s trust!” I understand.

I honestly don’t know whether the twists and turns in the evolution of Mike Miske’s trust mean much of anything, as the future of Miske’s fortune will be decided in federal court where the government appears to be in a strong position. If the government takes all of his property, then the trust will be left just a meaningless shell that will just fade away.

However, when new documents become public in a matter I’ve been following, and I’ve been following the Miske case for way too long, I insist on reading them at least once in the hope there will be a nugget or two of information that, at some future point, will prove relevant and perhaps even fill in a missing piece of the overall puzzle.

So I’m taking you, the reader, along on continued review of these trust documents. And if you’re not interested, no worries.

Miske crearted his revocable living trust in August 2008. It recently became public for the first time when it was filed in federal court along with a motion in opposition to the government’s pending lawsuit aimed at seizing all Miske’s personal and business assets.

A matter of timing

When Miske established his living trust in 2008, he likely already knew he was the target of a federal criminal investigation lauched just a few months earlier by a joint task force involving the FBI, IRS, and the Honolulu Police Department. Miske appears to have had sources in local law enforcement and likely the prosecutor’s office, and perhaps even in the FBI itself, according to trial testimony and evidence made public in the case.

The FBI gave the new investigation the title, “Waimanalo Blues,” referencing the community where Miske grew up and where his family still lived.

Was the new investigation an inflection point in Miske’s life that raised questions about the future, prompting the creation of his living trust? There’s no indication in the trust itself, and the timing might be a total coincidence, except that the next amendment of the trust came in September 2014, again about six months after the FBI launched a follow-up investigation that doubled down with a more intensive focus on Miske. They called this one “Operation EM-EM.”

The original

The original 27-page trust document is a relatively staightforward, plain-vanilla living trust and very much a family affair.

As long as he was alive and not incapacitated, Miske himself was both the trustee in control of the trust, and the trust’s beneficiary. He named successor trustees authorized to take over if he were incapacitated or in the event of his death.

Miske stayed close to home with his initial choices for successor co-trustees, appointing his mother, Maydeen Stancil, and Edward “Denny” Freitas, who was married to one of Miske’s cousins. Freitas had been operating Kamaaina Plumbing and Renovations since 2005 under Miske’s “Kamaaina” umbrella.

Freitas left Kamaaina Plumbing and cut his ties with Miske around 2014. However, his son, Kaulana Freitas, went to work doing odd jobs and running errands for Miske.

Kaulana Freitas was one of Miske’s ten original co-defendants in the racketeering case, and pleaded guilty in March 2022 to participating in Miske’s racketeering conspiracy and releasing the chemical chloropicrin on the dance floor of a nightclub that competed with Miske’s M Nightclub and its successor, Encore.

Freitas, 37, was sentenced to three years in federal prison, and is presently serving his time in the minimum security federal correctional instiutution in Lompoc, California.

The original trust provided that it would terminate in the event of Miske’s death, with a single $100,000 payment to be distributed to a daughter, not previously publicly acknowledged, while the rest of his assets were to be rolled over into a separate trust to benefit Miske’s son, Caleb.

The trust then provided that Caleb would be entitled to partial distributions “outright and free of trust” on his 21st birthday (5% of the value), 25th birthday (25% of the value), and the remainder on his 30th birthday, indicating Miske did not trust Caleb to simply inherit his property without strings.

The trust included no special provisions spelling out what would happen to Miske’s businesses if he were no longer in the picture. Presumably, his interests in the businesses would have passed to Caleb.

Coming soon: Revisions in 2014 and 2016 [Note: I’m traveling this week, but hope to follow-up soon]