July 22, 2016

Who doesn’t love a good mystery from the past? More enticing than a Lifetime Movie, the latest hunt to find out if an Upper East Side Socialite may have had an affair and gotten pregnant by John F. Kennedy, has all of Manhattan abuzz. The Administrator in charge of releasing the $17.5 million estate is investigating whether Alicia Corning Clark really did have a child that was the result of an affair with JFK.

Leonard Boehner, the Administer of the estate, along with a team of his lawyers recently filed a motion under the Freedom of Information Act with the request that the FBI look through the FBIs records to see if any evidence remains of a relationship between the two. Why the undertaking?

It is the job of both the attorneys for the estate, with the Administrator, along with workers comp attorney Los Angeles to ensure that there aren’t any unknown offspring or potential heirs that can be represented in court to contest the conditions of the will. At the heart of suspicious inquiry was a court case that indicated that the three-time married enchantress had several escapades, which was recently unsealed after 40 years of being hidden from the public.

DNAInfo New York was able to obtain a copy of the transcripts that did not have any evidence of a love child between the two, but there is evidence that they did have an affair. The trial notes, which have been kept classified up until recently, say that Lawyers for Clark had no problem coming forth with some of the most scandalous stories ever to hit Manhattan. What there is evidence of is that everyone went to great lengths to keep the information hush-hush.

Along with stories of her crazy outlandish relationships with men, are stories of scheming in the 1960s about how she planned to seek revenge against JFK by launching an all-out bad publicity tour on what was then known as Camelot. Trying her hardest to tarnish the Kennedy image of faith and fidelity, she went after the family with fervor to extort them for money to keep her from coming forward.

Simon Metrik, an ex-lawyer of Clark, recently sued the state for $1.2 million due to unpaid legal fees. He insists that she had every intention of letting the public known about their tawdry fair if JFK’s father didn’t pay her $250,000 ransom, which has many scratching their head. Clearly, she had enough money at the time.

Metrik maintains that he “talked her out of” attempting the blackmail campaign of extortion from Joseph P. Kennedy, who was then President John F. Kennedy’s father. He also was able to dissuade her from writing a tell-all about their forbidden relationship.

Clark recently died at the age of 79, just this last February, and left behind over $17.5 million, which in her estate includes her Upper East Side apartment and her mansion in the Bahamas. At the time of her death, she insisted that she had no heirs to claim the inheritance. Once more, there are no living relatives to lay stake to her estate either.

Boehner, Clark’s lawyer, helped her write her memoirs in the year 2004 and was named the preliminary executor of the estate by a judge of the Manhattan Surrogate Court last March. Included in his duties is to ensure that there aren’t any known heirs that could potentially come forward to claim legitimacy and inherit the estate. Due to the book written by Seymour Hersh entitled “The Dark Side of Camelot,” Boehner believes that it is worth an investigation to make sure that there weren’t any children that were born out of wedlock. A highly invasive outline of the Boston Dynasty, it is better to ensure than to sit idly and wait for something to arise.

In the book, Hersh talks of how then J. Edgar Hoover, FBI Director sent memos to Robert Kennedy, which warned him of the perils of a court case involving Clark and her exposure of the alleged affair between the two. The suspicion comes from warnings that political operatives were trying to sell information to the Republicans about how Kennedy had impregnated Clark before his Presidential campaign began.

The chances that there was a love child are very slim with no real evidence to indicate that a child was born out of wedlock, but Boehner feels like it is his duty to perform due diligence to ensure that he knows the true story. Before the estate is settled, he wants to ensure that there are no loose ends to contend with down the line.

There was a time when self-driving cars seemed like nothing short of fantasy, but with growing technology, not only is a self-driving car a reality, it may happen in the near future. Google, starting as nothing more than a search engine, has begun to creep into every part of our life, and its next target is getting behind the steering wheel.

Google’s self-driving car division called Alphabet, announced that it is nearing the realm of reality and is so close that they have actually initiated their own team of lawyers. The self-driving project was created by general counsel running through Google, but now is branching out on its own. The X portion of Google is the place where all “experimental” projects lie, and that is where the self-driving initiative has resided up until now.

Google spokesman announced this week that they hired Vosen, a lawyer who has worked for the Climate Corporation for the previous eight years. Monsanto acquired the Climate Corporation in 2013 to the tune of $930 million. It is a data company that originally gave counsel to farmers to make financial decisions to increase their profitability. Vosen, until recently, was the chief counsel and auto accident lawyer Santa Ana, handling all the legal affairs of the company, including litigation, strategic transactions and any regulations that they may encounter.

Google insists that they will have a self-driving car available to the public by the year 2020, which is a hefty goal, but one that many are seeing doable. They have the intention of taking from concept car to reality in less than five years. Already having a CEO in place, as well as a Director, the only piece missing was counsel. With Vosen on board, there is no stopping the project from continuing to the final phase.

There is likely going to be many legal issues revolving around the self-driven cars. Although up until now, there were very few regulations or barriers to building it, thanks to the crash of a Tesla car last week and the resulting death and injury of passengers, those barriers may increase. Now that self-driving cars may be a reality, there is probably going to be a push in the industry for more stringent regulations, which is why Google has taken Vosen on board.

The US Department of Transportation released a report in March that outlined the potential of huge regulatory statutes in place. Replacing someone’s eyes, ears and foot behind the wheel to make life and death decisions for passengers, is not something that the government or car makers can take lightly. Taking away the control of human intelligence and putting in the realm of auto-pilot is likely to be met with heavy restraints and many needs to prove the safety of self-driving cars.

Up until now, the government had no reason to even consider the concept car. Without a prototype in existence, it was nothing more than an idea. That is all about to take a huge change. The Department of Transportation is set to make standards already about the guidelines not only to test the a vehicle and the technology driving it but how to test and regulate the vehicles once they are ready to make their appearance.

Vosen’s major hurdles shortly are going to be to prevent the slow down of the technology. He is going to have to work closely with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the DOT to ensure that they don’t put a halt to Google’s efforts to take the car out of the “concept” phase and put it into the hands of the consumer.

With no standards in place, Google is ripe to either work with the government or to be slowed down by regulations and standards. A huge undertaking, his experience, and gumption are what led him down the path to be the chief lawyer for the Google division of self-driving cars. It is in his hands to keep things moving at a quick pace while tempering it with meeting government safety standards and not stepping on anyone’s toes in the process. That is no short order.