SOLD WHEN HE WAS 8 DAYS OLD, MAN SEEKS REDRESS 47 YEARS LATER

The Palm Beach Post

Author: Dan Moffett Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

An experienced commodities trader, Michael Chalek understands the reality that markets dictate pricing.

Still, he didn't expect that to apply to human lives - particularly his own.

Adopted days after his birth, Chalek wondered for decades about his natural mother and the circumstances that led her to leave him. He found out last fall when he persuaded a Gainesville judge to open his confidential adoption file, an extraordinary order usually granted only for medical emergencies.

``I found out that I had been sold for $200 to a baby broker,'' Chalek said. ``I was shocked, and I was hurt.''

Florida was a national center for black market adoptions in the 1950s, when Chalek and thousands like him lost their identities. Now he is fighting in the courts to reverse the injustice he says has tormented him since childhood.

Chalek, 47, who splits his time between Boca Raton and Estes Park, Colo., has filed a lawsuit that seeks to annul his adoption and issue a new birth certificate with his true mother's name. He has hired prominent Tallahassee attorney Mallory Horne, former Florida Senate president and House speaker, to make his case.

``I'm trying to make the statement that all the people who are victims of fraudulent adoptions should have their records released,'' Chalek said. ``I think the people who were involved in the illegal baby broker business should be exposed.''

The 85-page file the state surrendered last year revealed the missing details of Chalek's origins: He was born Jan. 25, 1952, in Jacksonville to Winnie Faye Higginbotham Yarber, an 18-year-old bar waitress. Yarber had separated from her husband and become pregnant by another man. When he was 8 days old and known only as ``Baby Barnwell,'' Chalek was sold by baby broker Lenora Fielding to Alex and Adela Chalek who lived in Gainesville. The birth certificate was issued under a fictitious name.

Within four days of receiving his file in December, Chalek located his birth mother in Tallahassee, with the help of Delray Beach private investigators Virginia Snyder and Wayne Campbell. She is Winnie Faye Whitaker now, and she was pleased to meet the son she had not seen for 47 years.

``The reunion was one of happiness,'' Chalek said. ``I was very nervous - like going to the doctor's office for the first time.''

Whitaker told him that his birth father died in the '70s. She said she had been pressured into giving him up and had misgivings about doing it.

``I asked if I could just get him back but they said no because I'd already signed the papers,'' she said. ``I was so young. I didn't understand what was happening.''

Fielding and the Chaleks, Alex and Adela, are dead. The attorney who brought the adoption to court and the judge who approved it are still living, and Chalek considered legal action against them but was advised it would be fruitless.

``I would like to have these guys nailed for fraud,'' he said, ``but I'll go along with whatever the court ends up with.''

Thousands of black market adoptions were arranged in Florida from the 1930s to the late '60s, experts say. Childless couples from the North would come to the state on vacations and return home with a baby, brokered at prices ranging from $25 to $3,000.

The adoptions were not legal, but until the laws were strengthened 30 years ago, the arrangements were largely ignored. Perhaps the most infamous broker was Katherine Morris Cole, a Miami doctor who placed hundreds of infants born to unwed mothers over a span of four decades, often falsifying birth certificates.

Madelyn Freundlich, executive director of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute in New York, an advocacy group for people who have been adopted, said she has not heard of a case quite like Chalek's.

``Adoption annulments are rare to begin with and most of them are sought by adoptive parents,'' Freundlich said. ``This is extremely rare.''

The Donaldson institute has no position in Chalek's case but is monitoring it and wonders whether it will set a precedent.

The Chaleks went to the baby broker thinking they could not have a child of their own. But a couple of years later, Adela Chalek did become pregnant, and Michael Chalek said he was ostracized by his adoptive parents as soon as their natural child arrived.

``It was like somebody turned the light switch off on my life,'' he said. ``I know all about abuse and alienation. I've wondered every every single day who I really was. It's a black void, a mental albatross that people who aren't adopted can't begin to understand.''

Caption:

Michael Chalek of Boca Raton, who found he'd been sold for $200 by a baby broker in 1952, shows a photo in December of the half sister he has never met