Yes, after the week I had last week with the Drag Week thrash, that was welcome good news. For anyone who didn't see the post on the FE Forum, the collection officer for the Romulus, Michigan court system finally got tired of waiting for Bill Coon to pay the rest of the judgment I had against him, and went to Coon's machine shop, Extreme Machines in Whitmore Lake, to take some of the SOHC heads that were there and auction them off to pay the judgment.
My friend Bob Stone, who is a former police officer in the Detroit area with a long history of dealing with the antics of Mr. Coon, went with the court officer and one other collection officer. They went into the office there and presented the owner of the company with the paperwork, and demanded to seize the heads. According to Stone the owner was very upset and came very close to being hauled off to jail for obstruction of police procedures, or something like that; I don't know the legal terms. As I understand it the issue was that Coon owed Extreme Machines some money for the machine work on the heads, and without the heads there anymore the owner thought that he would not be able to get paid. He called Coon, and then he called the local police department. The local police came, looked at the paperwork, and told the owner he had to cooperate.
Rather than release the heads, the owner wanted to pay the bill. Probably the lesser of two evils for him, and for all I know he didn't realize what kind of a person Coon was when he started dealing with him. Hard to blame him for that, I didn't know Coon was such a dishonest person when I started dealing with him either. The court officer gave me a call this afternoon when he was at Extreme Machines to get the exact amount of the judgment that had yet to be paid, and then the owner wrote the court officer a check for that amount. According to Bob Stone the court officer went to the bank and cashed the check right away, so in a week or so I should finally get paid the full amount of the judgment, and this whole fiasco will be over.
Looking back on this entire mess I am again struck by how irrational Coon's behavior was through the whole thing. After the conciliation court hearing he could have paid $1885, which was less than what he owed me, and been done with the whole thing. Instead he refused to pay, and also appealed the decision. This led to an increased judgment against him of around $4300. His car was seized to make part of the payment, and some of his heads would have been seized today if the owner of Extreme Machines wouldn't have stepped in to pay the bill. I'm sure that he is not a popular person right now at Extreme Machines, which by all accounts is a reputable business, so Coon's behavior has probably damaged the relationship with the vendor for his heads. Talk about cutting your nose to spite your face! None of this behavior is that of a rational person, and I wonder what's wrong upstairs with Mr. Coon. If he had just been honest about his situation, probably none of this would have happened, but he seems incapable of telling the truth and facing up to his responsibilities. Too bad; for a while he was making some nice SOHC heads. Thank goodness for Robert Pond's heads.
For my part, from start to finish I am out a few hundred bucks, plus the original amount that Coon owed me. From a money standpoint only, my legal actions against Coon have not paid off. Its easy to see why few people pursue legal actions in relatively small dollar cases like this; there's just no payback. However, the personal satisfaction I got from holding Mr. Coon's feet to the fire and forcing him to be responsible for his behavior was well worth the few hundred bucks it cost me. I doubt that he is smart enough to have learned from this situation, despite the fact that it cost him more than double what the court originally told him he had to pay. Some people will never learn...
