About Christopher Hollenback
Articles written by Christopher Hollenback
Keeping an Eye on What’s Right … And Wrong
Patricia Struck is looking out for your retirement savingsFrom 1989 to 2002, Kenneth Hackbarth—an usher at the Assembly of God church in Kenosha and an adviser with Homestead Investments—talked to fellow parishioners, often senior citizens, about investment opportunities. Give him $30,000 for three years, he said, and he would invest that money in real estate with the promise of a 15 percent return. But Hackbarth wasn't an investor. He was a retired schoolteacher taking the money and either donating it to the church, using it to pay off past …
Peer Recognition
How Erik Guenther gets juries to sympathize with clients accused of sexual assault“Agood lawyer,” says attorney Erik Guenther on the Hurley, Burish & Stanton Web site, “helps the jury see themselves in the client’s shoes.” Guenther should know. In only five years he has built a successful law practice doing just that. Not an easy task when your clients are accused of sexual assault and child molestation. “Sexual assault cases are probably worse than homicide cases in terms of carrying a stigma,” Guenther says. The presumption of innocence, he adds, is …
One-Man Law & Order
Mark Tilkens went from Top Cop to Top LawyerAfew years before Mark Tilkens became an attorney, he was a cop responding to a 911 call from a boy who said his stepfather was trying to kill his mom with a knife. Tilkens and his partner arrived, raced upstairs and hoped their radios wouldn’t startle the suspect. “We get in the room,” Tilkens remembers, “and what we find is a man holding a woman by the neck with a pistol in her stomach.” Tilkens and his partner aimed their guns and screamed at the suspect to put his weapon on the …
The Boxer
When Pedro Colón was a teenager, playing basketball alone on an isolated court near the south side of Milwaukee, he was cornered by six or seven gang members. “They were all older and bigger,” Colón remembers. “I was a boxer, but not much of a fighter. I was outnumbered. In a situation like that, you have options. Do you run? I’d be the chicken in the neighborhood forever. Do you say, ‘Hey, guys, it’s all cool’? And then I’m part of the gang? I just decided to [be] myself …
Out of Africa
Thomas Geraghty and his students fight for truth, justice, but not necessarily the American way"The place looked a lot like a concentration camp,” says David Hamsher, a Northwestern law student. He is describing a bare room, 30 feet by 15 feet, housing more than 100 people awaiting trial at a prison in Malawi in southeast Africa. “Each prisoner was sitting cross-legged on the floor directly next to another prisoner,” he says. “Apparently the prisoners sleep sitting up or like sardines on the floor. The room reeked of urine. TB, HIV and malaria all run rampant in the prison. Their …
The Storm
Madison attorney Victor Arellano was driving like Indiana Jones through the scorching Mexican jungle with his clients, Lauri and Jack Henderson. Lauri was holding onto their “lost ark” — a baby boy, Hunter Henderson, whom Lauri had tried to adopt two years earlier. Back then, federal authorities at the Cancun airport had arrested Lauri after she tried to leave with the newborn, and charged Lauri and her mother, Beverly Gehrke, with child trafficking. They were jailed in Mexico for a …
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