A North Little Rock man went to court Monday prepared to persuade a federal jury that an insurance company owed him $120,000 for a fire that destroyed his house in 2014.
He had paid the insurance premiums, after all, he argued in the lawsuit he filed last year in federal court in Little Rock.
But the insurance company refused to pay, citing the suspicious nature of the fire and the company's discovery that policy holder Dennis Dokes had previously been charged with burning down a nightclub his mother owned.
After Dokes filed a lawsuit in an effort to force the company to uphold its end of the contract, the company filed a counter-claim. It argued that because Dokes denied having a previous arson charge when he applied for home insurance, the policy never should have been issued in the first place, and should be declared retroactively void. It offered to return all his premium payments.
But the ambiguous wording of the question on the application kept U.S. District Judge Leon Holmes from granting the insurance company's motion to dismiss until Monday, during a pretrial hearing, when both parties stipulated that an insurance claim had, in fact, been filed in the earlier case.
"At issue is one question on the policy application as to whether anyone in the applicant's household had ever been 'convicted of, arrested for or charged with arson, fraud or other crimes related to an insurance claim,'" Holmes wrote. "That question was answered 'no.' It was undisputed in the summary judgment papers that Dokes had previously been charged with arson relating to business property owned by his mother. It was undisputed that the property was insured. The Court denied the motion because the summary judgment record did not include evidence that an insurance claim had been made with respect to that fire."
The judge said that on Monday, however, "the parties stipulated that an insurance claim was made with respect to that fire. Even so, Dokes contends that the answer to that question was not a misrepresentation because, he argues, the claim was not made on behalf of someone in his household."
Holmes overruled that argument. In dismissing the case, he noted in his written ruling that, "The question asked whether the applicant or someone in his household had been charged with arson in connection with an insurance claim; it did not require that the insurance claim [had] been made on behalf of someone in the applicant's household."
The previous case concerned a June 20, 2006, fire that destroyed the Bada Bing Grille on 145th Street, south of Little Rock in Pulaski County. The club was named after a strip club for mobsters on HBO's The Sopranos, and during its seven months of operations had been the subject of numerous visits by the Pulaski County sheriff's office in response to calls that included a drive-by machine-gun shooting.
In late August 2007, Damon Lamont Thomas, then 34, pleaded guilty to a federal arson conspiracy charge, saying that Dokes, the club's manager and a longtime friend, had paid him to burn down the club in the hope that Dokes' mother, who owned it, could collect on a $2 million insurance policy.
Thomas, who was sentenced to five years in prison, admitted pouring gasoline throughout the club and igniting it -- but only after nine 42-inch plasma televisions were removed, and after prosecutors said Dennis Dokes removed two large portraits of his father, a professional football player, and arranged for the alarm to be off.
Dokes' arson and arson-conspiracy charges were dismissed as part of a plea agreement in an unrelated drug case, for which he served a 10-year sentence. His mother was never charged with a crime.
In a motion filed in March asking Holmes to throw out the insurance lawsuit over Dokes' home on Keystone Road in North Little Rock, MDOW Insurance Co.'s attorney, Mark Breeding of Little Rock, argued that Dokes had also lied on the application by answering "yes" to the question, "Is the applicant the owner or mortgagee of the property?"
Breeding said that at the time of the application and the fire, Dokes' sister, Talesha Dokes, was the owner of the house.
Although Dennis Dokes was in prison serving out his drug sentence at the time the application was filled out, his mother, Jocelyn Dokes, signed the application on his behalf since he had given her his power of attorney, Breeding said. He said Jocelyn Dokes acknowledged in a deposition that she had signed the application on behalf of her son after an insurance agent went over the questions with her, and that she thought Dennis Dokes was the owner of the property.
The motion states that Talesha Dokes deeded the property to Dennis Dokes on Nov. 27, 2015 -- more than a year after the fire.
In Jocelyn Dokes' February deposition, a transcript of which was filed in the insurance lawsuit, she said she works in used car sales at Quality Motors, formerly known as Dokes Quality Auto Sales, in North Little Rock. She identified her children, Dennis Dokes and Talesha Dokes, as the owners of the auto business.
In the deposition, Jocelyn Dokes told Breeding that there had also been a fire in 2004 or 2005 at Delta Motor Co. in Brinkley, which she owned and Dennis Dokes managed.
"The building burned down," she said, adding that an insurance company whose name she couldn't remember paid a claim.
Little Rock attorney James Swindoll, representing Dennis Dokes, said it was the first he had heard of the third fire, and asked if it was an arson. Breeding replied that he didn't know.
Metro on 06/20/2017