Eight years. Two presidential administrations gone, a third seated. One of the company’s two principals is dead. Every adversary proceeding the trustee ever filed — including the fraudulent-transfer case against Jonathan Oglensky and his four children — has now closed. None of it produced a dollar for Labor. Not one. Not even Shari Nott’s own estate, the only NFN principal confirmed dead, has been reported to have paid the victims anything.
Shari Nott is the only NFN principal confirmed dead — killed in a rollover crash in Mason County on October 16, 2024, while a federal arrest warrant for contempt sat outstanding against her. That fact is independently reported by Michigan local news and unchanged.
We reported this case as unresolved for years because it was. It no longer is, in the sense that matters to lawyers: the litigation machine has finished running. What it produced, after eight years and every adversary proceeding closed, is nothing for the Field Service Technicians and property preservation contractors this bankruptcy was supposed to make whole.
That is not a smaller story than an open case. It is a worse one.
The Case, In Brief
National Management and Preservation Services LLC, doing business as National Field Network, was placed into involuntary bankruptcy on April 6, 2018. The petition originally proceeded as a Chapter 11 reorganization before converting to Chapter 7 liquidation on April 2, 2019. The 341 meeting of creditors was held May 17, 2019. The deadline for filing claims was August 12, 2019.
Shari Nott ran NFN’s day-to-day operations as CEO. Jack Jaffa, the sole owner of NFN, hired her in 2009 to run it. The trustee went after Jonathan Oglensky and his family members — Blake Eugene, Emma Rose, Sophie J., and Rachel M. Oglensky — alleging they received improper transfers of estate assets, including money that reportedly funded a Bahamas property purchase, vehicles, and college tuition. That case has closed. Jaffa himself, in a separate adversary proceeding, Adv. Pro. 20-1648, settled his portion of a $1.85 million claim for $300,000 — $60,000 upfront and $240,000 paid over 12 months, according to the 2022 consent order terms Foreclosurepedia previously reported. A later December 2023 consent order covering related claims produced terms we were unable to obtain in usable public detail.
Every one of these proceedings is now closed. None of them put money in Labor’s hands.
The Machine Finished. Nothing Came Out The Other End.
This is the part that should alarm anyone who has ever waited on this case for a check. A case that drags on for years with an open adversary proceeding is, at least in theory, still building toward something. A case where every proceeding has closed, every insider has settled, and the docket still shows zero distribution to the creditor class that forced this bankruptcy into existence in the first place — that is not a case in progress. That is a case that ran its entire course and delivered nothing to the people it exists to serve.
Not even Shari Nott’s estate — the one party in this entire saga who is actually dead, whose assets should be the most straightforward to reach — has been reported to have paid the victims a cent. If the estate of a fugitive who died while dodging a federal contempt warrant can’t produce a payment to Labor after this many years and this many closed proceedings, something other than “the case is complicated” is going on.
Where the Money Actually Went
Bankruptcy professionals do not work for free, and in this case, they have not worked cheap. Documented professional fee awards across the case — McManimon, Scotland & Baumann; Withum Smith & Brown PC; Bederson LLP; Ravin Greenberg LLC; and Atkinson & DeBartolo PC — total roughly $571,475.90 in fees plus $14,242.37 in expenses. That is a floor, not a ceiling. McManimon, Scotland and Baumann’s interim applications alone ran from $118,284.50 for the July 2020–May 2021 period to $223,520.50 for the following year, both granted in full. Withum Smith and Brown billed more than $111,000 across four separate applications. Muller, Baatenburg and Wilson was retained as special counsel in August 2024 and generated fees that never made it into any subsequent public accounting we could locate. The docket stopped recording itemized monthly billing years ago.
Compare that number to the payout Labor has received after every single adversary proceeding closed: zero. Not partial. Not delayed. Zero. Every closed proceeding was billable hours for someone. None of them were a payday for the contractors who were actually owed money.
Nearly a Dozen Sweetheart Deals — And Now They’re All Final
Adversary proceeding after adversary proceeding in this case ended the same way: a settlement, approved by the court, with terms that were either minimal or never fully disclosed to the public. The Oglensky family fraudulent-transfer suit is no longer the exception to that pattern — it is now simply the last entry in it. It closed like everything else. Case after case, the pattern holds — insiders and associates of a company that stiffed hundreds of contractors got quiet resolutions, while the contractors themselves got nothing, and now that every case is finished, “nothing” is the final word on the subject rather than a status update.
Ten claims — numbers 118 through 127, representing real contractors and small businesses including RCR1, Ray Consulting, Herbruck Enterprises, and Nile Property Solutions among others — were expunged by court order in August 2022 without payment. Trustee’s counsel Michele Dudas eventually acknowledged, in a November 13, 2023 filing, that the petitioning creditors were “actual victims” who had “their business lives and personal affairs devastated.” That acknowledgment is now more than two years old. It produced nothing.
The Judge Who Presided Over Eight Years of This
Chief Judge Christine M. Gravelle has presided over or supervised this case since it landed in Trenton in 2018. She signed the contempt order authorizing the U.S. Marshals to forcibly enter Shari Nott’s residence in April 2024. She signed the settlement orders that closed out insider after insider. And now that every adversary proceeding in this case is finished, the docket she is directly responsible for managing shows no final accounting, no distribution order, and no public explanation of where eight years of litigation and hundreds of thousands of dollars in professional fees actually left the creditor class this case was filed to protect.
Bankruptcy judges have the authority — and the duty — to demand case management. A judge with docket control does not let an eight-year case close out every adversary proceeding without a corresponding accounting to the people who are owed money. That is not a technicality. It is the entire point of the office. If Chief Judge Gravelle’s answer is that this was simply how long the process took, Foreclosurepedia would like that explained on the record, in detail, because “the process took eight years and paid Labor nothing” is not an explanation — it is the problem.
Judges are public officials, and the public is entitled to judge their public conduct in public cases harshly. On the record before us, “incompetent” is not a stretch — it is the plain description of an eight-year proceeding that closed every open matter and produced zero recovery for its primary creditor class. Whether that failure is bureaucratic inertia or something less innocent is a question this docket, on its own, cannot answer. It is a question worth someone with subpoena power actually asking.
The Trustee Who Closed the Book Without Opening the Register
Andrea Dobin succeeded Bunce D. Atkinson as Chapter 7 trustee on July 20, 2020. She has now held this case for six years and closed out settlements with American Express, Bank of America, Christopher Crandell, Jack Jaffa, and the Oglensky family. Every avenue of potential recovery this estate had has now been litigated to a close. What has not happened, anywhere on the public docket, is a final report showing what any of it actually recovered for Labor, or a distribution order putting money in the hands of the contractors who forced this case into existence in 2018.
If the estate recovered nothing collectible from any of these closed proceedings, Labor is entitled to be told that plainly, in a filed report, rather than left to infer it from years of silence. If the estate recovered something and it has not been distributed, Labor is entitled to know where that money is sitting and why.
The Institutions That Looked Away
Fannie Mae was one of NFN’s servicer clients, alongside Reverse Mortgage Solutions. Fannie Mae’s own objection to NFN’s disclosure statement, filed early in the case, cited delayed payments to subcontractors and liens on properties — meaning Fannie Mae had direct, documented knowledge that Labor was not getting paid while NFN was still operating. That objection protected Fannie Mae’s own interests as a creditor. It did nothing for the contractors on the ground.
HUD has not investigated the contractor payment practices of the platforms that routed work through NFN. Fannie Mae has never audited its field services sub-vendor payment chains. The CFPB has never treated contractor non-payment as the systemic servicer compliance failure it is. NAMFS has never once used this case, publicly, as a reason to push for bonding or payment-protection reform in an industry that keeps producing versions of this exact collapse.
Foreclosurepedia has stood by Field Service Technicians and Inspectors for years, documenting collapse after collapse — Berghorst, SEAS, Buczek, A2Z, and now the finished, unpaid conclusion of NFN. We have done this while HUD, Fannie Mae, NAMFS, and the CFPB treated Labor as an afterthought in an industry built on their unpaid work.
What Foreclosurepedia Is Asking For
We are renewing our call for the Department of Justice, the Office of the U.S. Trustee for the District of New Jersey, HUD, and the Federal Housing Finance Agency to examine this case’s administration. The question is no longer what is the status of any single adversary proceeding — they are all closed. The question is simpler and harder to dodge: with every proceeding concluded and every insider settled, where is the final accounting, where is the distribution order, and why, after eight years and hundreds of thousands of dollars in professional fees, has not one dollar reached the contractors this bankruptcy exists to make whole?
Contractors who are owed money by National Field Network and have not been contacted by the trustee’s office should demand a copy of the final accounting and ask, in writing, where the money went. Silence has been the only consistent output of this case for nearly a decade. A closed docket without a distribution order should not be allowed to be the final word.
Eight years after three Field Service Technicians forced this company into court because they could not get paid for work they had already done, every legal avenue this estate had is now exhausted, the professionals administering it were paid on a documented schedule for most of that time, and not one contractor creditor has received a dollar. That is not a bankruptcy that resolved. That is a bankruptcy that ended, and Foreclosurepedia intends to keep asking where the money went until someone answers.
Foreclosurepedia is an independent investigative publication covering the mortgage field services and property preservation industry. Court records cited in this article are drawn from PACER docket 18-16859-CMG, United States Bankruptcy Court, District of New Jersey, together with prior Foreclosurepedia reporting on file.
