He’s make people think twice about deals that would have provided seed money for a nail salon, a $40,000 down payment for a $200,000 house in Orlando and rent money for a recovering methamphetamine addict.

“Brutal,” he said. “There’s two places you don’t want to stand. That’s between people and love and between people and money.”

Gieatras does it all at the behest of two Kanawha Circuit judges who believe state law requires them to protect people selling annuity payments from rip-offs.

It’s controversial. Although many involved in the process acknowledge that the sellers get shorted in deals, most say that shouldn’t be a reason to keep it from going through.

“People have a right to make bad decisions if they want to,” said Kanawha Circuit Judge Charlie King. “Most time I try to talk them out of it. I tell them it’s a bad deal. But if they tell me they know it’s a bad deal and they want to go through with it anyway, I’ll usually approve it.”

King and state’s other circuit judges began getting requests to approve these deals a few years ago, after the West Virginia Legislature legalized the sale of annuity payments.

The measure opened the door for various outfits based in Florida, Nevada and elsewhere to begin buying up annuity payments for a fraction of their current value.

Using television ads and mail solicitations, they find people like Tony C. Walker, a Charleston resident receiving annual payments as part of a 1995 settlement that ended a personal injury lawsuit.

Last year, Walker sold the rights to 179 monthly payments of $629 to the Tort Victim’s Assistance Finance Company of West Virginia so he could pay back rent and overdue car payments. The Boca Raton, Fla.-based outfit gave the $6.50-an-hour temporary worker $20,525, less than a third of the payments’ current value, according to court records.

Like most of the people who sell their annuities to outfits like Tort Victim’s Finance Company, Walker never had an outside lawyer look at the deal, according to court records.

Such arrangements alarmed Kanawha Circuit Judges Tod Kaufman and Jim Stucky, especially since state law only permits the judges to approve deals that are “fair, reasonable and in the best interest of the consumer.”

So the judges began asking Giatras to take a look at the deals for them.

“It wouldn’t be right for the judges to say, ‘Ma’am, you know this is a bad deal,’ and then approve the deal,” said Giatras, who estimates he has made between $125 and $200 and hour doing the work. So far, only one of the five deals he’s examined has been approved. In that one, he said, a disabled man with two kids needed the money to buy land, a trailer and better teeth.

And even then, Giatras said, the deal may not have been in the seller’s best interest. “I believe that, frankly, is very difficult,” he said.

Giatras says that people selling their annuities usually come to his office presuming that the interview with him is a perfunctory step. It’s not until he starts looking at their monthly expenses and asking them whether they’ve shopped around for better deals that they realize that he could end up being a roadblock.

“I’m the one who kind of highlights the fine print,” Giatras said.

He said people “can get very bellicose, very angry” when he tells them that he will oppose their plans to sell off their annuities.

“But what I have found is if you give them enough information, five them enough time and present everything fairly, the client will come around,” he said. “In the end, the person whose money it is respects the fact that person was looking out for them.”

Well, sometimes.

At least one of the people whose annuity sales plans were spiked by Giatras has said she plans on trying again in a different court.

“I’m still going to try to get my money,” said the woman, who asked not to be named because she didn’t want people know that she could be coming into a significant sum of cash soon. “I’m go to get a judge that knows all about it and knows what he’s doing.”

At that, Giatras shrugs.

“Can you stop somebody if they want to make a bad choice?” he asked. “Well, only to a degree. You can stomp, you can yell, you can scream from the mountaintops. But I don’t know if you can stop them.”.