Miles Away… Worlds
Apart
By Alan Sakowitz
(Legacy Series Press, 223 pages, $27.95)
If you ever attend literary conventions, you will notice
an obsessive attention to literary conventions. Every discussion
about books harps on categorization, quantification, codification:
“What genre is it?” Everyone you buttonhole immediately wants to
pigeonhole. You learn quickly enough the overarching presumption of
our time, that there is no such thing as a new kind of
book. There are only new versions of old models.
Although my subscription to this closed-mindedness was
complimentary, and I never bought in of my own volition, I will not
claim to be unaffected. Like my colleagues, I have become less
hopeful of encountering originality between the covers. (Notice
that I am all set up here to begin a sentence with “Imagine my
surprise…”, yet I manfully resist the temptation. As a Jew, I
cannot mix cheesiness with red meat.)
You don’t need to imagine my surprise, I’ll tell you all
about it. Ponzi schemes have been proliferating lately, and it
seems like everybody who claims he can make your money grow is
putting it in his vest. Allen Stanford, Bernie Madoff, Samuel
Israel III, Al Gore: so many scammers out there ready to give you
nothing for something. Last year, here in Florida, we added a few
boys to this list. The most prominent one, which blossomed into a
national story, was Fort Lauderdale attorney Scott Rothstein. He
was such a
good friend of Charlie Crist, who appointed
him to the nominating committee for Florida’s 4th District Court of
Appeals, that he thought Charlie might make him a
Senator.
Rothstein’s law firm was not making the money to pay for
his red and yellow (ketchup and mustard?) Lamborghinis. Instead of
milking it and banking it like other lawyers, he just bilked it.
That is, until he made the mistake of trying to con an Orthodox Jew
named Alan Sakowitz, a neighbor of mine in North Miami Beach, who
saw though the charade and fed the info to the Feds. Having blown
the whistle, he is now entitled to blow his horn. I picked up
Sakowitz’s new book,
Miles Away… Worlds Apart, expecting
a boilerplate potboiler. Instead I discovered that rarest of
qualities to be captured in print: originality. Not just a new
book, but a new kind of book.
Instead of cashing in on the notoriety of the case to
write a sensationalistic work steeped in sleaze, he turned this
experience into a morality play. He interweaves his memoir of being
lured by Rothstein with stories about local heroes who put virtue
over profit and the needs of others before their comforts. As we
learn about a user, an abuser, a manipulator, a conniver, we get to
contrast his grasping ways with honest, solid folk who are more
motivated by principle than by interest.
The Rothstein story is all in here, without
sensationalism. His bunco game worked in a fascinating way. He
convinced people that his firm had settled large cases out of
court, with confidentiality of payment as a condition. When a real
lawyer tells you there is real lawsuit money, you tend to believe
it, even if the money is being paid off the books. You could see
that this was a unique setup where fairly solid income was
traveling along a fairly invisible highway. The winners of these
settlements wanted their cash now, the mark was told, so they were
severely discounting the obligations to receive a lump sum
now.
In the end, investors who did not discount this
information wound up taking their lumps soon enough. The only real
suits Rothstein had were made by Armani and bought by him with
other people’s money, vestments from investments. It is all so sad
and sordid, but Sakowitz helps us to swallow this bitter pill of
human failing by coating it with the sugar of human feeling. We can
warm our hearts by looking at the miners and rescuers in Chile,
even as we learn that John Elway was taken by yet another Ponzi
clone. After reading this book, I am convinced that nice guys
really do finish first.
