took a detour to Disney World, saw an IMAX film, and ate ice cream, and I tried to forget what a huge mistake I had just made. Perhaps the producer I was looking for was simply not in Miami.
6
Con Artists, Miami Style
A retired New York businessman and art dealer, whom I met at a Fisher Island art gallery cocktail party, had befriended me. I had become involved in a bizarre real estate tangle while attempting to purchase a penthouse located on Collins Avenue in Miami Beach, and my new friend offered his help. The place, filled with erotic art, and owned by a man whom I conjectured to be an elderly bipolar psychopath married to a twenty-something Polish dominatrix, had magnificent 360-degree views from the intercostal waterway to the ocean, and a fanciful rooftop guesthouse with canopied opium bed and all manner of antiques, the majority of which were to be included in the sale price.
As I had no desire to inherit the collection of erotica that filled the condo, my new businessman friend struck a deal with a buddy of his, a Hasidic rabbi, who suggested he could overestimate the value of the art, take it all off my hands, and anonymously sell it through various auctions in order to make a profit to benefit his temple. In return he promised a receipt for a fat charitable donation that I could use as a tax credit. Attending one of his basement schul dinners, I started to feel uneasy with this real estate deal and sensed that I was being drawn into a world I had little experience with.
• • •
I was also becoming frustrated with the singing lessons I had signed up for hoping to strengthen my voice. Mr. New York (my nickname for the businessman who had befriended me) had introduced me to Frank Sinatra’s former manager, Eliot Weisman, a music industry kingpin who encouraged my songwriting but insisted that I take singing lessons with his friend Tony Perez, at the crazy price of five hundred dollars a lesson!
Desperate to sing, I foolishly complied. During the lessons Perez would scream and yell at me, all the while dressed in camouflage gear and acting out an absurd drill sergeant persona. He told me I had to hold my breath longer then scream my lungs out. He added that if I felt like throwing up, the bathroom was right in the next room.
It was a humiliating experience. It brought back memories of the time back in Toronto when Kenneth Mills, the enigmatic, mystical leader of the Star-Scape Singers, had offered me a singing lesson and told me I had to be “prepared to die” for a few minutes. Learning that he would try to hypnotize me, I had brought my fiancé, Joel, along for protection. As I was not about to join Mills’s cult-like community, the lesson had no effect on my voice. I also remembered when my neighbour Ozzy Osbourne had suggested I take lessons from his singing coach, Ron Anderson. Anderson turned out to be a pretentious jerk who pocketed my $300 but refused to teach me, saying it was too late in life for me to learn. I had driven back home to Beverly Hills in tears.
This time, in Miami, I had just wasted a few thousand on these useless lessons, plus the time spent having to drive for an hour each week to his studio. I realized that my voice had not improved at all. I gave up on vocal coaches and took Srdjan’s advice to simply sing with my guitar.
• • •
Meanwhile, the plot thickened around my penthouse deal. A socialite, in whom I had confided about my negotiations, made an underhanded attempt to outbid me under the pretext of buying the zebra rug she had taken a fancy to, and which I would never have wanted to keep. The entire deal was getting messier and more complicated. Along with the main negotiations there were now many subplots, one of which involved a large sum of money I had been talked into investing with a branch of Regents Bank, whose Colombian manager was another buddy of Mr. New York. The two of them were pushing me to transfer my funds into a specialized account to get more than the normal investment income. It seems human nature to be greedy and, I confess, I was tempted by what I had thought was a legitimate offer. To this day, I have no evidence that there was really a scheme afoot, but paranoia set in fast.
My money was in jeopardy, the penthouse negotiations had become unbearably tangled, and I had unwittingly made myself dependent on Mr. New York, who was now suggesting the forging of a document — a complicated endeavour that involved the whiting out of some critical wording in the promissory agreement, play-acting a friendly visit with the owner, and then secretly exchanging his original contract for a copy.
I knew all of this was wrong, and just contemplating the scenario caused me sleepless nights. I definitely wanted out, but I was now dependent on this man. Adding to my discomfort was the fact that Mr. New York made it obvious he had more in mind than just taking me out to dinners and on boat trips and being my pro bono real estate adviser.
How had I let myself be lured into this mess? I knew I was in a desperate situation, but I consoled myself by rationalizing that all this double-dealing and intrigue — part of a world I had never before been involved with — was contributing to my education, and would hopefully smarten me up in the future. I had the illusion that I had somehow been swept into a bizarre crime movie; that I had actually fallen into a Miami Vice episode, and a bad one at that! How could a naive classical guitarist from Toronto and the once protected wife of an established Beverly Hills businessman have found herself entangled in this crowd of con artists?
“Welcome to Miami, Liona,” my Cuban girlfriend, Patricia, told me, shaking her head.
• • •
I decided to hire a private investigator to run a check on Mr. New York and the penthouse owner. There too, I should have done more due diligence when hiring the PI casually suggested by my buddy Ted. He turned out to be yet another charlatan; he took my money and a few days later handed me some useless data that I could have gathered myself using the internet.
In a panic, I hired a second investigator. He was the real deal and came back with a very different, detailed report. Lo and behold, my gut instincts had been absolutely right. I had suspected that, behind all of the clever dealings, what I had become involved with was a criminal mind at work. And I was right! I discovered to my horror that Mr. New York had twice served time in a federal penitentiary for money laundering.
I took some long, deep breaths and, with pounding heart, convinced that my funds were in jeopardy, rushed over to Regents Bank minutes before closing time. I asked how much money was in my account.
“It has all been withdrawn, madam, so the balance here is zero,” I was told.
My heart stopped dead. They had beaten me to it and all the money was gone.
Try to keep calm, Liona. Money is only money and you’ll still survive, I told myself, trying to recall words of wisdom from every Zen master I had ever read. I would be fine. Didn’t Wayne Dyer, one of my heroes, walk away from all his wealth on his path to enlightenment? But how could I ever tell Jack or my parents what an idiot I had been? I had nobody to blame but myself.
All of a sudden the bank teller exclaimed, “Ah, I’m so sorry, Miss Boyd. I was looking at your chequing account, and now I see that your deposit has been transferred into this high-interest one.”
Aaaah, what relief, what joy, what ecstasy … I felt like singing!
“Please put a freeze on that account immediately!” I stated emphatically.
At that instant, an elderly Cuban man entered the bank selling Toblerone chocolate bars from a basket. “I’ll have five,” I told him and handed them out to the manager and the delighted tellers.
The next day I spoke directly to a different manager and was able to get my funds transferred back to the safety of my Bank of America account. Were they actually planning some kind of an identity theft, or had paranoia taken over my normally calm and logical mind?
To this day I cannot be sure what games were being played. At the time, though, I knew that I had to cut all connections as soon as possible. I made a midnight run to a parking lot, with my trusted buddy Ted, to return a cache of Mr. New York’s art that he had given me to decorate my walls, and which I now suspected had been stolen. Other art, including a small Matisse print I bought from him, turned out to be a fake. Liona, how gullible could you have been?
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