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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?

• • •

Five times in my life I have had to outwit con artists and every time, except for one, I have managed to outsmart them.

I once lured a crooked producer to my house in Los Angeles on the pretext of giving him a guitar lesson. I made sure he arrived with the guitar that I had generously given him in exchange for all his supposed help — help that I soon discovered was completely worthless. The guy was a smart-talking fraud, and I had fallen easily for his promises and prevarications. Upon opening the garden gate, I grabbed the guitar from his hands and handed it quickly to my houseman, Dervin, who had been primed to dash into the house and slam the door shut.

“All those police men you see across the street are watching you, Lou!” I told him. “Leave immediately and never come back here!”

The policemen were merely guarding the home of my neighbour, Ozzy Osbourne, but my bravura worked like a charm and away he fled, never to be heard from again. Jack was amazed; he had been convinced there was no way I could possibly retrieve my guitar. Ah, the wily ways we women have to get back at the men who betray us!

Another con artist was an internationally renowned classical guitarist. Supposedly my friend, he charged me a fortune to purchase a collectable guitar for me in Germany. I later discovered he had paid less than half the amount he took from me. I knew he had pocketed the rest of my cash and was determined not to let him scam me as he no doubt had others.

Returning the guitar and retrieving the money required some clever play-acting on my part, several evidence-gathering calls to Europe, assisting him with an editing session for his new album at a local studio, offering to courier his master tapes to New York, and finally a friendly expedition with Jack to his new house in Encinitas under the pretext of possibly purchasing another guitar or two that I would need to test for a few days. Once we were inside, most fortuitously his roof started to to leak. The damage would possibly endanger his instruments, so I used my best blonde charm act and casually convinced him to entrust five of his most valuable guitars to me for safekeeping in my Beverly Hills guitar closet until his ceiling had been repaired.

Driving north on the San Diego freeway with the instruments we had just kidnapped, Jack and I felt triumphant! Confronting him the next day with incriminating evidence elicited crocodile tears and indignant rants that he would never do such a thing to me, whom he considered to be “ like a sister.” But by now I had in my possession several of his forged documents, and it was clear that his attempts to cover his tracks had failed. My husband started to enjoy the game, distasteful though it was, and faxed an anonymous note from a nearby Kinkos: “Fraud plus forgery plus perjury equals jail.” Knowing we had his guitars for ransom and finally realizing he had been caught red-handed, my former friend had no choice but to capitulate. The very next morning the money was returned to my lawyer’s office, where his guitars were handed over.

Now alone in Miami, I had to draw on all my resources to extricate myself from the tangled web that had been woven. This time I fabricated some wild astrological imaginings to back up my story, and fortune smiled down upon me again as Mr. New York fell for my creative scheme.

I made a phone call explaining why we needed to delay proceeding with our relationship: “Pluto is passing through Uranus with Mercury in retrograde this week, causing a harmful alignment with the moon in Capricorn, but complementing perfectly with Mars and Venus ten days from now.…”

It was all complete balderdash, but fortunately he bought my stalling tactic. This allowed me to retrieve the ten thousand–dollar deposit that was being held in escrow by his brother-in-law, a good guy who perhaps had sensed that something was amiss and kindly helped me out.

Several other characters were on the periphery of this unsavoury scenario … a seedy old French film director, a good-hearted wheeler-dealer Israeli realtor, and my astrologer-writer friend Suzanne White, who was send­ing me moral support from Buenos Aires. I did not dare confess to her the nonsensical astrology I had just invented until I was free from the dangerous mess that I had unintentionally helped to create.

Added to this mix of characters was a supposed girlfriend of mine who had helped me move house and with whom I had spent a few days in Grand Cayman. She astutely helped me negotiate my way out of the sticky penthouse deal, but over time she turned delusional. While staying as a welcomed guest in my condo, without my knowledge, she had copied my contact list from the computer that she had helped me set up. She then threatened to “destroy” me and proceeded to send emails filled with untruths to several of my friends and business associates. Later she claimed to have written my songs — a complete fabrication — forcing me to hire a lawyer to stop her destructive behaviour.

I realized sadly that some of the most distasteful experiences of my life had occurred in my tropical paradise of Miami, but I had also learned a valuable lesson there: never to get involved with people of questionable ethics, for it is inevitable that eventually you too will become contaminated by their bad energy.

• • •

Perhaps it was precisely those toxic energies that gave me another scare later the same year. A routine mammogram revealed a small area of calcification in my right breast and required a lumpectomy. Four years earlier I had tripped on a couple of uneven pavement stones in Brentwood and fallen flat on my guitar case while running to one of my focal dystonia hypnotherapy appointments, and I theorized that this trauma was the most likely cause. To my great relief, everything turned out to be benign.

My experience in the outpatient clinic of the hospital served as a wake-up call, though, to beware of hospitals! While the anesthetist was preparing me for the test, the tool that the doctor was using to insert a small metal marker broke in two, and while I lay face down on a cold slab with my breast hanging through a hole, the nurse and doctor started screaming at each other in Spanish. The doctor insisted the nurse run to find a new tool, and she retorted that the hospital had run out and they would have to make do and try to retrieve the marker.

The doctor apologized to me and indicated his preference that I now be given a general anesthetic as opposed to the planned local — the operation would be too painful without. I suspected that it was a ploy to bill the insurance company more, but I was in too uncomfortable a state to argue and submitted without a fight.

To date all my subsequent mammograms have been fine, and there was no residual scar from the procedure, but that experience in Miami gave me great empathy for all those unfortunate women of my generation whose results do not turn out so well. My dear friend Olivia Newton-John, who had her own well-publicized struggles with breast cancer, is now cancer-free, and admirably opened a cancer and wellness centre in Melbourne, Australia, for which she has personally raised millions.

• • •

Looking back now, I see that my life in Miami was enriched by so many varied experiences with so many different people: the opera’s staging of Aida; a dazzling concert by Paco de Lucia; a New Year’s Eve with my girlfriend Patricia at historic Vizcaya; a picnic with a wannabe suitor at Butterfly World, an evening he had arranged so that I could play with two baby tigers; occasional Sunday mornings spent at the Agape church; strolls around Fairchild Gardens with a doctor friend from Baltimore, lectures with my Italian astronomer girlfriend, Fiorelli Terzini; tea at the Biltmore with an amorous theatre producer; and dinner with fellow Torontonian Bob Ezrin, producer for the bands Chicago and Kiss and co-producer (with Michael Kamen) of Pink Floyd’s The Wall. Life in Miami was filled with interesting experiences, but my heart still ached for that elusive soul mate. As much as I adored the Latin men I kept meeting, none came close to fulfilling that role. I chose to be alone with my guitar rather than with the wrong partner.

Over the Christmas holidays Jack passed through Miami en route to catch a cruise. We were still in touch, of course, and we decided to take a day trip together to Palm Beach, where we had lunch and discussed how our post-divorce lives were playing out. Neither of us had found love, and I suppose that after three years alone he might have been hoping I would change my mind and come back to the secure life he had provided me for fourteen mostly happy years. I felt very sad for him — sad that I had broken my marriage vows and abandoned our shared life, and sad that he was going on a cruise by himself. I prayed that his future wife would soon materialize.

I told Jack a slightly abridged version of my Miami Vice real estate episode, hoping he would forgive my stupidity. Ever the protective Virgo, he cautioned me to be more careful living by myself, and it was with an ache in my heart, and I’m sure in his, that we hugged each other goodbye.

I also received a few words of advice from Prince Philip, who seemed to enjoy my letters in which I had recounted my adventures and misadventures. He wrote, “I can quite understand why ambitious men are anxious to attract your attention. Being alone and unattached has its advantages, but it also has its disadvantages!”

Yes, Prince Philip was right, and there were times when I sorely missed the feeling of security that Jack had offered me for so many years. But I was the one who had chosen adventure over safety, and adventure always involves some element of risk. I felt fortunate indeed to have two great men showing concern for me even though neither could protect me from the scoundrels and schemes I had almost fallen victim to. Living in a dangerous city without the benefit of “street smarts” had nearly tripped me up, but my guardian angels had once again come through.

I wondered, though, if I would always be so fortunate. I had caught glimpses of the dark side of Miami, and I had come to think that perhaps it was time for me to leave this city — this dynamic place with which I had originally been so besotted. Perhaps the nails that kept puncturing the tires of my poor Lexus were a sign.

I remembered discovering that one of Latin music’s most successful young producers had blatantly stolen the tracks to four songs of mine. I had paid him twenty-two thousand dollars to produce them — and months later realized that he had used them for one of his other artists. I also thought of all the horror stories Ted had told me about the dishonest dealings in Miami’s music scene.

In addition to the questionable ethics of some in the music business, the drug trade was omnipresent in Miami, funding much of the city’s growth.

Only a few days ago had I not been awakened at three a.m. by a mysterious helicopter landing on the strip of land at the edge of my property? I had imagined a drug drop in process. I had also been pulled aside by a policeman cautioning me that a mere two blocks away from my private compound in Coconut Grove was the centre of Miami’s crack cocaine business!

“Ma’am don’t ever drive through these streets after six p.m.,” he had warned me when, because of a road closure, I had been forced to take a different route than usual. “Lock all your doors and windows, look down, and drive fast!”

Not exactly comforting advice.

I thought about the “crime movie” scam I had narrowly escaped, the city’s traffic jams, the biting bugs, and the hurricane risks, and I decided with sadness in my heart that it was time for a change of scenery. The penny had dropped, the spell was broken, my Latin love affair was over. I finally understood why people had always reacted with such astonishment when I told them I had chosen to move from Beverly Hills to Miami.