Florida Scams

By Victor M. Knight

“Witty, informal, and sprinkled with down-home Florida vernacular . . . [These] tales of shady characters . . . are as informative as they are entertaining.” —Midwest Book Review
 
We all know about Florida’s sun, surf, and senior citizen population, but what do we know about its seedy underbelly? It is a fact that Florida's loophole-laden tax laws and laissez-faire attitude have attracted all kinds of swindlers, from the garden variety con man to criminals as infamous as Al Capone. It is also a fact that Vic Knight knows virtually all there is to know about every one of them. As a tenth-generation Floridian, Knight has abundant personal knowledge of Florida history, which augments his wealth of research on scams. Taking the immortal words of his Papa Johnson and Papa Knight, he has compiled a set of Grandaddy’s Rules that can help a person see through the “smooth-talking jaspers” who over the years have bamboozled victims out of billions of dollars.
 
Shady characters like mayor/preacher/convicted felon Oyster King Willie Popham, the fictitious Prince Michael of Austria, and “the mysterious fifty-dollar tipper” carry off a potpourri of scams involving everything from luxury cars to ostrich eggs to phony tax returns. Knight explains how Boca Raton is a city based on the scam, like Treasure Island, whose very name comes from the scam that put it on the map. These cons attract scores of people because they seem fool-proof; but remember Grandaddy’s Rule #3:"Nobody ever pulled a rabbit out of a hat without carefully puttin’ one in there first.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Nov 30, 1996
• ISBN: 9781455604425

Book preview

1

Ambition Is What Makes Us Work Hard to Get Ahead; Greed Is the Other Fellow's Ambition

Con. Webster's Dictionary Defines con As to learn, as in a lesson. Webster's also says something about to trick and swindle, which gets down to where the water hits the wheel a whole lot better. I think it was Grandaddy's Rule #2 that said, You learn something new every day . . . unless you're very, very careful.

My old friend, realtor-consultant Hank Thompson, had a malfunctioning soda pop machine in the lobby of his building that regularly ate whatever coins it was fed and gave nothing in return. Over the coin-slot, Hank hung a small cardboard sign that read, Instant Teaching Machine: insert a quarter and learn a lesson.

The thesaurus equates con with learning, as in self-instruction. Right next to that are the words prevaricate, garble, gloss over, cook up, and concoct. These are easy enough to grasp.

Basically, a con is a con is a con. And Florida has always had a giant-sized helping of them all, throughout her four hundred-year-plus history.

Florida scams, cons, stings, rip-offs, swindles . . . no matter what you hear them called, they range all the way from the simplest little-old-lady-pigeon-drops to the most complicated multi-million-dollar investment and stock market schemes. These include intricate bankruptcy scams involving folks with really deep pockets who seem to have a magic touch when it comes to financial maneuvering.

Often these deep-pocket folks simply want to have even deeper pockets, if they can get them. As you'll see, they often can—especially in Florida.

Florida, in some quarters, is known to be a bankruptcy haven. One state legislator, Senator Jim Scott, from the occasionally-maligned Fort Lauderdale, says that at least part of the blame must rest with the state legislature for being too easy on debtors and would-be bankruptcies coming to Florida. Florida's laws allow hundreds of bankrupt people to flee to the Sunshine State to escape their creditors in northern cities. (One of Grandaddy's Rules—I don't remember which one—said there was no danger in running into debt. It was running into your creditors that gave you problems.)

Anyway, the practice of declaring bankruptcy and running to Florida seems to be growing among the well-heeled crowd.

A bit north of Jim Scott's Fort Lauderdale, along Florida's magnetic southeastern Gold Coast, lies the famed city of Boca Raton, once nicknamed Maggot Mile in a New York Times News Service series.

It was here that Senator Scott addressed his fellow lawmakers, saying that while the legislature was busy with issues such as naming an official state pie, they should have been trying to close some of the loopholes in Florida's laws.

In 1993, even CBS's prestigious 60 Minutes devoted a major story to Florida's generous tax exemption policies toward personal and corporate bankrupts from her northern neighbor states.

That story indicated that Florida had the longest list among all the fifty states of what a bankrupt person might keep, no matter how much he or she might owe to his or her creditors.

At that time, Senator Scott, 60 Minutes, and the respected Knight-Ridder area newspaper The News all made note of the organization Florida Taxwatch, Inc., a private, non-partisan, fiscal watchdog group based in Tallahassee. Taxwatch is also urging the state to clamp down on bankruptcy and tax-dodger cases.

While they may not be exactly big-league scams or cons in the strictest sense, both Taxwatch and 60 Minutes cited the cases of baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn and Ohio banker Marvin Warner.

According to the feature reports, Kuhn, within days of his law firm declaring bankruptcy in the north, moved to Florida, acquired a million-dollar home, and was reported to have brought a $2-million investment portfolio.

Warner, according to the stories, was able to scrape up enough to move to Florida and acquire a $3-million horse farm in the Ocala area after the collapse of his Cincinnati banking interests.

The end result of all scams, large and small, is that the little people get hurt. The little people are the ones who, through taxes, must eventually bear the burden of supporting all those who are able to avoid carrying their own fair share of the fiscal load. And these creative minds seldom run out of ideas on how to beat the system. They never exhaust their supply of assistants who conjure up various creative bookkeeping techniques.

And it's not only private individuals who cook up scams. You also get misappropriation of public monies, malfeasance in public office, and instances of frivolous or self-serving use of your money by bureaus and county commissions.

We'll be exploring all of the above and more, just