Prior to my joining, an RRA partner named Melissa Britt Lewis was tragically murdered. It turned out the murderer was the husband of Scott’s assistant Debra Villegas. Scott would explain to anyone who asked about the police presence that he was never going to allow another one of his “family” of employees to be harmed the way that Melissa had been. He could afford the extra security, he said, so he would do it in her honor.
That Monday after Halloween, all everyone did was sit and talk about the unfolding drama. After Stuart told us about Scott running to Morocco, at least half of the people in the room dissolved into tears. I promptly returned to my office, thinking there was nothing I could do to alter this new reality other than to figure out where I’d go if the firm really did go out of business.
In the days that followed, as word got around, I received calls from several law firms in town asking if I wanted to join them in the wake of whatever was going on over at RRA. I needed some advice about where to go. I was pretty gun-shy about going to another big firm. I called a friend of mine who had a lot of connections and he advised me to see a lawyer whom I had known only by reputation. The lawyer’s office was directly across the street from RRA, so I went over without an appointment and told the receptionist I needed to see Bruce, it was an emergency.
Bruce Rogow was a law professor and a lawyer’s lawyer. He was known to have the ability to handle any situation. I think he had argued more cases before the Florida Supreme Court than any other lawyer alive. I’m sure I was talking too fast to make sense, looking for a magical piece of advice, when he took me into his conference room.
Bruce sat back in his chair and after listening said, “This is very amusing.”
I tilted my head and said, “What part?”
“I heard Scott Rothstein owns a Bugatti. I heard he etched his initials into the leather seats, and I wonder how difficult it would be to change his initials to mine,” he said. “I don’t understand why you think this is a problem. You have a great reputation, and you don’t need to go to another firm out of desperation. Do you like the people you’re working with over there? I know Steve Jaffe, Seth Lehrman, and Matt Weissing, and they’re all good lawyers. You should talk to them about starting your own law firm. You’re all going through this emergency, which means you’ll work faster than you would in normal circumstances.”
I went back to RRA and told Steve Jaffe I wanted to talk to him. We agreed to set a breakfast the next morning at the Floridian on Las Olas Boulevard. The meeting turned out to include me, Steve Jaffe, Gary Farmer, Matt Weissing, Mark Fistos, and Seth Lehrman. Russell Adler heard about it and came by, saying if we were starting something new, he wanted to be part of it. The problem was, he was a close friend of Scott’s and a named partner of RRA. Whether he was involved in Scott’s problems or not, it would be next to impossible for us to explain his joining us.
As soon as Russell sat down, we started grilling him about what was going on with Scott. As much as we all liked Russ and appreciated his bringing us together, we explained why we couldn’t be associated with him going forward. He said he understood, and I think he genuinely did. We left breakfast after I had explained to the guys that Bruce Rogow recommended we start our own law firm. We agreed we would pick up the conversation the next day and that I would take the lead on securing a place to have the meeting.
Then we all went back to RRA and worked. I tried to catch up on my other cases to make sure my clients knew I was on top of things and to make sure the judges on my cases knew it, too.
I was working at about six o’clock that night when, facing my computer screen, with my back to the door, I saw a reflection of someone entering my office. A male voice told me to take my hands off of my keyboard. When I turned around and looked up, there was a guy wearing all black with the letters FBI on his shirt. I assumed he was the only agent there. Why did he single me out?, I wondered. Epstein has to have something to do with this.
I lifted my hands from the keyboard and moved toward him. I walked slowly out of my office, confused, to find FBI and IRS agents everywhere. They had swarmed the building. By the time I got down to the lobby, there were dozens of RRA employees huddled together, all prevented from leaving the building. The agents were upstairs confiscating all of the firm’s files, documents, and computers—absolutely everything that held information. They kept us there for three hours or so before letting us leave and telling us we were not permitted to come back. Not that it mattered. By now, there was nothing to come back to. Everyone seemed panicked, but I felt relieved. At least this was not Epstein’s personal attack on me.
That night, the RRA firm hired Kendall Coffey to represent it. It wasn’t just the biggest news story in town, it was the biggest in the country. There were videos of the raid on national television, with Kendall doing his best to try to explain that only Scott Rothstein, and few if any others, had knowledge of the crimes that were said to have been committed. He even walked the news crews through the office to show how secluded Scott’s office was from everyone else’s. It was a nice try, I suppose, but this scandal was now beyond normal crisis management. In good times and bad, Scott Rothstein was a larger-than-life personality whose footprint could not be denied. The only thing missing was his moral compass. As it turned out, he had been running the largest Ponzi scheme in Florida history, and second-largest Ponzi scheme in United States history, trailing behind only Bernie Madoff.
Outside the Joe DiMaggio Children’s Hospital was a statue of Scott. The firm name was on display at the American Airlines Arena, where the Miami Heat play, and on the Long Key Park Garden of Relection for Crime Victims in Davie, Florida. Bova Prime was his restaurant, he owned the Versace Mansion, and Fort Lauderdale was his town. Overnight, he went from the most popular and powerful man in South Florida to the most destructive and hated criminal in our small-town history.
Just when I thought I had heard it all, I learned that the cases I was litigating against Jeffrey Epstein had been used in the final chapter of Scott’s Ponzi scheme just before its implosion. The premise of the scheme was to tell investors that he represented victims of sexual abuse or sexual harassment who had received large settlements that would be paid out to the victims over a period of time. For a significant payment, the investor could acquire the rights to the long-term payouts of the settlement. For example, Scott would tell an investor that an abuse victim received a settlement that would pay her $20 million over the next ten years, but that she would prefer to receive a one-time lump-sum $5 million payment immediately. The investor would then pay $5 million and acquire the rights to $20 million over time. What the investors didn’t know is that these were not real cases or settlements at all. Instead, they were just made-up stories living in Scott Rothstein’s mind.
At the end, Scott’s wealthy investors had become suspicious. Several investors had hired attorneys, wanting to verify that the cases in which Scott was offering the opportunity to acquire settlements were real. Of course, none were real, but Scott was unwilling to give up that easily. He was desperate for new funds to keep his Ponzi scheme afloat. Scott needed a case with sensational facts that fit into the framework of his stories about settlements for sexual abuse and sexual harassment victims. As luck would have it, just as his scheme started to fall apart, Scott found the perfect cases right at his fingertips. Enter the legitimate lawsuits that I was litigating against Jeffrey Epstein, which Scott, unbeknownst to me, showed to investors to try to convince them that all the other stories he was peddling were legitimate.
The only difference between Scott Rothstein and Jeffrey Epstein was the consequences that each faced for his crime. Scott was soon to be treated as he should have been. Epstein had been given special treatment, but I wasn’t done with him yet.
SIXTEEN THE FALLOUT
PRIOR TO MY JOINING RRA, Epstein definitely felt he had the advantage over me, and maybe that was true. He was intimidating his victims, having his lawyers bash them in public by filing motions to expose embarr
assing things in their lives and past history, from petty theft, to drug use, to abortion. You name it, he exposed it. What’s more, his lawyers kept us on the defense, forcing me into the courtroom on nitpicking discovery motions nearly every day. We were on our heels with his rat-a-tat-tat maneuvers. But that had all begun to change. Once I got to RRA, I’d been able to put on a very aggressive offensive, and Epstein was frantically defending.
As soon as he found a way to plug a hole we’d poked in his defense, we opened up another. The momentum had been shifting quickly. We’d served subpoenas on his friends and ex-employees to force them to testify under oath to what they had seen him do and say. We obtained crucial documents from his pilots and ex-butler.
Knowing that his most powerful weapon was his ability to control everyone in his employ through his vast wealth, we’d decided to attack his money directly. We filed a motion to freeze millions of dollars of his assets, citing the fraudulent transfers he had made to his chief pilot, Larry Visoski. We were cornering him. He had no way out. I thought in those days we were only a few moves away from checkmate. In order to get out of the traps we’d set, Epstein needed a big break. And thanks to Rothstein, he got it. Somehow, he always seemed to wriggle away just as the legal noose was tightening. When RRA imploded, he was able to do it again.
Practicing law during this time was not easy for me. The FBI had confiscated my files, including my computer and my digital notations in the Qtask system. With my case information gone, I found myself attending hearings and arguing motions without the benefit of documentation, an assistant, or even a formal law firm behind me. That was my life on a typical morning. In the afternoons, when my new partners and I weren’t busy looking for office space to open our new firm, Farmer, Jaffe, Weissing, Edwards, Fistos & Lehrman, I was going door-to-door to tell my clients what had happened and explain their choices. Telling them their law firm had been labeled a criminal enterprise was not fun.
According to the rules, I had to tell them they could remain with RRA—which had at this point been forced into bankruptcy, with the managing partner of the firm under investigation for running a $1.2 billion Ponzi scheme. Or they could stay with me and the new firm I was opening with five others who had also been at RRA. Or, of course, they could find a new law firm altogether and not deal with the headaches of RRA and those of us who’d been there. I had a good relationship with my clients; not one of them left me.
In November 2009, we opened the new law firm. I went to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Fort Lauderdale and let them know that it was important that I get the remainder of my files back from the FBI heist. They finished their review that day before helping me load the boxes into my car. After a month, I was finally able to get back to work. Or so I thought.
In December 2009, I set up a lunch with my friend Earleen Cote to let her know I was doing fine. Earleen had been my boss from 2004 to 2007, when I first left the State Attorney’s office for private civil practice, so she was particularly invested in my professional success. She’d been worried about me, since the new firm was working around the clock to get off the ground. During lunch, I got several calls from a telephone number I did not recognize. I finally answered to hear a process server tell me he had something for me to sign. I told him where I was, and he came to meet me. I figured it was probably something related to the bankruptcy proceedings with RRA, but instead, it was a message from Jeffrey Epstein. Not just any old message, but one that arrived in the form of a thirty-six-page complaint filed in Palm Beach County court. Jeffrey Epstein was now suing Scott Rothstein—no surprise there—but also my client Lynn, whom Epstein had abused, and me.
Epstein made outlandish criminal allegations against me. He first alleged that the three of us formed a criminal enterprise and conspiracy to defraud him. None of the Rothstein fraud had anything to do with me, Lynn, or the legitimate cases that were being prosecuted against Epstein. Epstein knew that, but he also knew that this was an opportunity to attempt to pressure me into abandoning my cases, including the CVRA, a case that exposed him to possible criminal liability and another prosecution. He had cover for his outlandish complaint, too, since there had been nine boxes of files related to him in Rothstein’s office when Rothstein left for Morocco.
In the complaint, Epstein alleged that I had forged judges’ signatures, conducted various kinds of illegal discovery including wiretaps, and formed a criminal enterprise in which I had directed Scott Rothstein on how to mastermind the RRA Ponzi scheme. On its face, the complaint was a joke. Earleen and I both laughed out loud as we read it. Frankly, it was confirmation that Epstein knew I was winning. But because he was able to hire respected lawyers, they added credibility to the false allegations. His lawyers disseminated the complaint to the press at a time when Scott Rothstein was the most hated lawyer in Broward County, the state of Florida, and a good part of the country.
People were reading the complaint against me at the same time that Scott’s statue was being removed from the hospital, millions of dollars in donations were being returned by various charities, and Scott was coming home from Morocco to begin cooperating with the FBI. The fact that he came back was a surprise to many; evidently it was not out of a respect for law or the goodness of his heart. According to rumors, some of the victims he’d duped in his Ponzi scheme, particularly a few less-than-upstanding citizens, were threatening to mail Scott some of his beloved relatives, one body part at a time, if he didn’t come home with their money.
When he returned to the U.S., Scott brilliantly defended himself by playing a role only he could. The media was following him around every step he took, and instead of hiding out, he made himself conspicuous. He was eating at restaurants all over town. The media would ambush him with questions and without faltering, he would explain, “The FBI has made a terrible mistake, but the truth will soon come out.”
But there was more to his act than met the eye. While he was all over town with everyone he could see, he was wearing a wire for the FBI and trying to nail the bad guys he had worked with throughout the years. One of them was named Roberto Settineri, a reputed Sicilian mob boss wanted in Italy for attempted murder. Scott convinced Settineri to help him destroy documents and launder $79,000 for him. Apparently, it had not occurred to the man that Scott was recording their conversations. Settineri was arrested.
The court initially sentenced Scott to fifty years. In order to shave some time off his sentence, he even had his own uncle arrested. It wasn’t an entirely fruitless strategy. His cooperation got him into the witness protection program and a drastically reduced sentence, which likely would have ended up at around seven to ten years.
With most crooks, cutting a deal with prosecutors and the courts to reduce a prison term would be considered a smart move, but Scott blew even that one. He started strong, giving weeks of sworn testimony in civil cases and countless hours of interviews to authorities, resulting in the arrest of all of his former co-conspirators and other criminals he knew. He put so many people in jail he probably could have reduced his sentence further, but then, he contacted his wife, Kimmy, and told her where he had hidden a 12.08-carat yellow diamond—an asset he had intentionally failed to disclose to the FBI.
Kimmy found the stone and had her friend sell it to Patrick Daoud of Daoud’s Fine Jewelry in Fort Lauderdale for $175,000. But that didn’t work out very well, either. Daoud was arrested, in part for lying about his role in the scandal, and was represented in criminal proceedings by a local legal legend named Fred Haddad, who would later become one of the lawyers representing Epstein in the case he had filed against me.
Daoud was sentenced to ten months of house arrest and two years probation for obstruction of justice, while Kimmy Rothstein was sentenced to eighteen months in prison and her friend was sentenced to three months in prison and three years of supervised release.
Because of his concealment of the diamond, Scott’s fifty-year sentence was not reduced, and he will be serving his prison sentence for the rest o
f his life. The word on the street was that he was able to remain in the witness protection program during his time in prison, but who knows how much that is worth these days.
In addition to Scott Rothstein, the remaining two named partners at RRA—Stuart Rosenfeldt and Russell Adler—also served time for crimes related to Rothstein’s operation. Russell Adler was also represented by Fred Haddad, who was able to keep him out of jail for a while. The government initially investigated Russell for being one of the main co-conspirators in the Ponzi scheme, but ultimately only had evidence related to campaign donations. It took them years to even file those charges. Once the government gave Russell his options and he realized that taking a plea was in the best interest of himself and his family, he didn’t back down like everyone else with their tail between their legs. That was not Russell’s style.
Instead, he threw a going-away party at Prime Cigar and Wine Bar in Boca Raton. The back room had a table with a black-and-white tablecloth that had jail bars on it. The pictures on the wall were of other people, mainly Italian wiseguys, who had thrown parties before going off to jail. You would think that someone going to jail wouldn’t have a very big turnout because for the most part, everyone wanted separation from everyone else who was at RRA and was being charged with a crime. But in true Russell Adler fashion, his party was full of doctors, lawyers, judges, and friends sending him on his way to Pensacola to do his two-and-a-half-year sentence.
In total, more than two dozen people were arrested in connection with Rothstein’s Ponzi scheme. The firm CFO, Irene Stay, was charged with conspiracy to commit money laundering and to defraud a financial institution for her role in overseeing the accounting functions of the law firm. Broward Sheriff’s Office lieutenant David Benjamin was arrested and charged with conspiracy to commit extortion and violate civil rights in federal court, and Detective Jeff Alan Poole was jailed for conspiracy to violate civil rights. RRA’s general counsel, David Boden, and Richard Pearson, an investment banker who worked in the same building as RRA, were also arrested in relation to the scheme.
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