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
