Does God Consider This Charity?

I had an interesting experience this morning. I realized a guy I thought of as big-hearted and kind of a salt-of-the-earth person had treated me very badly. I already knew what he had done, but somehow it didn’t affect my feelings about him until today.

His name was Don. He died 5 years ago. He was my dad’s partner. His wife’s name was Claudine. She died a decade earlier. I did a considerable amount of legal work for Don.

Don was eccentric. When I worked for him, he and my dad had separate offices. He worked out of a high rise condo on Miami Beach. A residential apartment. I used to drive there and use a converted bedroom for an office.

Claudine was his office manager. A former IRS attorney, she did not practice. She spent a lot of her time dealing with projects that arose from the death of their son, who was raped, murdered, and dismembered by an illegal alien. She knew John Walsh. She helped police departments get bloodhounds to track criminals.

Claudine was also eccentric.

Don snagged a beautiful client. It was part of a huge European corporation. I think it was Parmalat, but I don’t recall. It’s now part of UBS. The subsidiary that hired Don invested in several expensive high rise condo units, but construction was never finished.

The man who represented the client in America was named Giancarlo. He was a short, wiry Italian guy. Whenever I asked him how he was doing, he would thrust his fist in the air and say, “Like a LION!”

To hear Don tell it, Giancarlo had essentially handed a Miami Beach shyster a 7-figure check based on a handshake, and his employer wanted the money back.

There were boxes of badly-prepared documents. Duplicates. Irrelevant material. Don told me only a lawyer could fix it, so he told me to sift out the junk, dump it, and present him with the rest.

This took days. I sat in that bedroom for hours going through this stuff.

Don and Claudine were both disorganized. I’ll give you a Don story so you will understand.

Don took a trip for a client back in the Seventies. Being Don, he parked his c. 1970 Toronado in a short-term garage at Miami International. When he came home, he did not use his car to leave the airport. I don’t recall the reason. Maybe it wouldn’t start, or maybe his then-wife picked him up.

He kept procrastinating, and eventually, the bill became enormous. MIA kept pestering him. He decided to abandon the car.

MIA would not let him abandon the car. Eventually, he had to pay them a visit, give them a big check, and take his car.

When I worked with Don, he and my dad were no longer part of the first firm my dad led. Don got fired by that firm.

My dad really liked Don, but he eventually had to go along with the rest of the partners when they fired him. Don didn’t record his hours, so they couldn’t bill clients. Don told them he was so good, his value as a resource somehow made him worth keeping anyway. My dad had to explain that nobody was worth keeping if they didn’t generate income.

Because Claudine was lazy and disorganized, she put off checking my hours. When she and Don finally look at them, I had spent a number of full days on the boxes, unsupervised.

Don got upset. He looked panicked. He said he could never get the client, which had extremely deep pockets (especially compared to mine) to pay so much. His solution was to tell them I had spent much less time on the boxes, and I was underpaid accordingly.

Had I been a partner, there could have been some colorable argument that Don wasn’t on the hook, but though I worked as a partner with my dad, I was an associate as far as Don was concerned, so he owed me for every hour I spent.

As an associate, I was an employee. A subcontractor, really, because I was paid by the hour and had no expectation of severance pay if I was canned. If you hire a subcontractor, you pay him, whether you get paid or not. Let’s say you have an AirBnB. You pay someone to paint it because you think a rapper is going to rent it for 6 months. Then the rapper goes to prison for multiple counts of statutory rape. You still owe the painter.

For some reason, I let it go and didn’t hold it against Don and Claudine, and I kept working with him.

On another occasion, a man who owned delivery trucks asked us to write contracts for his drivers. He was a subcontractor for Fedex. Don told me to get to work, but he failed to get a retainer. When I was finished, the client refused to pay, and I got stiffed for 4 figures. Don, not the client, owed me the money, but I got what I got.

I don’t know why I continued working with Don and Claudine or why things remained cordial among us. I will never be able to explain that. I liked Don. I thought of Don as a very good person. I always looked forward to seeing him.

I got stiffed by other employers, and afterward, I didn’t think of them as good people. Why were they different?

My first boss in the legal world was the late Jack E. Dominik, a brilliant but nutty patent attorney. He had a domineering secretary he feared and obeyed. I worked for him as a law student.

One day, Jack told me and another student he would hire us after we graduated, and we would receive $50 per hour for our work, which was very good at the time. We worked assiduously, and I thought I had a good job waiting for me. Then I got an unexpected call from Jack.

He told me my services would no longer be required, blah, blah, blah, best of luck with my career.

I later learned that his secretary had told him to fire me. I was always courteous with her, but she must have seen me as a threat to her domain, so out I went. I learned this from his paralegal, a brilliant Swiss polyglot who understood Jack’s work better than he did. She is one of the most amazing human beings I have ever known. The secretary was just a blob.

The paralegal got an important job at Motorola. She probably runs the company from her desk. It will probably collapse if she quits.

Anyway, Jack owed me money.

We had a system. Our computers were networked. I kept a file in mine. In the file, I recorded my hours. The office manager, a friend of Jack’s daughter, was to go into my computer every so often, collect my information, pay me, and bill clients. The office manager called herself Jenae. It was not her real name. She just thought it was cool.

Jenae did not collect my information. Instead, she spent tens of thousands of dollars on Beanie Babies. Jack’s dollars. I think this was her retirement plan.

The plan did not pan out. Jenai was finally caught when Jack decided to look at his books, and she went to prison. I don’t know who got custody of the Beanie Babies.

When I asked Jack for my money, which was nothing like the cost of the Beanie Babies, he got very upset. He wrote me an emotional letter saying that writing my check made him “sick.” Jack liked money a lot, so this was true. He said there was no way his clients would pay him. Probably not true. Jack was not all that honest, and I suspect he managed to find a way to add my $2,200 to his own hours, which would have been fair, if not quite kosher.

After Jack sent me the money, he softened up and became more cordial. He told the paralegal he should never have fired me, and he said I would make a fine litigator. Well, thanks, I guess.

I didn’t think highly of Jack after this. I thought he was an untrustworthy jerk.

The other law student, Larry, left, too. I think Jack was just too wacky and erratic for him. He ended up working for a big firm farther up the coast.

While working for Jack, I met another lawyer who stiffed me. I did 30 hours of work for his client, I was owed $1500, and I never saw a dime. The other lawyer kept telling me the client was a standup guy who would pay up eventually, but it never happened. The problem was not the client, however, because I never contracted with the client. My agreement was with the lawyer, and he owed me the money regardless of what the client did.

I’m not naming this guy. His law practice is dead, and he may be, too, but for all I know, he’s sitting in a one-room apartment, Googling himself furiously in hopes of suing someone so he can pay his rent.

I don’t think of this lawyer as the salt of the earth. He’s a deadbeat who took advantage of a young lawyer who trusted him and did good work for his clients. He could have paid me.

Diane, Jack’s secretary, made a huge blunder. I was a good attorney, and Jack was about 77 when Diane had me fired for no reason. He quit about 5 years later, I believe. That’s when he stopped filing reports with the Department of State.

He had a disabling stroke in 2005 or 2006, and he ended up dying in California in 2009. I guess one of his kids put him in a facility. He was estranged from his son. Maybe it was his daughter.

I used to know the details, but I forgot.

Diane’s job ended with the stroke. Had she stayed out of my way, I would have kept the firm going, and I would have kept her on as long as she did her job. She had a cushy position in a very comfortable and spacious law office, there were tons of clients, and she could have ridden it into old age instead of setting fire to her own bed.

She should have done everything she could to help Larry and me succeed, but instead, she sacrificed her future for some petty reason Jack did not have the courage to articulate. She probably ended up with a menial job.

It’s interesting that I could have such low opinions of two lawyers who cheated me while continuing to think highly of Don, who underpaid me by much larger amounts, twice.

I forgive Don, Claudine, Jack, Diane, Jenae, and the guy who stiffed me for $1500. They did what they did, though.