The Dark Prince Scott Rothstein's Fort Lauderdale mansion
was full of high-class party guests and caterers back on a random day in October of 2009.
Exotic cars lined the front entrance.
The party was rocking, champagne flowing, and appetizers were passed around.
However, there's one very important person who was missing.
Where was Scott Rothstein?
While the guests at Rothstein's party enjoyed the high life, they were clueless about Scott’s
world that was about to come crumbling down around all of them.
Fort Lauderdale's self-proclaimed 'Prince of Darkness' had gone down the darkest road
of his life.
The FBI were coming after him for his central role in a massive $1.2 billion dollar ponzi
scheme.
Scott Rothstein Scott Rothstein was a force to be reckoned
with in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
He was a partner at his own law firm.
He was friends with powerful politicians, such as then Florida Governor Charlie Crist
and former Presidential Candidate John McCain.
Money ran through Rothstein's veins and he spent it like it was a bottomless pit.
He was renowned for his fleet of exotic cars that ranged from classic Rolls-Royces to a
Bugatti Veyron.
Rothstein was a large man with the energy to match.
He wore his hair like Guy Fieri did, except he was much louder and wore only the finest
Italian suits.
And he was always flaunting an expensive watch, one of the hundreds in his huge collection.
So how did he manage to have SO much more money than the average Florida Lawyer?
Hush Hush The answer is simply that he ran a ponzi scheme.
A huge one!
To understand Rothstein's Ponzi scheme, let’s take a look at the following very simple fictional
scenario just as an example.
Let’s say a woman named Melissa is an employee at a large company.
She’s been discriminated against by her employer.
So she decides to file a lawsuit against her employer.
But instead of going to court and damaging their reputation, her company decides to settle
with Melissa, and she’s due a million bucks, after all the lawyer fees and whatever other
fees.
Of course, the full Million dollars doesn't just go to Melissa's bank account.
It's paid out over several months or years.
But for one reason or another, Melissa wants her money in a lump sum now.
So what her lawyers would do is sell her settlement.
They’d sell it to investors for, let's say, 50 cents on the dollar.
So Melissa gets the Half a million dollars right now.
The investors eventually would get all her settlement money of a million dollars, for
an eventual profit of half a million and a nice ROI of 100%.
This is a perfectly legal thing to do, and it’s something that often happens in settlement
law.
Maybe you’ve seen the hilarious commercials for JG Wentworth?
It’s essentially the same business.
But here’s the thing.
Scott Rothstein often dealt with cases that were sensitive.
So the cases would have non-disclosure agreements.
Talking about specifics of the case would jeopardize any agreements in place.
And here's where Rothstein came into play.
Aside from being a talented attorney, Rothstein was a masterful storyteller.
He would make up scenarios, just like the one above to investors.
He would sell settlements that never existed to investors.
The returns were too good to pass up.
At that time, Scott Rothstein was a respectable lawyer who was running THE law firm to work
for.
And because of the sensitivity of the cases, Scott would play it up to the investors that
they CAN’T talk about their investments whatsoever.
Rothstein Early Years Rothstein’s life wasn’t always super flashy.
Rothstein grew up in the Bronx in New York, where he shared a bedroom with his sister.
His family wasn't wealthy by any means.
His father worked hard.
He went up and down the streets of New York selling random items.
His dad moved with his family to Florida in 1978, when Rothstein was 16 years old.
Rothstein claims that his grandmother emptied her life savings to send him to school at
the University of Florida and then on to Nova Southeastern Law School.
Rothstein got his first big break when he was hired by Gary Phillips in 1999 to work
for his law firm in Hollywood, Florida.
However, Rothstein couldn't deliver on his ambitious goals and asked to leave the firm
just two years later.
This was the time when Rothstein partnered with Stuart Rosenfeldt.
This was a decision that started the nine-year clock on Rothstein's ticking time bomb.
Gary Phillips, the man to give Rothstein his first big-break in law, described Scott as
having delusions of grandeur.
He said that Scott wanted to own the most powerful law firm the world has ever seen.
Scott wanted to be the most successful lawyer in America, and he was willing to do it by
any means necessary.
Phillips described Scott as being a talented lawyer.
He thought that Scott could have easily been rich and had a very comfortable life with
an honest career in law.
But Scott had much much bigger visions.
Phillps also described Rothstein as a man without a plan.
He thought he could do anything in the world without so much as a game plan or budget.
These so-called delusions of grandeur would be his ultimate demise.
Rothstein, Rosenfeldt, & Adler Scott Rothstein and Stuart Rosenfeldt partnered
with Russel Adler to found Rothstein, Rosenfeldt, & Adler, simply known as R.R.A.
For a while, the firm operated under the radar in Florida.
They specialized in labor law settlements, representing both employees and managers.
It was in 2005 that Rothstein began to make some serious plays.
R.R.A. began taking over law firm after firm, absorbing their lawyers and expanding their
in-house legal team ten-fold.
Jeffery Sonn, attorney for Rothstein's victims, speaks to how insane R.R.A.'s rapid growth
was.
In just a few years, they went from a handful of lawyers to seventy plus working attorneys.
In December of 2005, Rothstein was added to the list of Best Lawyers in America.
Money was coming in fast, and even Scott’s own spending couldn’t burn through the money
that was coming.
Scott Rothstein was running an elaborate Ponzi scheme that was completely unknown and unfathomable
to their clients.
Property, Cars, and Watches Rothstein had no problem spending money that
belonged to the clients he scammed.
He had access to hundreds of millions of dollars.
He began buying homes, restaurants, cars, watches, basically anything of value.
And he had a huge spending habit.
He ran up hundreds of thousands of dollars on his credit cards.
Rothsteing ran up $900,000 thousand dollars on his AMEX alone in one month at one point.
He drove a $1.7 Million dollar Bugatti Veyron to work everyday.
Here’s a fun fact, the IRS were only able to recoup about half the value of this Bugatti
back in 2010.
His wife, Kimberly, was no stranger to the money either.
She was a real estate agent by trade and helped Scott secure multiple properties in the Fort
Lauderdale area.
They purchased his first waterfront home for $1.2 Million on Castilla Isle.
He liked the area so much that he bought his neighbor's house too for a whopping $2.7 Million
dollars.
Who was his neighbor?
None other than former Miami Dolphins star running back, Ricky Williams.
Forged How did Scott get away with everything for
so long?
There was no way he could run such a huge scam all by himself right?
Yep, he had a team of fellow scammers who helped to forge legal documents and judges'
signatures to legitimize his fake cases.
He could hide through the fake veil of attorney-client privilege where he could claim that he could
never disclose any personal information about the phony claims.
And the money poured in.
Rothstein would use money stolen from victim B to pay off Victim A while pocketing a percentage
for himself.
Of course, his greed and grandeur would eventually catch up with him.
The one big fact that made the entire scheme absolutely convincing were the fake bank statements
showing the huge amounts of money being wired into trust accounts with R.R.A.
William Sherer, an attorney representing Rothstein's victims, claims his clients were suckered
in by those bank statements and those bank statements alone.
'The money was in the bank,' the victims would say.
The money was in the bank alright, just in Scott Rothstein's personal accounts.
Eat the rich, Devour the poor Rothstein's delusions of grandeur and lack
of planning finally caught up with him.
He started receiving daily emails from investors looking for their money.
This is because of the financial crisis that happened back in 2008.
Not even Scott Rothstein could escape the financial crisis.
The incoming cash flow started drying up because people just didn’t have money to invest.
On the flip side, because everyone started needing cash, his investors began calling
back loans early.
Rothstein started missing multiple payments in the millions.
This was around the time he started to dip into the real Trust accounts of R.R.A.'s other
clients.
Let’s look at a real quick example.
John Figueroa is a former highway maintenance worker.
He was injured on the job after a piece of equipment malfunctioned.
The father of two was living pay-check to pay-check at the time.
He ended up hiring one of R.R.A.'s legitimate attorneys and he won a $90,000 thousand dollar
settlement.
So what does Rothstein do when he was desperate for money?
Rothstein dips his hand into John's trust account and empties it.
Money that was supposed to help set up financial futures for John's children was instead used
to fund Rothstein's running pyramid scheme.
Escape to Morocco Rothstein's world finally came crashing down
in October of 2009.
While guests at his Fort Lauderdale Mansion sip champagne purchased with stolen money,
the guest of honor was on a flight to Casablanca, Morocco, which was a fugitive's paradise.
Why Morocco?
It all had to do with the Extradition agreement Morocco had with the US.
And that agreement was that there WAS no agreement.
Morocco has no Extradition treaty with the United States.
Just to explain extradition treaties very quickly, it allows countries in agreement
to hunt down and capture fugitives who have escaped and bring them to justice in the countries
where the crimes occured.
For those countries that have extradition treaties with the US, they’re expected to
hand over their own citizens charged with crimes in the United States.
Perhaps the most famous extradition case was Pablo Escobar's fear of extradition to the
US from Columbia.
If Rothstein made it safely to Morocco, the Moroccan government wouldn’t have turned
him over.
Nor could U.S. officials legally travel to Morocco to hunt him down.
He was a free man in Casablanca with $16 Million dollars in cash, and supposedly, his coveted
watch collection.
Change of Heart Scott Rothstein actually DID make it to Morocco.
He hid out there for a few weeks.
But he had a change of heart in Morocco.
He had spoken with friends and family for weeks.
Even though he faced a potential 100-year prison sentence on five counts of fraud, racketeering,
and money laundering, he returned to Fort Lauderdale on his own anyways.
Was it because he really felt bad?
Probably not.
It was because there were threats made against members of his family.
And for the safety of himself and his family, he decided the best play was to come back
to the US.
Scott wasn't formally arrested until December of 2009.
In the time between his return and his arrest, Rothstein spent days with federal agents detailing
his scheme and implicating everybody that was involved in the huge ponzi scheme.
He gave up everybody.
He even went as far as to undercover work against the Italian Mafia.
His cooperation cut his sentence in half.
Prosecutors settled on forty years, but the judge threw the book at Rothstein anyways.
The judge sentenced Scott Rothstein to 50 years in prison for his deep-seated infection
of American life.
He was involved in sports, politics, law, pop culture, and he cheated his way into all
of it.
Those people who helped in Rothstein's scheme have also seen prison time.
R.R.A. attorney Christina Kitterman was sentenced to five years in prison for impersonating
Florida Bar Officials.
R.R.A.
Partners Russell Adler and Stuart Rosenfeldt also were found guilty of illegal campaign
contributions on Rothstein's behalf.
Rothstein Today Scott Rothstein is currently serving out his
50-year sentence in the U.S. Bureau of Prisons' Federal Witness Protection Program.
He has long since been banned from practicing law in the state of Florida.
But that hasn't stopped him from practicing jailhouse law.
He's been submitting his own legal documents, arguing to reduce his sentence to getting
out as recently as 2018! Rothstein's pleas for a reduced sentence fell on deaf ears,
and as of the release of this video, he’s still in jail today.