Big money: Among the personal items that former Tyco International chief executive L. Dennis Kozlowski bought and charged to the company (without authorization, the company said in September) were two New York City apartments ($24 million), a Boca Raton, Fla., house ($29 million), furnishings and renovations ($14 million), a travel toiletries box ($17,000), an umbrella stand ($15,000), a shower curtain ($6,000) and a pincushion ($445), along with half the $2.1 million tab for a 40th birthday party for his wife (a former waitress at a restaurant near Tyco headquarters in Exeter, N.H.). (The party, at a Sardinian resort, featured Stoli vodka loaded into a statue of a man so that it could be poured out to guests through his penis.)
Lego your anger: The National Post (Toronto) reported in August on the $12,000 (U.S.) executive seminars given by the local management firm Case Solutions, centering around its clients’ using customized Lego blocks to build quixotic designs as metaphors for their companies’ opportunities and problems. For example, one executive made an octopus with a hard hat and holding a skeleton to show himself as a multi-tasker; the hard hat supposedly represented problems from the past, wrote the Post, while the skeleton was said to symbolize his tendency to protect himself from sales quotas.
Saving face: In August, a jury in Sarasota, Fla., awarded a 59-year-old woman $2.1 million from surgeon Holly Barbour for a faulty face-lift and neck-lift. According to testimony, Barbour had offered the patient a discount operation (at $7,500) because Barbour had previously worked only on eyes and wanted to expand her practice to faces. Barbour’s surgery took 10 hours (twice the norm) and left the patient with a lump on her face that made a popping sound when she blinked.
Compelling Explanations: Raymond Leopold, who was the “Winston man” model in cigarette ads from 1978 to 1980, filed a federal lawsuit in Little Rock, Ark., in April, demanding $65 million from R.J. Reynolds because he is so torn up with remorse and stress at the role he played in creating smoking-related illnesses in people who were influenced by his ads.
In September in Carlisle, Pa., Gordon Neal Diem was convicted of several charges in connection with an alleged attempt to lure two teenage girls (one being merely a police officer posing as one online) to a motel room for sex, but according to him, everything he did was part of his life’s dedication to finding and stopping adults who sexually abuse children. The 60 items of bondage and sex toys he had on him (and the Viagra tablets) were merely props, he said, to make him look like an authentic pervert, and a child-sex photo he had “helps motivate” him in his work, he said.
Least Competent Criminals: David Christopher Lander, 51, was arrested in Gainesville, Fla., in July, locked inside the Infiniti car he was burglarizing; while inside, he had accidentally triggered the car alarm, which automatically locks the doors. And in September, Andrew Birch, 21, was arrested in Renfrew, Scotland, after becoming wedged in the window of the car he was climbing through in order to (according to authorities) steal. (Alcohol was involved in both incidents.)
2002 CHUCK SHEPHERD
This article appears in Oct 9-15, 2002.
