So: read a few pages of the book before you judge the smiling, shiny cover. White teeth and a bespoke pinstripe suit may paint an attractive picture, but that colorful sports jacket and unforgettable slogan you see every time you take the midtown bus to the liquor store may be exactly the razzmatazz you need.
Summation
It’s pretty simple, really: pay your counselors for the services they’ve rendered. We have a right to earn a living, and we’ve put in the hard work and the study to be where we are. In fact, pay all the folks who are working for you. And give your mail carrier a holiday bonus, Scrooge McDuck. It’s the least you can do after ordering that fifty-pound vat of lube for home delivery last April.
Having said that, don’t let yourself be taken advantage of, either. Nobody should feel stuck in a situation where they’re being gouged, or talked down to, or generally cheated. Hell, you hired a lawyer to get you out of a jam—it’s downright twisted for that lawyer to try to make things worse for you.
This takes some common sense on the client’s part, and a heaping scoop of intuition and attention to detail. If anything, figuring out that you’ve got a crappy attorney might just come down to a gut check. I knew a lawyer who was having a conversation with a client about a court appearance on charges the client was stealing from his church donations every Sunday. The lawyer had new cards to give out, and opened his wallet. As he did that, he made a big show of turning the wallet and the few hundred-dollar bills inside away from his client’s view.
The guy wasn’t necessarily a bad lawyer, but that’s kind of an asshole move, right? Sure enough, that client—even though he was facing a tough case that could have ended with jail time—opted for different counsel. You can be killer at your job, but sometimes just a brief slip into the confirmed douchebag slot will be enough to lose a little face, not to mention present and future work.
See, it’s not all on you, the client. You’re not a contestant on one of those “So You Think You’re a Temptress” island brothel shows—or, if you are, you’re the one in the sexy hula skirt handing out the lei to your lawyer of choice. In all my “do this, don’t do that,” maybe I haven’t been clear enough about the fact that you are a hot commodity, you’re the creamy bowl of tomato bisque that’s going to feed one lucky hungry counselor. You deserve respect, not to mention the best defense that money can buy.
PART IV
Avoiding Temptation
I love my work. I enjoy gently guiding clients through the mean streets of the justice system, and I understand that sometimes even honor roll students end up in the back of a squad car, staring at their reflection in the window and asking themselves what the heck just happened.
Whatever it was that put you there—a drug deal, public urination, dognapping—you don’t want to repeat the misadventure. Don’t worry about keeping my practice in business, because there are many, many other things a canny entrepreneur like me can help you out with—all of them well within the boundaries of Farmer Five-O’s happy ranch of admissible activities. What I’m talking about now is more about taking off my lawyer hat (because we’ve already gotten you off the hook) and putting on my life coach cap. Here follows a few thoughts on how to keep your nose clean, as far as the authorities are concerned.
You’re familiar with judo; it’s that smooth-looking martial art deployed with pizzazz by most spies in old espionage flicks. It’s no accident that judo translates to “gentle way”—it may look like make-believe when a tiny little gumshoe upends a beefy henchman, but it’s all about gracefully turning the enemies’ own weight and balance against them.
Stay with me, here. The trick to successfully flipping your career in crime into a more respectable aboveboard way of life is to take the very thing dragging you down and turn it to your advantage.
I’m going to give some examples of folks who were this kind of judo master (I don’t know if any of them were actual judo masters). Then we’ll talk about what you can do to figure out what your hidden talent might be. Maybe you’re an innovator, a strategist, or mentor-in-disguise. One man’s spray-can-wielding hoodlum is another’s undiscovered Keith Haring.
They made a movie about Frank Abagnale. Starring Tom Hanks and Leonardo DiCaprio, no less. Frank was a prodigy. He was gifted at being other guys. He started early, the Mozart of fraud and deception. Frank was fifteen when he figured out a way to chisel more than $3,000 from his own father. It was only up from there. Frank soon began to joyfully bounce forged checks. He set up a false bank deposit situation, ended up walking off with sacks of cash directly from the banks themselves.
A man of the many-colored cloth, Frank liked to try on different looks. He impersonated an airline pilot and flew something like a million miles for free. The guy masqueraded as a doctor for almost a year. He was a chameleon.
Frank Abagnale even posed as an attorney—up to the point of passing the bar exam. All by the time he was legally old enough to buy a case of beer at the corner store.
Overachiever, right? Frank was arrested in France when he was twenty-one. He continued to impress, and escaped from a federal prison (don’t try this at home, kids)—but eventually he did do a little time. After he got out and cycled through some uninteresting, everyday gigs, Frank began selling his criminal banking expertise to the banks he might have been ripping off. He’d demonstrate the many ways con artists could cheat these financial institutions, so that they could learn to better protect their customers from people with Frank’s skills. This turned into a legitimate business that he was still running well into his sixties.
Every con man survives on being able to weave an entertaining fib, so it’s a little hard to tell how much of Frank’s story is true, but even if only half of his exploits really went down the way he tells, the guy was some kind of larcenous savant.
Frank’s famous today because he took that wily criminal expertise and turned it on its head. Not everyone has his brainiac attention to detail or his charm-their-pants-off smile, but any halfway decent criminal has a glitter of something in them that can be discovered, mined, and smelted in fine golden jewelry.
The next time you’re cruising down the highway, take a second glance at some of those beautiful blonde bombshells that you see plastered over billboards selling everything from sunglasses to buffalo wings, and think about Georgia Durante. In the 1970s, Georgia was a model in upstate New York, a “Kodak Girl”—the epitome of vintage urban glamour back when you still had to snap a flashcube to the top of your point-and-shoot if you wanted to take a picture in anything short of direct sunlight. While she was still a teenager, she fell in love and fell in with the mafia. One night, someone tossed her a set of keys, told her to get going, and soon the mob discovered that this girl could drive.