Obituary for Old Mr. Con

Old Mr. Con died this morning. He was one the first men to make a million dollars developing real estate in Florida after World War II. Everybody had a story about him: one man told me about a guy who hauled dirt for Mr. Con for thirty years. The man was poor and had just one truck and each week, so the story goes, Mr. Con would dispute Mr. Dirt’s bill. If it was $200, Mr. Con would offer him $150, and if it was $100, Mr. Con would offer him $75. Finally, Mr. Dirt started padding his bill by about twenty-five percent so that when Mr. Con got him to knock it back down, Mr. Dirt could collect the actual amount of money that was due.


(At right: Old Mr. Con at the Reagan White House. You could go there if you gave enough money to the Republican party. Old Mr. Con always gave to both parties, so he would always have a friend in high places.)


Most people laughed when they told a story like this because Mr. Con was so charming that even when he was conning you it was hard to dislike him. To regional business people, Mr. Con gradually became—to borrow a phrase from Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s—a real character from characterville. Eccentric and funny, ethically-challenged and extremely cunning, he told anyone who would listen that God talked to him each night and was responsible for helping to make him rich. This was Mr. Con’s most inspired assertion: first of all, He is the best reference a man can give, and, even better than that, He is the only reference for which the failure to verify can be seen as a triumph for the referring party. What? You couldn’t contact Him? Too bad sonny, I’ll speak to Him about it tonight.

In 2006, when he was 85, Mr. Con asked me to work with him on his biography. After doing some research on his life I pondered this proposal. How would we handle, for example, the conflicts he had with local governments over the chronic sewer backups in some his developments? Would he let me be honest about his federal indictment for allegedly breaking into his own safe deposit box—which had been seized and sealed by the IRS—and trying to scoot with at least $800,000 in disputed assets he’d stashed there? After much thought, I convinced Mr. Con to call the project “memoirs” instead of “biography.” I figured the memories this man had might be of interest to history, even if they were not always literally true.

Unlike many elderly people who are up at dawn, Mr. Con liked a late start. He explained this by saying that since God spoke to him each night in his dreams, “I have to wake up and write down what He says before I can go back to sleep again. So He keeps me up late.” In fact, Mr. Con ran late all day, often keeping local dignitaries cooling their heels in his outer office for hours. During those long waits, guests could while away the time reviewing the cheerful words on Mr. Con’s business cards, including a long list of exhortations like; “Keep your mind free from worry. Keep your heart free from hate. Think of others. Scatter sunshine. Give much.” If you took all this advice, you could become one of Mr. Con’s most affable victims, popping his Keys to Happiness into the pocket on one side of your pants while he took your wallet out of the other. The cards also carried this admonition in capitol letters: “EXPECT A MIRACLE!” Always good advice for anyone arriving on time to a meeting with Mr. Con.

Each day at his mansion, Mr. Con had the unusual—for a heart patient, certainly—breakfast of Lorna Doone Shortbread Cookies and a quart of chocolate milk. Then it was time to dress; and old Mr. Con had an extensive wardrobe from which to choose. He bought his trademark searsucker blazers by the dozen (on sale) and always had more than 300 pairs of shoes. Once dressed, he climbed into one of his seven luxury cars and headed to his office.

He was a notoriously bad driver and had two nearly fatal accidents in the last two years of his life. “I think I fell asleep at the wheel that second time,” he told me, “and my car just slid right under the back of that truck!” The accidents did not, however, keep him off the road. It might have helped his driving if he had worn eyeglasses. But he claimed to have learned a set of mysterious eye exercises once on a trip to Asia that enabled him to maintain his “perfect” eyesight on into his ninth decade. This was another unverifiable claim. He did have a huge magnifying glass the size of a fish tank in his office, but even with that his secretary read all of his mail to him aloud. Whenever I finished a draft of a new chapter on his “memoirs,” he would join me in his conference room to review the work—always an hour or two late—and would lean back in his chair and say: “Now just read that to me honey, I’m feelin’ a little tired.” Then I would remove his hand from my knee and begin to read to him.

He employed hundreds of people in his businesses over the years and was proud that he never paid any one of them health or retirement benefits. “One young fella came to me one time and kept asking me about my company’s benefits,” he said in an oft repeated story. “After a while I told him to jump in the car with me and we drove down here and turned left and then right, and finally he wondered where we were? I said to him, ‘Son, we’re in the cemetery. See those headstones? Those are my company’s benefits. You work until you die.’” Ha, ha, ha.

His pension-less plan for his employees seemed to stem from something close to a phobia he had about losing his fortune. Born in 1921 into poverty he spent most of his young life able to afford just one pair of shoes. His apparent fear that those days might come again—I’m being generous here—would so overwhelm his reason that he would not infrequently refuse to pay his bills, even for those whose services he valued, such as his lawyers, his doctors, and, eventually, for me. Rather than try to negotiate these invoices, as he had with Mr. Dirt, he’d just throw the bills away and say he’d lost them. If a person was willing to crawl back and work for him after he’d been stiffed by Mr. Con, the old guy knew he had himself a willing victim.

I was aware of this quirk and wrote into our agreement a provision that would void our deal if he failed to pay an invoice within ten days. For almost a year he paid me on time. Then, about a year and a half ago, he told me he was going on vacation. I gave him an invoice for the previous week and went on to other projects. After ten days, I had not received a check and called his office. His secretary, a very nice lady who, fortunately for her, was already receiving Social Security and Medicare and thus did not suffer from the lack of health and welfare benefits at the Con Company, told me with some embarrassment that she was “trying to convince him to pay” me. A week later I called again and still no check. I endured this tango for eight weeks and then wrote a letter resigning from the project. A week later he sent me my check and a note saying he was looking forward to “finishing the book.”
I did not go back.


I knew that life itself was ultimately con-proof and that one day soon, especially if he kept knocking back those Lorna Doones and chocolate milk, the cemetery would claim him as it would claim us all. He would follow his own guidelines and work until he died. But then—and I can say with absolute impunity since I’ve been talking a lot with God lately and He has been giving me some very special details of His plans—I understand He will have a number of things to say to old Mr. Con when He sees him. Before He sends him on to his final destination.