Word: floridas
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...Busted Dream Juan Puig embodied the Florida dream, proving that an ordinary guy with moxie could make a fortune and enjoy the high life by selling the dream to others. A Cuban immigrant, he started his career as a janitor and then a baggage handler at the Miami airport, living in a Hialeah apartment without air-conditioning, peddling sunglasses to co-workers on the side. In the 1990s, he discovered real estate, rehabbing and selling a few foreclosed duplexes, then developing town houses and branching into condo conversions as the market went nuts. He soon built a statewide empire with...
...certainly didn't bother Puig, who explained in a recent deposition that he never paid attention to his books, in part because his expertise was in matters like where to advertise property and whether to paint the doors yellow or white, and in part because he never imagined the Florida housing market could tank: "Of course, I trusted that the business, like always, would be successful...
...more about Florida...
...course, he got stucco. Now that South Florida has tied Las Vegas as the nation's fastest-tanking real estate market, Puig is bankrupt, with $80 million in debts. His mansion was liquidated for $11.4 million, and his yacht went back to the bank. At Puig's bankruptcy auction, bidders competed for a necklace studded with 226 diamonds, a Sopranos pinball machine, a 1965 Ferrari, nine designer bikes and other bubble baubles. The billiard table went for $25,000. "It's amazing how fast it all came crashing down," says Puig's criminal defense attorney, Joel Hirschhorn...
...wore a pinkie ring with a two-carat diamond; now he wears Brooks Brothers and defends fraud cases. "It's where the action is," he explains with a grin. An epidemic of inflated appraisals, exaggerated incomes, straw buyers - and the lax regulation to enable it all - has made Florida tops in mortgage fraud, according to the Mortgage Asset Research Institute; in a recent Palm Beach County case, a grocery cashier's salary was listed as $344,000 a year. And Paul Singerman, bankruptcy counsel for Puig's companies, is even busier. His firm represents the Florida home builders Tousa...