AN IDIOT FOR A CLIENT

I tell you that hiring an attorney to sue somebody is like hiring your own flesh eating bacteria, and now another lawsuit arrives to prove my point. Greg Calvino is an idiot as validated by the $100,000 check he wrote to prove his sincerity to Miss Elisa Kwon. They were in a two year relationship at the time (2005), and she says Calvino said she could cash the check if he ever tried to shove another strip club prostitute up his nose. And Miss Kwan says she believed him; silly girl. Evidently Ms. Kwan was unfamiliar with basic boiler room technique (a variation on the Nigerian lottery scam) in which the sucker is offered something later of alleged value in exchange for their cash right now. Of course the thing of value turns out to be worthless, but by the time the mark figures that out their cash is gone, as is the con artist. Scams like this are invented not by devious criminal geniuses but by opportunists who, in their struggle against their own demons rob their victims almost as an unintended consequence. In this specific case, the thing Calvino wanted was Miss Kwan’s honor and the worthless thing of alleged value he promised was the $100,000 check. OR maybe she was familiar with the scam, since the idiot actually signed the check and gave it to her to hold. And it was good!
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Mr. Calvino is a stock broker and the boy clearly has no respect for money or for Miss Kwan, either, because in July this year Calvino filed a claim demanding his money back, alleging that Miss Kwan was actually blackmailing him by threatening to go to his bosses with allegations of his boozing and whoring and drug use unless he wrote her the check. (Like his bosses didn’t know already know he was an idiot.) But, at the end of September, Miss Kwan filed her response, replete with copies of an instant message exchange in which Calvino apologized to her for boozing it up at “Flashdancers”, and Kwan reminds him that he also failed a “Rite-Aid” urine drug test for cocaine. Calvino then admits, “If you want to keep the money it’s yours to start anew”, because, “I didn’t hold up my part of the bargain.”
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We’ll just pass over the problematic idea of dating an idiot whose urine you feel the need to test (after all she did get the idiot to write her the check) and proceed directly to the question of what the hell was this idiot thinking? First he wrote her the check and then after she cashed it, like Oscar Wilde before him, Greg Calvino sued, an act of stupidity presumably justified as “defending his honor”. He’s a stock broker. He has no honor. And he’s already in the hole for the hundred grand (and the cash for the cocaine, the booze and the prostitutes) and now he’s also paying a lawyer! What an idiot!
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Did you hear about the $67 million pair of trousers? The media and the blogs portrayed the dry cleaners, the Chungs, as hard working immigrants almost driven from their new country by a legal lunatic, Judge Roy Pearson, who sued because the Chungs lost his $20 trousers. But until he sued the Chungs couldn’t find his pants. Then they did, answering the question, if anybody had asked it, what do you have to do to get a little service in this life? But more to the point, what kind of an idiot expects to be treated fairly by a Dry Clearners? People do not open dry cleaning business because they like the smell of dry cleaning fluid. The whole business is a fraud, as proven by the very phrase “dry cleaning fluid”. The only way a dry cleaner makes money is in volume, and customer service, like keeping track of individual items of clothing, wastes their time. And the only way owning clothing that requires ‘dry cleaning’ could make your life worse is if you get lawyers involved.
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In the end, Mr. Pearson’s lack of legal perspective on the case cost him his appointed position as an Administrative law judge, which had paid him over $100,000 a year. And the Chungs lost their store – but they still own two others. Maybe some of those who sent them money would like to sue them for a refund. Face it; the American Judicial system provides all the justice we are willing to pay for, and we are a nation of cheap bastards.
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Like when hedge fund manager Stuart Sugarman was pedaling his little heart out in ‘Spin Class’ at the Equinox Gym in Upper East Side of Manhattan, grunting like Tim Allen in a testicle clamp and shouting things like “You go girl!” This pissed off stock broker Chistopher Carter who was struggling to burn off carbs a bike or two away (In fact, some who witnessed the pedal-by-assault say Sugarman was working so enthusiastically he kept bumping into Carter’s cycle). After politely asking Sugarman to “shut the fuck up” a couple of times and being told, “This is spin class; Grow up”, Carter dismounted his bike and shoved Sugarman and his bike into the wall, thus proving the admonition to “grow up” was not taken by either of these idiots. Carter then returned to his pedaling…and so did Sugarman - for another 45 minutes, but presumably with his big fat mouth shut this time. And it all happened because Sugarman was too cheap to pay for a private class.
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But a few minutes after class Sugarman says he started to feel neck pain and called for an ambulance (on his own cell phone). Should I think it odd the gym, filled with trainers, didn’t offer to help or call or him? In any case, during his two week stay at Lenox Hill Hospital (during which he allegedly required a 3 hour operation on his spine) Sugarman was informed (by phone) that his gym membership had been cancelled. Insult to injury, I guess. Sugarman’s lawyer (ah, you knew he had one!) came out swinging, calling the assault a case of “spin rage”, and Carter’s lawyer (and you knew he had one, too) called the publicity generated an attempt to build a civil suit. The New York Post headlined the story, “Gym Victim Is Wheely Angry”, along with a picture of Sugarman in wheel chair and neck brace as if made up for a remake of “The Fortune Cookie”. But the Manhattan D.A. would only charge Carter with a misdemeanor assault, and I predict that at least one of these idiots is going to end up suing his lawyer.
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As probably will another lower Manhattan denizen, the new Mrs. Elana Glatt, who has decided to sue the florist for her wedding, because the flowers provided “…had a significant impact on the look of the room…” which was “…entirely inconsistent with the vision the plaintiffs had bargained for…”. So she’s suing them for $400,000. We shall just pretend that anybody selfish enough to spend that kind of money on a one time event like a wedding while George Bush can cancel health care for millions of children is the very definition of a bitch. And I’m willing to bet you that the lawsuit over the flowers lasts longer than the marriage, because if all this twit wants to remember from her wedding is that the centerpieces did not meet her personal standards for hue then God help her husband if he should ever get caught stuffing a prostitute up his nose at strip club, because she’ll kill him in the divorce
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