The Sun-Sentinel tells the story of how a "very nice Jewish kid" ended up being suspected of another Bernie Madoff:
Before the spiky hair and foul-mouthed bravado, before the mansions, yachts, cars and celebrities, before the crushing fraud charges and stark jail cell, Scott Rothstein was a curly-haired youth who serenaded a high school girlfriend with Beatles tunes.
"He was a very nice Jewish kid, cute, loved to sing," said Stacey Mahler Hayes, now of Long Island. "The kind of kid you’d bring home to your mother."
Somewhere during Rothstein’s growth from earnest teenager to motivated law student to ambitious attorney, he chose a path that ended, according to an FBI agent, with him masterminding what could be the largest fraud in South Florida history.
"Once he became an attorney, and he was trying to move up, and he saw that money … that’s when he really started to change," said Jay Ravede, a Plantation insurance agent who knew Rothstein during college, law school and his early days as a lawyer. "He was always looking for more. He wanted to make more money."
Read the full story.
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