One more thing about the scams in Miami. Back in the 1980s Miami was known as the Capitol of the Con Man's Triangle (a twist of the Bermuda Triange). The Con Man's Triangle was Miami to the Bahamas to Palm Beach and this included Ft. Lauderdale.

Besides the frauds involving selling land that was in the water, the other big frauds involved selling investors on investing in mortgages that would return 18% or more (going rate on loans was 8-12% at the time) gold (International Gold Bullion Exchange in Ft. Lauderdale had a vault filled with wood painted in gold-colored paint), and CDs from off shore banks that were nothing more than mail-drops.

Contributing to the frauds was that there was so much money in South Florida at the time as legitimate business people were scoring big profits from drug money that was buying real estate and cars and jewelry, plus South Florida was the big retirement locale for wealthy people from the northeast.

Just to give you an idea about how "easy" it was to get money:

An organization of Eastern Airlines employees approached me for help to raise money to fund a relief flight to Ethiopia. Eastern was donating the L1011 and it would carry food, medicine, equipment plus doctors and nurses to go to Ethiopia for the famine. But they had to raise $60,000 for the fuel. This was 1985. I put their story on the 6pm news on Channel 4. By 6:30pm I had taken one phone call from a wealthy retiree in Miami Beach who offered the sixty-grand, and our Ft Lauderdale bureau got a call from another couple offering their $60,000.

At 11pm I was on TV with another story with the two checks totaling $120,000 and the organization was able to send two flights instead of one. I got to go on the second flight with my two cameramen which is how I got to be one of the first TV reporters inside Ethiopia to cover the famine and to expose how the Communist government was seizing the relief supplies that got into the country.