“Always come back to love”

The coin finally dropped: my marriage would never recover. After more years than I care to admit of trying everything we could do to mend it, I ended it on the spot. To work a few things out in my head and heart, I saw an EMDR therapist.

EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. As I see it (no pun intended), by closely watching LED lights run back and forth, you become too distracted to game the process. It leaves no room for fooling yourself or the therapist. It is the hard truth, and it produces results.

For me, every session with Linda brought a lesson, and some were epiphanies. One time, when I wasn’t getting along with my mom, my beloved grandfather appeared as a larger-than-life hologram. Looking me square in the eye, he set me straight.

“Scotty,” he cautioned, wagging his thick, manicured pointer, “It’s my daughter…and she’s your mudda (he was a Bronx boy)…do the right fucking thing.” I cried like a baby, and called my mom every day until she was killed by a Covid vax shot.

Anyway, Linda was a master therapist, and the first person to explain to me that I had been the subject of long-term verbal abuse. I thought deeply that night about what she said while I read the pamphlet she gave me and re-watched one of my favorite films, Raging Bull.

De Niro plays Jake LaMotta, a tough boxer. He knocks out the champion, Sugar Ray Robinson. Then, he loses a decision to Robinson. In their third match, he lets Robinson clobber him, never throws a punch. De Niro loses by decision again.

All beaten to hell, he wanders the ring blind and bloody, calling out for Robinson. Finding him, De Niro delivers the line that still makes the hair on my arms stand up straight.

“Ray,” he says, “Hey Ray. I never went down, Ray. Ray. You hear me? You never got me down. You hear? See? Look!”

And here, I learned a huge lesson about a mistake I made that, contrary to my good intentions, contributed to our demise. I thought it was better to avoid confrontation and escalation, to not fight back, to be a tough guy like De Niro and take the beatings like a man. Better for us, the kids, everyone, even me.

But I was wrong. I needed to “Come back to love.” To speak my heart, and do it with kindness and compassion. To share my feelings, my pain, rather than swallow and hide them. In a way, by absorbing all those blows, I lost my marriage like De Niro lost the fight.

It was a stupid mistake on my part. Pride, ego and ignorance played their roles. I should have spoken up sooner and more often.

So, remember, don’t be a tough guy. Speak your heart. Always come back to love. It’s the best way, every time, with everyone you care about.

Thank you, Linda Cohn, for showing me the light, and enabling me to enjoy greater balance, intimacy and pleasure in my relationships with the people I love. 

“Know when to fold’em”

I enjoyed a long, interesting and rewarding career as an institutional real estate investor. Recognized by Columbia Business School as my class's Real Estate Merit Scholar and 25th Reunion Chair, I share credit for developing a number of innovative, large-scale strategies that changed the industry, led or approved tens of billions in successful investment decisions around the globe, raised billions from coveted institutional investors, authored white papers, spoke at conferences, received accolades...it was a fantastic ride! 

The Wiki and Linked In links at the top of this page provide some information on me and my companies.  

Make no mistake, though, professional investing is a contact sport. I left high-paying jobs and parted ways with "successful" colleagues over differences in personal values. After 25 years with leading firms including my own, I decided in 2012 to retire from a toxic industry riddled with fraud and abuse.

Leaving all that heartache behind was an easy decision to make, but the process of parting left a cloudy trail. In 2014, two years after retiring, having substantially severenced my team and wound down my firm's activities, a small group of investors complained about a fee.

We filed a lawsuit against the investors to claim the fee, and settled out of court. SEC investigators went on to allege we should have reported the fee sooner, and like almost everyone else we settled outside of their court and I agreed to neither admit nor deny things they wrote. An SEC staffer then issued a press release that reimagined those allegations by implying theft and a permanent bar. That was not expected. Throwing salt in the wound, news reporters picked up the press release and wrote puff pieces that are so irresponsible, I find it hard to believe anything I read on the internet. 

The public is, therefore, fed a story that is partly untold, often misunderstood and entirely unproven. All of it was settled out of court. My companies' claims, the SEC investigation, their staffer's unfounded opinions, the bogus news reports--none of it is confirmed by any neutral party, much less a judge. 

"Know when to fold'em." From my perspecive, the investors paid my firm a fee for its services, my firm netted millions, resigning as manager accelerated my companies' wind-down, and agreeing to be barred with the right to reapply confirmed my decision to retire from the industry I long loved and hated. Yes, settling was the right decision, but it could read a lot cleaner on the internet. 

Following the money, the big winners were the investors, who paid a below-market fee for my firm's valuable services; and the lawyers, who the insurers ironically paid about the same amount as the fee my firm initially charged its investors.  

Thank you, Kenny Rogers and Don Schlitz, for encouraging me to fold'em like those before us.

Thanks also to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) not only for taking a hard stance on widespread investment industry fraud that hurts every American every day, but also for taking a more mindful approach to publicity for other investigations in recent years. 

I also wish to express sympathy for the SEC staffer whose press release (and the fake news it spurred) clouded my otherwise sparse web presence; a career civil servant who served our nation in this capacity while battling painful urinary cancer until his untimely demise a year later in 2018.

Last, but never least, rest in peace, Peter Lewis. Ever the poet, Peter ended his life in 2013--one year to the day after being fired by one of the complaining investors, and the year before his former employer complained about the fee. As the most inquisitive, informed and outspoken of the investors' representatives, Peter would have been uniquely qualified to help all parties resolve their differences in better form. The industry suffers the loss of his wit, candor and intelligence, and I miss Peter's friendship to this day.