Nightmare in South Beach

EN A POPULAR TV WEATHERMAN WA

DRUGGED AND SCAMMED—TWICE—

I | BY THE SAME WOMEN,

~E COULD HAVE SHUT UP ~ I AND AVOIDED PUBLIC

EMBARRASSMENT. 1 .

INSTEAD, HE '^-L

UGHT BACK , T

OHN BOLARI5 WANTS HIS LIFE BACK. AMEX WANTS ITS MONEY. THE TWO ESTONIAN CHICKS WANT OUT OF MIAMI. STANISLAV PAVLENKO WANTS A NEW NAME. STEPHANIE BARKEY WANTS HER PHONE TO STOP RINGING. ANGELO PERUTO WANTS HER ASS IN A SLING. THE FBI WANTS TO INDICT SOMEBODY. THIS MUCH ALL THE CHARACTERS AGREE ON. The rest is fluid, you might say, as things tend to be in the scam capi­tal of America, South Beach, Florida, a.k.a. paradise.

Bolaris claims the Estonian chicks drugged him. The Estonian chicks claim Bolaris bought them cham­pagne and caviar. Pavlenko claims Bolaris charged it all on his Amex card. Bolaris claims the charges are fraudulent and refuses to pay. Amex cancels his credit card. Bolaris hires Peruto, a criminal defense attorney. Peruto calls Barkey at Amex. She refuses to take his calls. Peruto gets mad: "I left 15 fucking messages and now she can suck my dick!" Mean­while, the FBI begins handing out indictments like Halloween candy— 17 so far—to men and women with names like Russian tennis players: Albert Takhalov, Stanislav Pavlenko, Siavash "Sammy" Zargari, Marina Turcina, Julija Vinogradova, Anna Kilimatova, Valeria Matsova, Victorija Artemjeva, Anastassia Usakova, Irina Domkova, Anastassia Mikrukova, Agnese Rudaka. American Express, more ruthless than the Russian mob, isn't impressed. It turns Bolaris's account over to a collection agency. His credit is destroyed. Peruto sues Barkey and Amex for, among other things, his client's "loss of enjoy­ment of life." Bolaris learns what it's like to be a "deadbeat." He has to pay cash for everything, like Whitey Bulger. He also learns a lesson, too late it seems, but a very important lesson nonetheless: When you go to paradise thinking like a suicide

bomber that you're going to get laid by two black-haired chicks, chances are you probably won't, but you can rest assured—in fact you can pretty much guarantee—you will get screwed.

On March 28, 2010, Bolaris checked into the Fontainebleau hotel in Miami Beach. That evening he walked south a few blocks on Collins Avenue to the Delano hotel for dinner. He was sitting

at the sushi bar when two women with foreign accents came over. He bought them drinks. The next thing he remembers is waking up, alone, in his hotel room the following morning. The two women called that day and invited him out for drinks at the Del­ano again. They met. The next thing he remembers is the two women put­ting him into his bed, fully clothed.

The following afternoon, Bolaris flew home to Philadelphia, where he received a call from American Express to verify certain charges at the Caviar Bar. Bolaris asked, "Where?" Amex said, "The Caviar Bar, 643 Washington Avenue, Miami Beach, Florida." Bolaris asked, "What charges?" Amex said, "Charges totaling $43,712.25."

Bolaris doesn't remember much about the Estonian women, other than that they were "elegantly dressed" and had black hair and foreign accents. How­ever, he does remember with great clarity the clothes he wore and the weather in South Beach. He says, "The first night I dressed down—Armani jeans, cotton white shirt with a hint of yellow pinstripes, Salvatore Ferragamo black shoes. The second night, jeans again, Hugo Boss black shirt—Hugo's my favorite; all my suits are Hugo—and gunmetaljohn Varvatos boots." Of the weather, he says, "The first night had a beautiful starlit sky, with nighttime temps in the 70s, gentle Miami breezes from the east, slight hint of humidity, but it felt good. Both nights were picture-perfect." Well, yes, up to a point.

John Bolaris is 54, handsome, single and a TV weatherman in Philly, where he's considered something of a player, though it's possible that what constitutes a player in Philadelphia constitutes a mark in paradise. (A Philly native once told me, "I always thought Philly was a small New York until I worked in New York for a few years and realized Philly was just a (continued on page 194)

Even when Bolaris

got in trouble in

Miami, Philadel-

phians still loved

him. According to

the editor of the

Daily News, they

say, "That's our guy."

BOLARI5

(continued from page 146) big Harrisburg.") Bolaris is famous in Philly because he's on TV and also because he's amiable and accessible in public, something of a dandy and chick magnet, and passion­ate about the weather.

Larry Platt, editor of the Philadelphia Daily News, told me, "You've got to understand, in Philly weathermen and chefs are stars. John has been a huge star in Philly for years. He's good-looking and he dresses well. He's charming and nonthreatening. Women like to be seen with him at nice places. Ninety percent of life is just showing up, and John always shows up at club and restaurant openings. John's a staple at certain restau­rants. That's where he bonds with his public. In Philly people want to be John Bolaris."

But not everyone in Philly is enam­ored of Bolaris. According to Platt, some people laugh at him because of his 1970s swinging-bachelor lifestyle and because he's ubiquitous. If a Philadelphian doesn't bump into Bolaris at least once a week, he must be living under a rock. And some people, mostly men, are jealous of Bolaris. When he returned to Philly in 2008 after a stint as the CBS weatherman in New York City, he became chief meteorologist at the local Fox affiliate. His arrival back in town prompted this blurb on Philly.com: "Lock up your wives and your girlfriends...weatherhunk John Bolaris is angling to return to the Phil­adelphia airwaves in the fall." Another story called him "a media lightning rod" famous for "scattered brawls, flurries of name call­ing and nights of deep canoodling."

Bolaris can be a media self-promoter and publicity hound. He is not bashful about his weather-forecasting accomplishments (four Emmys) or his celebrity friendship with Lenny Dykstra, who was recently arrested for business fraud. When Bolaris's relation­ship with Dykstra was exposed in the media after Dykstra's arrest, Bolaris's boss at Fox was not pleased, any more than he was pleased that Bolaris had cavorted in South Beach with Estonian women who scammed him for $43,712.25, which was reported in the Philadelphia Daily News. Platt put Bolar­is's photo on the cover—his goofy Alfred E. Neuman smile from Mad magazine, "What, me worry?"—with the headline hangovkr! and the cutline "Russians, Roofies and a 43 Grand Rip-Off." Bolaris seems always to be at the center of some controversy ("It's always about you, John!" his Fox boss told him). Take the Flyers tattoo controversy for starters. Apparently Bolaris had gotten a Fly­ers tattoo, which would have been okay if it hadn't been on his ass and then been leaked to the internet. When his boss confronted him about the photo of the tattoo, Bolaris replied, "How do you know that's my ass?" The more relevant question is who put the photo on the internet. Bolaris's most private moments— his romances, brawls, peccadilloes—seem to be lived out in public, to the delight of Philadelphians. Just watching his life unfold, or maybe unravel, spices up their own drab lives. They experience those Estonian women vicariously through Bolaris. "Their attitude is 'There goes Bolaris, up to his old tricks

again,'" says Platt. "'That's our guy.'" Phil-adelphians even take perverse delight in Bolaris's bar fights, the beer bottles thrown at his head, the wrestling matches on tabletops, all precipitated by his attention to some lady. "I get my licks in, too," Bolaris says. Platt says those fights could easily be avoided. 'John interacts with so many people, he makes him­self a target for jealous guys," says Platt. "But John doesn't realize that."

Bolaris is also clueless about the remarks he makes, such as the time he told a Jewish anchorman, "Keep your nose covered; it's going to be cold tonight." When the anchor­man took offense, Bolaris uttered, "I didn't even know he was Jewish." Which poses even more questions: Is Bolaris a clever self-promoter or just a grown man of dim wattage? Is his life one of devious intent or merely a series of accidents, fortuitous or not? Bolaris likes to think his knowing hand, like the Wizard of Oz, controls all. "A weath­erman does predict the future," he says. "He plays God." One of Bolaris's girlfriends told me it's Bolaris's burden "to play God in pub­lic." She was out with him one night when people kept approaching him with ques­tions. Bolaris got confused and blurted out, "I don't know. I'm just a weatherman!"

On TV Bolaris looks big, handsome, square jawed, trim in his anchorman suits. His wire-rimmed eyeglasses lend him a cer­tain professorial weight as he intones about the weather. One night Bolaris was interrupted by anchor Lauren Cohn, a smartass Jennifer Anis-ton type, who asked sweetly, 'John, are those highlights in your hair?" Bolaris stuttered, "No, no, Lauren, I was out in the sun."

In posed photographs at celebrity events, Bolaris looks less big, maybe five-nine or five-10, as he stands with his arm around two beautiful women in low-cut dresses, a glass of champagne in his hand, a silly, self-satisfied smile on his face. In person, Bolaris looks even smaller, more rumpled, his French cuffs soiled, his eyeglasses mag­nifying his eyes and fluttering lashes so he resembles a startled llama. Bolaris admits, "I never looked at myself as a ladies' man. I was a weather nerd. It wasn't until I got on TV that women became aggressive."

Bolaris says he wanted to be a weatherman since third grade. "I was born with it," he says. "I'd go to the beach with my mom and point to the clouds and tell her rain was com­ing. In high school my baseball coach would glance at the sky and say, 'We gonna get the game in, weather kid?'" Bolaris got in trou­ble in school, he says, "for daydreaming out the window. But I was studying the clouds to see if it would rain. I was a freak. But I was blessed with a love for the weather." Bolaris covered hurricanes with the Weather Channel's Jim Cantore, and when they were out in a hurricane, "yeah, it's true, we got hard-ons," he says. "I thought I'd become Dr. Frank Field in some concrete bunker in south Florida, charting the path of Hur­ricane Hugo." What changed his career trajectory, from Frank Field to John Bolaris, weather hunk, he says, was how women per­ceived him on TV as eye candy.

He was 30, a weather forecaster on a Long Island TV station, driving a Dodge Dart or taking buses to work. He was courting a gor­geous model named Pamela whose "mom

wanted nothing to do with me." A CBS pro­ducer caught Bolaris's forecast one night and thought, That kid's a star, and hired him to be CBS's New York City meteorologist. To pub­licize Bolaris's arrival in the Big Apple, CBS plastered his photo all over town. His career, his image, his personality, his luck with the ladies, his very life changed overnight. "Pam and I were married soon after diat, but it lasted only two years, and we had no kids," he explains.

After his divorce, Bolaris's agent told him, "No more buses, kid. It's time for you to have a good time." And he has ever since.

One night this past summer, Bolaris was sit­ting at a small table on the sidewalk outside Serafina near Rittenhouse Square. Serafina is a hip new PhiUy restaurant already famous for its great-looking patrons and staff, like the long-legged hostess Courtney. When Court­ney heard Bolaris was stopping by after his 10 p.m. forecast, she pouted, 'John didn't tell me!" Still, she reserved a table for him inside, and now she is miffed that he prefers to sit outside so he can follow the street scene and, of course, be seen himself.

Bolaris greets well-wishers. People smile and stop at his table. One woman kisses him on the cheek and says, "I heard you'd be here tonight." Bolaris's movements about town are an open secret. He seems to live his life solely in the public eye, as if he has no private life, or maybe just prefers not to.

Someone whispers to Bolaris that Courtney is mildly piqued at him, and he goes inside to make amends. Bolaris's world is like high school: gossip, innuendo, hurt feelings, drama.

Bolaris returns and says, "Courtney keeps wanting to come to my apartment, and I have to fight her off. She's only 24." He sighs. Tonight is his birthday and he will spend it alone. He doesn't even have a dog for com­pany, though he has two hermit crabs as pets. It seems not to bother him. Bolaris is one of those unlucky people, or lucky, as the case may be, who have a diminished expectation of hap­piness. Being a TV celebrity in Philly, having his own table at Serafina and being recognized in public, preferably with two hot chicks on his arm, is all Bolaris needs. Bolaris says, "I don't like to feel empty, so I have some girls I call fillers." He's had only a few meaningful rela­tionships: with his ex-wife and with a Philly TV anchor, now married, which produced a daughter, Reina Sofia, seven.

He takes out his cell phone and scrolls through pictures until he comes to a pretty little girl with strawberry-blonde curls. "She asked me the other day if I was going to be a bachelor all my life," he says. "I told her, 'I have you. You're the love of my life.' She said, 'But, Daddy, one day I'll be at UCLA and you'll be alone.'"

He puts the phone down and says, "I'd like one woman in my life, but there are so many out there." And most of them don't think of Bolaris as marriage material. "They like to be seen with me at nice places," he says. "It's glamorous for them. Girls feel safe with me. It's funny, I can predict the weather, but I can't predict relationships." Which may be why Bolaris is so much more passionate about the weather than he is about relation­ships. He talks poetically about the weather

as "an art form, like building a wedding cake" and how he "lives and breathes the weather." But still, "I'm the guy next door, you see, accessible, blue-collar... even if I do have a reputation as a ladies' man."

A cute blonde stops at Bolaris's table. "I had my photo shoot today, John," she says. "They came out great." Then, leaning close to him, she says, "You haven't called, John." She drifts off to another table. Within minutes Bolaris's cell phone chirps with a message. Pictures. He scrolls past the pictures of his daughter until he comes to the new pictures of the cute blonde, naked. John stares at her naked body and says to himself, She's wild. Maybe she could be a filler tonight? A lot of Bolaris's girls are a certain type: young, striv­ing to move up, to be seen in the right places with a gentleman like Bolaris.

"I am a romantic," says Bolaris. "I always try to treat that special someone like a queen, always have the utmost respect for my lady. Manners, open the car door, women never pay, etc. Chivalry lives in my world." He says he doesn't have to go out to events with a beautiful woman to be seen. Sometimes he likes to just do "regular blue-collar things," like "watch football naked with my lady and a bottle of wine. Then, the next morning, make breakfast for her, turkey Hot Pockets with egg whites in the microwave." He bats his lashes and grins. "I draw the line at actu­ally cooking."

Bolaris's latest girlfriend, whom he calls "awesome," is a 32-year-old businesswoman named Erica who once did topless model­ing. "It's a touchy subject with some guys," Erica tells me over the phone. "One guido I was dating left me over it. But John thought it was cool. He wanted to see the pictures. Oh, John's a wonderful man, kind, caring, thoughtful, very gentle. He opens the door and pulls out my chair."

Which is why John Bolaris is such a com­modity to certain women in Philly and, conversely, why he was such a perfect mark for two Estonian women in paradise.

On the night of March 28, 2010, Bolaris was eating sushi at the bar in the Delano. He felt good about himself, dapper in his Armani jeans and Ferragamo shoes. He lacked only two things to make his night a success: recognition and women. Across the bar he saw two women on a swing. Very elegant, beautiful, classy, with jet-black hair and blue eyes. Not my type, he thought. Too old, too sophisticated, not young and eager like the women in Philly. (Actually, Marina Turcina was 24, and Anna Kilimatova was 25.) A tourist couple called out his name from a table behind him. "Hey, Bolaris! What's the weather in Philly?" They chat­ted with him about his TV weather forecasts for a few minutes. When he turned back he saw the two women smiling at him. They got off the swing and sauntered over. They were smoking cigarettes in that exotic European manner. One of them said, "You weather presenter?" in a foreign accent. The bar­tender said, "Yeah, he's a TV weatherman in Philly." The girls pressed close to Bolaris. One of them said, "Can you guess where we from?" Bolaris said, "Poland?" The girl said, "No. We from Estonia." Bolaris said, "I'm

not familiar with the island of Estonia." The other girl said, "We Russian." (In most of the newspaper stories about Bolaris's scam, the two women are referred to as Latvian.)

Bolaris perked up. Two gorgeous chicks coming on to him. There were infinite pos­sibilities ahead. "I'm a guy," Bolaris says. "There was the thought I might get laid." It never dawned on him to be suspicious about two gorgeous, elegant women all over him like a wet suit, he says, because "I was used to girls in Philly coming on to me aggressively once they found out I was John Bolaris, the TV weatherman." But these weren't Philly chicks. Philly chicks tend to be linear in their aspirations, direct, obvious. Chicks in paradise tend to be circuitous, duplicitous, conniving in their aspirations. They don't solicit offers, they field offers, unless they're pros. Bolaris bought each of the girls a glass of pinot gri-gio. They had some conversation Bolaris calls "light and breezy like the weather, but I don't remember about what." (Bolaris's memory is highly selective. He remembers precisely that he bought pinot grigio, that his shirt had "a hint of yellow pinstripes," but he remem­bers nothing about their faces, their clothes, their jewelry.)

Bolaris and the women went outside to the

dark, secluded pool. It was warm, with a gen­tle breeze off the ocean rustling the fronds of the palm trees. They sat at a table in the dark, away from the pool bar. One of the girls said, "You do shots?" It didn't seem odd to Bolaris that two elegantly dressed women wanted to down shots of tequila like college girls on spring break, he says, because "I was used to girls in Philly doing shots."

The girls insisted Bolaris "do shots," and one of them went to the bar. The other one began to massage his shoulders. When the girl returned with three shots, the one mas­saging him tilted his head back so he was looking up at the dark, velvet-blue sky dot­ted with diamonds. The other girl pried open his mouth and poured down a shot. "Immediately after that," Bolaris says, "I lost all concept of time."

Bolaris claims he remembers nothing after that shot except the girls saying, "We go to friend's place for auction now. Haitian Relief Fund," and at some point in time "someone holding me up while I signed something."

What happened next is confusing, since Bolaris has told two different versions of the events. In one, he says he woke up alone in a taxi with red wine spilled on his white shirt with the "hint of yellow pinstripes" and a large painting of "a woman's head" on the

seat beside him. In another version, he claims the next thing he remembers after "signing something" was waking up fully clothed and alone in his bed in his hotel room at noon with a large painting of "a woman's head" beside him. Despite the fact that the paint­ing would be in his possession for more than 24 hours, he doesn't remember what the face looked like, except that "it was not the head of a woman I'd be attracted to."

He got out of bed and looked for the auc­tion certificate that would allow him to deduct the painting's purchase price from his income taxes as a charitable donation. He had no idea how much he paid for that painting, and "it never occurred to me that my credit card was used to pay for it." His only thought was "I didn't want it. It was too big. I didn't want to carry it on a plane." He thought the two women could "relieve me of the pressure of that painting." But he didn't have their cell numbers. He claims the girls left a message on his hotel phone a few hours later saying they had inadvertently kept his sunglasses and wanted to return them. "I thought that was kind of nice," Bolaris says, so he called them back. He told them he wanted to return the painting because it had no certificate. This surprised them, they said, "because you very aggressive in bidding for painting; you really like it." They offered to come to his hotel and take it off his hands. Strangely enough, Bolaris didn't ask them how much he paid for the painting or whether it was in cash or with a credit card.

Later that night he met them again at the Delano for a drink. They ordered wine, and he went to the bathroom. When he returned he drank his wine, and the girls suggested they go back to his hotel room to get the painting, but first they had to stop at the Cav­iar Bar, where one of the girls had left her purse. Bolaris went with them in a taxi since the bar was 11 blocks south of the Delano. When they pulled up to the Caviar Bar, he waited in the cab for them, but they motioned for him to follow. The next thing he remem­bers is waking up hours later in a dark room. The girls got him back into a taxi to his hotel room. When he woke the next morning the painting was gone. For the second time in two nights Bolaris had passed out in bed after drinking with two strange women and awak­ened with no memory of the night before. It didn't make him suspicious, he says, because "I didn't wake with a headache, just some queasiness in my stomach. I was just glad the painting was gone"—without knowing how much he had paid for it or if his payment had been refunded.

Bolaris flew back to Philly, where he received a telephone call.

A woman's voice asked, "Is this Mr. John Bolaris?"

Bolaris said, "Yes."

The woman's voice said, "This is Stephanie Barkey."

"Who?"

"At American Express."

One sunny afternoon last summer, Bolaris went to the offices of his attorney, A. (Angelo) Charles Peruto Jr., and his partner, Richard DeSipio, to discuss his American Express lawsuit. The offices were in an old

brick townhouse on Pine Street. Peruto sat behind his desk, Bolaris and DeSipio across from him. Bolaris told Peruto he was being harassed by Amex's collection agency, which kept faxing threatening letters to his TV sta­tion in an attempt to embarrass him in front of his colleagues.

Bolaris said, "I called the collection agency and told them not to send any more bills to the station."

Peruto screamed at him, "How many fucking times I gotta tell ya? Send those cock-suckers to me. I'm your fucking lawyer."

"I was going out of my mind," Bolaris said. "I was pissed off."

Peruto said, "I told you, you're too trust­ing." Peruto, in his 50s, is short and muscular with black hair, like an extra from The Sopranos. Like Bolaris, he's famous in Philly as a ladies' man. One time Bolaris was dating a girl, and every time he called her house, Peruto answered the phone. DeSipio, how­ever, has sandy-colored hair, blue eyes and a buttoned-up Waspy temperament. Bolaris calls him Peruto's "designated driver."

Peruto then told Bolaris that Amex was finally offering to drop its claim to the $43,712.25. But at this late date, Peruto wanted more for his client than just a return to the status quo. He wanted legal fees and triple damages. What angered Peruto (who is in a constant state of pissed-off-ness) was that "this Amex clown" had refused for so long to drop the claims. "Even after Stan [and 15 members of the Russian mob] was arrested," said Peruto, "that douche bag Stephanie kept insisting he was a well-respected businessman in Miami." Actually, what Stanislav Pavlenko was, accord­ing to an FBI indictment, was owner of the Caviar Bar under a limited liability company called Rose Entertainment, incorporated in October 2009, as well as a member of the Rus­sian mob, which had similar scam bars all over Europe, and the chief conspirator, organizer and investor in a criminal organization that had defrauded patrons of hundreds of thou­sands of dollars in just over a year.

When Stephanie Barkey of the Amex fraud department had confronted Bolaris with his $43,000 bill, he told her he didn't remember being at the Caviar Bar or buy­ing girls champagne. He told her it was all a fraud, that he'd been duped, drugged and scammed by criminals. Barkey said she'd look into his allegations and call him back. Two weeks later she told him that the charges stood, that he was liable and to pay up.

Bolaris tried to plead his case, until Barkey interrupted him. "Listen," she said, "you were at the Caviar Bar with two girls. We have pic­tures." The pictures showed Bolaris with his arms around Anna and Marina, a grin on his face and a big, perfect lipstick kiss on his cheek. "We have all your credit card receipts with your signature," continued Barkey, "and a copy of your driver's license."

Finally she said, "Listen, Mr. Bolaris, I've seen this a thousand times. You were having a good time and you were highly intoxi­cated. [If you question the charges] all you have to do is talk to Stan. He's very nice and he will tell you what you spent money on. He runs a high-class business."

At this point Bolaris erupted, "Stan! Stan! Who the hell is Stan? You're on a first-name basis with a criminal and you

call me Mr. Bolaris!" Barkey hung up.

Bolaris continued to call American Express in late spring 2010 and then wrote letters. He wrote that Amex's "24-hour Fraud Protection failed miserably to protect me" and that Bar-key "treated me like a criminal." Over the next three weeks, he got three letters from Amex stating there was no fraud and "this case is closed"; his Amex account was canceled and then turned over to a collection agency. Enter Peruto, spewing invective, the bad cop.

Peruto sent Barkey a copy of Amex's fraud guarantee that states, "Use the American Express Card online or off, and you won't be held responsible for any fraudulent charges. Period. No fine print, no deductible—-just pure protection, so you can shop with con­fidence.... Our Fraud Detection system watches your account for uncharacteristic or high charges." Bolaris and Peruto had already been given copies of those "fraudu­lent" charges from the Caviar Bar.

All Bolaris's credit card bills were gen­erated during the early-morning hours of March 28 and 29, with the first night's charges beginning at 3:21 a.m. at the Caviar Bar and ending at 4:50 a.m. Bolaris bought bottles of champagne every 15 minutes or so, as well as caviar and one painting, to the tune of $16,517.37 on the 28th and $27,194.88 on the 29th, for a total of $43,712.25. Bolaris was a generous tipper for extravagantly priced champagne (an understatement). According to the receipts, he tipped $499 for a $2,495 bottle of Cristal Vintage, $761 for a $1,825 bottle of Louis Roederer and a $ 1,980 tin of Beluga caviar, and $637.60 for a $3,120 bottle of Dom Perignon and a $68 fruit and cheese tray. Bolaris even tipped someone $496 for a $2,480 painting of a woman's head—the only painting in the bar—which was yanked off the bar's wall and then auctioned off at 4:35 a.m. to its one and only bidder, John Bolaris, who was so eager to acquire the painting that he "aggressively" bid against himself. Assuming Bolaris was at the Caviar Bar, either "highly intoxicated" or, as he claimed, drugged into semiconsciousness, Peruto claimed those receipts should have raised red flags at Amex as "outrageous, ludicrous, absurd and obvi­ously criminally fraudulent charges." Barkey never responded to that letter or to Peruto's subsequent "15 fucking messages" or to his second letter threatening to sue her, Amex and the Caviar Bar.

Amex's refusal to acknowledge that his cli­ent was the victim of a scam made Peruto apoplectic, especially when he found out that Amex had canceled its account with the Cav­iar Bar shortly after Bolaris's first phone call to the company in May 2010 because of the "large volume of charge-backs from victims claiming unauthorized and fraudulent activ­ity" on their cards, according to the FBI. Almost immediately, the Caviar Bar ceased to exist, except in John Bolaris's nightmares.

Amex continued to ignore Peruto for almost a year, leaving him two options: sue or go away. Peruto had no intention of going away. He waited a year to make good on his threat, since he knew that "revenge is a dish best served cold."

During that year he had his client file a fraud complaint with the Miami Beach police, who promptly put him in touch with the local FBI, which was already aware of the Russian

mob's scam. Bolaris told the FBI how the scam worked, then testified before a grand jury, and then he and Peruto waited while the FBI conducted its investigation. Peruto's thinking was: Once the FBI indicted all the perpetrators, Amex would have no recourse but to setde with Bolaris on his terms or else have to go to court to defend itself in a case it couldn't win. After all, Amex's only defense would be that Stanislav Pavlenko and his bar girls, as they were called, were legitimate "high-class" businesspeople, overlooking of course their recent arrests by the FBI for criminal conspiracy and wire fraud, and that John Bolaris, a Philadelphia celebrity TV weatherman and notorious pussy hound, was just a drunken deadbeat.

Even before Bolaris talked to the FBI, the agency had a pretty good idea who the 17 co-conspirators were, how many men they'd allegedly scammed (88 including Bolaris) and their modus operandi. The bar girls picked up their marks at high-end hotels and bars in South Beach and steered them back to private clubs like the Caviar Bar. (The FBI identified six such clubs, all on Washington Avenue south of the Delano: Stars Lounge, Club Moreno, the Tangia Club, Steel Toast, Nowhere Bar and the Caviar Bar.) Once inside, the marks often found that the clubs were deserted, except for a bartender, bouncer and waitress and the bar girls who'd brought them there. There were never any customers but the mark of the moment. If the marks weren't drunk or drugged by the time the girls got them to the bar, the girls quickly got them drunk on shots of vodka or drugged on roofies, and then began ordering multi­ple bottles of champagne and tins of caviar. The ideal marks were traveling businessmen and tourists, preferably married. Married

men wouldn't dispute the charges out of fear their wives might find out about their pec­cadillo in South Beach, and out-of-towners in general wouldn't bother to prolong their stay in South Beach or return at a later date to dispute charges of a few thousand dollars. They would write them off as lessons learned and not go to the police. Bolaris, however, was scammed for $43,000—at least 10 times as much as any of the other men were—a sum too big for Bolaris to walk away from. Pavlenko and his bar girls had gotten greedy with Bolaris, and it led to their downfall. But why? Why John Bolaris? One of the girls told police that her bosses were greedier in Miami Beach than in their bars in Europe because it was easier to find marks in Miami Beach who were unlikely to go to the cops. Even so, she told police, her bosses were getting so carelessly greedy that it was beginning to frighten her. They were charging marks upward of $7,000 for a bottle of champagne they'd bought for less than $100 in a CVS pharmacy—and for which they charged only $2,000 in their European bars. They were greediest with Bolaris possibly because they couldn't believe their good fortune in finding a mark so gullible and eager that he returned to be screwed a second time. What they didn't know was that Bolaris had no fear of going public and being humiliated, since, after all, he lived his life in the public eye, and nothing in his life ever humiliated him. He says, "I was single, and I wasn't afraid of being blackmailed on TMZ."

Florida was the ideal place for such a scam because of its innkeeper laws. Florida is a vast, service-oriented state, with innumerable bars and restaurants for tourists, and it takes great pains to protect its businesses from travelers who think they can run out on a tab and take

the next plane home. Florida Statute 509.151 was designed to protect businesses from just such an eventuality. The law forces patrons to pay a disputed bill on the premises and then handle any dispute later with their credit card company or through the police. If a patron refuses to pay his bill on the premises, no matter how outrageous it may seem, the bar can call the police and have him arrested. Which is why most marks of the Russian mob squawked a bit when presented with an out­rageous bill, but when the police arrived with the very real threat that they might spend the night, or longer, in jail, the patrons paid up and left town muttering about a lesson learned. Patrons who did go back home and complain to their credit card company were forced to confront the bar owner's mountain of evidence attesting to the charges: credit card receipts, signatures, driver's license fac­similes and, if necessary, photographs of the mark hugging and kissing bar girls.

In late summer 2010, the FBI conducted its own scam, a reverse sting on the Rus­sian mob's champagne bars in South Beach. It infiltrated the mob using an undercover agent posing as a corrupt cop. He worked at all the various bars as a bouncer-doorman, a driver for the girls and muscle when patrons refused to pay their bill. It took him and the FBI 10 months to build a case, and on April 4, 2011, 16 members of the mob were arrested and charged with wire fraud and operating a criminal enterprise.

Forty-four days later, A. Charles Peruto Jr. filed suit against the American Express Com­pany on behalf of his client John Bolaris, "an adult male." The suit claimed that because of the defendant's "wanton, deliberate, reck­less, outrageously negligent acts," the plaintiff "suffered and will continue to suffer monetary damages, negative credit rating, loss of credit, mental anguish, humiliation, embarrassment, legal fees, loss of respect, shame and loss of enjoyment of life, all to his detriment." In November American Express settled the suit, wiping out Bolaris's $43,712.25 bill. It also paid him $100,000 for his suffering.

Actually, Bolaris didn't suffer much embarrassment or loss of respect in Philly when his story broke in the Philadelphia Daily News. Larry Platt tells me, "The city talked about John's Miami thing for days, but affec­tionately. You know, 'Man, that Bolaris. He did it again.' But Philly people like guys who are unabashedly themselves. They liked the idea that Bolaris got involved in the prosecu­tion of his scammers." What Philadelphians liked most was that Bolaris had once again amused them with details of his private life played out on a public stage.

When the Philadelphia Daily News story broke, on May 19, 2011, Bolaris had just started dating Erica. I ask her if Bolaris's esca­pades with the two Estonian women changed her attitude toward him. She tells me, "No, I felt bad for him, all that stress on him. I could see how it could happen to anyone." Twice?

Then I ask her how she felt about Bolaris's image as a ladies' man in Philly when she started dating him. She says, "I'm not sure I can answer that. I didn't know much about him, I mean his image.... I just knew he was a weatherman."

Bolaris perked up. Two gorgeous chicks coming on to him. There were infinite possibilities ahead. "I'm a guy," he says. "There was the thought I might get laid."