Just look at that happy, handsome couple! A May-December romance that surely had little to do with David Keezer's vast wealth. Indeed, Palm Beach County records show that the Keezers' crib in the Royal Palm Yacht & Country Club in Boca Raton is owned by his young wife, Lori, who dished out $7.35 million for it. However she made her fortune, it hasn't caused her to develop the wrinkles you usually get from stress.
If the Keezers remind you a bit of the Rothsteins, who were also a favorite of the high-society mags, maybe it's because they had the same jeweler. Or was it their flare for interior design?
OK, maybe it's the husband's role in a lucrative business that encountered some devastating legal turbulence.
For all the outward appearances of glamour, David Keezer made his fortune in a grimy business: telemarketing. He and his business partner, Scott Pasch, are from New Jersey, where they'd been sued on multiple occasions by suspicious state and federal regulators.
But for more than a decade, the telemarketing titans had managed to wriggle out of lawsuits that alleged they were using fraudulent means to win donations, telling those who answered their calls that a large portion of the money -- if not all of it -- was going straight to the police or fire department that had hired them. In fact, Keezer's company was pocketing some 85 percent of what it raised.
As of Wednesday, however, these telemarketers will have to find a new line of work and pay back a considerable portion of the wealth they accumulated -- $18.8 million, the biggest civil penalty in the history of the Federal Trade Commission. The settlement also called for the two businessmen to retire permanently from telemarketing.
An excerpt of an article at Philly.com:
To pay the penalties, they're forfeiting a treasure-trove of assets: two $2 million homes, paintings by Picasso and Van Gogh valued at $1.4 million, an $800,000 guitar collection, $270,000 from a recently sold wine collection, $117,000 in jewelry, three Mercedes, two Bentleys, and a variety of other property.No mention of the Boca house that's under Lori Keezer's name, currently valued at $6 million. And since there seem to be no victims who lost their life's earnings, it seems unlikely that there will be the pressure to seize assets like there is among victims of Bernie Madoff, for instance. No criminal charges were filed against Keezer or Pasch.
