In the office Bowe was like a ship's captain who began to notice grumbling from below deck. He tried to calm the incipient mutiny, but the siren call of cold cash was strong. Carol Neal says Bowe called her at home. "He talked about the affidavit I had signed and mentioned jail and perjury," she recalls. "He tried to intimidate me."
But, Neal says, her mind was made up. She was entitled. Through Gerrard, she filed suit in April 1998. And then Alvarez, Menendez, Maria Hernandez, and Marilyn Hernandez called Zibby. They did not call to apologize but rather to ask her if she would set up a meeting for them with Gerrard. And she did. They all came to Zibby's house one evening, most bringing along their spouses. Gerrard explained that they all deserved a share of the lottery, no matter what Bowe said. "It was difficult for them to come to terms with the idea that Leslie had lied to them," says Gerrard. "They trusted him, and they just didn't want to believe they had been betrayed."
Steve Satterwhite
Friend, politician, millionaire: Leslie Bowe was off on one wild ride
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If the shifting alliances at work and his imperiled financial condition weighed on him, Bowe didn't show it in the office. But in January 1999, Alvarez did ask that Bowe be reassigned to another job and moved to another office. In the meantime Bowe tended to his duties as a public official. "There was a little talk in the community, but he handled it with pride," says fellow council member Cindie Blanck. "We are swamped with work on the council, but he never lost his stride." And he continued to party. In March 1999 he threw himself a gala fortieth birthday bash: dinner for friends and colleagues in the bayside cafeteria at the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School on Virginia Key. There were, of course, fireworks and male strippers.
Nonetheless Bowe's legendary luck seemed to have waned. He had had to post an appeal bond of $673,000, and then in September 1998, a three-judge panel of the Third District Court of Appeals upheld the jury's decision for Giardina. Bowe vowed to fight on. "I am willing to spend all of my money fighting this issue because I have done nothing wrong," he told reporters when he went back to court for a third and final appeal in October.
By now everyone had filed: Franklin with her own attorney, Sherry Dickman, and the others through Gerrard. Those suits were scheduled to go to trial this past February. But after hearing an oral argument from Gerrard, reading depositions, and seeing the transcript of the Giardina trial, Judge Thomas S. Wilson, Jr., said the issue already had been decided. These players, too, were in a joint venture with Bowe, and, as they testified, had no understanding of fiduciary responsibility. But they were entitled.
He ordered Bowe to pay the others a total of $4.9 million in annual payments spread out over the next fourteen years. In what served as a penalty for waiting, the other six would not receive their share of the $17 million for the first six years.
Again Bowe was livid. "It's all pure greed, and it's not looking at factual evidence," he told the Miami Herald when the decision was announced. "They're liars."
Bowe's next step was to declare that he was broke. In March he filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in an effort to hold on to what he had. According to documents filed in bankruptcy court, Bowe listed his assets as a heavily mortgaged $600,000 home, an annual school board salary of $46,000, and future payments of $10 million from the lottery commission. His debts include $34,000 on his credit cards; a court judgment for $4.9 million to pay the other six pool members; $487,700 in unpaid bank loans; $48,146 in lease payments on a 1999 Porsche Carrera; a defunct sporting goods business, Dugout USA, Inc.; and the rent on storage space where he had mothballed his pitching machines.
But attorneys for the other six filed a petition calling Bowe's move a "litigation tactic." Judge Robert A. Mark sent the squabbling co-workers to mediation, and there a deal was worked out. Under the terms of a confidential settlement, Bowe in June agreed to split the ten million dollars in future lottery payments with the other six pool players over the next fourteen years and drop all legal appeals. "My life needs to go on," he said tersely when asked to comment.
Legally the case is over. Everyone has profited. According to figures from the lottery commission, Alvarez, Neal, Maria Hernandez, Menendez, and Marilyn Hernandez each received a lottery commission check for about $34,000 in August, will get the same amount next August, and then will receive ever-increasing payments each August 15 after that for the next twelve years. Franklin, who used a different attorney from the others, is paid slightly varying amounts.
The big winners, of course, are the lawyers, including several employed by Bowe over the years, and Gerrard, who represented Giardina and five other players. Gerrard is now a millionaire, too. Calling himself semiretired, he has a condo on Brickell Key, a farm in Lexington, Georgia, and plenty of time for his hobby, racing Porsches. He says he takes pro bono cases and those for a fee when he can represent "the underdog or the person who's been screwed, and where there's a strong issue of justice."
