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Seymour Lazar, 88, countercultural attorney/hanger-on; player in "Melvin & Howard" case
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That Derek
Apr 9, 2016, 12:22:51 AM4/9/16
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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/07/business/seymour-lazar-flamboyant-entertainment-lawyer-dies-at-88.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fobituaries&action=click&contentCollection=obituaries®ion=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront
Business Day
Seymour Lazar, Flamboyant Entertainment Lawyer and More, Dies at 88
By WILLIAM GRIMES
APRIL 6, 2016
Seymour M. Lazar, a swashbuckling entertainment lawyer, stock trader and serial litigator whose lifetime of adventures took him from the legal tangle surrounding the estate of Howard Hughes to involvement in a colossal fraud case that threatened to bring down one of the biggest shareholder class-action law firms in the United States, died on March 30 at his home in Palm Springs, Calif. He was 88.
His death was confirmed by his daughter, Tara Lazar.
Mr. Lazar was a flamboyant renegade. As a hip young lawyer in Los Angeles in the 1950s and '60s he represented a colorful list of clients that included the comedian Lenny Bruce, the jazz musicians Miles Davis and Cannonball Adderley, and emerging pop stars like Johnny Rivers.
He took LSD with Timothy Leary. He strolled through Haight-Ashbury with Allen Ginsberg. He offered career advice to Maya Angelou, then a struggling young cabaret singer whom, he said, he dated for a time.
"I was very shapely and nice to look at, but Seymour saw more than that," Ms. Angelou told The Wall Street Journal in 2006. "He knew I was always writing and encouraged me to be more than a cocktail singer." On the acknowledgments page of her book "All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes," she thanked him "for belief in my youthful ambition."
Bored with the law, Mr. Lazar jumped headfirst into the stock market. He became one of the largest independent traders in the United States, buying and selling more than $300 million in stocks in 1967, most of it related to mergers and acquisitions.
"I was an in-and-out trader," he told New York magazine in 1976. "If I bought a stock in the morning, and still owned it at noon, that was a long-term investment."
His wild deals and even wilder personal style -- he had a long ponytail, refused to wear socks and was on occasion seen in a Pierre Cardin leather suit with no shirt -- earned him a walk-on role as Seymour the Head in "Supermoney," George Goodman's 1972 account of the global financial game, written under the pen name Adam Smith.
Working with the celebrity lawyer Marvin Mitchelson, Mr. Lazar invested $250,000 in efforts to prove that a mysterious document discovered in the headquarters of the Church of Latter-day Saints in Salt Lake City represented the final wishes of the reclusive tycoon Howard Hughes, who died in 1976.
Continue reading the main story
The Mormon Will, as it was known, left millions to an unusual collection of beneficiaries, most peculiarly to a gas station owner named Melvin Dummar. Mr. Dummar said he had earned Hughes's gratitude after giving him a ride when he was wandering in the desert. A Nevada jury pronounced the will a fake.
"If I lose, I'll just go on to something else," Mr. Lazar said at the time.
The something else was class-action lawsuits, filed scattershot against companies large and small, claiming offenses large and small. In 1980 he filed suit against Hertz, claiming that it had overcharged him for gas on a rental car, to the tune of $11.15. That claim was denied, but others, often connected to the poor performance of stocks he owned, succeeded.
Mr. Lazar eventually pushed his luck too far. In 2005 a federal grand jury in Los Angeles indicted him on multiple counts, including mail fraud and money laundering. He was accused of taking $2.6 million in kickbacks over 25 years from the law firm of Milberg Weiss to initiate suits on its behalf in his own name and the names of relatives.
In 2007, as part of a plea bargain, he pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice, filing a false tax return and making a false declaration. He was sentenced to six months in home detention and ordered to pay a $600,000 fine, on top of a previously ordered $1.5 million forfeiture.
"Seymour was living in an unregulated age," Sheridan Hill, who is completing a biography of Mr. Lazar, said in an interview on Tuesday. "He was engaging in arbitrage before anyone called it arbitrage. The same with entertainment law. He was doing deals because he saw they were there to be done."
Seymour Manuel Lazar was born on June 14, 1927, in Brooklyn and grew up on a ranch in the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles. His father, Nathan, an accountant, moved the family west in 1933. His mother, the former Rita Tannenbaum, came from a family that ran a wholesale meat business in Beverly Hills.
By the time he was 12, Seymour was keeping the books for his father's accounting business. After graduating from Los Angeles High School in 1943, he took a job at Lockheed, which trained him as an electrical engineer, before enrolling in the pre-law program at the University of California, Berkeley.
Drafted into the Army Air Corps, he served two years before resuming his studies. He earned a bachelor's degree in economics from Berkeley in 1949 and a law degree from the University of Southern California in 1951.
After setting up in private practice, Mr. Lazar found his niche when a Hollywood producer walked into his office and asked if he specialized in entertainment law. He did not, but he said yes and played catch-up. He also bought the Café Gala, just off the Sunset Strip, which generated a stream of clients.
In the 1960s he somehow managed to combine two personas: Wall Street shark and dharma bum. He drove a Rolls-Royce and pushed vast sums through offshore accounts in the Bahamas. His gains and losses were staggering. When a proposed merger between Armour and General Host fell through in 1969, he took a $10 million hit.
At the same time, while soaking up the sun in the expatriate community in Cuernavaca, Mexico, he amassed a serious collection of pre-Columbian art. He later collected African and Oceanic art as well. He financed an ashram in Arizona and a monastery in Nepal.
It was in Cuernavaca that Mr. Goodman, quite skeptical of the Lazar lore he had heard so much of, met the man behind the myth. "Seymour was real," he wrote, describing him as a "formerly respectable lawyer with a respectable wife and child, who discovered arbitrage, mind-blowing chemicals and a new lifestyle all at the same time."
Mr. Lazar's first marriage ended in divorce. In addition to his daughter, he is survived by his wife, Alyce Lou; two sons, Job and Adam; a sister, Eileen Russell; and six grandchildren.
Mr. Lazar remained defiant after being indicted and in the stressful period that ensued. He languished for months at his home in Palm Springs, wearing an ankle bracelet that he was allowed to remove only when he had to undergo triple-bypass surgery. The so-called kickbacks, he insisted, were referral fees and perfectly legal.
The court disagreed. It rankled.
"I swear, they treated me like an absolute thug," he complained to The Wall Street Journal. "Did I hurt anybody? Who did I cheat? Did anybody get screwed?"
A version of this article appears in print on April 7, 2016, on page A25 of the New York edition with the headline: Seymour Lazar, Flamboyant Lawyer in Entertainment Industry, Dies at 88.
Business Day
Seymour Lazar, Flamboyant Entertainment Lawyer and More, Dies at 88
By WILLIAM GRIMES
APRIL 6, 2016
Seymour M. Lazar, a swashbuckling entertainment lawyer, stock trader and serial litigator whose lifetime of adventures took him from the legal tangle surrounding the estate of Howard Hughes to involvement in a colossal fraud case that threatened to bring down one of the biggest shareholder class-action law firms in the United States, died on March 30 at his home in Palm Springs, Calif. He was 88.
His death was confirmed by his daughter, Tara Lazar.
Mr. Lazar was a flamboyant renegade. As a hip young lawyer in Los Angeles in the 1950s and '60s he represented a colorful list of clients that included the comedian Lenny Bruce, the jazz musicians Miles Davis and Cannonball Adderley, and emerging pop stars like Johnny Rivers.
He took LSD with Timothy Leary. He strolled through Haight-Ashbury with Allen Ginsberg. He offered career advice to Maya Angelou, then a struggling young cabaret singer whom, he said, he dated for a time.
"I was very shapely and nice to look at, but Seymour saw more than that," Ms. Angelou told The Wall Street Journal in 2006. "He knew I was always writing and encouraged me to be more than a cocktail singer." On the acknowledgments page of her book "All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes," she thanked him "for belief in my youthful ambition."
Bored with the law, Mr. Lazar jumped headfirst into the stock market. He became one of the largest independent traders in the United States, buying and selling more than $300 million in stocks in 1967, most of it related to mergers and acquisitions.
"I was an in-and-out trader," he told New York magazine in 1976. "If I bought a stock in the morning, and still owned it at noon, that was a long-term investment."
His wild deals and even wilder personal style -- he had a long ponytail, refused to wear socks and was on occasion seen in a Pierre Cardin leather suit with no shirt -- earned him a walk-on role as Seymour the Head in "Supermoney," George Goodman's 1972 account of the global financial game, written under the pen name Adam Smith.
Working with the celebrity lawyer Marvin Mitchelson, Mr. Lazar invested $250,000 in efforts to prove that a mysterious document discovered in the headquarters of the Church of Latter-day Saints in Salt Lake City represented the final wishes of the reclusive tycoon Howard Hughes, who died in 1976.
Continue reading the main story
The Mormon Will, as it was known, left millions to an unusual collection of beneficiaries, most peculiarly to a gas station owner named Melvin Dummar. Mr. Dummar said he had earned Hughes's gratitude after giving him a ride when he was wandering in the desert. A Nevada jury pronounced the will a fake.
"If I lose, I'll just go on to something else," Mr. Lazar said at the time.
The something else was class-action lawsuits, filed scattershot against companies large and small, claiming offenses large and small. In 1980 he filed suit against Hertz, claiming that it had overcharged him for gas on a rental car, to the tune of $11.15. That claim was denied, but others, often connected to the poor performance of stocks he owned, succeeded.
Mr. Lazar eventually pushed his luck too far. In 2005 a federal grand jury in Los Angeles indicted him on multiple counts, including mail fraud and money laundering. He was accused of taking $2.6 million in kickbacks over 25 years from the law firm of Milberg Weiss to initiate suits on its behalf in his own name and the names of relatives.
In 2007, as part of a plea bargain, he pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice, filing a false tax return and making a false declaration. He was sentenced to six months in home detention and ordered to pay a $600,000 fine, on top of a previously ordered $1.5 million forfeiture.
"Seymour was living in an unregulated age," Sheridan Hill, who is completing a biography of Mr. Lazar, said in an interview on Tuesday. "He was engaging in arbitrage before anyone called it arbitrage. The same with entertainment law. He was doing deals because he saw they were there to be done."
Seymour Manuel Lazar was born on June 14, 1927, in Brooklyn and grew up on a ranch in the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles. His father, Nathan, an accountant, moved the family west in 1933. His mother, the former Rita Tannenbaum, came from a family that ran a wholesale meat business in Beverly Hills.
By the time he was 12, Seymour was keeping the books for his father's accounting business. After graduating from Los Angeles High School in 1943, he took a job at Lockheed, which trained him as an electrical engineer, before enrolling in the pre-law program at the University of California, Berkeley.
Drafted into the Army Air Corps, he served two years before resuming his studies. He earned a bachelor's degree in economics from Berkeley in 1949 and a law degree from the University of Southern California in 1951.
After setting up in private practice, Mr. Lazar found his niche when a Hollywood producer walked into his office and asked if he specialized in entertainment law. He did not, but he said yes and played catch-up. He also bought the Café Gala, just off the Sunset Strip, which generated a stream of clients.
In the 1960s he somehow managed to combine two personas: Wall Street shark and dharma bum. He drove a Rolls-Royce and pushed vast sums through offshore accounts in the Bahamas. His gains and losses were staggering. When a proposed merger between Armour and General Host fell through in 1969, he took a $10 million hit.
At the same time, while soaking up the sun in the expatriate community in Cuernavaca, Mexico, he amassed a serious collection of pre-Columbian art. He later collected African and Oceanic art as well. He financed an ashram in Arizona and a monastery in Nepal.
It was in Cuernavaca that Mr. Goodman, quite skeptical of the Lazar lore he had heard so much of, met the man behind the myth. "Seymour was real," he wrote, describing him as a "formerly respectable lawyer with a respectable wife and child, who discovered arbitrage, mind-blowing chemicals and a new lifestyle all at the same time."
Mr. Lazar's first marriage ended in divorce. In addition to his daughter, he is survived by his wife, Alyce Lou; two sons, Job and Adam; a sister, Eileen Russell; and six grandchildren.
Mr. Lazar remained defiant after being indicted and in the stressful period that ensued. He languished for months at his home in Palm Springs, wearing an ankle bracelet that he was allowed to remove only when he had to undergo triple-bypass surgery. The so-called kickbacks, he insisted, were referral fees and perfectly legal.
The court disagreed. It rankled.
"I swear, they treated me like an absolute thug," he complained to The Wall Street Journal. "Did I hurt anybody? Who did I cheat? Did anybody get screwed?"
A version of this article appears in print on April 7, 2016, on page A25 of the New York edition with the headline: Seymour Lazar, Flamboyant Lawyer in Entertainment Industry, Dies at 88.
Michael OConnor
Apr 9, 2016, 8:42:45 AM4/9/16
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Any relation to Swifty?
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