Photo by Dan Rattiner
Dan’s Papers February 25, 2011 danspapers.com Page 13
The corn plant, now in our dining room.
Friends Forever It’s Been 20 Years Now, Me and the Corn Plant I Rescued By Dan Rattiner One day when my daughter was a junior at East Hampton High School, she asked me if I could participate in the school’s Homecoming Weekend Parade. The reason she wanted me, actually, was because she wanted my car. My car was one of those big old Buick Skylark convertibles with the tailfins and a top that went up and down. My daughter was a member of the Queen’s Court, she told me, and the other four members of the court and, indeed, the actual Homecoming Queen with a crown on her head, needed to sit on the top of the back seat of a beautiful convertible car during the parade and she had volunteered me and my car. I’d be the driver. I was proud to do this for them. The parade line would be a short one with just four floats, one for each class, she told me. The floats would be all lined up by the curb on Newtown Lane in
front of the Junior High School at a quarter to one on Saturday of Homecoming Weekend. The high school marching band would be at the front. The queen and her court in the chauffeur-driven convertible at the back. At the appropriate time, I drove over and took my spot at the back. Shortly, the girls, all beautiful in gowns and crowns, climbed aboard, giggling and took their seats, the five of them, the queen in the middle and the court, my daughter among them, two on each side. Promptly at a quarter to one, the baton twirler at the front blew a whistle, the snare drums sounded and we started off up the lane toward the high school. Crowds of people lined both sides of the road. It was a brisk November day. The leaves swirled around in the breeze and off in the distance you could hear the crowd in the stadium cheering as the football players were apparently already coming out onto the field one after
another. It was almost time for kickoff. At the pace we were going, we’d be there in about 15 minutes. Directly in front of me was the last of the four floats in the parade, the Senior Float, which consisted of a flatbed truck with rocks and palm trees and cavemen and cavewomen onboard all wiggling and dancing in their furs to the theme song of the popular cartoon show “The Flintstones.” The theme song is only 15 seconds long. It played over and over and over. Actually, they didn’t have palm trees. They had a single eight-foot-tall corn plant on the back of the truck, posing there as a palm tree. You could imagine it a palm tree if you wanted. Soon, nose to tail, the parade arrived at the entrance to the high school grounds. We headed down the horseshoe road toward the front (continued on pag 16)
OUR FORMER LEGISLATOR IS GOING TO JAIL? By Dan Rattiner Former County Legislator George Guldi of Westhampton Beach was convicted of grand larceny and insurance fraud by a jury in Islip last week after two days of deliberations. He was found innocent of two other lesser offenses, one of which was possession of a forged instrument. He will be sentenced on March 13, the prosecutor is asking for 22 years for what Guldi did. This is just the first of what is expected to be several trials against Guldi. The others will involve co-defendants in what many believe was an elaborate “mortgage stacking” Ponzi scheme which, in good times, involved buying
and selling properties and using the profits and mortgages to finance the bigger and bigger deals that came along—something that works fine as long as the bubble doesn’t burst, which as we all know, it did. All together almost three dozen properties in the Hamptons and elsewhere valued at $60 million were involved and toward the end, when the money ran out, Guldi and his partners are alleged to have begun pocketing the monies that leaked down out here and there— an entirely illegal business—until finally there was nowhere to go but belly up. This larger matter—the present case just decided involved about $850,000—will be adju-
dicated later in the year since there is such a big tangle of evidence. The first case was pretty straightforward and so came to trial before the larger one. The basics of it are this: Guldi’s home, where he lives with his wife and children, burned to the ground on November 30, 2008. No one was in the house at the time. It had been a big house and the insurance company issued a check to Guldi and the bank that held the mortgage on his house for $850,000 to rebuild it. The law states that when a payment like that is smaller than the mortgage on the house, then it’s supposed to be cashed by the bank that (continued on next page)