Guilty Rich Review: Dirty Money
(Locally starts in half an hour on Investigation Discovery)
s any regular viewer of Investigation Discovery can attest, the wealthy constitute a huge proportion of the amoral, criminally deranged, and otherwise loathsome characters who populate its seductive case histories. The rich tend to be a doomed lot in the highest-rated true-crime network. In its new series, bluntly titled “Guilty Rich,” we first meet Andrew Luster, who has, like all the subjects of these stories, some claim to fame. In this case, it’s the fact that his great-grandfather was Max Factor, the cosmetics king who showed Hollywood’s stars how to make themselves more beautiful.
Mr. Luster is the face and character of all that the spoiled rich are supposed to represent in these sagas or, more precisely, morality tales. He grew up in Malibu and Brentwood, Calif., surrounded by the wealthy. As an adult, he had just two interests—surfing and sex. Handsome, living on family money, he’s free, in his early 20s, to enjoy a life on endless vacation at his beach shack, and he has plenty of beautiful women, numbers of whose pictures cover the walls of his house—so many they seem ominous to a visitor.
Still, none of it is enough—he needs the excitement that comes with the use of sex, drugs and connected illicit activities, the kind that lead to his ruin, which is inevitable. He was convicted in 2003 of sexual assaults using a date-rape drug. Mr. Luster, a witness says, looked astonished that he could be in the position in which he now found himself. Translation—the rich, protected by their money, coddled all their lives, think they can get away with everything. But they can’t, this quintessential ID series is here to say, in characteristically dark, triumphant tones—one of the essentials that make these stories irresistible.
But every rich rotter meets doom in his own way. In the next episode (Sept. 7), there’s Florida lawyer Scott Rothstein, who wasn’t born with any silver spoon in his mouth. He was a boy from the Bronx, N.Y., whose tuition for law school came from his grandmother’s savings—a boy who found his way to wealth and membership in Florida’s elite circles by virtue of his conspicuous success as an attorney specializing in sexual-harassment cases.
For a long time, all seemed to go swimmingly for Scott, shown photographed with luminaries from the political and sports worlds. He grew richer by the day, it seemed, and the evidence was on display—the owner of more than 20 luxury cars, he was also writing million-dollar checks to charities. It occurred to some people to wonder how he came by such wealth—he didn’t get that kind of money by practicing law, those who knew him tell the filmmakers. They were right: Mr. Rothstein came by his wealth another way, which we will leave undisclosed.
It’s a tale of greed and delusion, gripping in its complexity, and one that proves you don’t have to be born rich to be a scoundrel. Once he became wealthy he knew how to use his money to wield influence. Such was its power that he could arrange with the local police to arrest a woman who had given him cause to feel offended—an incident harrowing in its detail. She’s hauled off under arrest on a bogus drug charge. The evidence—possession of her child’s medication, which she carried in a nonprescription bottle. This rich rotter’s story, needless to say, does not end well for him.
More..
https://www.wsj.com/articles/guilty-rich-review-dirty-money-1503608616
(googling the title may let you read the whole story)
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