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Ira Gollobin's Insurance Fraud
There
was a seminal event early in Ira Gollobin's adult life that speaks to
his capacity to twist reality
and responsibility to whatever purpose he deemed right. It speaks volumes about who Ira Gollobin was.
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 First, The Suicide
Let
me start by sharing with you a virtually unknown fact - one that
Ira Gollobin worked to cover up for more than 70 years.
In April 1935, Ira
Gollobin's father committed
suicide. Apparently,
he lost a
considerable amount of money by his continued
speculation in the stock market well into the Depression - including significant amounts borrowed from relatives. It
was clearly a traumatic event for Ira
to find his father dead.
Dealing
with trauma is always difficult. But what one does when faced
with a traumatic situation tells much about a person.
In Ira's case, he
chose to hide the fact that his father
committed suicide - not just at the time but all through his life. He never mentioned it to his children (or
to anyone else as best I can determine). And when it finally came
out in the last few years of his life, it wasn't Ira who surfaced it.
Maybe more
important, there is no evidence that Ira ever sought out any
professional help to deal with this emotional trauma. Sadly, the primary
outcome appears to be Ira Gollobin's deep-seated hatred for all things
capitalistic as if it was capitalism that
caused his father's suicide rather than his father's bad investment decisions and his father's choice to kill himself.
Next, The Fraud
 Based on solid information from those
who were there, Ira Gollobin (by that time already a lawyer) covered up evidence of
his father's suicide. He put his father's body on a bed and generally worked to make things look
as if his father had died from natural causes. Then - a fraudulent life insurance claim was filed.
I
have been told that his father's life insurance policy was
for $100,000 - a very
considerable sum back in 1935, equivalent
to over $1,000,000 in today's dollars. The insurance company
paid the claim - and apparently, relatives were repaid with these
fraudulently-acquired funds.
Finally, The Cover-up
Having
defrauded an insurance
company, Ira Gollobin then covered up his involvement by
creating a self-serving myth to hide his direct involvement in the fraud.
 Ira
Gollobin's myth is one that he and others have repeated and
embellished for decades.
Even in his 90s, Ira Gollobin again told it in great detail - this
time to two Lawyers' Guild members, Susan Douglas Taylor and Amy Ruth
Tobol, who then wrote the myth into Ira Gollobin's biography and distributed it to attendees of the
2005 National Lawyers' Guild dinner. Ira's daughter, Ruth, to whom he left his estate, actively peddles Ira's myth to this day.
Ira's
myth is that at the time of his father's death he was
far away - traveling across the country, Liam O'Flaherty-style, riding the
rails, eating from farmers' fields, getting to know the American
people, being an enlightened
observer of
humanity. All this of course carefully contrived to put
Ira "somewhere else" at the very time he was with his father's
body, covering up a suicide, and defrauding an insurance company.
 Ira
Gollobin's evolving myth even included the touching "fact" that
his mother
(supposedly accepting the higher philosophical purpose of Ira's
travels) didn't tell him about his father's "natural" death
for another 9 months so as to not interrupt Ira's great
"voyage of discovery."
Ira's coverup is pure (or maybe I should
say impure) rubbish. I know of no one who has any recollection,
any letter, any photo, any telegram, anything
that corroborates Ira's self-serving story about riding the rails. I think the truth is
rather more simple - Ira created one very big self-serving lie to cover one very
big fraud.
A Comment
This
whole sordid tale raises lots of questions about Ira's whereabouts,
motivations, and honesty. When someone lies about one thing
(especially something as consequential as a suicide and and major
insurance fraud), it makes me question whether any of what they say is true.
Maybe
Ira did "ride the rails" like he said. If so, it
was after he covered up his father's suicide and defrauded an
insurance company - and then it wasn't to get to "know
America." More likely, it was to get away, have no
known address, and have no way to be reached or found until the dust
settled and the life insurance company had moved on.
Then
again, maybe he only "rode the rails" for a few days - not a year - and
holed up somewhere until he was told it was safe to come back and
resume his life as a lawyer.
Or maybe, he didn't ride the rails at all.
For
me, Ira's suicide cover-up, insurance fraud, and "traveling across America" hoax suggests
that, starting early in his life, when Ira Gollobin was faced faced a difficult situation, he decided it was OK to
lie and cheat rather than deal honestly with reality.
And
his continuing need to repeat his fake "Journey of Discovery" (which he told friends, family,
and even allowed the Lawyers' Guild to publish almost 70 years later) says something
very significant - and very ugly - about him.
After
all, having committed fraud is bad enough. And to do so as a
lawyer is worse. But to have the arrogance and emotional need to look
everyone
in the eye for the next 70 years and repeat this self-serving
and self-agrandizing fabrication speaks directly to Ira's
growing narcissistic
bent - and to his ability (and need) to appear credible even when he
was lying.
 Had Ira Gollobin's cover-up surfaced, there is no question that he would have been disbarred -
and probably in jail. He might actually have learned from that, might have
thought himself less of a god, and might even
have found some humanity and humility along the way. But that didn't happen.
Instead, Ira's
illegal coverup of his father's death and insurance fraud
became a dark harbinger of how he dealt with
(and justified) any reality or responsibility he didn't
like.
And
I further believe that tIra Gollobin used this same ability to twist and rewrite reality to justify his wicked, arrogant, and
self-rightous abuse of one of his two daughters and his only
biological grandchild.
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