Now that the murder of gambling boat owner Gus Boulis has been linked
to Casino Jack Abramoff, an extortionist/lobbyist with friends in high
places, the February 9, 2001 the South Florida Sun-Sentinel editorial
attacking Gus Boulis is worth reading again. It is below. First
Boulis was cheated out of his gambling boats, no different in a lot of
ways from the Tioga Indian tribe that lost it's tribal casino. Then,
after he is shot dead by Gambino crime family "cowboys," the
Sun-Sentinel blames Boulis' pride for his death, not the numerous
gunshot wounds delivered at close range.
Boulis was killed because he was suing Jack Abramoff to get back his
gambling boats after the $23 million wire transfer down payment bounced
higher than the Petronas Towers. Senator John McCain's Indian Affairs
committee found out the facts of the murder and with the FBI in the
picture, the Ft. Lauderdale police arrested three suspects in September
2005, over 4 years after a Gambling Magazine article named two of the
suspects. Easy enough to identify them, Abramoff and his partner Adam
Kidan paid them close to $200,000 from the SunCruz Casinos bank
account, Boulis' former company, for unknown services.
This true crime case, a murder deliberately left unsolved on orders
from the highest levels of the Florida state and Federal governments
will make the history books.
A BRIGHT LIFE LOST ON A DARK STREET
Published: Friday, February 9, 2001
Section: EDITORIAL
Page: 24A
Live large, die large. That sentiment won't appear on his gravestone,
but it may best sum up the flamboyant life and violent death of
Konstantinos "Gus" Boulis.
Boulis, a Greek immigrant who built a multimillion-dollar business
empire in South Florida, was gunned down gangland-style on Tuesday
night even while working to extricate himself from a tangled web of
legal and financial troubles. The murder is being investigated, but no
arrests have been made.
The police may not know who killed him, but the ancient Greeks coined a
word for what really brought Gus Boulis down: hubris.
Webster's defines hubris as "arrogance caused by too great pride." To
the classical tragedians of ancient Greece, it was the character flaw
that brought down many a hero, from Prometheus to Oedipus to Icarus. To
them it represented impious disregard for the limits governing human
action in an orderly universe, and it was a sin to which the great and
gifted were most susceptible.
Sounds like Gus all right. Personable, energetic and generous, he was
widely admired for his business acumen. He built the Miami Subs
fast-food restaurant chain, and almost single-handedly created South
Florida's "cruise to nowhere" gambling industry with his SunCruz Casino
ships. He was a doting father and had a legion of friends -- and
perhaps just as many enemies.
At the time of his death, Boulis was being divorced by his wife, had
been sued by myriad business partners, stood accused of threatening to
kill the man to whom he had been forced by the government to sell
SunCruz, and had been heavily fined for concealing his ownership in two
of his companies.
That was one side of Boulis. The other was that he was "imaginative and
dynamic," according to friends, one of whom described him as "just a
very gregarious, fun guy to be around."
Not on Tuesday night, though. Anyone who'd been around him that night
might have ended up dead, caught in the line of fire. Maybe that's what
it meant to be Boulis' friend: you had to take the bad with the good.
There was a lot of both in Gus Boulis' life. In the end, though,
despite his enormous talent, drive and wealth, he proved to be just
flesh and blood, an imperfect human vessel from which the life poured
unceremoniously onto a dark Fort Lauderdale street. It was the end of
the road for the man who, according to Hollywood Mayor Mara Giulianti,
"liked to play by his rules alone."
Someone changed the rules. So ends this Greek tragedy.
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