My first day of work at Rothstein Rosenfeldt Adler was a unique experience. Scott Rothstein, now-accused Ponzi schemer extraordinaire, carted me around town in his Bentley Continental, stopping first at a local elementary school, where we met with Governor Charlie Crist, after he gave a short press conference.

Next, we ate lunch at Capital Grille, where Scott dined daily and had his own table. Afterwards, Scott reserved a bike at Eddie Trotta’s Thunder Cycles. Three years ago, Scott was on top of the world and wanted everyone to know it, including me, an eighteen-year-old intern.

I was told that the rest of my time at RRA would not be like this, which was true. From that point on, I actually worked and my contact with Scott was fairly limited. He would strut loudly through the halls almost daily to check in with the firm’s lawyers and staff and generally make a small scene all over the place, again, just to make sure you knew who you were working for.

I rarely had a real conversation with him or spoke with him for more than a minute, yet he somehow made me feel like I and everyone else were part of his family; he would regularly refer to the firm’s employees (including high-paid attorneys) as his “kids” in emails. And plenty of employees were, in fact, Scott’s relatives. I often privately described RRA as the House of Nepotism. That was, after all, how I got my job.

Scott was a close family friend, having represented my parents in a labor employment case after they sold their business some years ago. In those days, Scott still made house calls. By the time I started at RRA more than three summers ago, Scott had moved up in the world: he was close friends with Gov. Crist and Sen. John McCain.

He managed the business side of a rapidly growing law firm which claimed lucrative clients overseas and had an innovative business model. The firm had brought in a number of successful, specialized law firms under the guise of RRA, so the firm was capable of handling all of a client’s different legal needs. And all of these attorneys were, in my experience, extremely sharp.

Also, RRA was the first “paperless” law firm in the nation, I was told, which cut down on costs and made it easy to keep client matters organized.

These features lended plausibility to the firm’s supposed grand success, but by the end of this summer I started to have my doubts, namely because Scott’s spending had grown out of control. The most absurd example would be his replacing his recently-purchased yacht with an even more grandiose 87-foot yacht. Scott was spending money like it wasn’t his, and it wasn’t.

In September, I ate dinner with close friend of mine, who also interned at RRA, and his older sister, who works at a more prestigious South Florida law firm. My friend and I inquired as to what his sister was hearing about Scott and RRA.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if, a few years from now, we find that he’s been running a massive Ponzi scheme,” I half-jokingly remarked.

Without missing a beat, she responded, “You know, I’ve been hearing a lot of that lately.”

I shit you not.

Neither of us deserved any sort of medal for prescience. It was easy for me to see, as someone who was not engaged in the idol worship of Scott that so many close to him were, that something was clearly up. This was much more apparent to other attorneys in the area who belonged to well established firms and had seen more than their fair share of cons in South Florida.

One of Scott’s drivers told me over lunch during my last day of work that he believed most of Scott’s money was derived from hedge funds and that he was regularly dealing with hundreds of millions of dollars. I believe that this explanation for Scott’s spending - which made some sense (an awful lot, as it turns out) - had dispelled most of the concerns of the firm’s lawyers.

It’s easy to say now that they should have been more suspicious, but I think that the supreme confidence with which Scott threw around money was disarming. It’s hard to fathom that anyone would continue to run a Ponzi scheme after the whole world watched the Ponzi scheme of a true financial genius - Bernie Madoff - implode right nearby.

Only a sick, demented individual could live so lavishly on his friends’ and investors’ dime as if their money didn’t even matter; or dupe his best friend out of $57 million to keep the wheels turning for another moment. That’s what makes this so unbelievable, so appalling, and so utterly fascinating that none of us can turn away.