Ken Burnstine: Scott Rothstein's Predecessor
Soon after arriving in South Florida in 1970, I heard of an intriguing figure named Ken Burnstine (picture left is Burnstine posed in 1974 in his air racing outfit with his B-26 bomber). He had a semi-Ivy League background (three years at Penn) and had initially done well as a real estate developer. The round building at Oakland Park Boulevard and U.S. 1 was named Kenann, after Ken and his then-wife Ann.
Burnstine had been president of his synagogue, and he was an excellent pilot who fancied World War II airplanes. He owned a B-26 bomber and a P-51 fighter, the latter painted garishly in the colors of several famous fighter outfits. One of his hobbies was air racing. He also had a gun range in his home and kept a pet lion in his yard.
People who knew those facts of Ken Burnstine's life also heard something else. He was a drug runner. I heard that the first time I ever heard his name. The rumors were reinforced by the fact that he owned an aviation company and his planes kept crashing, loaded with dope. Leased them out, he said, can't help what people do with them. Nobody believed that line and wondered why he wasn't taken down. Years later Gaeton Fonzi wrote in this magazine that Ken Burnstine survived as a drug runner because he was useful to the government, doing work with his aircraft supporting CIA efforts in Latin America.
Eventually the government did take him down, and he quickly turned informant, a job he liked even better than drug running. He died in an air racing crash in 1976. There were rumors for five years that he had faked his death and had been seen in Europe. Gaeton Fonzi blew up that story with his three-part series – "Ken Burnstine is Still Dead." Fonzi thinks Burnstine's plane was sabotaged. He thinks he was killed because he was the key witness in a big drug trial scheduled for just weeks after his death. Dozens of local people, targets of an FBI probe, might have gone to jail if he lived.
We think of Ken Burnstine this month because his record for getting away with bad deeds for years has been broken. Shattered in fact. Ken Burnstine was widely known almost from his arrival in Florida in the early 1960s. His flamboyant style and wild life and addiction to deals made him quite a figure in South Florida and elsewhere. But it took 15 years for him to come crashing down. Literally crashing down. Scott Rothstein did the same thing in just a few years.
Bernard McCormick "McCormick Place": http://mccormick-place.blogspot.com/
OTHER GREAT SCOTT ROTHSTEIN "SCOOP":
Bob Norman "The Daily Pulp": http://blogs.browardpalmbeach.com/pulp/
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