Smart Trusted Advice
Built By Experience
Photo credit: Visit Pensacola / visitpensacola.com
My initial original plan was to be an airplane pilot. An eye injury in the second grade nixed that idea and put not-always the most fashionable eyewear on me until today.
So, I moved on with plans to be a dual sport professional athlete quarterbacking an NFL team to the Super Bowl in the Fall. I would then slip into a phone booth after that season and emerge a goal-scoring machine as a right winger for a repeat NHL Stanley Cup champion. Being a small kid weighing less than 100 pounds soaking wet certainly was the ultimate obstacle to living those dreams.
My love of sports collided somehow with photo journalism. I got paid in high school to write about and photographed all the sports teams at my school for a local newspaper. Two another local newspapers hired me as the sport editor for separate summer hustles. Packed with an overflowing portfolio of sports and photo credits and the multi-year awards of my high school newspaper with me as sports editor and then editor at the helm, I headed off to journalism school.
College courses and separate stints as a press officer, intern for a city attorney and prosecutor's office and strong influences in my life at the time exposed me to the dangerous cocktail of the press, politics and law. Seeing the good, bad and the ugly of both such noble professions politics and law along the way convinced me the law and business was a match and the best route for me. I was off to law school and then on to the then top-rate tax school in the United States. Yeah, Go Gators!
Tax law presents seemingly impossible challenges at times. Being creative, innovative and stubborn to find solutions to maximize profits, minimize losses and create tax savings is what I like and enjoy about what I do.
MASTERS OF LAWS IN TAXATION (LL.M.), University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida
(1984)
JURIS DOCTOR, University of Toledo, Toledo, Ohio (1983)
BACHELOR OF SCIENCE, JOURNALISM, Ohio University, Athens, Ohio (1979)
Board Certified Tax Attorney - Florida Bar - Admitted US Tax Court
Published Author And Frequent Speaker On Tax Issues
Former Shareholder -management committee chairman of major law firm
36 years of counseling real estate, technology, hotel, retail, service, franchise and
general corporate clients doing business nationally and internationally in complex transactions requiring a high degree of original and creative legal effort and business acumen.
Pensacola City Council, 1997-2001, Chairman, Economic and Community Development Committee; Member, Finance Committee and Pensacola-Escambia Development Committee
Tidbits Here And There
My corporate tax professor on age and experience:
"These wrinkles aren't age, they're mileage."
My measure of risk tolerance envisions standing in the middle of a frozen lake:
"Remember standing on some ice is better than no ice."
On criminal prosecutions:
"The fish did not get on the wall because it had its mouth closed."