Angry retiree says Marco Island deals ruined him [South Florida]
One night in 30 years working at a car shop in a rough-and-tumble section of Queens, N.Y., is seared in Lothar Schaarschmidt’s memory.
Thugs slipped into the garage just after closing. One held a knife to Schaarschmidt’s throat, while another pointed a gun at his brother Werner’s head. The crooks fled with hundreds of dollars in cash.
That terror is eclipsed in Schaarschmidt’s mind by the abiding anguish over the hundreds of thousands of dollars he and his brother said they lost in a pair of Marco Island real estate deals.
“In Queens, we learned to live with the threat of a gun barrel. That was just part of it,” Lothar Schaarschmidt, 68, said in his broken German accent. “Getting cheated out of our property hurt 10 times worse. I lost everything I had.”