Chapter 3
Perry March was born to Arthur and Zipora March, the first of three children, in East Chicago, Indiana, on January 14, 1961. Situated along the southern edge of Lake Michigan, the city is home to a diverse mix of Caucasian, African American, and Hispanic inhabitants, with nearly one-quarter of its citizenry living below the poverty line. In recent years East Chicago is known for its corrupt government officials, some of whom have been involved in vote buying and “electioneering” schemes. In days of old, when Perry March’s ancestors first settled there, it was known as an industrial center.
In 1961, astronaut Alan Shepard made the first U.S. space flight, and “Moon River” and “Love Makes the World Go Round” were both popular songs heard on radios and record players everywhere. John F. Kennedy was inaugurated as the thirty-fifth and youngest president six days after Perry’s birth, the Berlin Wall was constructed, Adolf Eichmann was found guilty,
Judgment at Nuremberg
hit the theaters, and Harold Robbins published
The Carpetbaggers.
The year 1961 also recorded the notable deaths of Carl Jung, Dashiell Hammett, and Dag Hammarskjold, among others. Little could anyone know how such a seemingly insignificant date, such as a birthday, would create, years later, such an array of legal entanglements, a murder, and family destructions.
The March family came about when Perry’s grandfather, Paul Marcovich, on his father’s side of the family, immigrated to the United States from Eastern Europe sometime shortly after 1900—the exact year is uncertain. For whatever reason, he decided to settle in East Chicago. Marcovich married Pearl Cohen, a native Chicagoan, with whom he had two boys, Arthur and Martin. Arthur was born first, and attended Ohio Northern University, in part because his father insisted that his two sons should learn a trade. Arthur became a pharmacist and Martin, however, became a football player. He excelled in the sport right out of high school—he attended Exeter and, later, Princeton, reaching great heights playing on each school’s football team. The boys’ father, being the hard worker that he was, became very wealthy, in part through real estate deals. Truly an entrepreneur, Marcovich went on to own several businesses, including a pharmacy, a travel agency, and a bank. At one time the Marcoviches were one of the wealthiest families in East Chicago.
After he graduated from college, Arthur March joined the U.S. Army and served three years in Japan, from 1950 to 1953, where he performed his military service as a pharmacist and as a laboratory officer in a military hospital. Upon his discharge he returned to East Chicago and worked at his father’s pharmacy, all the while maintaining his military service in the U.S. Army Reserves.
While in the reserves, according to records at the U.S. Army Reserve Personnel Center in St. Louis, Missouri, Arthur took several correspondence courses in guerilla warfare and would later brag to anyone who would listen that he had been in the Green Berets, served in the Special Forces, and had been sent on a number of missions to Israel. He was also fond of handing out business cards that identified him as a retired colonel in the Army Reserves, but much of the information that he had been disseminating about army status turned out to be either bogus or only partially accurate. In reality, according to army records, Arthur had retired from the reserves as a lieutenant colonel, the step of rank just below that of a full colonel.
“If he thinks he’s a colonel,” said an army spokesperson, “he’s never complained about the fact that his pension payments reflect lieutenant colonel status.” The army spokesperson contended that Arthur March’s identification card was either a forgery or the result of an error by the clerk who issued it.
Art, as he prefers to be called, changed his surname from Marcovich to March in 1956, according to an article in the
Nashville Scene
. He told the
Nashville Scene
that he changed his name so that it would be easier for others to pronounce and to spell, not because he wanted to mask the fact that he was Jewish.
In the late 1950s, Art March, now using his new name, made an actual trip to Israel, apparently as a civilian. While there, he met Zipora Elyson, daughter of a working-class man employed by a Tel Aviv bus company and whose mother had immigrated to Israel from the Ukraine. The two fell in love almost immediately—it seemed like love at first sight. Art and Zipora married quickly, and together they returned to East Chicago. Within a couple of years Zipora was pregnant with Perry—and in what seemed like rapid succession she and Art gave Perry a brother, Ron, and then a sister, Kathy.
Like Perry and Janet, Art and Zipora seemed like a happy younger couple raising a happy family of young children, aged closely to one another. While not well-off, they were financially secure, despite Art going from one job to another, purportedly due to his not-much-desired rough etiquette. Nonetheless, they were able to afford to purchase a vacation home in Michiana, Michigan, situated along the shore of Lake Michigan, approximately forty miles from East Chicago. It was a popular vacation destination, particularly for residents of Chicago and its suburbs. Arthur, Zipora, and the children spent a great deal of time there.
In 1970, when Perry was nine years old, his world, and that of his immediate family, was met with tragedy when his mother died of an apparent overdose of barbiturates. According to Arthur’s version of the events leading up to her death, Zipora had apparently sustained a head injury, for which her doctor had prescribed Darvon, a much-prescribed painkiller. Arthur believes that Zipora succumbed to anaphylactic shock after experiencing an allergic reaction to Darvon. But her death certificate shows that she died of “barbiturate overdose,” and indicated that a “partially empty bottle” of Darvon capsules were recovered from her bedroom. It was generally believed that Arthur had latched onto the anaphylactic shock explanation of his wife’s death because he may have been attempting to shield the stigma of suicide from his children.
Following Zipora’s death, Arthur decided to leave East Chicago. He sold their house, packed up the kids, and moved to the Michiana vacation house. Although he liked to spend a lot of time on the weekends with friends, some of whom dated to his army days, Arthur was very devoted to each of his kids and would literally do anything for them. Years later, his degree of involvement with Perry and his schemes would serve as a testament of sorts to how much he would do for one of his children. Perry became a lawyer specializing in taxation. His other son, Ron, became a lawyer who works in Chicago, and his daughter, Kathy, graduated from dental school and has a practice in Michigan. All of his kids did well for themselves. It would be Perry, however, who would take a wrong turn later in life.
Even though he is Jewish, Perry March went to the Catholic college preparatory high school, La Lumiere School. La Lumiere is a coeducational lay Catholic boarding school situated on an estate in La Porte, Indiana, about sixty miles east of Chicago. Actor-comedian Chris Farley attended La Lumiere for a short time, and the school produced a chief justice of the United States, John Roberts. It was clear that Arthur wanted nothing but the best for his kids, and got it. Perry always achieved high marks at La Lumiere, and took part in many extracurricular activities, such as tennis, wrestling, soccer, and karate. He earned a first-degree black belt while still in high school. He graduated with several varsity letters in wrestling and in soccer, and could have had his pick of many universities to attend. He also liked to ski, and he enjoyed mountain biking. He also played guitar—at times it didn’t seem like there was much that he could not do.
Of the many offers of acceptance that he received, Perry decided on the University of Michigan because, he said, the lower rate of tuition for being an in-state student would help out his father financially. He also chose the University of Michigan because of his interest in learning the Chinese language—that school, according to Perry, offered an excellent program in Chinese. Perry, majoring in Asian studies, went on to become fluent in the language. He also served on the University of Michigan’s Honors Student Council.
It was at the University of Michigan that Perry met Janet. They were introduced by Janet’s roommate, and like his father had been attracted to his mother, Perry and Janet hit it off almost instantly. Although Janet missed their first date because she overslept, she and Perry were always together after they finally went out on a date. Janet was capricious and creative, and she was beautiful—all attributes that attracted Perry to her. She could be quirky at times, but she always had a sense of humor, which Perry liked. When Perry graduated in 1983, he had made plans to relocate to Chicago, where he had obtained work as a brokerage house manager trainee. Janet joined him in Chicago approximately six months later, toward the end of the year.
They lived together in the Windy City for about two years, before deciding to move to Nashville, where Janet’s parents lived. Perry, at one point, decided that he wanted to be a lawyer. He subsequently applied to and was accepted at Vanderbilt University Law School, one of the top-twenty law schools in the United States. Janet’s father, himself a lawyer and fond of Perry, offered to pay Perry’s tuition and expenses while he was at Vanderbilt, even though he and Janet were not yet married. Perry was, of course, ecstatic at such an opportunity and he eagerly accepted the Levines’ generosity.
It wouldn’t be until 1987, however, that Perry and Janet would wed. Janet had been hoping for years that Perry would propose to her, but when he never did, she took matters into her own hands and proposed to
him.
They had gone on an outing to Percy Warner Park, not far from the Levines’ home and near to the location of Janet’s future dream house on Blackberry Road. While at the park, Janet knelt on the ground and asked Perry to marry her. He, of course, accepted, and Janet became, in a manner of speaking, Perry’s “golden goose.” What more could he ask for? It was a dream come true, especially on the financial side of things.
Now that Perry and Janet were finally married, Lawrence and Carolyn Levine wanted to do everything in their power to assist their only daughter as much as possible. According to family friends, Perry had developed a close relationship with Janet’s mother, Carolyn, because of his desire for a mother figure in his life, since his own mother had died when he was only nine. As a result, the Levines gave Janet and Perry money so that they could purchase a house that they both wanted. They wanted so much, they would later say, to help make their daughter happy. At that time they also wanted to help Perry so that he could make a good life with their daughter and provide for her in the manner to which she was accustomed. The house, located on a hill on Thirty-second Avenue, helped a great deal in that regard.
Perry, by this time, had begun to worry about his father’s financial situation. Arthur’s finances had suddenly put him on a track with hard times ahead. The mortgage company had foreclosed on his Michiana home a year earlier, due to his inability to keep up the payments, and Lawrence Levine, upon hearing of the foreclosure, purchased the property from the mortgage company for $115,000 and allowed Arthur to live in the house, presumably until he could get back on his feet. Records show that Levine terminated Arthur’s lease on the property in early 1987 when Arthur was unable to keep up with the rent payments. Levine sold the house the following year for $144,500, which was $29,500 more than what he paid for it.
After vacating the Michiana house, where he had lived for years, Arthur moved to Nashville in order to be nearer Perry and Janet. When he first got into town, Arthur stayed with the Levines at their home and they loaned him money to help him get established in his new locale. However, despite his efforts, Arthur would file for bankruptcy in 1991, the same year that his grandson, Sammy, was born. Upon his discharge from bankruptcy court, he would begin making plans for his move to Mexico, where he would eventually reside in a caretaker’s cottage on a Lake Chapala estate. The Lake Chapala area is a beautiful setting where many American retirees relocate so that they can live for significantly less money than it would take to retire in the United States.
Meanwhile, Perry excelled at Vanderbilt, just as everyone had expected he would. He made Vanderbilt’s prestigious Law Review and, upon graduation, claimed that he had received a number of lucrative offers from some of the country’s most prestigious law firms, including two in New York. However, Perry decided to accept an offer as an associate from the prominent Nashville firm of Bass, Berry & Sims at a starting salary of $42,500 annually. In 1988, Perry became the first Jew ever hired as an attorney for Bass, Berry & Sims, the same year the firm hired its first African American attorney.
One of Perry’s former professors at Vanderbilt characterized him as being personable and extremely bright.
“Perry wanted very much to be a good lawyer,” said Vanderbilt law professor Donald Langevoort. “He was quite committed and hardworking in pursuit of just about everything he did.”
Several of his coworkers thought that Perry was on the fast track to becoming a partner at the firm. Little did anyone know at that time that Perry would be asked to leave the firm three years later in disgrace after an internal investigation indicated that he had written a series of sexually explicit letters to a young female paralegal. The incident would mark the first of many problems that would affect his personal, as well as his professional, life.
After being forced to leave Bass, Berry & Sims, Perry landed a position practicing corporate law at the firm where his father-in-law was a senior partner. Levine, Mattson, Orr & Geracioti was a much smaller firm than Bass, Berry & Sims, and Perry justified his move there by telling people that he desired more freedom to pursue his own legal interests. Others would say that he landed there because he had nowhere else to go at that juncture in his life. Nonetheless, Perry proved that he could be successful at his father-in-law’s firm. While employed there, he represented several local businesses, including Music City Mix Factory, a strip club, and several prominent and wealthy individuals.