• Al Pacino went from a $50 million fortune to almost nothing in the bank, he said in a new book.
• The actor said he overspent, ignored his finances, and had an accountant who later went to prison.
• Pacino sold assets and did seminars, a coffee commercial, and an Adam Sandler movie to stay afloat.
Al Pacino says he went from $50 million to broke by spending too much, ignoring his finances, and using an accountant who ultimately went to prison for fraud. He joins a long list of celebrities who’ve made and lost vast fortunes during their careers.
The “Scarface” actor, 84, detailed a host of money problems in his new autobiography, “Sonny Boy.” One of his first cash crunches occurred after he finished making “The Godfather,” and MGM Studios sued him for taking that role when it had already cast him in a Mafia comedy.
“It was like I was some sort of gambler and the bookies were going to get me,” Pacino wrote. “I had to hire lawyers to help get me out of that contract. Soon I was $15,000 in debt to the lawyers too.”
In a scene somewhat reminiscent of a mob movie, Pacino set up a meeting with the studio’s boss and asked him to back down. “You’re killing me. I don’t have any money, and I have to keep paying for lawyers because you keep suing me,” he wrote.
The studio head agreed to back off in return for Pacino letting MGM have the first look at any book or script he wanted to make — an offer Pacino couldn’t refuse.
The born-and-bred New Yorker went on to make a fortune starring in movies such as “Heat” and “Donnie Brasco.” He said he virtually ignored his finances for most of his career, trusting his accountant to manage his cash. Eventually, he looked over his books in 2011, when he’d just returned from an extravagant family getaway in Europe, and was surprised to see he was wealthier than before he’d left.
Several other red flags eventually led him to an accountant who told him he believed his current bookkeeper was an “arrogant crook.”
“I was broke,” Pacino wrote. “I had $50 million, and then I had nothing. I had property, but I didn’t have any money.”
He added: “There’s almost nothing worse for a famous person — there’s being dead, and then there’s being broke.”
Pacino said he’d been far too loose with the pursestrings: “The kind of money I was spending and where it was going was just a crazy montage of loss. The door was wide open, and people who I didn’t know were living off me. It was ‘Come one, come all! Al’s got it and he doesn’t care!'”
“Even though I only had two cars, I was somehow paying for 16, along with 23 cell phones I didn’t know about,” he added. “The landscaper was getting $400,000 a year and, mind you, that was for landscaping at a house I didn’t even live in.”
“It was all about: let’s keep this dumb actor happy, just keep him working, and we will reap.”
Pacino said he ignored his finances because he thought they’d be too hard to understand and felt he was too old and lacked the time to understand them.
The movie star had to scramble to stay afloat. He said he sold one of his two homes, hawked coffee after previously refusing to do commercials, took part in seminars that helped him cover his monthly bills, and acted in a movie called “Jack and Jill” with Adam Sandler because “they paid me a lot for it.”
At about the same time, he wrote, he learned his former accountant had been arrested, charged with running a Ponzi scheme, and sentenced to 7 ½ years in prison.
Many athletes, actors, musicians, and other celebrities have made and lost huge amounts of money. The list includes the singer Michael Jackson, the boxer Mike Tyson, the rapper 50 Cent, the soccer star Diego Maradona, and the basketball icon Dennis Rodman.
People who receive huge windfalls when they’re relatively young and unaccustomed to being wealthy tend to be at higher risk of having financial problems.
“I don’t mind a little ice,” the basketball legend Charles Barkley said during a May episode of the “Club Shay Shay” podcast, referring to young athletes’ spending, “but too much ice, they got Dior shoes.”
“They do know,” he added, “that money ain’t going to last forever, right?”
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