This is a true story and was the first place winner in a recent Criminal Lawyers Award listing:

ONLY IN AMERICA!!!

Here is a heart-warming lawyer story. An American lawyer purchased a box of very rare and expensive cigars then insured them against fire among other things. Within a month having smoked his entire stockpile of these great cigars and without yet having made even his first premium payment on the policy, the lawyer filed a claim against the insurance company. In his claim, the lawyer stated the cigars were lost “in a series of small fires”. The insurance company refused to pay, citing the obvious reason, that the man had consumed the cigars in the normal fashion. The lawyer sued and won. In delivering the ruling the judge agreed with the insurance company that the claim was frivolous, however; the judge stated that the lawyer held a policy from the company in which it had warranted that the cigars were insurable and also guaranteed that it would insure them against fire, without defining what is considered to be unacceptable fire and was obligated to pay the claim. Rather than endure a lengthy and costly appeal process, the insurance company accepted the ruling and paid $15,000.00 to the lawyer for his loss of the rare cigars lost in the “fires”.

Now for the good part … After the lawyer cashed the cheque, the insurance company had him arrested on 24 counts of arson. With his own insurance claim and testimony from the previous case being used against him, the lawyer was convicted of intentionally burning his insured property and was sentenced to two years in jail plus a $24,000.00 fine.

*****

Comment from a Facebook friend:

This site suggests it’s not true: http://www.hoax-slayer.com/lawyer-cigar-arson.shtml 🙂

*****

And this one from another Facebook friend:

While I can’t readily find the story on line, I have heard that this one is true:

In the early days of skyscrapers in the US, one was built and then found to encroach by something like half an inch upon a neighbouring property. The owner of the neighbouring site demanded that the building be removed, or that the building owners pay an exorbitant amount to acquire the strip of land, vastly more than it was worth.

The building owners decided to follow the former course, and cut their building back over the entire height of the encroachment.

The owner of the adjoining site then built his own skyscraper.

When the building work was completed, the owners of the original building revealed that they had cut their building back an extra quarter inch or so. The owner of the new building had no option but to acquire the land on which his building encroached. The price charged more than adequately covered the costs the owners of the earlier building had incurred in cutting back their building.