Juanita: You mentioned your father—
Cam: Pretty sure that was you who mentioned him, but okay.
Juanita: Right. I mentioned your father, but only because you implied you weren’t eager to follow in his footsteps.
Cam: Not many people would be.
Juanita: Because he lost his business, a chain of three thousand-plus hardware stores that went belly-up after the divorce? Or because his investors then sued him for using off-the-books accounting to overstate profits and conceal debts? His conviction left your mother and you penniless.
Cam: Yeah, well, in the end, so was he, so... [shrugs]
Juanita: You say that like you think his bankruptcy and subsequent prison sentence were a justified result of his behavior. Do you see these things as some sort of karma?
Cam: Not really a fan of that word, but yeah, I do. My father drove everyone he’d ever loved away, and then when his life went to shit, he blamed those same people for deserting him. Money was the only thing he cared about, so I’m not going to lie. When he lost all of his, it wasn’t necessarily a bad day.
Juanita: He died in prison.
Cam: Yes. Penniless and friendless, alone and bitter. The old man dug his own grave. And before you ask, no. We never reconciled.
Juanita: And your mother?
Cam: You’d have to ask her. That’s her story to tell, not mine.
Juanita: But considering what you’ve been through, surely you must have gained some understanding into your father’s behavior. Surely you must feel some regret for the way things between you ended.
Cam: No on both accounts. Not even a little bit. My father walked out on his family and never looked back. He replaced us with a girl half his age, who up and left after his company tanked. He never once apologized for what he did to us, not even when he got sick. I lost my father many years before he died.
Juanita: And what would you say to the people who say “like father, like son”? Who put you in the same boat as him, as someone primarily motivated by money?
Cam: I’d say they have it completely, one hundred percent back-ass-ward. Unlike my father, I wasn’t motivated by money, but by the way money eased the weight of my responsibility to the people I love. Jade and the kids, my mother. Every single thing I did was for them, to feed and clothe and take care of them. I would have never left them in the dust to fend for themselves. The last thing I ever would have done is walk away.
Juanita: And yet you took your wife’s jewelry without her knowledge or permission, essentially theft. You pawned some of her most precious pieces and replaced them with fakes so she wouldn’t know.
Cam: And then I used that money to pay my children’s tuition. For Beatrix’s violin lessons and the homeowner association fees on my mother’s condo. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not proud of what I did, but at least I stuck around. I did it to save my family the heartache of losing everything including their friends—because make no mistake. A bankruptcy is a surefire way of learning who’s in your life because they want what you have. I was trying to save them from that.
Juanita: By being the polar opposite of your father.
Cam: Exactly.
Juanita: And yet, just like your father, you’ve also been accused of underhanded business practices. Things like employing undocumented workers and paying them under the table, for example.
Cam: Have you ever been in a restaurant kitchen? Something like 95 percent of the folks working the cleanup lines are Latino. They are the hardest workers doing the dirtiest jobs. Lasky’s policy was to hire only the ones who had individual taxpayer identification numbers, which means they could pay the IRS without alerting ICE. Whether or not they actually filed is none of my business.
Juanita: But were they legal?
Cam: Also none of my business. And look, judge me all you want, but I did what it took to keep my family and business afloat.
Juanita: So again, like father, like son.
Cam: Well, Juanita, I guess it’s true what they say. In the end we all become our parents.