Welcome to Jon-David & Goliath

“I was still a hairdresser with a printer. But this time, I also had a microphone.” – Jon-David

When I accepted a position as a hairdresser at The Boca Raton in late 2021, I believed I was walking into an extraordinary professional opportunity.

This wasn’t some little neighborhood salon.

This was The Boca Raton—one of Florida’s most recognizable luxury resorts.

I had moved from Chicago to Florida. I had taken an apartment near the property. I had reorganized my life around this job and the income I believed I could earn there.

There was just one rather important problem.

People couldn’t call us.

What Happens to a Hairdresser When the Phones Don’t Work?

Hairdressers need clients.

This is not a particularly complicated business model.

Clients call. Clients make appointments. Hairdressers perform services. Hairdressers earn money.

But the telephone and reservation problems I encountered at The Boca Raton made something as basic as booking an appointment extraordinarily difficult.

Members struggled to reach the salon.

Employees struggled to build clientele.

I watched coworkers trying to survive financially. Some maintained second jobs. People left.

And I kept being told things would get better.

That mattered because I was making financial decisions based on what management was telling me.

I stayed.

I waited.

I trusted.

And that’s where the story of Jon-David & Goliath really begins.

Fraud, Fraudulent Inducement—and What I Believed Happened to Me

When lawyers use terms such as fraud and fraudulent inducement, they’re talking about specific legal concepts with specific requirements.

I’m not a lawyer.

I’m a hairdresser.

But after what happened at The Boca Raton, I spent a great deal of time with lawyers—and a great deal of my own money—trying to understand those words.

My contention was straightforward: I believed I had been given assurances about my employment and the resort’s operational problems that caused me to continue making decisions I would not otherwise have made.

I had relocated.

I had taken on living expenses.

I had expected to earn a living.

And I believed the people managing me knew far more about the seriousness of the problems than I did.

That distinction is important.

A business having problems isn’t fraud.

A new system failing isn’t fraud.

A company making an expensive mistake isn’t necessarily fraud.

The question I began asking was different:

What did management know, what were employees being told, and when did they know it?

That’s the question at the heart of Jon-David & Goliath.

And What About the Members?

Employees weren’t the only people affected by the operational chaos I witnessed.

Members were trying to make appointments and reservations, too.

Imagine paying enormous membership fees to belong to one of America’s great luxury resorts and discovering that something as simple as making a salon appointment could become an ordeal.

Yet from my perspective as an employee, the full extent of what was happening behind the scenes wasn’t being explained.

That’s one of the reasons I eventually became so angry.

It wasn’t merely about me anymore.

Then I Started Asking Questions

Remember my landlord?

Remember the eight-page document?

Apparently I hadn’t learned to mind my own business.

I began asking questions at The Boca Raton.

I confronted management about what I believed employees had been told. I began documenting what had happened. I saved communications. I reconstructed dates. I tried to understand how long the telephone problems had existed and who knew what.

And according to my recollection, some of those conversations became extremely emotional.

Managers cried.

There were apologies.

There were explanations.

And then, in my view, the story changed again.

At some point you stop asking:

“When are they going to fix this?”

And start asking:

“What the hell actually happened here?”

That is a very different question.

The Financial Damage Wasn’t Theoretical

This wasn’t an intellectual exercise about corporate ethics.

It was my life.

I had moved across the country for this opportunity. I had housing expenses. I needed health insurance. I needed income. I had built a 40-plus-year career around my ability to attract, retain and serve clients.

You cannot build a clientele when clients cannot reliably reach you.

And you certainly cannot go backward in time and recover months of income after discovering that circumstances were not what you believed them to be.

The consequences followed me long after I left Florida.

That’s the part that gets lost when we use tidy phrases like “employment dispute.”

An employment dispute can mean somebody’s home.

Their savings.

Their debt.

Their career.

Their future.

So I Made a Podcast

Eventually, I tried the legal route.

I hired lawyers. I spent my savings. And I learned another uncomfortable lesson: being convinced that you were wronged and being financially capable of litigating against enormously well-funded organizations are two entirely different things.

I ultimately walked away from the lawsuit.

But—as I’ve written elsewhere—I didn’t walk away from the story.

I made Jon-David & Goliath.

The podcast allowed me to assemble the timeline, revisit the communications, tell listeners what I personally experienced, explain what I allege happened behind the scenes, and put the evidence I had gathered into context.

Oddly enough, making it became therapeutic.

For months I had felt powerless.

Then I sat behind a microphone.

Suddenly, I wasn’t powerless anymore.

Maybe I’ve Always Been This Guy

Looking back at that old story about my landlord, I understand something about myself a little better.

When I see something that doesn’t make sense, I start asking questions.

When the answers don’t make sense, I start looking for documents.

And apparently, when I find enough documents, I start publishing.

It’s probably not the most relaxing personality trait.

But it has given me some very good stories.

The little battle at my apartment building taught me that ordinary people can push back when something feels wrong.

The Boca Raton taught me something else:

Sometimes Goliath really is enormous.

He has lawyers.

He has money.

He has public relations people.

He has beautiful buildings.

And David?

Sometimes David has a microphone.

Listen to Jon-David & Goliath, part of The Mafia Hairdresser Chronicles, and hear the complete story for yourself.