While in college, Reservitz was heavily involved in high-stakes card games, according to a former classmate. Reservitz also boasted about his friendships with professional athletes, including players on the Red Sox and the Celtics. In 1967, Reservitz passed the bar and joined his father’s law firm, pursuing his career with, as one acquaintance recalls, “vim and vigor.”
But within a year Reservitz’s father died of a heart attack. And Larry – with vim and vigor, if not judiciousness – embarked on a career in crime. He started concocting phony car crashes and bilking insurance companies for damages, according to his own testimony. The motivation, Reservitz acknowledges, was “probably greed.”
“It was part of a large deal,” Reservitz testified. “They were set up accidents. It wasn’t that there was a legitimate client. The majority of these accidents were phony accidents, they were staged …Where there was a legitimate accident, if there were two people in the car, for example, by the time the case got ready for settlement it would have been four people in the car.”
Among Reservitz’s partners in crime was a man named Elias Kenaan of Braintree. Kenaan’s wife, Eileen, is the daughter of Ilario “Larry Baione” Zannino, now the reputed head of the Boston Mafia. Reservitz testified that he had probably filed more than 20 phony insurance claims during an 18-month period. The scheme had come to an abrupt halt when Reservitz read in a newspaper that a grand jury in Plymouth had been convened to indict an unnamed lawyer for filing false claims.
In early 1970, Reservitz, his wife, and their baby fled to Europe. Shortly before he left, he received a $650 fee to represent a Stoughton man charged with selling LSD to a state policeman. Reservitz never represented the man but did not return the fee. Reservitz said he’d hoped the move to Europe would bolster his faltering marriage. After landing in Geneva, Reservitz and his family moved to the Spanish island of Palma de Mallorca, about 120 miles off Barcelona. He invested in a nightclub and ran a small clothing store. Reservitz and his wife had another child. But one day Reservitz returned home to find his family had vanished.
A few months later, more trouble struck. A member of the Spanish secret police, whom Reservitz had befriended, told him that he was about to be arrested and extradited. While he was in Spain, Reservitz had been indicted in Plymouth County on more than a dozen charges of bilking from insurance companies, in bogus claims that exceeded $50,000.
Reservitz quickly sold off his interests in the clothing store and the nightclub at a loss and flew to Marseilles and then to Genoa. From there, he took a boat to Israel – “because I’d never been there before and I wanted to see it.” He settled in a suburb of Haifa for several months, living off his savings and selling money on the black market.
