Nicholas Cage blames bad money management for his financial collapse. But the actor's former accountant says the real reason was Cage's out-of-control spending habits.
Responding to the 45-year-old star's $20 million negligence lawsuit, his former accountant Samuel J. Levin says Cage was a compulsive spender who thwarted any attempt to reign in his extravagant lifestyle.
Cage claims that Levin "lined his own pockets with several million dollars in business management fees while sending Cage down a path toward financial ruin."
However, Levin says by the time he was hired in 2001, Cage "had already squandered tens of millions of dollars he had earned as a movie star" and owed millions more in unpaid income taxes. The situation was so bad that Levin says Cage needed to earn $30 million a year just to keep up his lifestyle.
He persuaded Cage to sell off more than a dozen of his cars and his comic book collection worth $1.6 million but after 'National Treasure', 'The Ant Bully' and 'Ghost Rider', he was back to his old ways with an "epic spending spree."
According to Levin, Cage purchased three mansions at more than $33 million, 22 cars, including nine Rolls Royces, and 47 pieces of artwork in 2007. If that wasn't enough, he also "spent huge sums of money taking his sizable entourage on costly vacations and threw enormous Gatsby-scale parties at his residences."
By the time 2008 rolled around, Cage owned 15 homes around the world, four yachts, a Gulfstream jet, and an Island in the Bahamas.
Levin says he took no more than the standard fee for a consultant and warned Cage numerous times to curb his spending because he was "living beyond his means."
"He knows that his losses are entirely and solely the result of his own compulsive, self-destructive spending, which he engaged in against Levin's advice," states the cross-complaint.
Nicholas Cage blames bad money management for his financial collapse. But the actor's former accountant says the real reason was Cage's out-of-control spending habits.
