“No legacy is so rich as honesty.”  William Shakespeare

We can’t all be Shakespeare.

Irrepressible con artist Andrew Komis, otherwise known as The Mighty KOMIX, was a high school dropout turned infamous Toronto DJ turned house music impresario turned would be mogul with appetites to rival Harvey Weinstein and the brains and the balls to match. A creative genius by all accounts who dreamed of going long in order to become legitimate, he would also prove to be a darkly endearing sociopath who ultimately couldn’t get out of his own way.

KOMIX begged, borrowed, and stole from everyone he knew, including those closest to him over and over again, as part of his brilliance was to surround himself with a circle of reputable friends who loved him despite his monumental character flaws. He was a master of appropriating the winning elements of their lives while playing one against the other in ways that preyed on collective greed and kept alive the fiction his life had always been. Like all champion fabulists, he made the preposterous seem plausible by believing his own stories. People naturally wanted to believe them as well because he so desperately wished his elaborate lies to be true.

Only in his bizarre death at 41 would his house of cards finally collapse and leave all who had trusted him in the lurch. And what a house it was: private wine collections and film libraries, gold mines in Arizona, African diamond deals, Broadway musicals in Macau, Swiss bank accounts, real estate around the world, scripted and unscripted TV series, restaurant chains, boutique hotels, talent agencies, infomercials, Indie films, P&A funds, and FCC broadcast licenses—all suspect to be sure—along with a dozen false identities and millions swindled from friends for no apparent reason other than to compulsively piss away on pussy and petty indulgences like Cuban cigars, the latest consumer electronics, and retro Adidas tennis wear.

Had KOMIX harnessed the self-discipline to channel his enormous energies into productive ends, it is hard to imagine all he might have accomplished. An autodidact to the very core, there was no subject beyond his grasp wherever there was an easy angle to be played. But, alas, such great gifts are often born to compensate for even greater demons. Going long just wasn’t his story. His short life, however, spanning from a broken home and the streets of Montreal to Toronto, Manhattan, London, Hollywood, the Sony boardroom, and beyond, is worthy of more legend than mere legacy.

Live on.