Get Rich! Live Forever!

CAN AN EXOTIC JUICE LEAD TO

HEALTH AND WEALTH? OR IS IT JUST A DIRECT-SALES SCAM?

\n ¦ o. this is not Lourdes. Out front and to the left is a dog-grooming busi-I I ness. To the right is a State Farm office, then Ceramic and Pottery Ul\ J I Creations'tnen Albano's Deli. The testimonials come from folks seated I \ I on foxing chairs in a yoga studio. I "^J This is a small strip mall in a suburb west of Chicago. We are gathered here this morning to report on the miracle cure for what ails us. The potion is purple and delicious, a cross between grape and cranberry juices.

It is called XanGo. as in tango, as in the hottest product to hit the network-marketing field in decades. That's right, XanGo is not just a juice; it is a strategy to quit the rat race and stay home and play golf. It is a way to retire at 50 with millions in the bank. The fellow leading today's session is well on his way. He's Jeff FaTlon, 35, a trim martial-arts aficionado who worked for 10 years at the Leo Burnett advertising agency. His Ford Explorer is parked out back. It's black with an orange "XanGo" slashed across the trunk and doors. His license plate reads iv xango.

Like most everyone who's juked on the juice. Fallon has a story to teTI, and it isn't pretty. His is about his wife and her irritable bowel syndrome. Her name is Annie: she's a taut, attractive, dark-haired woman. This is the studio where she teaches yoga and works as a personal trainer For years she was plagued by IBS. The details are not dinner-party conversation—suffice it to say, she spent a lot of time in the bathroom. By chance Fallon mentioned his wife's problem to a friend, who turned him on to XanGo. Two days later his wife's IBS was history. That was three years ago. "I had such bad menopause it threw my thyroid out of whack."

COLLAGE BY WINSTON SMITH

"I had a friend with an inoperable brain tumor"

"I'm ready to try XanGo," pipes up a first-timer. "I'm 60 pounds overweight, with asthma and shooting pains in my leg. My husband ran off with a co-worker"

Lechery may be one of the few conditions about which no claims have been made for the juice. Claims, though, is not the right word: you will never hear a XanGoite say XanGo "cures" anything. That would invite the scrutiny of the Federal Drug Administration, which XanGo. as a mere food supplement, scru­pulously avoids. It is. in fact, little more than a juice, albeit a juice from a very special fruit. Queen Victoria was fascinated by the fruit—legend says she offered a reward to anyone who could transport it to England without its spoiling, which gave it the nickname the queen of fruits. It owes its current prominence to a fellow named Joe Morton, who happened to be having lunch at a seaside cafe in Malaysia six years ago when the waiter presented a fruit dessert.

The exterior of the fruit was unattractive —a bulbous, rootlike rind that resembled gnarled ginger. But the inte­rior was another matter, a pillowy white pulp that Morton scooped out with his spoon and that immediately made him think he'd gone to heaven.

"I've never tasted anything so delicious in all my life." he exclaimed to the waiter. "What is it?"

"It is a mangosteen. sir." said the waiter.

It's quite a fruit, this mangosteen. Not only is it reputed to cure an alphabet soup of ailments, it has made a lot of people rich. A mere eight years after Morton's epiphany, he sits atop a company that employs 600 people. A privately held business. XanGo wont disclose sales figures, but insider estimates put the number at S300 million last year; by 2010 XanGo aims to hit a billion.

In all likelihood the juice is not on your breakfast menu. You can't buy it. not in drugstores or at Wal-Mart or even in health-food stores. That's because Morton shuns the retail shelf. He much prefers direct marketing—or multilevel marketing. MLM for short—a strategy to sell products without the benefit of stores or advertising. Instead, a fan of the product. A. tells B. C and D about it. selling them on both the juice and the idea of selling it themselves. Each of them gives E, F. G, H. I and J the same

routine, tou gei tne iaea. i-aster tnan you can say" lupperwa parties." an exponentially huge population is buying the prod uct and telling (or is it selling?) all their friends.

Now before you go calling the attorney general, please understand: This is not a pyramid scheme. In the classi pyramid scheme, participants attempt to make mone^ solely by recruiting new participants into the pro­gram. "The hallmark of these schemes," according to a document from the Securities and Exchange Commission, "is the promise of sky-high returns in a short period of time for doing nothing more than : handing over your money and getting others to do the same." The pyramid pancakes as soon as the number of people necessary to sustain it gets too big, which can happen fast. If each new recruit aims to enlist, say. six others, the number will exceed the population of the United States at level 11. At what­ever level it collapses, all the bottom-tier investors lose their money and the promoter walks away with a fortune, at least until the feds throw him in jail.

Morton is not in jail, and neither will you be if you sell his juice. I am not in jail, and I have purchased two cases of XanGo. My first case of four bottles cost me S160 (each bottle is 750 milliliters. or slightly ! less than a quart). The next case, discounted, ran me

S100. I will report on the results shortly.

You're probably thinking. Four bottles for S160—that's S40 a bottle. That's expensive juice! If so. you've learned the first lesson of XanGo salesmanship. Make the cost work for you. Here's how it goes. You've got a friend with chronic colitis. She tries the juice, and two weeks later—unbelievable!—the colitis is gone. She's a XanGo convert for life.

"But I drank one bottle in 10 days." she wails. "I can't afford a S40 bottle every 10 days."

"Suppose." you say in your best confidential voice. "I told you how you could drink the juice for free."

All your friend has to do is sell XanGo to. oh. three other people. Each of them has to sell to three others. That's when your commission kicks in. Get enough levels, or "down people." and you'll be digging a new basement to store your money. If you happen to have been recruited by Jeff Fallon. he'll get a commission too.

Legitimate companies—huge companies—have prospered nicely through direct marketing. The legal obstacles were cleared in a landmark 1970s FTC decision. In re: Amway Corp., which distinguished the banned pyramid from a more legitimate multilevel marketing program. Among the top MLM companies in the United States, when rated by annual growth. Amway now holds second place behind the leader of the pack, Avon. Number three is Mary Kay. Can you guess which rookie outfit has burrowed its way into the number four slot after only three years in business?

XanGo.

"XanGo is definitely in the right place at the right time." says George Madiou, editor of the online Network Marketing Magazine. "The biggest misconception is that it's a scam. On the contrary, XanGo is a large company in a market that's monstrous. It's a way for people to leave a dismal job they hate, send a kid to college and become a millionaire."

I want to become a millionaire, and I'm curious who else does, so I trek to one of XanGo's city meetings—which the company stages around the country every few weeks—at an Embassy Suites hotel sandwiched between a huge parking garage and the access road to Chicago's O'Hare Airport. On this warm autumn

"light. 150 people show up. many confirmed XanGoites who greet one another with evangelical smiles and warm hugs. It's my first clue to one of XanGo's main appeals: It gener­ates a fake family, a like-minded clan joined by the juice into a loving, supportive community akin to. say. Alcohol­ics Anonymous or a church. The group tonight is diverse, more young than old. more white than black (thouah

more than 10 percent are African American), with

everyone from students and financial consultants to

clerks at gas-station mini-marts. There's an excited

rush into ballroom B, where murmured gasps soon

greet the matinee-idol-handsome dark-haired man

who strides to the front of the room. He's tonight's

star attraction. XanGo's top trainer and. of even

greater significance, none other than the nephew of

Donny and Marie—Doug Osmond!

"Hello. Chicago! I'm a huge Michael Jordan fan!"

The crowd, which has erupted in applause, is

on its feet.

"What are you looking for?" asks Osmond. "Free­dom? Wellness? Guess what. You can have it all!"

All thanks to Joe Morton, "the nicest guy you'll ever meet," says Osmond. Mortons a little obsessed. Osmond confides, with finding the great new elixir to [continued on page 135)

GET RICH!

(continued from page 94) help mankind—"An herbal gerbil, that's Joe"—but guess what. He found it. XanGo has now sold enough juice that if the bottles were placed end to end, they would reach the summit of Mount Ever­est—88 times over. It has sold enough to deliver a bottle to every resident in the state of Virginia. Worried about the sup­ply running out? Forget it. Even $2 bil­lion in sales would sap only 10 percent of the world's supply. You may as well ask if the world could run short of oranges.

The gentleman following Osmond just taxied over from O'Hare. He is Dr. Vaughn Johnson, a kindly board-certified family practitioner from outside Salt Lake City. The man looks incapable of duplicity, and does he have tales to tell! Patients plagued by arthritis started drinking the juice and went back to slam­ming aces on the tennis court. A girl with terrible acne and allergies was as good as new after two weeks of XanGo.

"I'm not saying XanGo caused the change," he stresses. "I'm just saying she came in one way, started drinking XanGo, and two weeks later she was symptom free."

Johnson is not about to skip over what he calls "the technical stuff," including the fruit's name, Garciniti nuingoslana. He's got his own pictures to project on the screen behind him—Tinkertoy-like molecular structures. These turn out to be the leg­endary xanthones, a class of antioxidants. The ingredients can be found in plenty of fruits and vegetables, concedes the doc­tor, but not in such concentration. XanGo uses the entire fruit, the pulp and the rind, which is where the good stuff is.

The value of XanGo's antioxidants prompts some debate. No one denies the mangosteen rind has antioxidants to spare, and few dispute their value. "Antioxidants, which are in XanGo and similar products," says Joe Pizzorno, edi­tor of the prestigious Integrative Medicine: A Clinician's Journal, "have dramatically high amounts of carotenoids, flavonoids and omega-3 acids, which are badly lack­ing in the standard American diet. When these are low, there's a higher incidence of disease."

But the esteemed high priest of al­ternative medicine, Dr. Andrew Weil, is not convinced XanGo is the way to go. "I would dismiss the testimonials on the company's website as unsupported mar­keting gimmicks," Weil says. "XanGo is priced at $32.50 for a 25-ounce bottle, a hefty price for fruit juice. My advice? Save your money and squeeze your own from less exotic fruits."

You could argue antioxidants from dawn to dusk. What you can't ques­tion—and what Osmond is thrilled to demonstrate—is the business potential of Garcinia mangostana.

"Let's see who's here tonight," he says.

"Raise your hands if you're a 1 K level."

1K means you and the folks under you are selling a thousand bucks' worth of the juice a month. Maybe 40 hands shoot up, greeted by warm applause.

"How about 5K?"

Twenty hands and even louder applause.

10K, 50K, 100K: This is truly the stratosphere. Your distributors are selling §100,000 worth of juice every month. The two who stand are greeted with stunned acclaim.

The next level, 200K, has been achieved by only a select few, and none appear to have come to the Embassy Suites. But wait, Osmond's not through! There's a higher level still. This is truly XanGo nirvana, an honor reserved for a hallowed quintet that merits its own page in XanGo's monthly Go magazine. Each of these has hit the 500K mark, which means they and their distributors sell half a million dollars' worth of prod­uct every month.

It seems inconceivable, yet one of them is here tonight! Osmond gestures to the back of the room as if summoning the pope. "Sharon, come on up here."

Thunderous applause rocks ballroom B as Sharon Davidson-Unkefer makes her way to the front of the room. What may be most unusual about her is how normal she looks: middle-aged, attrac­tive enough, not exactly shy but not ag­gressive, either. The fact is, she never thought it would happen to her. She was just a single mom looking to make some money at home.

"Even my best friend, who's a double diamond at Amway, couldn't believe what happened, but it's all true. I can't tell you how much I make. But this month's check," she says with a smile, "was more than the president makes in a year!"

But don't think XanGo is all about making money. That would be so crass! As Osmond solemnly points out, "People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care." XanGo cares a lot. Between five and seven percent of profits go to good works and charity. After the 2004 tsunami an entire Thai village was rebuilt with XanGo cash. The company also gives to Operation Kids, an umbrella charity best known for its ads showing a child's cleft palate.

I go home and thumb through my XanGo material. It's classy stuff, printed on heavy stock. The basic welcome kit—a handsome "XanGo: The Whole Experi­ence" brochure plus two GDs—comes in a ribbed orange-and-silver package that could pass for sculpture on my coffee table. The GDs are nothing if not pro­fessional, "joe's Story" (my favorite) is a kind of travelogue that commences with Joe Morton wandering Southeast Asian ruins like Indiana Jones and, many sun­sets later, finding the magical fruit.

Yet maybe it's all a slick promotional gimmick, a virtual scam. I'd like to meet

Joe Morton. I'd like to see the operation in person. I need to go to Utah.

XanGo headquarters is 30 miles south of Salt Lake City, just off'Interstate 15. It's in the "town" of Lehi, which con­sists mainly of a posh country club and a cluster of improbable glass build­ings that jut from the desert like the Pyramids. The buildings are strangely similar—high glass atria with soar­ing portico stonework. One of these, a 60,000-square-footer, has housed XanGo since it was built three years ago. Now it's way too small. XanGo will soon expand into a three-building, 300,000-square-foot whopper. It has 10,000 square feet of bathroom space. The entire fourth floor of one building is a gym and employee break room.

This is explained to me by XanGo's PR person, who greets me warmly, then produces a bottle of XanGo from a desk drawer and pours me a double shot. He's having a noonday refresher too. I throw mine down in two gulps. I've been drinking the stuff for close to a month now, often three times a day. That's the dose prescribed by Gail, the woman who enrolled me. She cautioned me that XanGo often takes two or three months to "work," which was why I needed to lay in a supply.

I have enjoyed the juice. My nine-year-old son likes the taste. But so far nothing has happened, though perhaps I'm being too cavalier. Maybe the juice has knocked the bejesus out of a loom­ing infection. I don't feel any smarter, healthier or more energized, but on the other hand I haven't developed the flu or beriberi. In passing along sales tech­niques to new trainees, Kallon had this comeback for someone who claimed to be perfectly healthy: "Most people think they're perfectly healthy the day they have a heart attack."

To date I have not had a heart attack. Morton looks like an unlikely candidate for a heart attack. He's a trim, good-looking guy casually dressed in a sharp blue shirt. He sits in a spacious though unpretentious office. He shakes my hand vigorously and looks me in the eye. His bright presence is all the more impres­sive given his recent travels.

"Yesterday I was at a meeting in Mex­ico with 2,200 people," he says. "Two days ago it was Sweden. We just opened Sweden and Germany. Right now we're in 16 international markets. It all started in Malaysia when we found a nutrient called xanthones inside the peel of the mangosteen. So we decided to put it in a product. When people think of the man­gosteen and xanihones, we want them to think of XanGo. Nobody now is putting the whole fruit into a juice. We're the category creator."

People at XanGo like to draw analogies with other category creators. When you

blow your nose, you reach for Kleenex: you cut your finger and slap on a Band-Aid. Feel a cold coming on? Back freez­ing up? Joints aching? Open the fridge and swill your XanGo. It is not. inciden­tally, an accident that XanGo conies in a bottle and benefits from refrigeration. Researchers at XanGo have found that the average American opens the refrig­erator 22 times a day. And there it is. the purple bottle. As pills or powder, the magic elixir would be stuck on a dark, neglected shelf in a cupboard. Pills and powder also go down hard, whereas XanGo tastes delicious.

But how did the business grow so quickly. I ask.

"It's the human-touch factor." Morton explains. "Direct sales is a person-to-person business. People get very passion­ate about our product. They experience it and think, Gosh, this is my experience. I want to share it with the people I know and love. It's a beautiful model."

That model, direct sales, may have a smarmy reputation. Here in the Beehive State, it's the backbone of business. "We want to tell people. It's in our nature," Morton says. "I go to a good movie; I tell people about the movie. Like these new shoes I bought. Oh my gosh, I love them so much. What we want to do as human beings is tell people. This is an industry that helps a lot of people."

It is worth noting that Morton did not stumble blindly into direct sales or even herbal gerbildom. He comes from a Canadian family so devoted to natural health that he grew up without sugar, white flour or ice cream. Dinner-table talk was all about ginkgo biloba, gin­seng and hawthorne berries. A pioneer­ing water-filtration system took up most of the kitchen. FV>r vacation the Mor­tons piled into the family Ford and went on "top-achiever trips" funded by the company for which Dad peddled nutri­tional supplements. At the time of the mangosleen revelation, Morton headed Malaysian operations for Herbalife, another multilevel-marketing company, founded in 1980.

The market for nutritional supple­ments is huge, S23 billion, and XanGo is hardly the only product to tap its po­tential. It is not even the only product along this stretch of Interstate 15. No fewer than 100 supplement companies have set up shop under the Wasatch Range, prompting the nickname Cel­lulose Valley, after the primary compo­nent of green plants. These businesses have thrived here for several reasons. One is Utah senator Orrin Hatch, who co-sponsored the Dietary Supplement Health and Fducalion Act of 1994. which allowed companies to release products without first having to prove their safety. Hatch himself has invested in a Utah company called Pharmics. His top cam­paign contributor happens to be XanGo. which threw in close to S50.000 in 2()()(i.

The other reason, of course, is Joseph Smith, who founded the Church of Jesus Christ of Latler-Day Saints, more com­monly known as Mormonism. The Mor­mons have a long history of using natural remedies, and a Mormon herbalist, John Christopher, concocted formulas in the mid-2()th century that have become the basis for three pioneering companies, Nature's Way, Nature's Sunshine and Nature's Herbs. More important. Mor­mons have an entrepreneurial streak that relies a lot on door-to-door evange­lism. Thai's how they spread the word back when Smith ran the church; that's how they get the message out now.

"This is a very personal industry," says Morton. "You've uot to love beine aronnrl

people. Kin ve goi to love taking phone calls from people and listening to their emotions. We love our distributors. We love what we do. We love nutritional sup­plements, and we love direct sales."

Joe Morton is not alone in his enthusi­asm for direct sales. You don't have to travel far down the interstate to find that same enthu­siasm. Less than 15 miles south of XanGo headquar­ters is the city of Provo, where an­other spectacular new office complex is home to a product that bears a strik­ing resemblance to XanGo. Its fruit also comes from an exotic locale—and is similarly ugly, resembling a medi­um-size potato with spores. And it has a

Miniiai story ueninci n. 10 wit: tor years, maybe thousands of years, wise men of the islands employed the fruit to cure all manner of ills, from cancer to diarrhea and boils.

This fruit is the noni. The product is Tahitian Noni Juice.

Noni is marketed almost identically to XanGo. Kach convert or interested party enrolls distributors, who themselves en­roll more distributors. The larger the base of I ho pyramid beneath, the bigger the compensation. XanGo encourages you to find three people, at which point you get a five percent payout on their sales; when each of those throe people recruits throe more, you got another live percent payout. Though there are different com-

pensation plans, if you get enough levels beneath you, you can ultimately reach a 30 percent payout. Exactly like XanGo, Noni holds out the promise of a piece of the worldwide distribution pie—in its case, two percent. The similarity in plans is something more than coincidence: Two years ago several top Noni execu­tives defected to XanGo.

A bitter lawsuit ensued. Terms of the settlement preclude the release of any details, and Morton shrugs an apology: "I can't really talk about that." He dismisses any business threat posed by Noni juice. "It's a completely different botanical. It's like saying vitamin C versus vitamin B. We don't see them as competition."

XanGo and Noni may be the two most

prominent heavyweights slugging it out, but plenty of other companies in the valley are vying for business and atten­tion on the web. I'll pick one at random: MonaVie markets a juice based on the renowned a<;ai berry, touted on Oprah by Dr. Nicholas Perricone as "number one among the most nutritional fruits of the world. Worthy," he adds, "in light of the Hurry of single-fruit health juices." It didn't hurt MonaVie sales when NBC's Matt Lauer took a trip into the Brazil­ian jungle and called the acai berry "the Viagra of the Amazon."

The agai berry is also selling nicely. There must be dozens of yet undis­covered fruits in far-off jungles whose medley with science could make me

rich. Gordon Morton, Joe's brother and XanGo's chief marketing exec, sets me straight. Bottling the mangosteen is not without its challenges. The fruit is highly perishable. Off the tree, it rots within a couple of days. It took forever before XanGo figured out how to turn it and its tough rind quickly to pulp, freeze it and then ship the frozen product to the factory warehouse in Kentucky.

I return from Utah chastened but dog­gedly optimistic. I'm still drinking the juice and remain free of dire infection. I'm still thinking double diamond. It's true that statistics are not in my favor. A studv of several MLM comnanies bv

Robert KitzPatrick of the nonprofit group Pyramid Scheme Alert found that more than 90 percent of network sellers had an aver­age income of less than $10 a week before taxes. The attrition rate for first-year sellers can be as high as 75 percent at some MLM companies. The reasons are various: lack of motivation, lousy product, poor sales skills, bad compen­sation plan, limited circle of contacts, missing out on the ground floor. "MLMs must always be in a state of failure," says FitzPatrick, "in which nearly all are losing and quitting. The model must have a massive loss rate. Otherwise it would consume the planet and collapse." All, it seems, can spell a return to cu-

bide culture. But 1 m not deterred. For starters I can certainly ramp up my sales technique. To that end, 1 mark my cal­endar to catch an upcoming conference call with David Butler. He and his pretty, beaming wife, Colli, are smack in the middle of Go's page of 500K superstars. The man is a legend and not bad at self-promotion. He has his own CD. When he's not selling XanGo—which is rare­ly—he runs around the country giving talks and conducting cheerleader ses­sions. On the day of the call, he's driving back from Los Angeles, where he hosted a two-day event and gave a speech called "The 12 Minefields." He pulls oil the in­terstate while participants check in from around the country: "I'm Nina from

Portland," "Jeff from Atlanta," "Emma from Florida." We've all called in to hear Butler's selling secrets.

I've got my pencil sharpened.

"First, become a good storyteller," says Butler, "and we'll break that into three parts. One, testimonials: V'ou need them at your fingertips. They could be per­sonal; they could come from a newsletter. Testimonials are key. Two, the product: Have it down—what it looks like, where it came from, what it tastes like, what's the pulp, what do those xanthones do. Three, money: Be able to talk money, and don't be embarrassed by big numbers."

But we should be flexible. Some folks want to hear about money, some about the product. Here's how Butler "pros­pects"—MLM lingo for lining up buyers. He talks to everybody. Don't tell him you don't have time to enroll new distribu­tors because you spent half the day at ShopRite and Curves.

"You're in the checkout line," he says. "You talk to the clerk and ask, 'How's your day going?' She says, 'You know.' I say, 'You know, I don't know." So maybe she says she's standing all day on her feet and her feet are killing her. 'Oh my gosh,' you say, 'Do 1 have a product for you! Can I give you a couple of websites?' Or she com­plains about her job. Too many hours and not enough money. You say, 'How would you like to make twice as much money and never leave home? Can I give you a cou­ple of websites?' Product or money. You're ready to go in either direction."

Butler has one final tip before turn­ing back on the interstate. You say you're shy? Can't strike up a conversa­tion? Learn how to give compliments. "There's no better way to create an in­stant bond," he says. "Tell her you like her smile or what she's wearing or her business style. I met a gal in a store; she's a major successful person. I told her, 'You know what? In my business you're a $50,000 story waiting to happen.' 'Oh

my gosh! Really? What business is that?' Make a date to call. Don't ever leave a place without making something hap­pen. Get her the websites."

I've underlined that tip on my note­pad. Get a prospect to the XanGo web­site. Let XanGo do the selling. Let the "tools" work. Jeff Fallon made the very same point at his own modest training session in Annie's yoga studio. He too was big on flattery as a conversation starter: "Pay compliments. 'Hey, awesome shoes!' 'Love that haircut!' Smile. Carry breath mints. Eighty percent of sales are lost because of bad breath."

Fallon also stressed learning your story— specifically, your "elevator speech." You've got six floors and 30 seconds. If people ask what you do, answer, "I own a global bev­erage distributorship." For something lon­ger try, "I discover ways to assist executives in multiplying their retirement objective without the stock market." Or "I special­ize in compressing 30 to 40 years' worth of earnings into 30 months."

I decide to try it. I'm psyched; 1 can feel the xanthones working. So when I spot an attractive woman waiting for the valet to retrieve her car, I move a step closer. I wait until she looks in my direction.

"Awesome haircut," I tell her.

She looks ready to smack my head with her purse.

"You know something," I say. "You look like an $80,000 job just waiting to happen."

Her car arrives before I can send her to a website.

I continue trying as the weeks go on. Sadly, my further attempts to sell XanGo go no better. When I flatter women, they eye me suspiciously. When I flatter men, the result is worse. Most XanGo newbies reach out to friends in the beginning, but my few halfhearted calls to friends go nowhere. My chances at riches are evaporating before my eyes, and it's my fault. My heart simply isn't in it.

If I'm a bad multilevel marketer. I'm also a lousy customer. My XanGo con­sumption has plummeted. Days go by. and I fail to take even a swallow. My body doesn't call out for antioxidants. I'm no less healthy than I was when I was juicing regularly; I'm merely $40 a bottle richer.

And some dark clouds are gathering around XanGo. The Federal Trade Com­mission may soon require multilevel mar­keters to disclose to potential recruits how slim the likelihood of financial success is. But members of the XanGo family claim they aren't worried—and with good rea­son. Multilevel marketing rarely appeals to anyone's rational side, so no one thinks potential recruits will be dissuaded.

Perhaps I need another dose of XanGo encouragement. Luckily, six weeks after the Embassy Suites meeting, the team's back in Chicago, and this time the meet­ing isn't at an airport hotel with 737s rumbling overhead. Tonight it's down­town on Michigan Avenue, the boulevard of dreams. The top brass is here tonight: none other than Gordon Morton and Dr. Frederick Templeton. Morton, dapper and slick as an Osmond, is his own best sales tool. Up on the big screen, he shows himself years back, fat and looking as old as Methuselah; today, a XanGo convert, he looks like a GQ cover and a dad to boot. "When my four-year-old daughter got hurt, she used to say, 'Ouch, can I have a Band-Aid?'" says Morton. "Now she says, 'Ouch, can I have a XanGo?'"

Templeton, up next, is the big cheese among doctors extolling XanGo, but the man knows where to draw the line. .After telling of an ex-monk he followed on the Thailand-Cambodia border who treated everyone with mangosteen, Templeton barks, "But this is not medicine! Do not talk about it as medicine, or you'll have the wrath of God fall upon us!"

The evening's final attraction is a short, lively Filipino woman, Leonid Lehay, who recently hit the 100K mark and was awarded a first-class, all-expenses-paid trip to Thailand. XanGo even bought her luggage.

"The food was unbelievable. We rode to the resort on elephants. We ate man-gosteens every day in our hotel room," gushes Lehay, "and 1 pigged out so much, I almost forgot to drink my XanGo juice!"

Eventually the crowd disperses into the balmy October night. Not a few rlutch their telltale orange-and-purple XanGo CDs and brochures. There are plenty of distributors, too, most identifi-ible by their cheery manner and conver­sational skills. One who stands waiting for a taxi outside turns to address the itranger behind her.

"That," she exclaims, "is an awe-iomc haircut!" Somehow for her it seems to work.

"THE FOG'S LIFTED. I'M OFF PAXIL!"

"I LOST 26 POUNDS AND QUIT SMOKING."

"MY ECZEMA IS CONE! SO ARE MY ALLERGIES!"

"I'M FINALLY NOT CRIPPLED BY TENDINITIS."

"THE BIGGEST MISCONCEPTION IS THAT IT'S A SCAM. XANGO IS A LARGE COMPANY IN A MARKET THAT'S MONSTROUS."