Death of a Salesman

DON LAPRE WAS ONCE THE KING OF INFOMERCIALS, THE MAN WHO

CONVINCED VIEWERS HE COULD MAKE THEM RICH. HE CONVINCED

HIMSELF TOO, AND THAT'S ONE REASON HE'S DEAD

Before the tragedy that resulted in his death, you were likely to remember Don Lapre, if at all, from the mid-1990s, standing on a beach in an open-collared sport shirt, the waves lapping gently behind him, his hair black and gel-slicked, his face baby smooth, his body leaning con-spiratorially toward the camera, his hands, fingers splayed, semaphoring nonstop, his eyes widening and squinting in punctuation, his mouth taking small gulps of air before each sally as if he needed an oxygen boost to fuel his excitement and his tone, as his voice rose into its higher register, halfway between beseeching and wheedling. In those days he was a phenomenon-—maybe the most visible and imitable pitchman on late-night TV. "The sssssecret is learning how to take one tiny classified ad [gulp] that made $30 to $40 profit in a week [gulp] and to realize that you could now take that same exact ad [gulp] and place it in up to 3,000 other newspapers around the country," he told his viewers. "That's how I generated over $50,000 a week out of my one-bedroom apartment!" And he added in the same cheery, high-pitched delivery, "You may start making so much money you may not want to do anything else!" And there were the testimonials: the bearded man who was making so much money he couldn't stop smiling in shy disbelief ("It don't even sound right"); the gaunt, triangular-faced man in the cranberry shirt who called

it "phenomenal"; the doughy young man with hair piled high atop his head who testified that he had visited Don Lapre's office and had seen with his own eyes "stacks and stacks and stacks and stacks" of tracking sheets for the classified ads Lapre had placed.

This was the half-hour program called The Money Making Show With Don Lapre (pronounced la-FRKK), and according to Jordan Whitney, Inc., a company that monitors info-mercials, back in the 1990s it consistently ranked in the top 10 in number of viewers and frequency of airings. It also seemed to do its job. Lapre once claimed to have sold 500,000 "Money Making" kits in a five-year period, and one source estimated that at one point his company was gross­ing $60 million a year. But money wasn't the only measure of his success. Lapre became a minor pop culture icon. David Spade imitated him on Saturday Night Live. David

Letterman invited him on his show to spoof himself. He appeared on the MTV Video Mu­sic Awards. He became friends with Mike Tyson. If Lapre made an impression, it was no doubt because he was different from most of the TV hucksters selling magic real estate plans or miracle diets or slice-and-dice machines or exercise contraptions. For one thing, he was young—only in his 20s when he began. For an-

other, he didn t act as it he was out to pick your pocket. He had a personal story he always shared in his broad­casts, and that gave him a patina of sincerity. He had been poor. He didn't have a high school diploma. He lived in a one-bedroom apartment. He was going nowhere fast. And then...and then, he learned the key to success—the way to make money fast and easy, which he was now passing on to his viewers. Lapre wasn't selling just a scheme. As one of his attorneys later put it, "Don was selling opportunity." He was selling the American dream in no small measure because Lapre, the very personification of 1990s exuber­ance, seemed to be living the American dream himself.

Don Lapre's rise began, as Lapre would enunciate it in his infomercials, in "a ONE [pause] BEDROOM [pause] APARTMENT" situated in a large bi-level, red-tile-roofed, tan stucco complex called Woodstone in Phoenix, just off Interstate 17 on Cactus Road, not far from where Lapre had grown up. At the time he moved in, Lapre was a house-painter, like his father, and he was doing well enough, but his dreams always exceeded his paycheck. He would spend his nights at his desk scribbling ideas on a yellow legal pad—ideas he hoped would make him rich. At 23 he got a sudden inspiration that young singles had a difficult time meeting one another outside the bar scene. His remedy was what he called the 1828 Club, named after the age range of his prospective clients. The way Lapre imagined it, he would advertise and host a huge party with food and kegs of beer at a Phoenix park where singles could mingle for a nominal admission fee.

Like many of Lapre's ideas, it wasn't exactly bad. But when the big day of the party arrived, almost no one showed up. Lapre lost everything. Ever resilient, he began a credit-repair service that was quickly closed by the Ari­zona attorney general for overpromising customers. Still

undeterred, he found another opportunity the same way his customers would: by watching an infomercial late one night on his old black-and-white TV with tinfoil crimped around the antennas. The ad extolled the money one could make by searching for uncollected Federal Housing Administration insurance refunds. Lapre discovered there was nothing in the kit he couldn't produce himself, which is exactly what he did. It cost him $4 to print. He sold it for $75. He called it MIP, Mortgage Insurance Premium, and it constituted Lapre's crossover moment—the realization that he could make more money by telling other people how to make money than by doing what he was telling them to do. With MIP, he crossed another line too—the fateful line to television. He had come to the attention of an info­mercial entrepreneur named Bobby Singer, who pitched how to win at blackjack. As a child, Lapre had dreamed

of being an entertainer, and Singer, recogniz­ing Lapre's sales talent, hired him to pitch one of Singer's own schemes in exchange for a royalty on the kits sold. When Lapre feared that Singer was shortchanging him, he decided to produce his own infomercial.

All this time Lapre had continued painting houses, until another en­trepreneur introduced him to 900 lines. People would call the numbers, pay a fee to chat or to

get a psychic reading, and a bureau in Las Vegas, which set up the lines and provided the folks to answer them, would give the owner a kickback. In 1989 Lapre bought a chat line for lonely people who just wanted someone to talk to, then advertised it in "tiny classified ads" in newspapers across the country. (One line could have hundreds of ex­tensions.) This time he hit pay dirt. "Debbie, oh my God!" he told his sister, sounding like one of his own testimoni­als. "I'm making $1,800 in my sleep." But that was only a drop in the bucket. In no time his ads drove thousands of callers to his lines. When he later said he was making $50,000 a week from his one-bedroom apartment, he actu­ally was making $50,000 from his one-bedroom apartment. His sister Debbie says that some weeks he made as much as $90,000. And he was barely 25 years old.

But it was never really about the money. It was about the thrill, Debbie says, the challenge of seeing how many more things you could do, how much further you could extend your vision. Since he was making so much money with his own 900 numbers, he decided to sell 900 numbers to other people like him, or rather, since it cost $1,800 to buy a line, he would sell extensions to them at the cut-rate price of $99 and take a percentage of each call. The idea was that the customers could advertise their extensions in "tiny classified ads" just as Lapre had. Then he decided he would sell them the "tiny classified ads" himself and charge them $79 for the service. Then he began selling them a full package that told them how they could do exactly what he had done: buy lines and advertise. That was The Money Making Show With Don Lapre, which began airing its infomercials early in 1992.

And that was what made Don Lapre a star.

But it wasn't what made Don Lapre successful. What made him successful was that he was a true believer in a TV world of cynical manipulators. He would (continued on page 139)

SALESMAN

(continued from page 116) be accused of preying on poor innocents who didn't know any better, on losers and dreamers, on aimless young insomniacs hoping for a first score and on retirees hoping for a last one, on recent immigrants who thought America would reward them and on working-class families who thought their ship had finally come in. Eventu­ally his life would come apart for seeming to have scammed them. But his biggest moneymaking secret was that he could sell to them because he was one of them. His belief was their belief, his faith their faith. You can talk to the people who knew Don well, and you will hear the same thing re­peatedly. He thought he was providing his customers a service by teaching them what he had discovered himself. As one longtime employee put it, "His passion was for success."

This was practically part of Don Lapre's DNA. The Lapres—the name is French Canadian—had moved from Massachu­setts to Phoenix when Don was seven. As Don's older brother Michael remembers it, theirs was a poverty-stricken childhood, especially after their father suffered a back injury and couldn't work for two years and their mother had to take a job as a cashier at Safeway. On weekends Mrs. Lapre would drive the children in her white sta­tion wagon to the Goodwill bin outside the supermarket, where Michael would lower Don through the opening and Don would pull out the most promising articles for his mother to scrutinize and then toss away or keep to sell at a swap meet.

Still, of all the children, Don seemed unaffected by the strife. He was always upbeat—"always in a good mood," his sis­ter Debbie says. In childhood, as in later life, he would sit for hours with pens and a pad of paper, concocting schemes that would make him rich. By the time he was in the third or fourth grade he was buy­ing value packs of Bubble Yum and selling individual pieces to his classmates for a profit. They called him Candy Boy.

The Lapres knew there wasn't enough money for college, and Don left high school one half-credit short of gradua­tion. At 16 he had gone to work for the department store chain Gemco, which now offered him a managerial position in Bakersfield, California. He took it, but Don was too ambitious for Gemco, and he soon returned to Phoenix, found his one-bedroom apartment, began house painting and schemed furiously at night on his yel­low pads, impatient to score. He was even impatient romantically. It was at this time that Lapre, then 24, met Sally Redondo, a darkly complected, petite, pretty 20-year-old student, one night in Tempe at the dance club Devil House, named after the Arizona State University Sun Devils. Lapre asked her for a dance, and they exchanged numbers. Then he called persistently.

A little over a week after they met, he invited her to a friend's wedding and, af­ter the ceremony, blurted, "We should get married." Lapre wasn't drunk. He never drank alcohol or took drugs. It was just

his impulsiveness. He and Sally spent the rest of the evening hunting for a wed­ding chapel, to no avail. They resolved to meet the next day and drive to Las Vegas, where they were wed at the Silver Bell Wedding Chapel. "There was something about him that intrigued me," Sally says now, but she was so terrified about how her mother would react to the sudden marriage that she had Don break the news over the phone.

He took his bride back to the one-bedroom apartment at Woodstone, where he promptly announced he was $35,000 in debt thanks to the 1828 Club and that he would have to declare personal bankruptcy. Sally was astonished, especially when Don told her to shove their unpaid bills in a drawer. Don didn't seem fazed by it. "He was so confident in his ability to make money, and he believed in these ideas so much," Sally recalls, "that there was no way to fail."

Roaring optimism was Lapre's natural state. He hated when Sally's enthusiasm didn't match his, and Sally once insisted on marriage counseling to get him to under­stand that she didn't have to be as ebullient as he was all the time. But Lapre told the counselor that he couldn't fathom mood swings. "I'm always happy," he said. The zeal viewers saw on the infomercials was no act. "Exactly the way he was on TV was how he would be," Sally says. "He was al­ways on a high."

The manifestation of Don Lapre's em­pire of happiness and of his enormous success was his headquarters at 3255 El-wood Street, a modern building sheathed in reflective glass in southeast Phoenix in a quiet grove of office parks where he had moved in November 1993, when The Money Making Show was soaring. One mea­sured Suite 100, his headquarters, not in square footage but in acreage. The sell­ing floor was a bright, cavernous expanse of white linoleum with high ceilings and endless windows. There were no cubicles, just rows of small desks, and even Lapre's office, right off the floor, had glass parti­tions so people could see him at all times, usually pacing, seldom in repose. The walls were decorated with murals of tropi­cal scenes because the beach was Lapre's idea of nirvana, and he placed trays of co­conut suntan lotion around the room to add a tropical scent. He named his parent company Tropical Beaches, though it had no connection to a beach.

Within this faux tropical cavern hous­ing his 400 employees were amenities: everything from free catered lunches and a Cinnabon wagon to a basketball half-court outside his office to incentives that included down payments on a home. The atmosphere was loose, like Don; employees could take breaks whenever they chose. Lapre himself wore a "uniform" of cargo shorts, running shoes, a Ralph Lauren polo shirt and a yellow baseball hat turned backward. At the Monday morning pep talks he held on the sales floor to motivate his staff, he would say, "I want everybody to want to come to work." They would often explode in cheers.

And then there was the money. The telemarketers who made the sales calls often earned between $100,000 and $200,000 a year. "The commission split for them was way in excess of practical," says Michael Lapre, a successful insur­ance broker who occasionally advised his brother on business. But then, Michael also observes, "What he was selling was making a lot of money.... Get everybody believing in the same hype."

Yet people who knew him insist it wasn't just business that caused Lapre to overpay his employees. He was naturally generous, which may have been the real propulsion behind his entire enterprise. Lapre liked to give people things, liked to see them happy, liked to be the benefactor. One longtime employee calls him "the most generous person I've ever known in my life." He bought his parents and his in-laws homes and gave Sally's sister a down payment for one. He would take prized employees and their families with him, at his expense, on trips to Honolulu or to a ski resort. For one employee's father who had suffered a heart attack, he secured a top-rated cardiologist and paid for an experimental treatment.

In doing so, he was always mindful that if he was luckier than most, he was never­theless no different from most. He had a Christmas Eve ritual, a kind of reversal of his own childhood ritual at the Good­will bins, in which he took his two young daughters to an ATM, withdrew a large amount of money, drove around town looking for unfortunates who needed aid and then had his girls give them the cash. In a line that would later carry a haunting irony, he would tell them, "Don't believe because we are not hurting that we are bet­ter than they are."

He wasn't hurting then. He drew a sal­ary of roughly $500,000 a year, but he eschewed extravagance. He lived in a handsome but not ostentatious house in the Ahwatukee section of Phoenix. Though he bought a red Mercedes SL500 convertible, he gave it away to an investment partner when the partner admired it. Sally briefly had a Range Rover, which was financed, then gave it up too. He trimmed his own hair over the sink. Dressing up meant clothes from the Gap. His only indulgences besides his largesse were the vacations on which he frequently took his extended family.

Extravagant or not, Lapre was the "King of Infomercials." He had added a National Lifetime Reminder Service that, for $390, provided customers with 100 kits they could then sell for $39 apiece, allowing those who bought them to keep track of friends' and relatives' birthdays and other special anniversaries and have gift baskets automatically sent to them. He teamed up with television personality Alan Thicke for a new infomercial hawking the Incredible Products Store, which was a store to be set up in malls across the country where any­one with an incredible product could buy a screen on which Lapre would show ads he produced for the products. Money was pouring in—$80,000 a day, Lapre claimed, on the National Lifetime Reminder Ser­vice alone. He was writing checks for up to $1 million a week for media buys for

his infomercials, which were playing more than 300 times a week on stations across the country. And "one-bedroom apart­ment" and "tiny classified ads" had become national catchphrases.

But as the decade drew to a close there were already signs of trouble in the beach para­dise. The entire operation was predicated on aggressive telemarketers who would get lists of "leads," people who had called in to order the moneymaking kits. The telemar­keters would then make follow-up calls to try to sell them additional services—what telemarketers call "reloading." Would you like to buy more lines, more ads, even more secrets? The full treatment could cost as much as $5,000. Lapre was cautious that his telemarketers not overpromise. He had his attorneys vet a script for the market­ers to read that suggested customers could make money without coming right out and telling them they would, and he recorded calls to make sure his telemarketers stuck to the script. Lapre was adamant that his intention in having lawyers scrutinize the pitch wasn't to find ways to skirt the law; his intention was to operate fully within it. Still, some telemarketers had twinges of conscience. "Anyone who is buying this idea either does not have the highest men­tal capacity of a regular person," says Elliot

Storch, who worked for Lapre in the 1990s, "or they're desperate and they really want something, so of course they're going to be­lieve what they want to hear, and they want to hear that they can make it. In either situation, you're taking advantage of some­body." Storch wouldn't sell the most ex­pensive packages, though he didn't believe Lapre was a con artist. On the contrary, he thought Lapre had actually conned himself into believing his own pitch that anyone could make money if he worked at it.

That self-delusion turned out to be a problem. Lapre was intoxicated by his own irrational exuberance. As Sally puts it, he had "ADD with his business plans. Something would work, and it would be successful and it would be good and it should have just stayed that way. But he'd tweak it, he'd tweak it, he'd tweak it." Sometimes he would tweak it into oblivion. The Incredible Products Store bombed. Then he switched out his origi­nal Money Making Show infomercial for a new infomercial promoting websites that promised three new ways to make money. That bombed too.

And there was worse to come—much worse. After deciding to take his family on a vacation to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, he suddenly hatched a new idea: to build a nine-acre resort complex of 18 villas and 56 condominiums that he called La

Playa Estates. He thought of it as a place where his staff could vacation.

Michael Lapre had warned Don not to invest in Mexican real estate. "And every­thing I said would go wrong did," Michael says. The plan was to fast-track the con­struction, so Don pulled money—$4 mil­lion in total—out of the company to finance it on the assumption that it would soon be up and running and generating income. It wasn't, and it didn't. The complex was too far from Puerto Vallarta to attract buyers, and the construction dragged on and went over budget. When the time came for Lapre to pay his income taxes on the money he had drawn from the company, he had no proceeds. Meanwhile, he had fallen weeks behind on his media buys, which were the lifeblood of his operation.

By June 1999, Storch noticed that Lapre's pep talks had lost some of their confidence and that Lapre was less visible behind the glass partitions. As the pressure mounted, Tempa Brown, who had worked as an executive for Lapre since he was headquartered in his one-bedroom apart­ment, says that he had "sort of a break­down. He sort of checked out a little bit," leaving decisions to others and no longer coming to the office. Things began reeling. One day Brown arrived at work to find that the lights had been turned off and was told that they weren't selling that day. As anxi­ety rippled across the selling floor, Lapre was privately in a panic, but he kept reas­suring his employees that whatever rumors they were hearing were untrue.

This was Lapre duping himself, trying to talk his way into averting disaster as he had talked his way into a fortune. On Mon­day, June 28, 1999, at 5:05 p.m., he took to the selling floor to announce that the next morning he was going to launch a new company. Instead, on Tuesday he glumly announced he was declaring bankruptcy and that the company would close its doors temporarily. As he made the announce­ment, he began to weep, apologizing to the employees and telling them that if he could shoot himself, he would. He said he had let them down. No one had ever seen him like this. For himself, he had lost the entire $4 million he'd invested in La Playa Estates and, as Sally puts it, didn't even get a time share. Whatever he had made from his company was gone too, since he had rein­vested most of it and the rest went to taxes.

Two weeks later the company reopened under the command of a bankruptcy trustee named Vern Schweigert—a beefy, balding, bespectacled business veteran who, according to one employee, resented Lapre for his youth and his fortune. Lapre, eager to get his company out of bankruptcy, had gotten Carleton Sheets, the real estate infomercial giant, to agree to buy the company and pay off its creditors. As Sandy Cercone, one of Lapre's clos­est associates, remembers it, Schweigert nixed the deal, insinuating that Sheets's outfit could be Mafia (for which there was absolutely no basis); Lapre groused that Schweigert just didn't want to give up his $10,000-a-week salary. At two a.m. one day, Lapre, utterly frustrated, sent Schweigert an e-mail that he was resigning. Schweigert

readily accepted. Later Schweigert sold the company to a cagey entrepreneur named Joseph Deihl, who continued to run Lapre's infomercials. Deihl also sold clearly fraudulent products, according to the FDA, including a spray that pur­ported to protect the thyroid gland in case of nuclear attack. Lapre was so incensed when he was told that Deihl was scamming customers that he rebuked Deihl on his website and disassociated himself from the company he had started.

So ended Don Lapre's heyday.

"If you want to know the truth, my brother died back then," says his sister Debbie. "He

was never the same after that." But as downcast as he was, Lapre refused to put away his yel­low pad. "He was still an idea guy," recalls Brown. "He was going to light the world on fire. He always had an­other idea he want­ed to try." Working out of his home, he began day-trading stocks during the Nasdaq boom and then got the idea of showing people how they could night trade. As he described it to the Phoenix New Times, night-trading was "for people who work all day and don't have time during the normal business hours" to play the market. But Lapre wasn't nimble enough to beat the market. "If it's down, he'd double down or tri­ple down on things, and it didn't work out," says his broth­er Michael of Don's strategy. "And he

went on to the next thing and the next thing and the next thing."

The next thing was farming himself out to other infomercial entrepreneurs. Set up in his garage, he worked for Dean Graziosi, who ran a real estate tutorial called "Think a Little Different" about cashing in on fore­closures. Then he partnered with another get-rich-quick guru, Russ Dalbey, who spe­cialized in selling kits on how to make com­missions on banknotes with an infomercial titled Winning in the Cash Flow Business. The problem was that Lapre wasn't accustomed to sharing power. He and Dalbey eventu­ally had a falling-out, which led to Dalbey buying Lapre's share of the business.

But if Lapre now had a grubstake for a new venture, his belief in the dream had been shaken, and having had that belief

shaken, he lost his fire—the fire that had made him Don Lapre. He kept moping that he had let everyone down, that his staff had lost their jobs because of him, and he was clearly despondent that he couldn't do what he had always done, what had made him happiest, which was support his extended family and his friends. The man who had always been happy, the man who couldn't understand why everyone else wasn't happy like him, the man who was the very personifica­tion of the American dream was suddenly enveloped in gloom and pessimism. "We were really concerned about him," says his sister Michelle, "because I had never seen him that despondent before."

As it turned out, they had reason to be concerned. One night after the bankruptcy he called Debbie from his cell phone. He was standing on the railroad tracks waiting for the train to mow him down, and Debbie frantically had to talk him out of it. Afterward, he was hospital­ized for depression, and it was then that a doctor made a startling diagnosis: He believed that Lapre was bipolar. (Lapre himself denied it.) The wild enthusiasm that had been his trademark may not have been so much an unshakable devotion to American opportunity as it was a neurosis stemming from genetic demons. The fam­ily had a long history of mental illness.

But once Lapre was released from the hospital, Michelle says, he "snapped back quickly," as he always had after adversity,

and began looking for another idea. Ac­cording to Sally, it was Tylene Megley who approached Lapre in the summer of 2002 with a new business venture. Meg­ley, an attractive, youthful 33-year-old fit­ness enthusiast with long brown hair and generous cleavage, had some credibility, having worked with local athletes includ­ing Phoenix Suns star Steve Nash. She had teamed with Doug Grant, a health entre­preneur who claimed to be a "nutritionist by degree"—the degree was granted by a correspondence school—and who had fab­ricated a new vitamin of "natural" ingredi­ents only. Megley took the vitamin to Lapre knowing he was something of a health nut; he wouldn't even take a Tylenol. Lapre was

smitten with the vitamin—so smit­ten that in January 2003 he formed GVW, "The Great­est Vitamin in the World," and intro­duced an infomer-cial that declared, "Nothing like this has ever been seen before in the his­tory of the world!" For Lapre this wasn't just hokum. Sally said he was "passionate" about these vitamins, sending bottles of them to his sib­lings with enco­miums about all the ills they would cure and taking them himself re­ligiously, even though the dosage ran to eight large tablets a day. But as he had with his earlier businesses, Lapre didn't just sell the vitamins, which were priced at $39.95 a bottle. He sold the op­portunity to sell the vitamins. The idea was that one could become an

independent advertiser, or IA, by buying the vitamins from Lapre. The IA would then set up websites—which could also be provided by Lapre for a fee—on which the IA would advertise the vitamins. And Lapre gave the IA an inducement to buy. For every 20 customers the IA got, Lapre promised him a $1,000 check. On the face of it, it sounded like a good deal for the IAs, perhaps too good. Lapre hooked hun­dreds of thousands of them, and it seemed as if he was back in business after the set­backs, though not without one major con­cession: Megley, in a low-cut top, was the primary spokesperson for GVW because, as Don told Sally when she protested that buxom women cheapened the product, you need a "channel stopper." Lapre real­ized he was no longer that stopper.

Still, Lapre had always been better at selling than at conducting actual business. His brother Michael was amazed when Don would ask how the company could be generating such huge revenue and yet making such meager profits. Michael tried to explain to him that the math didn't work: You couldn't have IAs sell vitamins to 20 customers at $39.95 a bottle and then give them a $1,000 premium. Even Debbie, who was very close to Don, told him that he had to state specifically that it was 20 customers, not 20 bottles, since many customers would buy more than one bottle, and that he should give IAs the option of continuing to sell on their own or handing their customer list to Lapre and cashing out. Don wouldn't listen. He even added diet and arthritis remedies. He felt it was just a matter of time.

But time wasn't kind. As Lapre fell be­hind on his $1,000 premiums and on re­funds to dissatisfied customers, IAs began lodging complaints—more than 473 filed with the Phoenix Better Business Bureau between 2004 and 2007. Meanwhile, in 2005 the FDA filed its own warning against GVW, asking Lapre to desist from making extravagant claims in his info-mercial about the diseases the pill could treat, including cancer. According to crit-

ics, the vitamin was no different from those one could buy in any drugstore. As if that weren't bad enough, Doug Grant, who made the vitamins, was arrested for killing his wife by drugging her and put­ting her in a bathtub to drown. Lapre was shocked. "Of all the people in the world I get to create my vitamin," he told Debbie, "it has to be someone accused of murder­ing his wife."

And bad as it was, even that wasn't the worst of it. Postal inspectors went under­cover both as prospective IAs and as pro­spective telemarketers and concluded that GVW was defrauding its customers by lur­ing them into adding services such as ads and websites and the promise of 12,000 targeted potential buyers, which they said were just 12,000 "junk" hits from pop-up ads. In any case, no one was buying the vitamins Lapre loved.

In fact, Lapre didn't have the money to pay the premiums or the refunds in large part because he kept reinvesting what he collected into the company in hopes of re­viving it. He told Sally that after Grant's indictment, he should have seen the writ­ing on the wall and declared bankruptcy again, but instead he reluctantly found a buyer in Los Angeles for the company who promised to make good on every-

thing he owed. It was his concession that it was finally over—the dream dead and buried once and for all.

Lapre wasn't prepared for what happened next. Early on the morning of August 8, 2007, Sally was getting her daughters ready for school when she heard a pound­ing at the door. She opened it to find a SWAT team and a crew of FBI agents with guns drawn—about half a dozen men in all—yelling at the top of their lungs, "Don Lapre! Don Lapre! Are you in this house?" Lapre, in fact, was still upstairs in bed in his pajamas, and when he heard the commo­tion, he thought the police might be doing a house-to-house search for a murderer. He pulled on his pants and scrambled down the stairs to find the group in his house and asked why they were there. "You know why," snapped one agent dis-missively. "You know what kind of busi­ness you were running." Another agent asked to see his boat, as if he owned a yacht, which of course he didn't. At the same time agents were raiding his office, a storage facility, even his cars.

Lapre was bewildered. He assumed there was some misunderstanding, since he had always had those attorneys making

certain he was operating within the law. He admitted he may have made mistakes, but he had never intended to swindle anyone. He believed that those who didn't make money from his operation were people who didn't work hard enough at it. And he was going to pay back everyone anyway once he sold the company. But the raid scared off the buyer.

The old Lapre might have gotten up from the mat, shaken off the dust and be­gun anew. The Lapre who had been bat­tered by bankruptcy spiraled into depres­sion. There were days when he couldn't get out of bed. Obviously he couldn't find work—what work was there for a TV pitch­man under investigation?—and there was no rainy-day fund, since Lapre never had any investments. Of the $2.5 million he had made from GVW over its four years, almost all of it had gone right back into the company, and what little remained he used for legal bills. There was nothing left. He and Sally were forced to hold yard sales to raise money. Their cars were repossessed, and 18 months after the raid, they lost their home to foreclosure. Sally had to talk her way into a waitressing job at a restaurant.

Meanwhile, Lapre tried to pacify the federal prosecutors, hoping to stave off an indictment, even if he wasn't sure what he would be indicted for. He prepared big three-ring binders with copies of checks he had paid out and said that if he could just show the prosecutors the notebook and explain his business to them, they would realize they had made a mistake. Talked out of doing that, he hired two highly regarded criminal attorneys to meet with the federal prosecutors, and he asked Wayne Little, a former prosecutor with the Los Angeles District Attorney's Office and a business law expert, to comb his records for any hints of criminal ac­tivity. All three attorneys concluded that there was no case against him—that while he may have been delinquent in making payments, he had certainly had no inten­tion to defraud anyone and that he was selling a viable product and system. The prosecutors countered, not altogether implausibly, that he should have known there wasn't a big enough vitamin market for so many sellers. Disheartened, Lapre told everyone that they were going to prosecute him no matter what he did.

But he still had his yellow pads, and he made a few feeble attempts to restart his career, opening a website aptly titled imgoingbananas.com on which he pitched his personal consulting services to busi­nesses in return for three percent of the company's profits. It was an absurd offer, and the webmercials, with Lapre sitting in his study photographed in close-up by his webcam, are a sad contrast to the peppy old infomercials. The energy has evapo­rated and so has the exuberance. He is subdued. He is begging. "It was like a thor­oughbred who has been broken," observes his old telemarketer Elliot Storch.

He stopped seeing his extended family. He would tell people, "I'm such a loser. I'm worthless. I feel like nothing." When friends visited, he would remain upstairs. And there was something else: He had be-

gun disappearing, leaving home without telling Sally, sometimes going missing for days at a stretch. One time she used his debit card to trace him to a hotel where he had taken pills—the man who had previ­ously taken nothing but vitamins—and had a friend fetch him. Another time she called the police because that was the only way she could find him. A third time she filed a missing-person report. During these absences, Sally in desperation would sometimes ask friends to text him. "It's all good," he would text back.

Of course it wasn't. As the investigation dragged into its fourth year with still no indictment, and with Lapre unemployed, broke and living on handouts from friends and family, the infomercial world came to his rescue one last time. Jim Piccolo had run a real estate investment school called Nou-veau Riche. In December 2010 he launched a new company called BizziBiz that would franchise digital marketing to local busi­nesses, and he hired Lapre as a consultant. "That was the first time I saw a little bit of happiness in him," says his sister Deb­bie. It even got him to thinking about new schemes of his own, which he would pitch to his siblings as he had in the old days. They didn't have the heart to discourage him.

It was a time of reevaluation. Sally used to lament that Don was always at the of­fice, but she says she came to realize "that was what made him happy." Lapre him­self had come to the opposite conclusion. His quest for the dream had come at the expense of the things that really mat­tered. He told his young nephew, "When you are in your first one-bedroom apart­ment and you're having the time of your life, just stay there."

All along Lapre had said the feds were never going to let him rest, and he was right. On June 8, 2011, as the statute of limitations was about to expire, he was in­dicted on charges of defrauding 226,794 people out of $51.8 million—the total number of GVW independent advertis­ers and the total amount of money GVW took in. In other words, the prosecutors were saying he had defrauded everyone. The government claimed that only 5,000 IAs ever received any funds, $6.3 million in all. Even so, the fraud amounted to roughly $200 per person—not exactly a MadofF-size scandal. Lapre had no money for an attorney, so the court appointed one, but he insisted he didn't want to go to trial because, he said, "People aren't going to believe us." He had stopped taking the medication prescribed for his depression, and the week before the indictment was handed down he told Debbie he had been thinking of some "really, really bad things." By the time of a scheduled court appear­ance on June 22, he was utterly hopeless. He left that morning for the Sandra Day O'Connor U.S. Courthouse in downtown Phoenix, dropping off his younger daugh­ter at school on the way. But he never ar­rived, and the judge issued a bench war­rant for his arrest. By the next evening the federal marshals had gotten a tip that he

was holed up at the Lifetime Fitness cen­ter in Tempe. Haifa dozen cars from the U.S. Marshals Service staked out the cen­ter from the parking lot. Meanwhile, Lapre had phoned both Sally and Debbie from his cell. Debbie arrived first and found her brother staggering outside, dressed in his usual outfit: long tan shorts, a yellow Ralph Lauren polo shirt and his yellow baseball cap turned backward. And she saw five spreading circles of blood on his torso and leg, as if he had been shot. She hustled him into her car just as his court-appointed at­torney and her private investigator pulled up, the first of whom had been notified by Sally. When the attorney saw Lapre in the back of the car she told Debbie to drive to the hospital. As Lapre sank into the back­seat, he mumbled, "I don't want to die."

As it was later pieced together, Lapre had headed for Lifetime Fitness after the school drop-off to kill himself. He had ac­quired a hunting knife in the same mall. Then he had gone into a shower stall in a family room at the health club (Debbie said his hands were "white and pruney" from the water) and stabbed himself five times in the stomach and groin—one wound so severe it had practically severed his femo­ral artery, which apparently was his intent, though in phoning Sally and Debbie he had obviously had second thoughts. At 7:30 p.m., on Warner Road, about half a mile from Lifetime Fitness and just before the entrance ramp to I-10, where Debbie was heading to get to the hospital, the mar­shals swarmed the car and removed Lapre.

He underwent surgery and spent the next three weeks convalescing. His arraign­ment took place in his hospital room. He was then transferred to a federal holding facility in Florence, Arizona. Lapre played cards, met with a psychologist weekly and phoned his family daily—occasionally five to 10 times a day—but he absolutely for­bade them to visit him there. He said it would "crush" him.

He did visit with Pat Gitre—his court-appointed attorney—or her investiga­tor six or seven times during his incar­ceration, and he kept vacillating over whether to plead guilty to something he still insisted he didn't do or go to trial and risk getting 20 years in prison. Gitre was tough, a single woman who drove a Dodge pickup, wore five-inch heels in the courtroom to tower over her oppos­ing counsel and had successfully defended a Hells Angel accused of murder and a Jamaican drug dealer accused of murder­ing another drug dealer. She had also de­fended many white-collar criminals, and she wasn't given to painting rosy pictures. But she fervently believed that Lapre was innocent. Whether or not he was naive in his business operations, she thought he was different from her other clients. "He had no greed," she says. "He was looking to make money, but he wanted to share that with everybody else. We don't have a guy who had 15 vehicles and 20 Rolexes. That is what is so unique about this case." Moreover, the government admitted that Lapre plowed 95 percent of the money

right back into the company to pay his IAs and creditors, which, Gitre asserts, isn't the modus operandi of a crook.

Lapre, however, had decided what he wanted to do. While he was at Florence, his brother Michael and his sister Debbie would take turns depositing money into his prison account for coffee, candy, phone calls and incidentals. (Generous as always, he would share his money with his fellow inmates.) But at one point he began buying sweatshirts. He told Michael it was because his bed was uncomfortable and he needed them as padding. At the time Michael didn't give it much thought.

Nor did anyone at the prison. To his prison psychologist Lapre talked about his children and about going to trial. What he never talked about, according to U.S. Marshal David Gonzales, was taking his life. Gonzales says this was his last and best sales job. But Lapre's family had their sus­picions. He was calling them now often in tears. And he had sent Sally a note ex­pressing his hopes for the rest of his family and his apologies to her—a note that Sally saw as his valedictory. It was the morn­ing of October 2, just two days before his next scheduled court appearance, when Sally, on her way to pick up breakfast bur-ritos for her children, got a call on her cell phone. It was a prison officer: Don had been found dead in his cell. Sometime after the last bed check, he had swathed himself in his sweatshirts and slit his throat with the blade from a Bic disposable razor. The sweatshirts absorbed the blood so he wouldn't be discovered and saved before he expired. He was 47 years old.

Most of the public had long forgotten Don Lapre, but there was a reaction none­theless. On the internet, many cheered his death. "Rot in Hell, Don Lapre," read one comment. "Another slithering snake con artist bites the dust," read a second. And yet there were others who defended him and mourned his passing, many of them former employees or customers. One of them, a Phoenix printer named David Salinas who had once bought a Lapre kit and was inspired by it, had created a website during Lapre's imprisonment, freedonlapre.com, which now became an online eulogy. Tens of thousands visited the site. Similarly, hundreds showed up to Lapre's funeral. The procession from the church to the grave site, which would ordi­narily have taken 10 minutes, took 45.

But whether he was being vilified or deified, and whether in the end he was a shrewd scammer or a naif, Don Lapre was a quintessential American entrepreneur. His life had reflected his faith in the American gospel of success, for which he was an evan­gelist who seemed genuinely convinced that anyone in this country could make a fortune as he had. And his death reflected the doubts that shaded this proposition— that in America success always belonged to the rich and powerful and that aggres­sive upstarts like him would ultimately be punished. And when he died, it wasn't for guilt or release. It was for the failure of the dream he had once so devoutly held.

WHAT MADE HIM SUCCESSFUL WAS THAT HE WAS A TRUE BELIEVER IN A TV WORLD OF CYNICAL MANIPULATORS.