My Father’s Dream: Investigating a pyramid scheme that bankrupted my father

Ebook

A best-selling Kindle Single about a tantalizing offer to anyone fallen on hard times: Here’s a business that promises to make you $150,000, in your spare time, in just a couple of years. All it costs to get started is $250—and a dream. A salesman from the network marketing company Amway made this pitch to my father in the early 1980s and touched off the darkest chapter in my family’s past. Two decades later, armed with a reporter’s notebook, I investigated the grim reality behind a company that promises deliverance in the service of selling soap.

Here’s an excerpt:

They’ve flocked from all over Long Island and New York – fresh-faced salespeople, most of them under 30 – decked in dark suits and skirts, swilling energy drinks to quench the weeknight fatigue, everyone bright-eyed and super-enthused, slapping backs, shaking hands, making contacts, because these people are excited, they’re fired up and they’re aggressively looking to get ahead. On this cold night in October 2004, they’ve packed themselves into a windowless conference room at the Long Island Marriott Hotel, 150 eager men and women, some seated in rows of metal chairs and others – the latecomers – leaning against folding tables in the back. It’s a throng of lipstick and hair gel, loafers and panty hose, and they’re heating the air with talk.

A hush settles quickly over the room when 72-year-old Jean Valerio steps to the front with her microphone. She is – in the words of several people I just met – “a totally awesome individual.” Valerio stands at the summit of this group of salespeople. She came tonight to share wisdom, to entice newcomers and motivate the faithful. The faith in question is this group’s belief in the transformative power of network marketing. Everyone in the room has already signed on as a seller with a company called Amway or they’ve been invited to do so. The company promises its sales force big money for selling consumer products like soap, make-up and vitamins and, most importantly, for recruiting an army of others to do the same.

“I’m going to talk about a business where you can make $150,000, in your spare time, over the next two to five years,” Valerio will say later in the presentation. “And it’s
going to cost you about 250 bucks.”

After paying to register with Amway, every salesperson receives a small cut of all the merchandise they sell and a slight percentage refund on goods they buy themselves. Salespeople also receive a bonus on all the selling done by those whom they sponsor in the organization. The serious money rolls in, so the pitch goes, when your recruits sponsor salespeople who, in turn, recruit even more. These branching, root-like networks of sponsorship, called downlines, flourish through personal connections, friendships and ties of blood. They’re supposed to enrich everyone involved. I came here looking for roots of my own. Twenty-eight years earlier, my father signed on as an Amway salesman and worked the business hard. In the early 1980’s he was a talented young writer who was good at just about everything he’d ever tried, from football to carpentry to poetry. He was handsome, charismatic and, in the words of his Amway sponsor, Dad was “a runner” – someone with a knack for selling and the smarts to make it pay. And yet my father failed catastrophically in the business. He went bankrupt and had an absolute personal meltdown. When asked about “our Amway days,” as he calls them, he speaks distantly of a past self whom he regards with shame, resignation and a little bit of awe.

I sought out the Amway people in Long Island to understand how the company exerted such a powerful pull on my father. How could something like this have drawn him in? How could anyone so talented give up writing to sell soap? I have come here to see if that pull might have any power for myself. And I have come, ultimately, to figure out what could have gone so terribly wrong in my father’s network marketing career when the promises made to him, and to me, were so fantastic.

In her speech tonight, Valerio will map out the basic structure of the Amway business for the rookies and offer recruiting tips to veterans. But most of all, she will exhibit herself as living, jeweled proof that Amway really works. “If you want to know what the American dream looks like,” she tells the crowd, “you are looking at her.”

America’s collective aspirations are embodied, apparently, by a fast-talking, thickset woman with a run in the right ankle of her nylons. Picture Margaret Thatcher with pink lipstick, dyed brown hair and you’ll be close. Valerio looks a decade younger than her 72 years and she speaks with the vigor of a cheerleader. During her talk, she will describe the $1.6 million house she owns in Westchester, the luxury cars she loves to drive and the trips she takes to Hawaii. Tonight she’s wearing a black-and-white checkered blazer, patent leather pumps and some serious jewelry. Both ring fingers glitter with heavy-looking stones, several more rocks sparkle on her necklace and walnut-sized golden teardrops visibly stretch her earlobes. “My life is a fantasy,” she said with a wave of her hand. “I live like most people dream.”

And before she says a word about the company that made her rich, Valerio does a little of what people in the business call “building the dream.” She chooses a nervouslooking 17-year-old in the second row and asks what kind of car he always hoped to drive.

“A brand-new Corvette,” the teen says, quietly.

“A brand new Corvette. What color?” Valerio asks, her eyebrows penciled on and arched high.

“Yellow.”

Valerio looks away, towards the rest of the room and repeats the word yellow. Her tone is pensive. Approving. She says it again — “yellow” — letting it sink in, giving everyone time to summon a crisp image of the sunny sports car in their mind. Valerio turns back to the 17-year-old and asks what he actually drives. A 1988 Oldsmobile Cutlass, as it turns out. This, too, Valerio repeats and lets steep.

“Why don’t you DRIVE a Corvette?” she finally asks him.

Well, he says, he can’t afford it. And that happens be precisely Valerio’s point. He can’t afford to fulfill his wish. Then she steps away from him and launches into a story about herself. Such physical movement will become a pattern throughout the evening. A practiced choreography will guide Valerio from spot to spot on the room’s green carpet as she moves through different sections of her talk. Valerio’s story details how she finally, at age 55, bought herself the Mercedes 560 SL convertible, white with a white hard top, that she’d wanted since age 15. She paid for it all at once, just wrote the check, she said. And after she drove away from the lot, “I cried all the way home because dreams do come true.”

This will be the sustained message for the next two hours. Varlerio represents herself as your dreams come true. She seizes on the disappointments and humiliations of lower-middle-class life – long hours away from family, crushing daily routines, un-used educations, un-fulfilled dreams – and she juxtaposes them with her own success. Most important, she casts Amway as the instrument of that success.

And for those who doubt, what can they possibly know? They’re broke. “If you came here and you were skeptical, so is everybody,” she says, less than five minutes into the pitch, “After awhile you’ll take your skepticism and put it in your pocket. And there’s a lot of room – because there’s no money in there.” For most of this crowd, Valerio is probably right. They work at rental car agencies, they manage restaurants, they’re college students living off loans. Valerio knows this, she invites them to consider their dreams and she says Amway can make them real.

As a speaker, Valerio verges on amazing. Her delivery is colloquial and fresh, as if these thoughts are only occurring to her just now. And yet even the rawest, most rousing moments in her talk exhibit a canny structure. Here she is, at the climax of the second hour:

“You come in ‘cause you WANT to, you come in ‘cause you DREAM big, you come in ‘cause there’s CARS you want to buy. YELLOW ones. And it’s fun because you know that one of these days you’re going to have enough money to walk in and BUY the car and PAY for it – CASH. I know what I’m saying is hard to handle, but it’s the God’s truth.” Valerio stresses the key words, calling us back to the beginning of the evening, calling us back to the dream, the sunny Corvette in the mind of that first 17-year-old she picked out of the crowd.

But amidst all this excitement, the only pictures emerging in my mind spring from the darkest chapter of my family’s past. For a long time, the details were murky. The $25,000 of debt. The basement full of audio tapes, most of them recordings of speeches like Valerio’s. The frozen houseplants when the gas ran out. Mom, hawking her rings. My skinny young family loading the car in 1983 for our strange, 18-month visit to Grandma and Grandpa. Here my earliest memories begin – my stuffed pig, imaginary friends, first Christmases blend indistinguishably now with photographs and the stories of severe poverty.

All of this was hard to handle but it, too, was the God’s truth.

The piece in its entirety is available on Amazon.

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