There was an enormous amount of what I believed to be truly hostile, negative information about Amway and its key distributor leaders. One web site had information about a Canadian Fraud case, for which Amway had to pay a multimillion-dollar fine. What was the real truth? The Amway Corporation was founded, owned and run by solid Christian families, wasn’t it? Some big distributors might have done things to give Amway bad press, but I was certain that they had not committed fraud. Whoever put those web sites up was way overboard.

There was quite a bit of information regarding how incredibly expensive Amway products were in comparison to similar products you could buy off the shelf at the store. The party line immediately flashed across my mind. ‘These people simply did not understand the power of concentration. Amway products were very concentrated and, as such, lasted much longer than a competitor’s products.’ They were not comparing apples to apples in this so-called price review. I was very surprised that people would take this amount of time to put together a web site like this, when they could be doing something productive with their lives.

As I did more Internet searches under the word Amway, I found more web sites with nearly identical complaints. There were quite a few references to cultism and mind-control techniques. Once again, the tapes played through my mind—This was a farce. How could a business that starts training sessions and every seminar with a prayer and a pledge of allegiance to the American flag be a cult? Those charges were ludicrous. It was a shame that so much trash was included with the few smaller points that might have had some merit.

In one sense, all the Internet information did not help me. I felt more and more uneasy. I did not know it, but I was still well over a year away from beginning to think clearly and to reason without the system-installed paradigms, through which I now filtered all information. Unconsciously, I was overcoming my own objections and mentally deleting information that did not conform to the world, as I believed it to be. I had read a great deal of negative, harmful, fact-based information but did not see it. I was operating with a psychological blind spot that I would later learn is called, by researchers, a scotoma.

Three things happened that shattered the world I knew, or believed to exist. The first was a comment that my mother-in-law made. Despite all the in-law jokes, I have the world’s best mother-in-law. Kathy’s parents are two of the most kind, gentle, honorable people I have ever known. They also have been very supportive, despite being aware of the near insane schedule we kept and the little real contact we had with them since we got in The Business. They were always there with an encouraging word. This was extremely unusual for people on the ‘outside.’

Kathy was talking with her mother one day, and her mother remarked, in all kindness, that I had changed. I had been so energetic and full of life and enthusiasm when we got started in The Business. I had told them how much time it was going to give us as a family, but now it seemed like I would see them more if I had two full-time jobs. I was constantly exhausted, and the happiness, I once had been known for, had long since left me.

Kathy repeated this to me, and I argued with her. I backed her down and overcame her mother’s objection with about five automatic, well-rehearsed, rapid-fire analogies. Working for my own business to eventually be totally free was far better than being a broke, slave [employee] for the rest of my life.

It made me angry that she would even repeat something like this. The effort to continue overcoming all objections was draining. Deep in my spirit, I knew that Kathy and her mom were right. Yet, at the same time, I knew this couldn’t be a reality, because that would require facing it and making changes. We got in this business almost for the sole purpose of creating enough income to be together full time as a family. I could not surrender what I had cherished the most. Psychologically, I had lost the resources needed for me to even entertain this thought.

The second event that brought a glimmer of truth into my life came from a talk with my son, Josh. He is a very warm, spirited, loving child. He makes friends easily and has nothing bad to say about anyone. I love this boy more than words can possibly express. He is one of the key reasons I had gotten into this business. More than anything, I wanted to have the time with him that divorce had robbed from my relationship with my own father. Being a good father was one of the most important ambitions of my life.

Josh and I were having a quiet talk one afternoon when he asked me a very pointed question. He looked me right in the eye and said, "Dad, when we go Diamond, you’ll be home some, and I’ll see you, right?" Automatically I responded, "Of course," and described briefly how I was looking forward to it. A feeling of nausea swept over me, and I left the room as quickly and inconspicuously as possible.

I nearly vomited as I realized, on a conscious level, that I had just lied to my best friend in the world. For the first time, I allowed myself to think ‘negative’ thoughts and realized that the Amway Diamonds were working eight-, ten-, twelve-, and fifteen-hour days up to seven days a week. Although Zack had told of the joys of family time when recruiting us, the truth was far different. At the leadership level, we learned that he often watched his own son’s sports victories on video, because he was too busy to be there. Molly had confided in Kathy and another Emerald that their youngest daughter had told her that she hated her for ever marrying Zack (her father). The Diamonds were gone almost constantly. One Diamond’s son had been electrocuted and killed when he and his wife were away from home. Backstage, I heard one Diamond bragging that he had only slept in his own bed eight nights that month, because he was on the road so much. So much for the famed Diamond lifestyle. Why had they lied to us? What was the point?

I was crushed by the overwhelming weight of just this small amount of truth. I was an absentee dad. Kathy had been a single mother for years. My mind was spinning in a whirlwind of seemingly irrational, tormenting thoughts. What was going on? Part of me knew that there was a real problem, but I was completely incapable of discerning the root. In my torment, it was by the grace of God that I made a decision that changed my life. I decided to ‘unplug’ from the system in ways that would be invisible to the group. I stopped listening to tapes every day and reading books from the approved list. I felt they were keeping me from being able to have clear thoughts.

I stopped showing the plan, and fortunately, our group was so large that no one knew. They all assumed I was working with other leaders or in new organizations that I had been developing. We made mandatory appearances at training sessions, open meetings, and seminars. The longer I was "off the tapes," the more problems slowly became apparent to me. I was beginning to remember conversations and situations that I had blocked out and not allowed myself to think about. I was backstage hosting a group of Diamond ladies, and they were all laughing hysterically. When I got to the table to deliver their drinks, I heard what they thought was so amusing. Several of them were sharing how many times each of them had been so completely busy that they had forgotten to pick up their own children at school. What a lifestyle!

The third incident happened within a few weeks of the first two. I got a call from Keith, a Ruby Direct in our organization. He wanted to get together for lunch to go over some things. We had worked together in the corporate world and had grown close over the near decade we had worked together in The Business. He was the only one in our entire organization who worked as hard as I worked. He was a true road warrior. As a matter of fact, he probably worked harder than I did during that last year. He still had a job and would drive on alternating nights to New York and then New Jersey. He would routinely get home between 2:00 and 4:00 a.m. and get up at 7:00 a.m. to put on his suit and go to work and do the same thing over again. I had been concerned he would actually die on the road and had asked him not to schedule these out of town trips back to back. He, like me, would do anything to buy his freedom to be with his family.

We got together at a Chinese restaurant near his office and settled in for our meal. We went over the usual ‘fired up’ jargon, and suddenly, the mask came off. He was speaking, paused quietly for a moment, and with tears in his eyes, he told me that he had driven 40,000 miles the previous year, had almost never seen his wife or daughters, and made a net income of only about $4,000. He was one of our most successful, driven distributors. People in his group thought he was making about $50,000. Hard to believe and yet, from the representations we were all given, he thought I was making over $100,000. His wife, Lisa, had written him a letter telling him that she was sick of being a single mother and would not live like that any longer. He was willing, literally, to die in the pursuit of his freedom. He looked at me, welling up with emotion, seeking the encouragement I had always provided. At that moment, he needed me to tell him it was going to be worth it.

Once again, a wave of shock and physical nausea overcame me. As always, I was careful to not reveal it. How could I possibly reveal something that I did not understand? I had worked closely with him and his wife for nearly a decade in business; yet we had never discussed his income. Why was it that we would not discuss his income in a business that had a 100% success rate? I had counseled him as we had been counseled. We went over his goal sheet and always discussed his tape and ticket sales. The income was supposed to follow these numbers. I was in a state of complete disbelief and panic, as I realized that of all the details tracked by this vital business building tool, there was no place to record or track your income. There was a reason for this! We were not supposed to focus on our income but the bigger picture of long-term success. I thought I was beginning to grasp what the training had truly been about.

My mind was reeling as another layer of truth was revealed to me. Keith told me he felt like a phony and was having a hard time telling others how great The Business was when he was making almost nothing after nearly a decade of full-time effort, in addition to his job. He didn’t know what he was doing wrong and felt like a loser. I had thought it was just me that felt like that. We were all psychologically conditioned to believe we were the problem if we were not earning what we were supposed to receive. He and I had both worked like animals for pathetic incomes. I was still grappling with what appeared to be a terrible revelation. I was sickened and needed to get out of the restaurant. I recommended he spend some quality time with his wife and girls, as it would help him re-group. He needed it desperately. I left as suddenly as I could without arousing too much suspicion.

I drove for hours in my car, without a tape playing, and began to think somewhat clearly for the first time in as long as I can remember. It was a strange sensation. If what I was now beginning to understand was true, Dexter, Zack and other Diamonds may have perpetrated perhaps the largest global business fraud in history. At the very least, it appeared that they had collaboratively extracted as much as a billion dollars in book, tape, and seminar money by well-coordinated deception. If this was true, I must face an even darker revelation. If all of it was a well-orchestrated fraud, then I had taken an enormous sum of money from the people that I loved the most. Having been an auditor, I quickly ran some numbers in my head and estimated that I had collected somewhere in the range of $3-4,000,000 or more in book, tapes, videos, and seminar money from my dearest friends and family. Yes, I even collected tool money for the "system of success" from my own father. My mind slammed shut, but there was a storm brewing within me that I would not be able to ignore.

I began a quest for the truth, mostly to prove to myself that my new beliefs were unfounded. I did not want to believe any of this. This was a good, honorable business, predicated upon servant-hood. Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford, Senator Rick Santorum, Jack Kemp, Mary Lou Retton, Jerry Falwell, Billy Zeoli, Charles Stanley, Robert Schuller, Dave Thomas, Dennis Waitely, Zig Ziglar, Oliver North and Newt Gingrich had directly or indirectly lent their credibility to this organization when they came in to speak at large seminars. There were Senators and mayors who were distributors. They were all relatively wise people. They certainly could not all have been conned or been in on the deal if they knew it was crooked. It had to be stress to make me think so irrationally. I went into my auditor’s mode. Thank God that for those nine years I had been taping training sessions, seminars, open meetings, and counseling sessions with Zack and Molly. Little did I know how valuable those tapes would really become.

I could only share my fears and conflicting thoughts with Kathy. I was still running a relatively large organization of people who were counting on me. I needed to discover the truth, whatever it might look like. I began reviewing the nearly 200 hours of tapes that I had recorded myself from training sessions. I also began to attend many open meetings to really listen and observe the representations made. I taped them for documentation too. I "knew" the whole business could not possibly be a fraud.

Amway and Amway distributors had collected over $20,000,000 for Easter seals. How could any benevolent donation that large come from a source that was beginning to sound like a bad, corrupt business? I needed to prove to myself once and for all that this was not true, so I could move on to Diamond. In retrospect, deep in my spirit, I already knew but could not comprehend the truth. To have completely rational thought at that time would have been devastating. I was unable to face the enormous burden of the blood of good, honorable people that would be on my own hands if this were all true. In case it was a fraud, I would expose it. But I realized, at an early stage, that I would be crushed like an insect without volumes of documentation. I began collecting what would grow to a cache of over 2,000 commercially recorded ‘system’ tapes and videos.

We were scheduled to do a seminar and speak to a large group of people in the Pittsburgh area. To cancel this would have brought immediate attention to us. We agonized over how we could do this with the uncertainty we now possessed. For our own sanity’s sake, we had to believe that The Business was good. Maybe we were just dealing with some corrupt people. We decided to do the seminar but to keep most of our comments generic. I would give the distributors some good motivation to apply success principles to every area of life and cover The Business in as general terms as possible. We were greeted warmly and treated like royalty while we were there. We could now identify that most all the leaders there seemed to be making false positive professions about how well they were doing and about The Business. We had no way to know without crosslining. Income was a taboo topic. They had the same robotic fake smiles on their faces that we used to flash to everyone. I knew where these canned smiles came from—they were well-conditioned, 1000-tape smiles. The deceit was being revealed, and our hope was being stripped away in layers.

We began to realize that we may be a part of something that had some horrific problems. We could not yet face or comprehend the magnitude of them. We did know, at this point, that under no circumstances would we do another seminar. We soon began to feel like we were leading sheep to slaughter. We went to an open meeting and several of our Direct Distributors spoke afterwards and regurgitated the tapes verbatim, saying how happy and excited they were and how much The Business had helped their marriages. We still could only comprehend some of the truth. Or were they all lies? We knew them too well. We knew all their situations from counseling with them.

At a major function about a year earlier, one of our leaders confided in us that he and his wife were having major problems. They were actually discussing divorce. They had to fly to Texas to see a pastor to try to save their marriage with counseling. I was deeply ashamed to admit that within an hour of being told this delicate information in complete confidence, I told Zack. I still believed that he had wisdom and could solve all problems. We were trained to do this, as it could affect his business as well as ours. We were complimented by Zack and were told we had made a wise decision by sharing with him. I was now completely sickened by the level of perversion of my own twisted loyalties. For a brief moment, we seemed ‘plugged in’ and very loyal to Zack, but I had sold my soul and a friend’s trust to do it. I was beginning to hate myself for what I had done in the name of Amway. Soon, it became far worse.

We had a large local seminar coming up in our area. We went and it was an agonizing ordeal. We could more clearly see the cesspool of lies we had actually accepted as truth for the past few years. We could barely go through the motions. We were not the speakers but were frequently used to motivate the group or do specific promotions. Our minds were still racing in an attempt to understand what had happened to our good friends, our leaders, this business, and us. Weren’t we all virtuous once? What happened next was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.

At the end of the seminar, as was customary, all the Direct couples walked on stage and stood in a semi-circle. All the distributors in the audience would clasp hands and sing "God Bless America." Kerry, the host, made a comment that hit like a bullet. He looked back at the stage full of Direct, Ruby and Emerald-level distributors and made a comment to the effect of look at all the success we have here. "No one is going to say The Business doesn’t work here." On the surface, it appeared to be true. They were a well-groomed and well-dressed, smiling group of robots. Most drove Cadillacs to the seminar.

I went down the line and did a mental inventory of what they had told us about their situations:

• One Direct had left his job under bad circumstances and was nearly $40,000 in debt since getting into Amway.
• Another had lost his job, due to his militant loyalty to his business and had since started another traditional business but was nearly $60,000 in debt.
• One leader was trying not to get divorced.
• A dedicated member had fallen asleep at the wheel and crashed his newly purchased, white Cadillac.
• Two of the moms on stage had ‘retired’—complete with a limousine picking them up at work, but they were now back at jobs.
• Another Direct had been fired for using his company’s phone, truck, and contacts for his Amway business. He is a wonderful, energetic young man, but his self-esteem was destroyed when this happened, and he has not gotten it back.
• Another Profit Sharing Direct was Keith, whose wife had just written him a letter saying she could not live like that anymore.
• One other Direct on stage was being audited by the IRS. He was just one of three leaders in our group currently being audited.
• All three ultimately had large amounts of deductions disallowed and had assessments in the $5,000 range.
• One of the Directs above had his wife threaten to leave him several times.

Understand now that the audience believed that those of us on stage were making from $25,000 to over $100,000 a year and were debt free. The truth is that many of the Direct Distributors were actually running their business at a loss. Yes, they were losing money. We were near bankruptcy as Emeralds. We had to go to a credit counseling service to have them negotiate lower monthly payments from all our creditors, so we could stay afloat. The distributors in the audience were making sacrifices of money and time away from their families, so they could live as well as those of us on stage. How ironic!

The leaders on stage were not stupid people. Our Directs included an eye surgeon, a lead homicide detective, a professional log buyer, a CPA, two insurance executives and others. They were the hardest working, most loyal, charismatic group of people I had ever known. They were our family. Sadly, most of them felt like failures, as they had been well conditioned to believe that everyone else was making out well. Most of them believed, as I had, they were losers and were not making money in this incredible business, due to a lack of faith or a poor work ethic. There was not a harder working, tougher group of people. Those men were the road warriors. They were the Marines of Amway. They were the first in and the last out of every meeting. They could live on almost no sleep. They were thankful for the wonderful opportunity and the mentoring of upline millionaires. But they were being slowly destroyed, and all the while, they were thanking and praising those who were taking their money.

After almost 45 days without listening to any tapes, I began to see more clearly. We clasped hands on stage, and Keith’s wife led us in singing "God Bless America." I looked out at the beautiful people in the audience, knowing how I had promised to help them build a better life. They smiled and swayed gently, as we all sang. Some had hope in their eyes and others had tears of joy, in knowing they had now found a way to a better life. I glanced over my shoulder at the well-dressed group of leaders, whose lives were in tatters. I now saw the truth but could not yet understand how the average net income for the Emeralds, the Rubys, the Profit Sharing and Silver Direct distributors in this organization was more accurately near $3,000 a year, and that was after all the system expenses.

I felt sick. I was totally, completely burdened with the crushing weight of all their crumbling lives. I looked into the audience and saw many good friends that Kathy and I loved. They joined this business and its related system for success, because they completely trusted us. I had tied them (and their children) firmly on the train tracks, and now I could hear the rumble of the train! They were nodding and winking at me in gratitude. (As I write this, nearly two years later, tears are streaming down my face. I still have that image in my mind.) My heart started pounding as if it were going to rip from my chest. Immense pressure moved from my chest to my head as tormenting, conflicting thoughts screamed through my mind.

I could barely breathe, as we made a quick exit from the seminar. I could not even reveal this deep shame to Kathy or that I felt like I was having a heart attack. I kept on walking, and in about fifteen minutes, my breathing and heart rate returned to normal, but there seemed to be a violent war of opposing thoughts, beliefs, and emotions raging in my head. I did not understand what was happening to me. Even if did, I could not "pass this negative" on to Kathy. We had enough stress in our own situation without her having to carry the tormenting weight that now rested on my shoulders. I needed an action plan. I needed far more information.

Perhaps if I gathered enough documentation and threatened to go public, Zack would return our business to the honorable status it once held. Incredibly, in my mind, I thought The Business, as a whole, was good and could be fixed. I had to stay active enough to appear ‘plugged in.’ The only way we could ethically justify going to seminars, training sessions, and open meetings was that I needed to stay undercover at the highest level possible to gather large amounts of documentation directly from representations made by Diamond-level distributors. It was the only way we could ultimately protect our people. 

Could any of this be fixed? What was wrong? How could this all have happened? Why could so many sharp people not discern what was happening to them? Was I just making excuses for my own inability to make a good income at the Emerald level, a pinnacle of success? As many of the tapes said, "You could make money, or you could make excuses…." Which was I doing? The old programming kicked in. Because I seemed unable to solve my own financial challenges, was I just looking for someone to blame? How could we have gone far over $100,000 in debt after getting into a business that was sold to us as having no employees, no risk, and no overhead? Was Zack a ruthless thief, marginally honest, or a wonderful servant? How could I not know the answer to this question? How could I travel the world, reach a supposedly high level of success, speak with confidence to thousands, and still feel like a loser and complete failure? I could not comprehend what was happening.

Those questions and many others began firing through my mind. I think at a subconscious level, I already knew the answers, but a dark veil once again descended upon my ability to think clearly. God had entrusted many lives to us, and the guilt and shame of what I had unconsciously done was almost more than I could bear. Our downline leaders were running around dressed well, driving Cadillacs, with perpetual 1,000-tape smiles on their faces and being unbelievably upbeat as possible. The truth is that they were a completely broken, discouraged group of people, whose financial, spiritual, and family lives were falling apart. They were unable to acknowledge reality. To the outside world, they appeared to be succeeding. They had all the trappings—nice clothing, cars, exotic travels and totally upbeat, positive demeanors. They all believed they had chosen a new, special life. They were happily deceived, mostly from pseudo-Christian principles that I had so thoroughly taught them.

As I later discovered, I was then functioning with a high level of what psychologists call cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is a method in which your mind works to resolve an internal conflict that arises, concerning what you perceive to be true when you are faced with information or situations that contradict this perception. It is unnatural for us to consciously and knowingly retain an illogical belief. Our subconscious mind has two choices when faced with information that challenges a belief set or paradigm that we embrace. If the information is not too threatening to our global beliefs, we can accept this information and use it as a foundation for a new belief.

When this does not happen, and the information strongly contradicts a core belief, cognitive dissonance comes into play, as the mind attempts to resolve the internal conflict between the new information and a contradicting belief set. It sounds more complicated than it is. We have all experienced it in one form or another. Have you ever been looking for something and could not find it for quite a long period of time, only to have someone walk right up and point it out—directly in front of you?

You may have said, "Honey, there’s no milk in the refrigerator" three or four times while staring directly at it. Isn’t it embarrassing then when she walks up and says, "What’s that?" (Why, it’s that gallon of milk in front of your nose.) Did you see it before? Of course you did, but externally and internally your dialogue reflected your belief that there was no milk. Your mind went to work to make you believe that there was no milk there and created a scotoma (literally a blind spot) to resolve the cognitive dissonance. You saw it, but your mind deleted it from your conscious perception. Have you ever been frustrated because you could not find your glasses and then felt foolish when you realize you were wearing them? We have all had experiences like this.

As my strongest core beliefs began to falter, I began to see and remember situations where I had previously been blind. Two examples as they related to The Business immediately came to mind. The first was in regard to facial hair. The dress code in our organization required men to wear a red tie, white shirt, dark suit and absolutely no facial hair. You would not be given a leadership duty if you had a beard or mustache. You would be seen as not totally ‘plugged in’ and as setting a poor example for your group if you chose to violate the dress code. No leaders broke this or any other code and still maintained their leadership role.

The problem was that Dexter Yager had sported a full or partial beard since we joined in The Business. Guess what? After about a year of indoctrination, we never saw it. We unconsciously blocked out Dexter’s flaws and those of other Diamond leaders. We were with Dexter in person in small rooms. I was even alone with him and Zack on his private jet. He was also prominently pictured in Profiles of Success and in his own Dream Builders magazine. The beard was in front of us all the time. We saw his picture every single night when we showed the plan and then the Profiles of Success, but we did not ‘see’ the beard. If I had ‘seen’ the beard, I would have had to wrestle with the fact that Dexter was violating a rule that we identified as critical. No deviations from the system he created were permitted. What a paradox!

The second example involved Zack. First, let me tell you that I have black friends. As a matter of fact, Kathy’s best friend from college, the woman who was the maid of honor at our wedding, is black. I despise racism of any type. Given that background, it disturbed me that there were very few black distributors in Zack’s organization. There were two interracial couples. I was told by one Direct and one Diamond that these mixed marriages really bothered Zack. The Diamond said it was so bad that they kept this couple away from Zack as much as possible.

On one occasion, we were discussing the customs of some wonderful Mennonite folks in our organization. Molly talked about people that had different customs and advised that the Hasidic Jews in their organization really bothered Zack. On stage, Zack spoke of how great a business this was that a person could be compensated based upon his or her effort and not the color of their skin. Backstage, he seemed to enjoy telling and re-telling his leaders a joke in which O.J. Simpson is referred to as a ‘Coon.’ How could my mind resolve the disparity between my deeply rooted belief that Zack, my father figure, was a compassionate, Christian servant, and my hearing these overtly racist comments? I didn’t see or hear it until much later when my deep core beliefs about him began to crumble. Only then could I process information that I found reprehensible.

I was reading enormous volumes of court cases, books, articles, and former distributors’ reflections on Amway, its related motivational organizations and cultism. I somehow ‘deleted’ or literally did not see much of it, as it directly contradicted my beliefs. I would read and re-read the same information and come away blank. This situation did not make any sense to me. I thought I was losing my mind, as I had always been able to read large amounts of text with near total recall of the key points. How could I read forty pages of a simple court case, not remember the key causes for action, or even come away with no basic understanding of it? In retrospect, what I was learning was so wrong and so horrific that I could only handle it in gradual stages of revelation. My mind kept putting up buffers to hold me together. The small parts of information that I was able to perceive were destroying me.

I began doing enormous amounts of research on Amway, going back as far as the early 1960s. I spent as many as 16 hours a day in my little home office at the computer scouring the web. I did not realize it, but I was becoming completely obsessed with discovering and documenting everything, and whatever the truth might be, I would have it in writing. Despite being off "the system" for some time now, I had paradigms, thought processes, and automatic emotional responses that were wrong but still functioned effectively without my consent. I sensed that I was not in control of many of my own thoughts and emotions. The feeling was terrifying. Day and night my mind was filled with an all-out war of opposing thoughts. The now constant noise in my head was deafening.

It felt like I was sitting in between two sets of railroad tracks with freight trains careening by, inches from my head, in opposite directions. The noise and confusion were growing in intensity. I was in a fog most of the time I was awake, and I was often unaware of what was happening around me, as Kathy struggled to hold our family together. The war for my mind, in which I often felt like a spectator, had overtaken me.

I faded in and out psychologically and would have a good day or two. My research continued, as I was now unable to stop my urgent day-in-and-day-out quest for the truth. From what I was reading, it appeared that the vast majority of the Diamonds’ incomes came secretly from the tool business. It was looking as if Amway was just a good-looking, Christian, business opportunity that Dexter and his crew used as a front to recruit millions. This immediately linked them into the secret shadow business, which was the big money maker—selling books, tapes, and seminars to their own people. Being a former federal auditor and having testified on the state level for cases involving material misrepresentation, we seemed to have some real legal problems here. It looked like the majority of distributors in the United States had been recruited under completely false pretenses.

Distributors had been routinely recruited, across the country, with nearly an identical pitch. In many cases, they were told any or all of the following about the Amway business:

1. It would only take 12-15 hours a week
2. Amway required no investment or risk
3. There was no selling, just self-use of products
4. There was no overhead
5. You had freedom to run and own your own independent business
6. It was a two- to five-year financial plan to complete financial freedom
7. You could retire young, due to residual income
8. You can pass the tax-free, residual, income stream on to future generations
9. Emeralds made $100,000 and Diamonds at least $250,000-$300,000

All of the above now seemed to be either completely false or a violation of Amway’s own code of conduct. Additionally, after every single plan I had seen, in several countries, Profiles of Success was used to show the lavish, wealthy lifestyles created by the Amway business. Millions of people were again and again shown the Amway Sales and Marketing plan and then Profiles of Success to document the success of upper-level Amway Distributors. It was beginning to look like the jets, yachts, mansions, jewelry, trips, and luxury cars depicted in this book were not purchased with Amway money, but more with system money extracted from faithful, trusting distributors. They had been deceived and raped for profit.

These good people were told again and again by the Diamonds of the 100% success rate of the system. I had Zack and many others on tapes referring to this "100%" success rate. After recruiting somewhere far over 2,000 people into Amway over the years, approximately 10 made a net income of over one-dollar last year. To me, that looked like just under a 100% failure rate in the Amway business, despite the ‘system of success.’ Remember also that was after our organization, as a whole, pumped an estimated $3,000,000 or more into the system. Had all these good people been deceived, raped, and then conditioned to believe that they were failures, so they would go away quietly once their financial resources had been depleted?

Many stayed in long after their resources were depleted and began borrowing money, just as we did, to invest in ‘their businesses.’ They were continually bombarded with analogies about investing in yourself and scripture quotes regarding reaping what you sow. If someone needed money, he had to have enough faith in God and this business to continue to sow his resources into it. Diamonds would mock people who would want to invest in their business only after it was profitable. That was like freezing to death by a fireplace and deciding to put wood in only after it provided heat. Every successful person understood investing, or so we had been coached.

The only way to fail was to quit. Both Rich DeVos and the Amway Diamonds advised distributors to never, never quit. The ‘never, never quit’ was an often repeated quote and was from a famous speech that Winston Churchill made to a graduating class many years earlier. To quit would be setting a life lesson that your children would later follow in life. Quitters would never win, and winners never quit. We would occasionally see people in the mall that had quit. They would avoid eye contact and scurry away like little rats so that they did not have see us and face their own failure. I remember thinking they were pathetic, lost souls with no hope. I had been almost disgusted by their lack of courage to do what it took in order to take care of their families. Now I wondered which of us was more pathetic.

It was a tremendous strain to attend even the minimum of necessary meetings to keep the appearance that we were plugged in, while I gathered documentation. It was a living hell to knowingly see our good people further seduced. The only thing that kept me going was my loyalty to them. I had to either fix or expose this, for their sake.

One of the most difficult of these occasions was when we went to a training session with Zack and Molly in our town. The group was full of excitement and falling all over themselves like Zack and Molly were movie stars or royalty. I feigned enthusiasm but felt repulsed by their presence.

They began their relatively long talks, as I once again clicked on my tape recorder. What I could now see was a thinly veiled self-promotion. Zack talked about how many thousands of people they had helped make thousands of dollars a month. I knew for certain that he was lying. I knew that almost everyone in his organization was losing, despite their involvement in the alleged system of success and his ‘wise’ leadership. Both Zack and Molly went on to make lifestyle and income-relative representations that I believed to be totally false. Not a single person in the room was aware of the fact that they derived a huge income from the books, tapes, and seminars, and Zack was telling them that they could not succeed without them. He made references to God and faith, and I wanted to beat him unconscious. My heart screamed, "Don’t use the Lord’s name or scripture to rape the sheep!" When we exchanged small talk later in the evening, I sensed an evil presence all about him. How could I ever have been convinced by this man?

Yet he was not a stupid man. In addition to being brilliant and charismatic, Zack was uncanny in his perceptive abilities. At times, we thought he could actually read our minds. He had a deep, penetrating gaze that focused on you and seemed to peer into your soul. It was as if you could keep no secrets from him, even in your heart. I felt very uneasy talking to him, as I regurgitated all the positive confessions that were expected. None of his leaders would get away with speaking or confessing negative in his presence. Kathy and I lied and went through the motions of telling them what someone at our level should be saying. We told him and Molly how excited we were about how this was going to be our Diamond year and how very thankful we were that they were willing to take their very valuable time to teach our organization and us.

It is not clear when Zack sensed we might become a problem. We covered and masked our true emotions well enough to at least have him think we were just off track. Over the next few months, he began to circumvent us and counseled with leaders in our organization that he had previously never met with. I later learned that Zack and Kerry secretly arranged for Keith and Lisa to counsel with him. This was something they had always wanted to do. He was very shrewd. We did not understand at the time why he was suddenly showing an interest in people he had hardly known in our group.

The couples he was now meeting with were as naïve as we had been not so very long ago. We had taught them to trust him without question. He was teaching them the belief that he would look after each of them as he would his own children. Zack was a master of psychology and keen in his understanding of human nature. Only later would we understand that he was building relationships and loyalties in depth around us so no matter what happened to us, the organization that we developed would remain intact. This would allow it to continue over time to pump millions more into his secretive book and tape income. We did not even see this coming.

The deeper I got into the research, the more rotten and deceitful nearly every aspect of The Business seemed. It appeared as if the entire recruitment and training process was predicated upon fraud or outright intentional deceit. You may think that I would have had a feeling of relief having discovered this; however, there was no one on earth that would want me to be wrong more than me. If this was all true, I had butchered the lives of my closest friends and families. I had been used as a dupe to rob them of the very things I had promised that they would gain by getting into The Business with me. I had told them they could create incredible incomes, improve their lives, and spend more time with their families. As it turned out, nothing was further from the truth. This was not God’s principle of reaping what you sowed. They had been intentionally and systematically deceived and robbed by an apparent collaboration of respected and well-known people, Diamonds and Amway.

I did not want any of this to be true. I felt divided in two. Defying all reason, part of me still believed that this was a good business. Maybe I was just a loser with lots of excuses. If there were some minor problems with The Business, we could resolve them. Part of me was certain Zack would eventually make all of this right. My psychological problems became great, as I battled dark shadows in this mental war of conflicting thoughts, feelings, and loyalties. I found it more and more difficult to make even the simplest of decisions. Kathy had always admired my strength and decisiveness. Now, I agonized over small choices like what to eat or what time to get the mail. I was becoming more and more incapacitated.

This was all the more agonizing, because in a weird way, I was fully aware of my weakness. It might not be bad losing your mind if you were oblivious to it, but I could feel myself slipping towards insanity. The arguments constantly raged in my mind and did so without any way of stopping them. I felt as if something was taking control of me.

I began to have terrible nightmares. The first one was indicative of what I would experience for years, increasing in frequency until I had an episode every night. The first time it happened, I awoke from a terrifying dream, panic stricken, ripping the hair from my chest. I was hyperventilating and had a tremendous pressure in my chest. I thought I was having a heart attack—and I was only in my thirties! I felt certain I was about to die. Strangely enough, it actually was almost a relief because of the guilt I felt over those I had recruited and what I had done to my family. I did not want Kathy to watch me die and have terrible memories of my last moments. I moved quickly and quietly to our living room to lie down on the couch and accept my fate. The intensity of the chest pressure and hyperventilating subsided in about twenty minutes. I had mixed feelings—both glad and disappointed that I had lived. What was going on?

I did not speak of it to Kathy. I did not need to speak negative into her life and give her more worry. I continued to do more research and to gather job history information to get my resume together. How on earth would I tell a prospective employer that I got in Amway, rose to one of its highest, coveted levels, recruited thousands globally, and then realized that I had been used to steal millions of dollars from my closest friends? That sounds very stable doesn’t it? At the same time, the thought of a job revolted me. I knew it was necessary but the other voice in my head was repeating the old paradigms for a J-O-B of Just Over Broke, Jackass Of the Boss and Jerk On Board. I would have to earn a living and be employed, and the thought of that completely repulsed me! The indoctrination had been thorough, all right. I thought that I certainly would be a loser, and I did not want to face this self-condemnation.

We went to another seminar and a very strange thing happened. We were saying all the right things for the people around us when one of Zack’s young Diamonds struck up a conversation with me. He had become, in my opinion, somewhat of a lunatic. Like me, he saw Zack as having replaced his father. He was fairly normal until he went Diamond. After going Diamond, he stopped in the middle of an open meeting and told the audience, which included prospects, that he was not there to entertain them but was going to do or say whatever the Holy Spirit directed him to say. Additionally, he was the one leader that claimed to be the most loyal to Zack. He, too, had stated that he was willing to die for Zack without question.

I apparently had been identified as a potential "problem." We were talking about different topics, and out of the blue, he started telling me of his loyalty, and the size of his gun collection. In the recent past, his loyalty talks had been so bizarre that he had become notorious for them. He took things to the far extreme, very much as Kerry had done in the past. What he shared with me next crossed the line. He told me he was not afraid of prison and would ‘take me out’ if I ever messed with Zack. He advised he would do this to anyone that messed with Zack. He described in detail his gun collection of revolvers and 9mm automatics. He then told me that he had three Mac 10s that would do the job for sure. That weapon is very similar to the Uzi assault submachine gun. He would later do speeches from stage that Zack made into tapes and marketed to his group. He bragged about the death threat, his willingness to die to be the most loyal to Zack, and the fact that he had carried a gun with a fifteen round clip. His own wife admitted at a taped seminar that he had threatened to shoot her through the back if she ever left him. Strangely, perhaps because he was the most loyal, these "teachings" were disseminated to the group on tapes.

He patted me on the shoulder, smiled, and walked away, leaving me in a stunned silence. Had that message been sent by Zack? Had I been found out? He was not kidding, as I knew him well. He had the capacity not only to do this, but also to see it as the ultimate test of loyalty. I believed he would kill me or anyone else who happened to get in the way of The Business. It did not matter that he might get caught, since that would supply proof he was Zack’s most loyal man. This was really getting scary now. I did not know how long I could stay undercover to compile more documentation. Strangely, I, too, was willing to die, but I was willing to die to protect my group and family. Were we going to have a final showdown? I still was not certain what the whole truth was.

I had sold my gun and hunting rifles to raise money to live on long ago. I went to a trusted friend and borrowed money to buy a handgun, which I began to carry, concealed every day. I even taught my adult Sunday school class with it on me, with a round in the chamber, ready to go. I was certain that if my execution had been ordered, I would die, but I would not do so without a fight. Those people were really scaring me. The deeper the roots of evil seemed to extend, the more determined I was to expose it! (Yes, as completely bizarre and irrational as this seems, part of me felt we could still make all this right.) How did this happen? We just got in a business to develop a secondary income. Now our lives were becoming a horror movie.

Kathy was not filled with a sense of peace, seeing me strap on a loaded gun every day. I carried it so the kids were not aware of it. The poor little guys still thought we were going Diamond. Part of me did too. Somehow, a part of me felt that I would be the one to resolve this and be a hero to my group and ultimately find favor with Zack for doing so. Deep down, he must be good and just got off track. This was egotistical, delusional, and fed my savior complex, but I could not reason it out. My thought process was now so convoluted that I frequently forgot to eat for an entire day. I often finished my Internet research at 2:00 or 3:00 a.m. and collapsed, still fully dressed, on my side of the bed.

We made arrangements to attend what would ultimately be our final Dream Weekend seminar in Baltimore, Maryland. We went a day early for the Emerald and Diamond meeting that preceded the arrival of thousands of distributors the next day. As usual, it was held in a luxury hotel, and Zack and Molly had an opulent suite. I knew that I would garner strong documentation at the Emerald/Diamond and Directs’ meeting, as this was where the leaders seemed to let their guard down. Our efforts were rewarded, as I gathered very specific evidence from these meetings.

Zack knew that I had been on the Internet and was probably a little fearful that others had done the same. He also knew that distributors or prospects might come to any one of us with questions, so he talked about the Amway company and billionaire founders Rich DeVos and Jay VanAndel, specifically. He once again explained to us that they knew almost nothing about building The Business, as they had not sponsored anyone in nearly thirty years. The field built The Business, and they (Rich and Jay) really did not know how it happened. They were our suppliers and were very good at being suppliers. Zack continued to talk about the time that Rich DeVos really screwed The Business by sending out a tape called Directly Speaking to all the Directs. Zack shared how they realized after listening to that tape that it was a mistake, and he and Dexter knew how to build The Business and would continue to do so.

I was probably the only person in the room that had any awareness as to what this meant. I had read the transcripts of this tape on the Internet. From what I remembered, Rich DeVos was, in essence, saying that the tool business was becoming an illegal pyramid and was never set up to be an income source. He seemed to be saying that the big kingpin distributors that were forcing the tool business on their downline were taking advantage of them. The tapes and seminars were supposed to support the building of a profitable Amway business. The contents of this transcript were incredibly damaging to both Amway and the Yager-based tool system.

My psychological resources were nearly depleted, so at this point, I was only able to discern about ten percent of what I read. It would be quite a while before I could actually read and understand all of it. I was, however, shocked that Zack had just broken a Cardinal rule and repeated negative. The group of Emeralds and Diamonds nodded at everything he said as if it were gospel. Of course, no one questioned anything. Zack had spoken.

I received my standard assignment of managing the speakers and hosts back-stage. Kerry, as usual, was in charge of security. Yet again, he used my leaders for free labor the entire weekend. One ridiculous thing that Zack routinely did was charge $10 for an extra leadership meeting on Sunday. This was after distributors already had over $400 in expenses into paying for what they thought was a full weekend seminar. Think about it. There were almost 2,000 distributors at this function. There seemed to be no end to the greed. Neither Kerry nor Zack knew that one of my Directs had secretly revealed to me that the security team collected, secretly counted, and moved large sums of cash collected for the leadership meetings.

The weather the next day was extremely dangerous. There were snow and ice storms. A weather emergency was declared by the state, and people were advised to travel only if absolutely necessary. We had a Directs’ meeting scheduled for early that afternoon. People were going to get hurt or even killed if they drove in this weather, because the major arteries to the city would become a sheet of ice. I was fearful for my leaders, as I knew all of them would get on the road to come to the seminar. They knew that a leader did not miss a leadership meeting, for any reason. There was no excuse. They could not afford not to look plugged into the system. I had a bad feeling about the whole situation.

There were many accidents. Emeralds in our group, traveling with a Direct couple, were rear ended with such force that the windows were blown out of their vehicle, and their luggage was strewn across the road. There were some serious back injuries. When the Emerald went to the meeting, he sheepishly found me while looking for Zack. He seemed fearful, even though his wife was injured, because he showed up late.