The "Directly Speaking" tapes started a battle between Amway and the motivational organizations over the tool business. The aftermath of these tapes caused what Billy Zeoli referred to as the "War of the Roses." Billy was the President of Gospel Films and frequently spoke to Amway groups and particularly to Dexter’s Emeralds and Diamonds. He also worked closely in Michigan with Rich DeVos, who happened to be Chairman of the Board of Gospel Films. They also have Gospelcom.net, the most successful Christian Internet site in history, with over one billion hits a year. We ‘passed the plate’ at many seminars and contributed, at our upline’s request, to Gospel Films.

A literal legal war broke out between Amway and the high-level distributors that were reaping fortunes from their surreptitious tool businesses. The legal war, combined with some bad press, caused Amway’s annual revenues to plummet by tens of millions of dollars in twelve months’ time. It sounded as if Billy acted as a go between for Amway or Rich DeVos and Dexter, at some point in this war. At a leaders-only Emerald meeting, Diamonds talked about those hard times. Some spoke of being summoned to hearings at Amway headquarters and being told that Dexter Yager was a crook. One Diamond shared how she went to a meeting with a tape recorder and a bodyguard snatched it out of her hands before the meeting. Did Amway have a goon squad to intimidate people? Deeper research appeared to confirm Amway’s willingness to use strong-arm tactics on anyone who dared verbalize opposition. Amway was becoming a very wealthy, influential company. In 1991, Forbes did a story on Amway and its leaders. This article stated:

DeVos and Van Andel have become very powerful men. Former Presidents Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan have addressed Amway rallies. Some Senators have been Amway distributors, as have celebrities like Pat Boone and former football coach Tom Landry. All of these role models help inspire the Amway movement with a patriotic and religious feeling.¹

The article went on to illuminate some of Amway’s problems:  

Former distributors and Amway officials say that, like many movements based on a cult of personality, Amway’s attitude toward any insider critical of the organization has bordered on paranoia. Edward Engel was Amway’s Chief Financial Officer until 1979; he resigned over a disagreement with DeVos and Van Andel on how to run the Canadian operations. That apparently branded him a traitor; he says he and his family received threats for years after his resignation. "It was a Big Brother organization, " says Engel today. "Everyone assumed that the phones were tapped, and that Amway had something on everybody." In 1983, Engel’s former secretary, Dorothy Edgar, was helping the Canadians in their investigation of the company. She was roughed up in Chicago, after she was told to "stay away from Amway." Engel, who picked her up after the incident, says he believes her story. Amway would not comment on the incident. There was extremely bad publicity in 1982 when a former distributor, Philip Kerns, quit to write a damaging expose called Fake It Till You Make It. Kerns charges that Amway used detectives to follow him and rough him up. Kern’s expose prompted the Phil Donahue show and 60 minutes to run uncomplimentary pieces on Amway. Amway’s recruitment dropped off; with it, sales plunged an estimated 30% in the early 1980’s. In 1984, another former Amway insider, Donald Gregory, says he started to write a book on Amway, but the company obtained a gag order against Gregory in a Grand Rapids court.²

In an Emerald meeting I attended with Zack and Dexter, Amway Triple Diamond Rick Setzer spoke of his personal legal war against Amway to defend and/or protect his tool business. He explained that, while he was incurring huge legal fees, Amway cut off his income completely in an apparent effort to starve him out. He had to sell many of his assets just to survive this period. Unlike Kathy and I, he had been wealthy at the inception of this financial assault. Kathy and I did not have that luxury. This information was never passed to the group but was given to us, so we could "truly appreciate the price our upline had paid" in order to secure a strong future and the tools that we needed to grow. We had been told for some time that things had never been better between the field (us) and the company (Amway). Now I understood these references. Because we were cut off from outside or negative information, we had not had knowledge of what happened in the past. No matter how I looked at this situation and scrutinized the information, I couldn’t find any relief, because I did not want these accusations to be true. But the real picture was becoming all too clear. It had been a rotten, stinking, deceptive mess many years before we came along. Worse than that, Amway was fully aware of the problems and did not stop the abusive high-level leaders. I was an unlikely whistle blower, as I had wanted more than anything to discover that I was wrong about everything.

I read and reread the documentation several times over a few months. During the last couple of readings, the system-induced psychological coma had been wearing off, and I was now able to think more clearly and reason at times. My thinking was not yet consistent, but I had several days in a row when I could actually function almost normally. I would then crash into depression and a fog-like trance. This would last for well over a year.

"You are God’s anointed!"- Amway Crown Ambassador Dexter Yager ·

I was now able to spend almost all my time at home with my family. Out of the horror had come the opportunity that I had striven for all along. I literally loved my family more than life itself. You would think this would be a relief to me, but I was tormented now by our time together. For years, I had been tormented by our time apart. How can I help you understand this? I was strangely nervous about the time at home and often felt compelled to leave at strange hours. I had not been home much in the afternoons, nights, and weekends for so many years that Kathy had developed her own life and schedule. We did not know where we fit into each other’s lives or what our roles should be. I was a stranger in my own home and being there, during what had been my non-stop work hours, made me panicky and nervous.

I played with my kids, and we actually took walks to the park as a family. Often, when we arrived at the park, it would be near 8:00 p.m., which was the time I would have been showing the plan. I felt panic stricken and guilty. If I loved my family, I would be out performing for them and securing their future. The old programs were still running powerfully in my mind—without my consent. We sat in bed and watched television shows as a family. We had heard again and again that it was the ‘hell-a-vision’ and the ‘electronic income reducer.’ We had heard of losers that would nightly succumb to the ‘blue hue,’ as they went broke. In my own seminars to very large crowds, I had often reinforced this point by imploring the men to be real men and heroes to their families by setting the example. They did not want to be "couch potatoes raising little ‘tater tots’!" It was an effective joke to make the point clear.

Previously, before a counseling session, the wives of Directs in our group would call Kathy or me and report on their husbands for watching TV when they should be out getting financially free. I would then address this problem by using third party examples, so the husband wouldn’t know he had been exposed. What a sick perversion of loyalties. I really felt ashamed of myself.

Continual letters from our upline and Amway arrived, and I was feeling a tremendous financial pressure. I had not been able to secure employment, despite a flurry of resumes and interviews. I had not anticipated being unemployed for such a long period of time, as I had never gone without a job more than a few weeks in my life.

Amway was posturing to stop my income if I did not agree to buy back many books and tapes that were of no commercial value to me. I also would not meet face to face with my gun-toting sponsor. His over-the-edge loyalty scared me. I did not know what he was capable of doing, and I really did not want to find out either. There seemed to be no limit. I was unable to purchase the tools back, as I was financially destitute. Even if I had the money, I was unable to purchase them and then resell them into my group. I had been threatened with legal action for having any contact with my own organization. Most importantly, I now believed the tool business was completely deceptive, unethical, and illegal. I would have nothing to do with it.

Amway was going to cancel our income if we did not obtain a written servicing agreement from Kerry and Chris. They were well aware of our dire financial situation, because I had advised everyone that needed to know with certified letters. We are unable to make even the minimum payments on the massive debt we had accumulated while we had been Amway distributors. We attempted to keep our mortgages current but were forced to file for bankruptcy. It was one more degradation. We actually had to borrow money to pay the fees for an attorney to help us declare the bankruptcy. We had had so much of our human dignity stripped away from us that we numbly and painfully filled out all the appropriate forms. We were like Zombies by then. How far would this go?

Our upline seemed to find new ways to harass us, and once more, they pummeled us unmercifully. They made insane demands that looked very much like blackmail. Dan Bailey at Amway Rules and Conduct continued to try to steer us toward the informal conciliation process. This was a funnel that could lead to binding arbitration, perhaps an enormous check for us and then silence. We would not do this. Despite the fact that Kathy and I and Kerry and Chris have serviced non-personally sponsored distributors for years for no fee and without an agreement, they pressed for an agreement with a 15% fee of our total monthly income. At one point, they even pressed us to pre-pay other trumped-up costs, knowing full well that we were destitute and unable to meet any such financial requirement. During this, we told Zack, Kerry, and Dan Bailey that we were being forced into bankruptcy. We told them that we had already lost our medical insurance and were facing foreclosure.

Kerry made more far-reaching demands as our situation worsened. He agreed to sign a servicing agreement, which allowed us to save our home and keep our medical insurance, if we agreed to release Kerry and Zack from any liability related to our Amway business. In another ridiculous blackmail-like offer, they agreed to sign the servicing agreement if we signed a form stating essentially that we would not transmit, publish, or broadcast (in any form) our experiences in Amway.

We could save ourselves if we simply turned our backs on humanity. Had we signed it, you would not be reading these words. We wondered how long it could all last and how far they would go to completely destroy us. Dan Bailey seemed to be working in harmony with our upline and openly carbon copied them on some correspondence to us.

We were feeling incredible pressured when I sent a professional letter to Dick DeVos, Rich’s son and the new President of Amway. I was fearful that Amway would cancel our income, and we would lose our home. The letter that I sent was not hateful or angry, and I felt it would win him over with reason. Part of me wanted to still believe this was a good company. Naively, I believed that the letter I sent would resolve our situation. With the single exception of concealing my sponsor’s name, the text you read below is the complete, unedited version of the letter that I faxed and sent by certified mail to him regarding our current status.

May 21, 1999

1. I am a drug addict
2. I am an alcoholic
3. I have a gambling problem
4. I am having an affair
5. My wife is sleeping with one of our Directs
6. We are getting divorced
7. I falsified tax returns that were shown to my leaders
8. I told (Kerry’s true name here) that the way to make big money in Amway is to go Emerald and sue

I was relieved to send this off, as I felt it was well thought out and appealed to Mr. DeVos’ sheer sense of basic integrity. I could not have been more wrong, judging by the response. You see, neither he nor his staff ever did respond to this certified letter and the fax that went directly to his office. Now you would think that the President of a multinational, multi-billion-dollar corporation would have an interest when a key leader exposed enormous global abuses. Perhaps, as the analogy goes, the apple does not fall far from the tree, as many distributors had previously written to his father for years over the same issues. Pathetically, Dick DeVos had made the statement below to us at a seminar.

You would have thought that all of the revelations from my research would have brought us comfort. But we felt even more injured and abused knowing that what happened to us could have been prevented. I was further sickened, knowing how we were used and manipulated from our very first contact with Kerry and Zack. This may be the largest, ongoing, most well coordinated, well-orchestrated theft by deception in the history of business. I could not believe it had gone on that long. I also could not believe the magnitude of the beast we were up against. How could I ever expose this and help people? How would I keep my home and feed my family? We now had bill collectors calling us sometimes twice a day, which added to our daily stress. We were fearful to go out in our own community. It was like a strange land to us now, and we were very uncomfortable with it.

There was never either an acknowledgement or response from Dick DeVos or his office staff. I did, however, receive a letter from Dan Bailey dated June 24, 1999, stating that indeed they were shutting my income off. They were not keeping it; they were just "putting it in escrow". They also advised me that they were going to begin taking 10% of the money I was not getting and paying it to a Direct as a forced servicing fee. Although we received no money from the global business that we had developed, Amway decided to begin paying Kerry and Chris 10% of it every month, thereby, eliminating any need for them to want to reasonably negotiate a trumped-up servicing agreement. They began to get paid from our escrowed funds, and we stopped paying on our mortgages. Free enterprise is a wonderful thing. Rich DeVos had written a highly touted book called Compassionate Capitalism. Was this his version of compassionate capitalism?

We began to worry about how we would feed our children. I was stunned and in shock. I truly did not believe that they could be quite so evil. Our upline was probably dancing with glee, as we were further punished and humiliated.

I was so angry and ashamed. I had just gone to my father a few months ago and borrowed over $10,000 to bring many bills current. We had been paying him and his wife Kelly monthly. I now had to default on payments to them, after I had lured them into Amway and extracted money from them for Amway products and system tapes. I did not know how I would ever face them again. More than anything, I had wanted to make them both proud of me. I felt like I was a total and complete failure to all who knew me.

I was now drowning in an image of the blood of good people being washed over my head, as I learned how many more were getting deeper into The Business and were being further seduced to buy large amounts of constantly changing tools, tapes, CD’s, laptops, and videos for the upcoming launch of the Amway owner’s Internet company, Quixtar. It was slick, sexy, and high tech, and I believed many more millions of distributors would be recruited. The new high-tech venture was mixed with the same mind-numbing combination of the system, patriotism, religion, and loyalty that overtook us.

My research continued as I learned of the enormous sums of money that Amway, its founders, and distributors contributed to the Republican Party. A Texas paper reported in a 1997 article entitled "Amway Has Voice in Congress" that Amway and "its top leaders have contributed at least $4 million to the Republican Party during the past four years"³ The article later went on to state:

The Amway yachts are used to entertain and host influential individuals that may be friendly to ‘the cause.’ Published reports placed, now President elect, George W. Bush, on an Amway yacht in the Philadelphia harbor during the 2000 Republican Convention. Jeff Birnbaum, from Fortune magazine, was interviewed by Brit Hume on the Fox news, and they discussed how large sums of money are being raised for a new committee called the Republican Majority Issues Committee. Hume asked who the possible contributors may be and Birnbaum responded:

The Republican Party seems to be an off-site division of the Amway Corporation. In addition to direct contributions, many politicians garnered huge fees for speaking at large seminars and singing the praises of Amway, America, and Free Enterprise. Amway groups have had the support of such speakers as Newt Gingrich, Ronald Reagan, George Bush, Sr., Jack Kemp and many others. Former President Gerald Ford even spoke very highly of Amway. A former distributor told me that George Bush, Sr. may have been paid as much as $100,000 to come and speak at a single seminar for Amway distributors. Newt Gingrich was known to sing Amway’s praises at large Amway rallies across the nation. I met Newt when he spoke to thousands of distributors at a large rally in Hershey, PA. At this seminar, Newt Gingrich said:

USA Today ran an interesting article on Mr. Gingrich, stating that the former Speaker of the House of Representatives raked in a windfall fee of "$50,000 a speech."⁸ Could those large amounts of money actually be considered an investment for Amway or its motivational organizations? The answer to that question would soon be evident. One report discussed a "$283 million payoff"⁹ for Amway’s campaign contributions. It described a new budget package that was amended by an apparent friend of Amway. "The payoff for Amway was not in the original House or Senate version of the tax bill. House Speaker Newt Gingrich intervened at the last minute to help get the special tax break inserted in the bill."¹⁰ The book The Buying of the Congress sheds more light on this sweetheart deal:

The more I learned, the greater the deterioration of my psychological well-being. I was overwhelmed by the contrast of wealthy, apparently corrupt billionaire getting a $283 million dollar tax break for their company, while I was struggling to find food money for my family after telling the truth. Goliath’s shadow seemed bigger than ever.

The panic attacks and nightmares came back, and Kathy and I were so shell shocked that we walked through each day like zombies. Survival was now a one-day-at-a-time goal for both of us. We had no idea how to communicate, after being silent for so long concerning our real feelings. She was able to tell me that she was angry at herself for not jumping up and down and shouting about how much she hated our life. She told me that she had hated our life for years and never trusted Zack. I, too, had hated our life but had no idea what was wrong during the last few years. She was angry with me for continuing against all odds. She was angry with herself for sometimes encouraging me, because the encouragement was what often kept me going. She knew I was doing it for her and the kids but was unimaginably hurt for literally being abandoned for years. She was a single mom, an Amway widow. It was so confusing when my love for my family was used against me to keep me out and away from them constantly.

I told her that I would have stopped had she let me know how she felt. We were now shouting. She told me that if she gave me the choice between her and Amway, I would have chosen Amway. I was now screaming that that was insane and that I loved her and that was why I did it. I calmed down after a while, and I realized that she was right. It was all so sick. Had she given me the choice between her and Amway, I probably would have gotten an apartment and worked non-stop to go Diamond to prove how much I loved her. That was crushing. I felt like I was entering a twilight zone. The torrent of conflicting, screaming thoughts returned. I had destroyed the very person I loved the most in a business that was supposed to give us income and family time. I had lost almost everything I had been promised.

I needed help desperately, but I did not know where to turn. I was in a cave of darkness. I could barely decide whether to eat or what to wear at times. I went down to our swimming hole and smoked a cigar with my only trusted friends—the gun, a can of mace, and a beer. I prayed for death. I had ruined all that I had hoped for my entire life. All I wanted was to be successful enough to be a good father and husband. I was worthless. In the depths of the deepest despair, I decided there was no God. I renounced my salvation. If there even was a God, I would curse Him. I was utterly and completely hopeless. I told no one of this but was obviously no longer qualified to strap on my concealed gun and teach adult Sunday school.

Feeling broken and hopeless, I thought I was losing both my mind and family at the same time. I appeared to lose most of my sense of taste, and I saw everything almost in a subdued black and white. I never knew such a darkness even existed. I cried often for no reason. After it started happening in public, I knew that I was falling apart; yet I was obsessed with exposing this horror. We were going into foreclosure. I learned of other distributors who alleged that they had gone bankrupt, lost their homes, or gotten divorced as a result of their experiences as Amway distributors. I used to laugh at "losers" that said those kinds of things. Now, I was one of them.

I discovered that the cultish abuses and fraudulent business practices were global in scope. Through the Internet, I was able to make contact with many former distributors. I documented nearly identical systematic abuses in many countries. I became a low-profile member of an Internet underground of former distributors that shared information and encouragement. I contacted a few people myself, and some were sent to me for help, as they attempted to deprogram from their Amway motivational comas. One woman had just come from a Cult Wellness center called Wellspring. Her life had been destroyed in nearly every sense by her Amway experience. We offered each other encouragement and intuitively understood what the other was going through.

I continued to contact plaintiffs and their attorneys to offer high-level, insider testimony and documentation. I was talking to a current plaintiff when I received the most chilling news to date. He asked me if I had heard about the murder. I told him I had not. He asked me if I was familiar with the Morrison lawsuit in Texas. I was well aware of that suit, because it was one of the largest in Amway’s history and involved high-level distributors like myself.

Dr. Joe Morrison was a spokesperson for the group of 29 complainants, most of who were at the Emerald level. They collectively were seeking over $200 million in damages. The number of distributors in the group had been estimated near as many as 40,000. Among the plaintiffs were three doctors, a chiropractor, and other professionals. Many of these people had left their full time careers, just as I had done. In a press release issued by their attorneys, Dr. Morrison made the following statements.

On 8/13/98, the judge in this case ordered it into Amway’s forced binding arbitration and silence. When I spoke with the offices of one of the Attorneys involved, I was advised that they were shocked by this action, as some of the plaintiffs involved had never even signed the form. They were vigorously appealing this decision.

The person who had asked me if I had knowledge of this case had heard that one of the defendant’s children had been kidnapped and killed in a possible attempt to get them to drop the suit. This sounded even too far out for me. It was reported by an individual who was very close to many of the Amway scandals and lawsuits. I called him and explained that I was a renegade Emerald and that I had discovered all the problems that he knew about already. Once he was comfortable that I was who I said I was, I asked him about this alleged murder. He not only had heard of it, but gave me the name of the convicted killer on death row. The name was Hilton Crawford. I asked him about the circumstances, and he did not know firsthand, but had heard from multiple sources in Texas that the original target was Dr. Joe Morrison’s family. He had heard that on a seminar day, Dr. Morrison's house had been broken into, but no one was home. The murderer, he heard, went to another home and kidnapped, beat, and shot another distributor’s child. I was shocked but tried to remain calm. As I began my own investigation, I did not even want to allow myself to believe that this could be true.

I researched this myself and eventually found factual information in The Dallas Morning News. The paper reported that Hilton Crawford was convicted of murder and sentenced to death for kidnapping and killing a 12-year-old boy named McKay Everett in a botched extortion attempt. Chillingly, the newspaper reported, "McKay was abducted from his Conroe home Sept. 12, while his parents were attending an Amway meeting. He was beaten and shot, and his body was dumped in a Louisiana swamp."¹²

I was in total disbelief and did not know if there really was a tie into the Morrison case but believed that possibly Amway and/or Yager operatives were fully capable of being involved in something like that. Just how low would they stoop? Murder?

I grieved for the poor family. They, too, were away at a meeting, hoping to improve their lives for their family’s sake, and what they loved most was stolen from them. This could happen to any Amway distributor, as their schedules were so predictable. At least one night a month, they were away for a local open meeting at a hotel. One entire Saturday a month, most were normally away for a whole day and evening seminar. Their schedules were an open book and an open invitation to predators.

I took and have maintained extraordinary security measures to protect my family that will not be discussed in this book. I had told the FBI about my own death threat and felt it was very real. They took the Diamond’s name and address that had made the threat. They also requested copies of cancelled checks that had been made out to Kerry and Chris as well as Walters International (Zack’s business name).

I felt certain that I was going to be killed. The terror was intense. There was too much money at stake. I became nearly insane with paranoia. When I walked alone, I walked in a stagger step, as I knew that kind of a gait made it more difficult for snipers. I was ready at any moment for my bullet. This was insane.

I had told too many people that I was going to expose everything. I had told too many people that I might write a book. One day, I was walking our children down near our swimming hole, when Grace, an older neighbor, stopped and began talking to us. She was always walking and was a delight to talk to. We shared pleasantries for a moment and then it happened. We both instinctively winced as a staccato of gunfire erupted from behind us. I arched my back toward them and tensed, looking her in the eye as the bullets ripped through my flesh. Somehow, I had thought it was going to hurt more than that. Time froze. I realized that this poor woman and my children were about to watch me bleed to death. The kids were okay. I was the target. Thank God, she would take them home. It would all be over in an instant.

The ‘gunshots’ were firecrackers set off by kids on a small walking bridge behind us. She jumped a little, laughed, and continued on her way. I turned the other way and was gasping for air. My chest was heaving uncontrollably. I could not catch my breath.

There was no end to the torment. I could tell no one of the events in my now seemingly insane world. I caught my breath after about fifteen minutes and joined the kids who were already down playing by the water. I heard nothing they said. They were so sweet, but I could not even hear their voices over the mounting clamor in my mind. I did not know what was happening or maybe I did…

I reached out for help and attempted to locate Ashley Wilkes, the formerly ‘evil’ web site owner. He no longer seemed evil to me. There was no way to contact him through his web site, but I learned of where he worked and tracked him down through his employer. We corresponded by e-mail, and I thanked him repeatedly for helping deliver me from the bowels of deception. He, too, had paid an enormous price as a distributor. He felt that it had cost him his marriage, because his wife left him and was now living with a man that would help her to build The Business. Ashley had lost custody of his precious daughter, Ruby, and it pained him greatly.

We set up a time to talk, and we bonded immediately from our shared Amway experiences. He had been in Amway in a completely different motivational organization, but the deceptions and lies were identical. I read a transcript of the plan his upline did, and he used the exact same joke I did to make a point. We talked and laughed when I told him that I had fantasized about meeting him and beating the crap out of him for being a negative loser and for taking shots at my upline. He shared how he felt like a total failure. I encouraged him by telling him that he was far from being a loser and that one-day Ruby would know and recognize him as a hero. He wept openly on the phone, and I cried too. It was such an avalanche of emotions. It was a comfort to speak with someone who understood.

He, too, was under siege from Amway in the form of a legal process. They were draining his nearly non-existent resources in an apparent attempt to get him to shut his web site down by tying him up with subpoenas for his computer hard drive at home and work. Ashley informed me that his legal bills were near $14,000 by the time they were done with him. When he could afford no more legal fees or psychological strain, he had to allow Amway access to his computer hard drive. He also had to shut down his web site. This was terrifying to me, as his hard drive may still have had many emails from me on it. Big Brother was alive.

It appeared that Amway had to "hit squads" that would take you down financially if you spoke against them. The first I had plenty of experience with. Amway’s Rule and Conduct Department, headed by Dan Bailey, seemed to have no qualms at all about starving us into submission by cutting our sole income off. The second seems to be an external legal hit team that is a law firm called Warner, Norcross & Judd LLP in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Their point man for these issues was an Attorney named Norbert Kugele. He is the attorney who caused Ashley Wilkes (and many others) to incur massive legal bills and personal stress beyond comprehension. Who would do this for a living? From what I heard, he seemed to be a monster in a suit. Little did I know, I would meet him face to face when Kathy and I would be sucked into yet another Amway legal action. Ashley had helped many people like myself to "deprogram". He offered this service for free to any who contacted him. It was a therapy to him to help others as he felt almost defenseless in stopping this burgeoning, dark predator. To shut down his site and not be able to help people was a crushing blow to him.

Ashley became a close friend, mentor, and confidant. We had much in common. The greater the personal destruction that was heaped upon us, the greater our resolve became to stop the harm being done. He proved to be a tremendous resource to me, as I uncovered more and more about ‘The Business.’ At times we felt strong but most of the time we felt entirely helpless against this towering dark force that was coming against us. He mentioned that there was quite a bit of information on Amway and cult mind-control techniques that were being used on distributors. It sounded a little far out there, but I listened.

I shared this idea with some of our friends who had quit and explained that there might be some type of mind control involved with The Business. In a few days, one called and told me to turn on a talk show named Leeza. I turned on the television and tuned into the show. It was, indeed, about cults and destructive mind-control techniques.

There were two guests on the show. One was a well-spoken woman named Deborah Layton, who wrote the book Seductive Poison after being in the Jim Jones cult, which resulted in 913 tragic deaths in Guyana in 1978. She was one of the few survivors. Her mother had died there. Some of the deceptions she talked about had vague similarities to situations that had occurred to us in Amway, but I knew that I had not been in a cult.

The other guest was a gentleman named Dick Joslyn who had been one of the few surviving members of the Heaven’s Gate cult. He, too, was very articulate and said something that caused the audience to mock him. He said something to the effect that any one of them could be recruited into a destructive cult. They jeered him, as I silently disagreed. I was too smart for that. When the audience quieted down, he made a point that altered the course of my life. He told the audience something that they had not understood. He explained that cults do not recruit stupid, weak people. They recruit smart, ambitious, well-meaning people, who would in turn recruit others. A red flag went up. We had always been told to sponsor up. Sponsoring up meant to recruit the sharpest, most credible people you knew, as others would come into The Business quickly based upon their credibility. I was not jumping up and down yet, but there were some parallels that I needed to explore.

It was strange. I could tell that I had flashes of clarity and then, without rhyme or reason, I fell off the deep end. As I watched that show, I was able to think clearly, and I acted quickly. After some quick web-based research, I ordered the books Seductive Poison and Cults in our Midst. I also began to do preliminary research on a man named Steve Hassan. His name came up quite frequently. He had been a former high-level "Moonie" in the Unification Church, a group that former members had branded as a cult.

The books were helpful. Seductive Poison was informative, as the author described how she was seduced into the cult by deception through the charismatic leadership of Jim Jones. There seemed to be several parallels between her experience in leadership in the Jones cult and our experiences as young leaders in Amway. Jim Jones had used the credibility of then California State Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, as well as that of President Carter’s wife, Roslyn, in building his own image. He demanded total loyalty from his followers, who thought of him as a father. He even had "a makeshift goon squad to enforce his perverted will."¹³ Jones also had a habit of keeping his followers off balance. They both loved and feared him at the same time. This was sounding too familiar.

Cults in Our Midst, was even more informative in relation to my experience. Below I will quote bits of text that seemed to jump off the pages at me, as I devoured this book.

Thank you Margaret and Janja. Thank you so much. You were angels of mercy. I was not insane. Maybe I wasn’t a loser. Maybe I did not deserve death. They are two people I hope to meet, if not work with one day. Their work, in part, saved my life. I was far from healthy but now had a small glimmer of hope. I was still in bad shape but continued my cult research with incredible vigor while having ‘healthy’ days.

I discovered the work of Robert Fitzpatrick while researching the legal aspects of Amway and the system. He is a nationally recognized consultant, speaker and author on distribution trends. His work involves evaluating factors of trust, ethics and integrity in distribution channels. He co-authored False Profits: Seeking Financial and Spiritual Deliverance in Multi-Level Marketing and Pyramid Schemes. This book revealed much of what I had discovered in the Amway organization. However, his book brought my purpose more clearly into focus, because it revealed the deceptions that are often an integral part of these businesses.

Robert wrote another small book that specifically addressed Amway entitled, The Case for Reopening the Amway Pyramid Scheme Case. This book is not written for the mass audience as it addresses, in great detail, the legal issues and FTC rulings involved. It is written specifically for regulators, attorneys, journalists, talk show hosts and business leaders whose work requires sorting out finance from fraud. I located a copy at www.falseprofits.com and subsequently provided it to the FBI agent that I was working with. This detailed why my book had to be written. Someone had to stand up to protect the many silent victims.