Saturday, September 29, 2001

By Jack Naudi
The Grand Rapids Press


Cross off Oct. 9 as the date that Amway Corp. was supposed to start showing a jury evidence of a broad conspiracy to run it out of business.

The latest turn in the long-running court battle includes a bizarre stunt that left one Amway lawyer shaken.

Two weeks ago, a federal district court judge in Grand
Rapids removed the major defendant from the case, Cincinnati-based Procter & Gamble Co. This week, one of two remaining two defendants, an individual with an anti-Amway Internet site, was dropped from the case.

In the case, Ada-based Amway claims that Procter & Gamble fed anti-Amway information to Sidney Schwartz, a Portland, Ore., man who once ran a site called, "Amway: The Untold Story."

Information on Schwartz's site eventually was copied onto Web sites run by other individuals around the world, including one operated by an Indiana resident, Kenneth Lowndes.

On Tuesday, Amway and Schwartz settled their differences. Amway, whose parent company is Alticor Inc., dropped the suit after Schwartz agreed to stop publishing anti-Amway information.

"We're satisfied, based on the compromise that we reached with Mr. Schwartz, that he will no longer be publishing information about Amway and its affiliates," said Michael Mohr, Alticor's vice president and general counsel.

Schwartz's lawyer, J.B. Meade, did not return calls for comment.

The case against Lowndes effectively came to an end last week when he failed to show up for a pretrial conference. At the conference, Amway lawyers presented Judge Robert Holmes Bell with altered photographs placed on the Internet of the Amway Grand Plaza Hotel, Alticor corporate headquarters and other Alticor buildings in Ada.

Amway attorney Charles Babcock told Bell that the person who posted the photographs "is a member of the group that Mr. Lowndes is a part of."

The group, called the Stinking Thinking Club, Babcock said, has "acted in a joint purpose to bring Amway down, to implode them, to destroy their business and to make Amway drop like a rock."

The photographs were not made public, but Babcock apologized to Bell for his shaky voice as he discussed them. The photographs were placed on the Internet in the days following the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.

In addition, Babcock said Lowndes has impersonated Amway co-founder Rich DeVos more than 90 times "on the Internet or elsewhere."

Lowndes denied this week he had anything to do with the photographs. He did admit to impersonating DeVos, but only by creating an AOL profile with DeVos' name. Lowndes said his use of the name primarily was limited to checking for e-mails sent to his "Rich DeVos" profile.

Bell agreed to impose an injunction prohibiting Lowndes from impersonating DeVos, sending spam e-mails to Amway employees and distributors, contacting employees for information about the company, and taking any other action "designed to appear to advocate the demise of this company ..."

With that injunction in place, Amway's case against Lowndes is all but over. However, Amway attorneys said they might return for remedies against those responsible for the photographs.

The Grand Rapids federal case is one of three between Procter & Gamble and Amway that started over rumors that P&G is linked to Satanism. In 1995 and again in 1997, Procter & Gamble sued in federal court saying Amway was responsible for spreading the rumors.