The Call of the Weird (21 page)

When the frenzy had subsided, Marshall had sold twenty-two Millionaire Mentorship Programs at about $5,000 each, and seventy places on the Turning Point seminar for $500 each. A gross of $145,000.

“I’m so glad you’re here. Welcome to Vegas,” Marshall said when I finally got to meet him backstage. He was swigging Pepsi from a bottle, still wearing his microphone headset. He had a deep melodious voice, like a DJ, and an unnerving way of holding my gaze. It’s only when someone really holds your gaze that you realize how little we do it as human beings. I asked him if he was doing it on purpose.

“Well, you know what I’ve discovered, Louis, is that highly intelligent people are always extremely responsive. And as I speak to you and you hear the sound of my voice; as your eyelids start to close—close your eyelids . . . ”

“No, Marshall, I’m going to resist being hypnotized.”

I’ve seen this conversation a few times on tape. At this moment, his face hardens. He really seems to think that, having waited several hours for the interview, I am just going to conk out at his bidding without asking any questions. From this point on, the conversation became more awkward. “What was today in relation to your total program, the Marshall Sylver system? Today represented how much?”

“A day,” Marshall said. Then we sat in silence for a few seconds.

“A day?” I said.

At the end of the conversation, Marshall said: “You’re loved. Welcome. Glad you’re here! Thanks so much for having an interest.”

A few hours after telling me I was loved, I got word that Marshall had been so unimpressed with my interview that he was
having second thoughts about cooperating with the documentary. The exact nature of the problem wasn’t clear, or possibly I’ve blocked it out. I don’t think it could have been lack of deference on my part; perhaps he was offended by my not being better dressed . . . Maybe he didn’t like that it was a documentary, rather than a well-lit sit-down interview. Maybe it really was my unwillingness to be hypnotized. Who knows? But he wasn’t happy.

With no access to our main character, I visited Michael Yee. Though he worked for Marshall as a salesman, Michael was something closer to a disciple. His faith in Marshall was absolute. He slicked his hair back like Marshall. He said he’d spent tens of thousands of dollars on Marshall’s seminars. He used to be an introvert; through Marshall’s system he’d created a whole new personality for himself. Confident. Outgoing. Successful. And, it has to be said, a little robotic. Marshall wasn’t running a business. It was a “moral mission,” he said. “People helping people. Money just comes naturally.”

Michael lived in a house in a pristine new development rolled out like carpet on the south side of Las Vegas. Upstairs, amid his
Star
Wars
memorabilia, he told me to try to lift a figurine of Yoda out of his hand. I lifted it out. “No, I said ‘try to lift it.’” The point was, you can’t “try” to do something that it’s in your power to do. So you shouldn’t “try” to do anything. It was a word that implied possible failure. “Do or do not, there is no try,” Michael said, quoting Yoda. Changing one’s language, as Michael explained it, was a big component of changing one’s outlook. Don’t say you’ve got a problem, say you’ve got a “challenge.” Don’t say you’re “fine,” say you’re “awesome.” Then you’ll start to feel awesome. He said he’d feel awesome even if he just found out he had cancer.

“If you just had an accident and you lost several limbs, you’re bleeding profusely, how would you be doing then?”

“Awesome. I’m alive. I’m breathing. I’m doing awesome.”

He outlined his theory, learned from Marshall, that there are two types of people in the world: wolves and sheep.

“See, the sheep are all penned up. And one sheep goes to the left, they all go to the left. Well, that’s the masses. Now the wolves have all the freedom. They have all the woods, they have everything out there. They can come and play when they want and leave when they want.”

“But the wolves actually eat the sheep,” I observed.

“They come and go when they want to.”

“They actually kill and eat the sheep.”

Later, one of the other salesmen suggested I come along to Marshall’s thirty-eighth birthday party as a way of getting back into his good graces. I bought him a cigar trimmer, trailed after him during a tour of his palatial home, marveling dutifully at his collection of historic magic posters. I concentrated on not speaking too much, nervous that anything I said might queer the deal.

The next day I found myself back on for the Turning Point Seminar.

There were about sixty of us at the seminar: working people, a range of ages. Fairly typical was Mark, a hotel custodian, who wanted to get married but felt he lacked money to support a wife. His confidence was holding him back. “What has attacked your self-esteem so much?” Marshall asked him in front of the class. “What is it that brings the tears up inside of your heart? What is it that makes you emotional right now? Almost feeling that you can’t be real in front of people that love ya?” Marshall seemed intent on trying to make Mark cry. “One of the things I want you to get, Mark, is that you are a multimillionaire. How would a multimillionaire address another multimillionaire? How would a multimillionaire look at another
multimillionaire? . . . A multimillionaire does not look down when he speaks to another multimillionaire. A multimillionaire smiles, holds himself open.”

The main message of the class was to have faith in Marshall. Unless we believed in him and followed his instructions, he wouldn’t be able to help us become millionaires. He told us to stand up and turn around when he snapped his fingers. It felt pretty silly. It also felt a lot more like being a sheep than a wolf. Wasn’t there a bit of a contradiction in Marshall’s assertion that we could become wolves if we just did as he said? “Even if you think we’re only telling you to do it for our personal gain, how many of you are willing to trust us and follow through and do what we tell you to do? Put your hand up nice and high.”

I wasn’t sure what to do. Having just been to his house the day before and cozied up to him, it felt rude not to stand up and twirl around, or put my hand up when he asked if we trusted him. But then, I didn’t trust him. I kept my hand down.

We role-played with partners, pretending they were our parents. We took turns saying: “Father, I have something I want to release,” and sharing intimate details of our lives. Volunteers walked up and down with boxes of Kleenex. For the grand final we “ate fire”—lined up and clamped our mouths around the ends of coolburning batons. Emotions ran high and it felt churlish to begrudge the forum that had allowed people to experience something; but I felt goaded and coaxed and I didn’t like it.

The biggest trust we could put in Marshall was to splash $5,000 on a place in the Millionaire Mentorship Program.

At the end of the class, I approached Marshall. I still felt cowed and influenced from eight hours of turning in circles and being exhorted to be positive, to believe in Marshall and his system. I was hemmed in by politesse. It felt somehow destructive to voice dis
sent. I said that I’d seen real emotion among the participants, but that I wondered if the commitment lasted with people. Marshall mentioned the Millionaire Mentorship Program and the daily calls designed to hold students to their commitment. I asked Marshall how many millionaires he’d created.

“I’ve got ten that I’ve created right now. I’ve got a plan to create a hundred over the course of the next four or five years. But I think we’re going to be way ahead of that, actually.”

“I may have an unhealthy skeptical mind, but it would help me if you could bring out some of the millionaires onstage for testimonials. Is that something you’ve thought about doing?”

“Yeah, we have.”

Pause.

“So why don’t you do it?”

“Because the skeptics won’t do the program anyway . . . What you can do, Louis, is let go of the skepticism. It doesn’t serve you. You’re not being helped by it.”

I was running out of questions, and didn’t feel I was getting anywhere.

“Does the Millionaire Mentorship Program really work?”

“No,” Marshall said, sharply. “Not for you. It would never work for you. Because you have to have the faith of a mustard seed and you have none.”

Not long after I left, the investigation started.

First came the Attorney General’s raid on Marshall’s house. Then the following year, an exposé on Marshall appeared in
Las Vegas
Life
magazine. Among the revelations: He’d served six months in a federal prison for counterfeiting fifty-dollar bills; part of the sentencing had been four years in drug rehab; in 1990 he was convicted of misdemeanor battery for assaulting a police officer; he
was being sued for sexual harassment by a former employee, a one-time model, who said Marshall had told her she had a “luscious butt” and claimed he could give her a one-hour orgasm; he was being sued by several casinos for unpaid gambling debts. The man who’d “subconsciously reprogrammed” himself as an Übermensch of discipline and focus was bouncing $20,000 checks at the Luxor.

The state’s prosecution began in December 2003. The trial was for nine counts of theft by obtaining money on false pretenses.

Marshall was represented by Dominic Gentile, a high-powered criminal defense lawyer, described in a profile in the
New York Times
as “the devil’s own advocate.” In the eighties, he’d specialized in defending cocaine dealers. Possibly on Gentile’s advice, Marshall opted not to take the stand. The responsibility of testifying on behalf of the Sylver System fell instead on the shoulders of Michael Yee, now no longer working for Marshall, but still every inch the believer. In fact, the Sylver trial became a de facto trial of Michael Yee’s “subconsciously reprogrammed” personality: His blithe assertion that success is a state of mind and that to admit that there might be other factors involved is automatically self-sabotaging.

The trial hinged on the Millionaire Mentorship Program, specifically Marshall’s failure to make good on his money-back guarantees. Marshall’s defense was that his money-back guarantee was conditional on the students’ having completed “all assignments and daily commitments.” And the disgruntled graduates hadn’t done that. They hadn’t chosen the right “income vehicle.” Or they’d missed one of their mentor’s phone calls. The reasons varied, but there was always a reason.

In his testimony, Michael quoted freely from the gospel of Marshall. He said the program wasn’t really about making money but about “the four cornerstones of well-being.”

The prosecution asked Michael about Mark Connolly sleeping on Art’s floor.

Talking about losing money in a business venture, Michael struck up a greatest hits medley of self-empowerment clichés: “You’ve got to eat chicken while you’re hunting elephants, and go back to the drawing board, but just because I’ve had a bad meal doesn’t mean I’m going to quit eating.” He put dissatisfaction with the course down to a small group of agitators whose belief wasn’t
strong enough. “During that time frame, we had disgruntled individuals that were interrupting many of our seminars and, in effect, were affecting what other people were thinking . . . Everybody was thinking and talking and being together with people. Just the number and the volume of people requesting refunds came from a small cell of individuals that was collaborating and growing.”

The truth, in Michael’s world as in Marshall’s, was that there was no reason ever to refund any money. The Program worked. therefore failure to make money on the Program was ipso facto evidence of “failure to complete the assignments.”

In his summing up, the prosecutor said of Michael: “He’s clearly a Marshall Sylver follower to this day. He recites Marshall Sylver speak as well as anybody, and whether he knows it or not, he’s indoctrinated. He still is.” He reminded jurors that Michael Yee could not say whether a single one of his students had doubled his money. “Marshall Sylver is a professional seminar dealer. That’s what he does. He sells no actual goods through his programs other than the seminars themselves and some of these multilevel marketing memberships that fall below it.”

Marshall’s attorney pointed out that the Program was still running. He said the promotional brochure that listed the money-back guarantee was no longer being used “as a result of some problems that some people were having understanding” it. The crux of his argument was that Marshall had operated “in good faith,” and therefore he could not have had an “intent to defraud.” He mentioned Art’s résumé. “Which I’m sure anybody who is an employer is just going to be thrilled to receive, okay?’Cause God knows if you’re a successful businessman you got nothing but time, okay, to read a hundred-and-thirty-threepage résumé.”