This is not quite a transcript, but it is more of a summary of the audio. Substack provides transcripts of the audios that are not too bad. Also, you can turn on closed captions while listening to it by using Google’s Chrome browser and turning on Live Captioning (under “Settings” and “Accessibility”). You can also select any part of the transcript and Substack will play that sound clip. I am continually amazed at how these kinds of technologies are progressing. This is decidedly a less formal way of presenting my work, and we will see if people find it helpful.
From the Amway headquarters in Michigan, Dennis flew home to Yakima, where his father was dying of rheumatoid arthritis. He was not even 70, as I recall. I drove the truck that hauled my Pinto wagon behind it to my home town of Ventura, and put the truck’s contents in a storage facility and waited for Dennis and his family. Dennis said goodbye to his father, who died a few days after Dennis and his family came to Ventura.
The Boston experience was not successful, and the family of Dennis’s salesman soon went out of business and that family lost their home. Even though they fought Dennis the entire way, it was sad to witness that failure. When Dennis got to Ventura, my college professor handed Dennis the $40K that he had raised. Dennis was astounded. He had never had investors like me and Mr. Professor before, who just handed Dennis the money, to do what he could with it.
Dennis’s free-energy idea seemed dubious, and at best, needed millions of dollars of research and development (R&D), to see if it would work. Dennis still had the world’s best heating system, but Carter’s tax credit, which made Dennis’s program so explosive, had expired. But commercial hot water systems were still a gold mine, and I think that if enough R&D had been done, to make it installer-proof (as Dennis envisioned in Seattle) and cheaper to make, there was still a vast home market for it.
Soon after Dennis and his family arrived, they rented a house a few miles from where I was raised, and I soon lived with them again. We initially used Mr. Professor’s office, as he had a tax practice on the side, in addition to his professor duties. Mr. Professor was the best teacher I ever had, and he was the main reason why I became an accountant. He was universally beloved at the college and was a pillar of the community. He was a North Dakota farm boy, with that taciturn plains-farmer demeanor that I came to love. He changed lives as a professor. He was that kind of teacher, encouraging his students to do their best, in a very demanding class (Accounting 101). When I went to the university, I scored the highest on the national accounting exam in the accounting classes that first fall at the university, and it was partly because of the quality of education that I had received from Mr. Professor. He was an early investor in A.L. Williams’s life insurance company, that took on the corrupt life insurance industry and prevailed, although the industry tried to wipe him out, which I witnessed. Mr. Professor became a millionaire from that investment. He saw that what Dennis was doing as similar to what A.L. Williams did, in taking on a corrupt industry. But as I eventually learned, the energy industry is the most powerful and corrupt on Earth, which we were about to learn the hard way.
The first thing that Dennis did in Ventura was run ads in the LA Times, looking for salesmen, with the heading “Free Electricity!” Dennis eventually had me screen the people who responded, but he answered the first ones, and one evening in Mr. Professor’s office, he had a memorable call.
I have not discussed it yet much in this series, but my mentor’s engine was initially just another one of his ingenious ideas, his employers at the Navy were used to them by then, and even admirals stole his ideas. But his engine was not easy to initially understand and steal, and the Navy brought in a literal rocket scientist, Owen Dykema, to assess that engine, and Owen soon became that engine’s greatest champion. Before Senator John Tunney called Mr. Mentor at home, to try to mount Congressional hearings around his engine, in the wake of a federal study that concluded that it was the best engine on Earth for powering an automobile, an industrialist in LA had offered to found a car company based on Mr. Mentor’s engine. The industrialist would own 95% of the company, and Owen and Mr. Mentor would own the other 5%. With a deal like that, they did not get involved. But that apparently did not dissuade the industrialist, and it was likely his company that built a prototype of Mr. Mentor’s engine and drove it in the Rose Parade some years later.
That evening in Mr. Professor’s office, I think that Dennis heard of the fate of that industrialist’s company. The head of marketing responded to Dennis’s ad, and proceeded to tell Dennis that he had no idea what he was going to encounter. He told Dennis that they were preparing to mass produce a car that would get about 100 miles per gallon (it was very likely based on Mr. Mentor’s engine). And just as they were about to produce the cars, the company was prosecuted for fraud. It was a ludicrous charge, but at the trial, the prosecution produced a man who claimed to be an engineer for them, who testified to their fraudulent practices. The only problem was that nobody at the company had ever seen the man before. Forged payroll records were introduced into evidence, to “prove” that the man worked at the company. The caller avoided prison, but the company’s founders all went to prison. The man yelled at Dennis, “You don’t know what they will do to you!” Dennis replied, “Admit it, you called me because you believe some people have the guts to do it. You want to see me succeed.” Less than a year later, Dennis would be arrested with a million-dollar bail, but that story comes later. That was likely an instance in which one of Mr. Mentor’s inventions was both stolen and suppressed.
Dennis got deathly ill with a kidney problem soon after he arrived in Ventura, and as he lied on the floor in our house, I did hands-on healing with him as he lied there, unconscious, and he made a miraculous recovery in a few days. I remember thinking that he was our primary asset, so I needed to heal him. That was not entirely a selfless healing effort on my part, but I certainly loved Dennis by that time. I have never met anybody else like him.
I cannot recall the exact sequence of events, as they happened so close together, but Dennis tried a new idea. He ran an ad in USA Today, again with the “Free Electricity!” title, but he was not trying to sell free electricity equipment that had yet to be developed or looking for salespeople. He announced that he would sell educational kits on how to sell, install, and build his heat pumps. The kits were $2K a kit, or $5K for all three, with a 10-day money-back guarantee. People began mailing us checks from all over the USA. All that I had seen was bloody ruin so far, and I did not see what was special about what had happened with Dennis’s USA Today response, and neither did Alison. But in our kitchen one day, Dennis gave us a dowsing gesture, saying that he had found his next rocket ship. He was the master, but we did not see it yet. Dennis was right.
He ran more USA Today ads, and money began pouring in from around the USA. We were quickly overwhelmed by the response. We went from a few volunteers to 40 employees in two months. That was what I signed on for, and I never saw anything like it before or since.
Also, around the same time, and this was late August, 1987, Mr. Mentor came on board. He was initially wary of Dennis, because he had always been screwed as an inventor. But he and Stan hit it off like two old engineers, and when he told Dennis that he heard that Dennis did not treat inventors right, Stan replied that Dennis treated them better than they deserved, if anything. Then Mr. Mentor not only came aboard, but he proposed his own idea, of marrying his engine with Dennis’s heat pump panels to make free energy. I admit that the idea is contrary to the popular interpretation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, but Mr. Mentor thought that it could work, as later Victor Fischer did, as much later Eugene Mallove did, as did other scientists that approached us. I don’t know if it would, but there is only one way to find out, which is trying to do it. So, within the same one-month period, we rented a facility with offices and a warehouse behind it, in which we built a machine shop and began building a prototype of Mr. Mentor’s engine. One young man from Boston came with us, who was a machinist, we began hiring like mad to fill those educational kit orders, and for me, it was like trying to hang onto a rope tied to a rocket as it took off. I began working 12-hour days once again, to try to keep up.
For the rest of 1987, we became a kind of mecca. People began visiting us from around the world. I recall a Japanese trade official who met with Dennis. One encounter was particularly memorable. An attorney from Washington, D.C., came to our facility. Dennis had Saturday morning presentations in our R&D area, and that attorney came to one of those, as I recall. That attorney was doing his diligence and knew the USA’s Attorney General at the time, Edwin Meese. He asked Meese what he knew about Dennis. Meese replied with, “We have thoroughly investigated Lee, and he is “squeaky clean.” That attorney emphasized “squeaky clean” as he handed Dennis a check for $10K for two full kits.
But we also began hearing many cautionary tales, and I likely only heard a fraction of what was told at our offices. One that I heard of was from a man who arrived at our offices in a limousine. Dennis had a sales assistant named Cab by that time, and I think that Cab heard most such stories, if they could not get to Dennis, which became hard in those days. That man in the limo was rich, with a net worth of around $400 million. He told us the story of what happened to him. He had made his fortune, wanted to do something in the energy field, and built a windmill farm in the American Southwest, probably in the 1970s, long before windmills became popular, and back then, many were scams to get tax breaks. But this guy was serious. He had spent $35 million on his windmill project and was working late in the office one night when he got a phone call. The caller said that if the man did not walk away from his windmill project immediately, his family would be dead by dawn, and the caller gave some details that showed that it was no idle threat. That rich man hung up the phone, got out his calculator, and figured that 9% of his net worth was wrapped up in his windmill effort. He decided that it was not worth it, packed up his briefcase, left his office, and never returned. He told us, “I wish you the best, but you do not know what you are up against.”
Another man approached us and told his story of how he worked with a college professor in developing a new chemical technique for mining platinum, for ores considered unmineable. Their early efforts were unbelievably promising, they sought investors, and bought a mine in the California desert. Their technique promised to make platinum much cheaper. Eastern Oligarchy money got involved, but suddenly, the sheriff was beating their door down for supposedly violating some obscure law from the 1800s, and they knew that they had been targeted. The professor’s truck was found abandoned in the desert, he was never seen again, and the man who told us the story hid in the back office of a chiropractor’s office for two years, to stay alive. And the Eastern Oligarchy then owned the mine, that technique got shelved, and platinum never got any cheaper.
By that time, we also began hearing free-energy suppression stories, such as an inventor whose entire family was murdered, and their home was burned down and bulldozed, with the murdered family inside. Again, I likely only heard a fraction of the stories that came to us in those days, but I heard some myself. One was kind of fun. Somehow a man got through to me, who had an engine that worked underwater and could easily propel scuba divers and aquatic craft, but the government seized it under national security laws. I think it was by classifying the patent, and another man who approached us was in the middle of a legal battle to prevent the government from classifying his engine. I later learned that it was a favored tactic for suppressing disruptive energy technology. That man also told me an amazing anecdote. As a young man, he had the occasion to call Princeton’s physics department, back in the 1950s, and Einstein answered the phone with, “This is Albert.” The man proceeded to have a conversation with Einstein, who quickly took the conversation in a quasi-mystical direction, as he marveled at the universe’s mysteries.
In those days, I heard about alternative cancer treatments for the first time, and a pair of elderly brothers talked to me one day. They were from Eastern Europe, and they told me that they attended a conference run by Max Gerson, and that Gerson was poisoned with arsenic at the conference, which abruptly ended it. A few years later, I read about that incident in Ralph Hovnanian’s Medical Dark Ages, and it was not the only time that Gerson was poisoned.
I talked with tax protestors who beat the IRS in court, as they argued that as an executive branch agency, it was not legally empowered to levy and collect taxes, as that was Congress’s job. Dennis attracted right wingers with a lot of his “patriot” message, and right-wing scholarship was the first alternative political scholarship that I was exposed to. A lot of it seemed paranoid, but some of that paranoia was understandable, as I was about to discover.
I could go on and on about the stories that I heard in those days, but that should give a flavor of them. By that time, I had lived with Dennis and his family for nearly a year, knew his journey better than anybody but Alison, and as we began making money, for the first time in 18 months, I asked Dennis if I could take a salary, to pay to rent a room in a house. They were understandably not fastidious housekeepers, and nearly all of my roommates in my life until then kept filthy kitchens, and I wanted to cook for myself. I did not want sloppy roommates any longer. I can tell that my otherworldly “friends” once again had a heavy hand in my life, as I walked right into the home of the woman who became my wife, and I knew that I somehow knew her when I first laid eyes on her. It was also the beginning of the end of my days with Dennis, as I look back at it. My wife eventually took me away from all of that. Also, in more of those crazy “coincidences” in my life, she lived about 200 yards from the house where my first girlfriend was raised.
As 1987 ended, Dennis and I worked into the wee hours in the office most days, and Dennis brought a friend from Yakima into the operation, a salesman named Fred. Fred ran our Boston operation after we left, for a couple of months, but that operation never really had a prayer. The original man who we brought in tried to steal the business, as usual. But several people from our Boston days got involved with us in Ventura.
Dennis also tried to bring the dropped out “loyalists” from Seattle into the operation. Soon after I reached Boston, Dennis had me talk to Bob the inventor about promoting his heat-storage technology. Bob had a screaming fit, demanding money from Dennis. As I earlier wrote, I felt badly for Bob, but yelling at me and attacking Dennis, who was Bob’s only ally, was ironically an early confirmation of what Bob told me about inventors, how they were greedy and all trying to get rich and famous.
Dennis was the best salesman that I ever saw or heard of, but his marketing plans were where his genius was most evident. With his shared savings programs and Carter’s tax credit, a chimpanzee could sell his heat pump. People who had never sold anything in their lives had an 80% closing rate on a $10K heating system that nobody really knew if it worked. Numbers like that are unheard of. Those salespeople often thought that they were immensely talented, when it took no talent at all to make those sales. One of Dennis’s goals was to give formerly mundane salespeople the idea that they were especially talented, and he did that with the man who became his leading salesman in Seattle, named Dave.
That autumn of 1987, when the rocket ship was taking off, Dennis invited that salesman to Ventura. I picked Dave up from the LA airport, and we paid for his trip. He stayed a day or two, as I recall, and it soon became evident that Dave was only scouting for other “loyalists,” to see if they could extort money from Dennis. A week or two after Dave’s visit, we received a demand for $250K from Dave, Bob the inventor, Blake the installer, and Brian the engineer. Blake never missed a paycheck, Brian was incapable of thinking past his textbooks, even when he produced data that defied them, and for trying to make Bob whole while promoting his marginally important heat storage technology, Dennis got an extortion demand. And these were the “loyalists.” Blake and Brian eventually testified at Dennis’s preliminary hearing, and Bob eagerly wanted to testify against Dennis, but not even the corrupt prosecution wanted that crazy old man on the witness stand, and he had nothing to testify to, anyway, and the prosecution was trying to deny that his heat-storage technology even existed.
That salesman from Yakima soon came to Ventura, and Fred and Dennis worked and drank late into the night. One night in December, 1987, I drove to the office (I was only a ten-minute drive away) to take a drunken Dennis home. By that time, our growth was so explosive that we rented a second building, next to our original one. As I half-carried Dennis to my car, Dennis stopped, took a look at our buildings, and said that the “Big Boys” must have their eyes popping out, seeing what we had going. At that time, I still only had a vague idea of the global elite, who were Dennis’s “Big Boys,” and I also thought that if we were not stopped soon, they might not be able to. Those were unfortunately prophetic thoughts.
In a later post, I will describe what I had hoped that we would accomplish. Dennis and I had very similar dreams, which, if not identical, were highly compatible.
In late December, 1987, Victor Fischer attended one of Dennis’s Saturday shows and left his business plan with us. Mr. Researcher saw that Fischer’s engine was very similar to Mr. Mentor’s, and they had already built prototypes of it. He suggested that they could pursue Fischer’s engine instead of Mr. Mentor’s, and at a meeting at our office on New Year’s Day, 1988, we brought Fischer aboard, as I handed him his first check. Dennis was practically in orbit by then, called a meeting of his kit owners in Ventura, and several hundred people attended from across the USA. One attendee was Mr. Deputy, who readied a search warrant the next day for a raid of our facilities , and my life’s worst year was about to begin.
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