The Call of the Weird

by Louis Theroux

  In the time left over, Art did his assignments for the Millionaire Mentorship Program. But he was struggling with some of the definitions in his workbook for the Program. He kept a journal of his progress which, in its confused good faith, reads like satire: “Week 4: VISION TRAINING. Subjects such as ‘Focus on Focus’ and ‘Potentializing’ are mentioned in the Week 4 section, but for the most part I don’t know what they exactly mean . . . I tried to figure out what ‘Future Pacing’ was and do some Vision Training for that.”

  Art needed help from his “millionaire mentor,” Mark Connolly. Mark had claimed to be a millionaire. But he was elusive. He was late with his calls. “I found out later it was because he had no phone and no car,” Art said. Halfway through his mentorship, having invested about $12,000 in Marshall’s seminars, Art became desperate for money. He was still holding out for a job with Marshall. Mark Connolly was fired as a mentor. A man called Michael Yee took over. “And that’s when Michael Yee told me, ‘No, you’re not going to work with Marshall or anything.’” Art discovered that, according to the small print of a personal release for an outwardbound self-esteem-building event for the Mentorship University, he’d also waived any guarantee of being hired.

  “Michael Yee’s advice was essentially, Well, go get a minimumwage job! Just get some work! And I thought, I don’t need to pay $6,000 for someone to tell me to get a minimum-wage job.” So Art pursued his dream of running his own business seminars, called

  “Biz-Masters.”

  Toward the end of the Program, Art got a call from Mark Connolly. “He said, ‘We’re working on these ideas together, Art, do you mind if I come over and stay at your place, and that’ll give us some close proximity while we work?’ So he moved in with me and began sleeping on the floor. I didn’t know at that time that he didn’t have a vehicle, and I had a Mercedes-Benz that I was letting him use.

  “Even though he was only going to stay a couple of weeks, he ended up staying a couple of months. I was carrying his food and rent and everything, so it was draining me pretty heavily. I didn’t realize he’d worked as a male prostitute, and one of his old tricks, a lady, had come into town and wanted to meet up, and he said, ‘Can I borrow your car?’ I thought it was a regular date, and he just never came back.” In addition to the car, Mark made off with $10,000 Art had raised on his credit card.

  “And this was supposed to be his mentor!” Gene said.

  Shortly after completing the Millionaire Mentorship Program, Art lost his apartment and had his other car (the one that hadn’t been stolen by his former mentor) repossessed. His credit by now was ruined, too. Until he made some of his money back, he said he felt he couldn’t go back to Texas and see his family. “I’d like to be at least somewhere on the rebound.”

  He’d brought his 133-page résumé in a white ring binder. It had a logo on the front and it said: “You need The Eagle now!” He was still out of work.

  My own experience of Marshall began in 1995. I was up late channel-surfing, in Hawaii for my dad’s wedding. “If you’re watching this infomercial you’re probably not where you want to be,” Marshall said.There was something not quite human about his delivery. Every gesture and inflection seemed practiced. He explained that the mind is like a tape recorder, and that by using the power of hypnosis you can change your mental cassette, become a new person. It wasn’t so implausible when Marshall himself seemed half machine. He was selling a set of tapes to help people take control of their lives. His technique was called “subconscious reprogramming.”

  In 2000, curious about this reprogrammer of human beings, I traveled to Las Vegas to make a documentary. I arrived at an auditorium where he was due to give a presentation. There was no sign of Marshall, so I spoke to one of his employees as he helped set up. The employee was Michael Yee, the young man who would later become Art’s mentor.

  As we talked, I saw Marshall walk past. He strode purposefully. His hair was combed back, and he was powerfully built. I expected him to come up and say hello; he knew who we were; we were there at his invitation. But he kept walking.

  I asked Michael to speak to Marshall backstage and see if I could introduce myself. Michael went off still wearing his microphone, and without meaning to, my sound recordist picked up the conversation through his headphones.

  “The BBC was wondering if they could have a minute.”

  “No,” Marshall said. “And do me a favor. It’s very bad to step in on another guy’s gig. I heard you talking about your other businesses. ‘I work for Marshall. That’s what I do.’ Because you just made us both look like idiots. You look like you’re trying to worm in on my territory.”

  Michael reemerged looking subdued. “Unfortunately, Marshall is in his trance session,” he said.

  For the presentation, Marshall came out on stage wearing a microphone headset. “Stand up! Make yourself feel good! If you want more money, stand up, say ‘Oh yeah!’ If you’re still seated, you’re not going to get it! I got a question for ya! Who wants to be a millionaire? What if I told you exactly how to become a millionaire? How many of you would be willing to do it? Okay, I got ninetyfive percent of you are liars . . .

  “ninetyfive percent of the population is led around by their noses by the other five percent. ninetyfive percent of the money on this planet is controlled by five percent. Half of all the money on the planet is controlled by one percent of the population. Pretty scary, huh?”

  As weird and controlling as he appeared behind the scenes, Marshall was masterful in front of an audience. He showed video clips of his beautiful mansion and his appearances on David Letterman. All this success could be ours, if we only did what Marshall told us to. The hallmark of the Sylver style was a mildly contradictory message: You need to do this to change your life, but you probably won’t do it because you lack faith. He was both gung-ho and discouraging. The paradoxical nature of this combination was surprisingly compelling. We were like kittens being teased with string. It goes without saying that not everyone can be part of the 5 percent; someone has to be in the 95 percent. In fact, 95 percent of the people do. But there we all were secretly thinking: I’m a 5 percenter! Not those others, but me! It was in exaggerated form the regnant myth of the American Dream.

  “How many of you would like to program your mind to automatically go to the gym? Put your hands up. How many of you believe that if someone else believes in you it’s almost easier to believe in yourself?”

  Marshall brought a woman on stage. He hypnotized her into thinking she was “as rigid as a steel bar”; laid her, face up, between two struts; then stood on her like a plank. If he could hypnotize someone into being a plank, the thinking went, then why shouldn’t he be able to hypnotize me into stopping smoking, being “permanently slender,” acquiring the habits of a multimillionaire? “How many of you would be willing to trust me to see if together we can’t make your life better and get rid of that bondage that’s been holding you back?”

  The atmosphere was like a church revival, but instead of rebirth through Christ, the climax of Marshall’s presentation was the moment when, for a limited time, he offered discounts on his two major courses. Geed up from the presentation and the image of a woman hypnotized into being a plank, we scurried into the lobby, where sales staff were standing by with credit-card machines. My fellow attendees looked for the most part to be struggling business people. They handed me their business cards, which had the names of network marketing companies. “Prepaid Legal” was one, a subscription legal service that cost twenty dollars a month. Another,

  “Renaissance,” taught people how to incorporate themselves as companies and save money on taxes.

  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 dissent. 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.
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  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.