Steve Warshak made millions on "natural male enhancement." Now he's doing hard time
The ads just ooze intentional cheesiness, none more so than “Enzyte Christmas.”
In the (unlikely) event you’ve never seen it, picture an office holiday party: reindeer sweaters, cubicles festooned with garlands, and antler-headed colleagues engaged in photocopier high jinks. Into this jolly tableau strides Smilin’ Bob—just your average middle manager with a bigger-than-average grin—in a Santa suit. “Not long ago, Santa decided he needed a little more room in his sled,” goes the smarmy voice-over, as a whistling theme song plays in the background. “So he made a call to Enzyte about natural male enhancement. And after a few short weeks, what did he get?” The camera cuts to a group of women who titter and leer in Bob’s general direction. “Why, not only a sleigh full of confidence and a sack full of pride, but it looks like Bob got the one thing that every lady likes: the joy of a gift that keeps on”—big pause—“giving.”
And that’s just one of eighteen Smilin’ Bob ads, all of which share the same objective: to sell a truckload of Enzyte, the once-a-day tablet that touts itself as “the effective, reliable way” to “the strongest, most powerful erections imaginable.” There’s the airport ad, in which Bob smiles his way through security (“Bob is not traveling as light as he used to!”), the one where Bob jumps off a diving board (“Bob has a big new spring of confidence, a generous swelling of pride”), and the one at the bowling alley (“Bob is throwing them hard and straight”). Smilin’ Bob never speaks, but the voice-over explains that he is “doing well. Very well indeed.”
Retro in style and slyly inexplicit, the ads let Bob’s smirk suggest what Enzyte can do, and millions of men have responded—even after the man who created Bob lost his business, his home, his fortune, and ultimately his freedom. Since then, that man—Steven E. Warshak, Federal Inmate #04431-061—has kept as quiet as the star of his commercials, refusing all interview requests. Here, for the first time, he attempts to explain himself.
*****the problem was growth, Steve Warshak tells me. First it made him a threat, he says; then it made him a target.
We are alone, except for two distant prison administrators, in the huge sterile visiting room of a medium-security facility in the Appalachian Mountains of West Virginia. I have come to ask Warshak, 43, about what prosecutors call his “diabolical” nature, a nature exhibited—to quote the judge who sentenced him to twenty-five years behind bars—by the “massive fraudulent undertaking” for which he was convicted in August 2008.
Warshak was the founder of Berkeley Premium Nutraceuticals, a Cincinnati company that sold a wide range of supplements but made most of its money on one blockbuster product: Enzyte. Warshak sold countless men on the simple idea that happiness was just a little blue pill away. His pill had a six-letter name, just like the prescription drug it was designed to evoke. But unlike Viagra, Enzyte was “natural” and could be ordered without a prescription in the privacy of one’s home.
At last year’s trial, prosecutors alleged that Warshak had exploited that desire for privacy to bilk his customers out of more than $100 million. The scam was simple, they alleged: Get a customer’s credit card number by offering a free sample (pay only the postage!), then charge the card again for more product than the customer ever ordered. Enzyte was marketed to men who didn’t want to go to the doctor, the government argued, and thus were likely to be ashamed of their sexual inadequacy. Warshak figured he could steal from these customers with minimum risk, prosecutors said; embarrassment would keep them from complaining....MORE
HT: Longform, also HT on yesterday's Campendonk piece:
"The Greatest Fake-Art Scam in History?"
