In case you even slept up late in front of the television set in the 1990s, there is a very high possibility you previously came across one single fast-moving businessman arguing that he had earned fifty thousand dollars a week working in his one-bedroom apartment writing classified advertisements in the newspapers. Don Lapre was one of the most familiar faces of late-night television, and his story will forever be one of the most instructive and interesting chapters in American business history.
A Rhode Island Beginning
Lapre ( Providence, Rhode Island, 1964, Phoenix, Arizona, brought up in Arizona) married in 1988 and co-partnered with Sally Redondo in the credit repair business that they established, called Unknown Concepts, his first joint business venture together with her.
The Tiny Classified Ads
Lapre, in 1992, created The Making Money Show – a late-night infomercial that purported that viewers could earn a lot of money by placing small classified adverts in the newspapers that would bring big profits, as he allegedly had achieved in his own apartment.
King of Infomercials
By the mid-nineties, his show was listed as one of the top ten infomercials on cable being broadcast in America. He was one of the most memorable and recognizable faces of late-night television with his fast-talking, enthusiastic delivery and rags-to-riches narrative.
The best Vitamin in the World
Lapre turned to selling a vitamin supplement in a multi-level marketing scheme, where distributors received huge commissions in selling the product in an online market. In 2005 and 2006, the FDA issued formal warnings regarding unsubstantiated health claims made.
The Business Model Examined
The vitamin business by them had no valid business model and provided no valuable assistance to the distributors, which was concluded by federal investigators. The sites offered to the participants were reported in the court documents as fundamentally useless and producing no sensible income to all parties engaged in the whole process.
Forty-One Count Indictment
A federal grand jury in Phoenix, Arizona, on June 8 2011, indicted Lapre on forty-one counts of conspiracy, mail fraud, wire fraud, and promotional money laundering charges in his vitamin marketing business and business practices all over the country.
Two-Hundred and twenty thousand casualties
Federal prosecutors claimed the scheme had ripped off more than two hundred and twenty thousand people of almost fifty two million dollars – and was one of the largest consumer frauds in direct response television marketing in the legal history of American legal history.
Saturday Night Live Noticed
The zenith of his popularity, Lapre has even been parodied in the infomercial style of Saturday Night Live, a cultural landmark in itself on how ingrained into popular American culture was his unique fast-talking pitchman image over the course of the decade.
A Tragic Ending
In October 2011, Don Lapre died as he awaited trial in an Arizona facility. He was forty-seven years old. The indictment against him was later dismissed when he died, and a verdict was never actually passed.
A Cautionary Chapter
The story of Don Lapre is still a book to be written in the history of American direct response marketing as a warning to the aspirations of charisma and ambition that no matter how good the origin is, without a sound base, it is not only the entrepreneur but also the masses of people who believed and trusted him or her that have been defrauded.
