The Counter-deception Blog

August 28, 2005 NYTimes.com

After Jail and More, Salesman Scores Big With Cure-All Book

By MELANIE WARNER

When Carol Boruk of La Marque, Tex., saw Kevin Trudeau selling his book on a late-night infomercial last November, she was mesmerized.

Mr. Trudeau was good-looking, energetic and articulate, and talked about nonpharmaceutical remedies that could eradicate virtually any disease - and that he said were being suppressed by the government and the drug industry.

Ms. Boruk, who suffered from allergies and recurring headaches, called the number on the screen and happily forked over $30 for a copy.

So have millions of others. In the last three weeks, the updated and expanded version of "Natural Cures 'They' Don't Want You to Know About," which Mr. Trudeau self-published, has been outsold only by "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince," according to Nielsen Book-Scan.

The book has been on the New York Times list of best-selling how-to and advice books for eight weeks and is currently No. 1. Mr. Trudeau's publishing company says it has sold roughly three million copies since last August.

The book, 570 pages of Mr. Trudeau's musings on how natural therapies, diet and lifestyle can help people free themselves from illness and disease, has quickly become an unusual success story in the publishing business.

"It's a remarkable case," said John Oakes, a vice president at Avalon Publishing Group. "People who don't have the marketing muscle of a big publisher behind them don't usually rocket to the top of the sales list like this."

There are other unusual things about the book's success. Mr. Trudeau, 42, a publishing novice, is not a doctor or scientist, and has had some run-ins with the law.

In the early 90's, he served two years in federal prison for credit-card fraud. He was later sued by the Illinois attorney general over an alleged pyramid marketing scheme, and he has tangled twice with the Federal Trade Commission over claims that he made in infomercials for various alternative remedies.

Last year, the commission barred him from selling products through infomercials. "Natural Cures" was able to skirt that rule because books are protected as free speech under the First Amendment, a lawyer for the agency said.

Some of the book's assertions have prompted some readers to declare it a fraud. "Nothing more than a latter-day snake oil salesman," one reader, D. Bellini of Grand Rapids, Mich., posted on Amazon.com. Another reader called it "the worst rip-off I have gotten sucked into."

Officials at the New York State Consumer Protection Board also did not like the book. In early August the board issued a statement warning that "Natural Cures" is full of "empty promises."

"This book is exploiting and misleading people who are searching for cures to serious illnesses," Teresa A. Santiago, the board's chairwoman, said in the statement. "What they discover is page after page of pure speculation."

The board points out that in the book Mr. Trudeau directs readers to his subscription-based Web site, naturalcures.com, for more information. On the site they are offered subscriptions for $9.95 a month or $499 for life.

Ms. Boruk, the allergy sufferer in Texas, said the book was not entirely what she was expecting, but she found it "eye-opening" and said it had inspired her to stop taking several medications and make significant changes to her diet. "I've lost 30 pounds, never get headaches anymore and hardly notice my allergies," she said.

Mr. Trudeau says those who would call him a fraud misunderstand him. In a telephone interview, he said that he was preaching a holistic gospel he firmly believed in. He said that he eats mostly organic and natural food, never takes drugs, travels with a shower filter to strip the chlorine and fluoride from water and recently completed a seven-day fast to purge toxins.

"I can't remember the last time I was sick," he said, speaking after just returning from what he said was a 14-mile hike.

He noted that lawsuits filed by the trade commission and by Illinois had been settled out of court, and had not involved any findings of wrongdoing. He called the prison time stemming from activities in his mid-20's a "youthful mistake."

"I changed my priority from making money to positively impacting people," said Mr. Trudeau, who lives in Ojai, Calif., a small town popular with Hollywood producers and writers. His main base of operations is Chicago, where he runs half a dozen businesses related to his book and Web site.

Mr. Trudeau has amassed millions from producing infomercials and from direct sales of products. Promotional materials he used in the mid-90's boasted of a net worth of more than $200 million. Today, Mr. Trudeau says he does not know how much money he has, but it is "probably a lot."

He said he owns 10 cars and dozens of houses and condominiums around the world. Sam Catanese, president of Infomercial Monitoring Service, an infomercial research and tracking firm, said Mr. Trudeau, who is unmarried, was usually in the company of beautiful women. Mr. Trudeau said he is now engaged.

Former partners and associates said Mr. Trudeau has been successful because of his sales skills. "There's no doubt in my mind that he could sell anything," said David Bertrand, who worked with Mr. Trudeau from 1995 to 1997 at Nutrition for Life, a seller of vitamin and nutritional supplements. "He's a marketing genius."

Mr. Trudeau has been honing his marketing skills since he was in high school in the former mill town of Lynn, Mass. He started when he was 15 with a mail-order business on how to obtain loans. Mr. Trudeau said the operation had close to $1 million in sales.

After high school, while working at a car dealership, Mr. Trudeau said he met the owner of a company called Memory Masters Institute. He said he loved how the program sharpened his mind. When Memory Masters offered him a job in Chicago, he jumped.

During that period, he falsified credit-card applications, charged a total of $122,000 and landed in prison.

When he was released, Mr. Trudeau struck up a business partnership with his former cellmate, Jules Lieb. He and Mr. Lieb, who had been imprisoned for conspiracy to distribute cocaine, started working for Nutrition for Life. The two, through their company Trudeau Marketing Group, sold nutritional supplements and skin care products and recruited other distributors.

Mr. Bertrand said Mr. Trudeau, then 32, was by far the most successful distributor the company ever had. In the first year of Mr. Trudeau's alliance with Nutrition for Life, sales more than doubled.

Mr. Bertrand said Mr. Trudeau was also gutsy - sometimes too gutsy. "He was always a bit more aggressive than we would have liked," said Mr. Bertrand, now president of a similar nutritional supplements company called Vitamark International. "He started doing things we were not happy with." Mr. Trudeau would, for instance, make overly optimistic promises to new recruits about their future income, Mr. Bertrand said.

Mr. Trudeau says he told recruits what other people had earned in the past but did not offer them any guarantees.

Lawyers in the Illinois attorney general's office were not happy with what they were seeing. In its lawsuit against Trudeau Marketing Group, the office alleged that Mr. Trudeau and Mr. Lieb were operating a pyramid scheme.

Mr. Trudeau maintains that his work for Nutrition for Life, which was not named in the suit, was a legal marketing strategy, no different from Amway. In the settlement, Mr. Trudeau paid $10,000.

Darrell Stoddard, who worked with Mr. Trudeau in 2003, also said Mr. Trudeau's tendency to exaggerate caused trouble. Mr. Stoddard, who created a pain treatment called Biotape, said he hired Mr. Trudeau to create an infomercial for the product, a patented membrane that looks a bit like electrical tape. Mr. Stoddard, trained in Chinese medicine, believes that pain is caused by broken electrical connections between cells, and that Biotape can help with this.

In the infomercial, Mr. Trudeau said Biotape permanently relieved pain, a claim that made Mr. Stoddard cringe. "I knew we were going to get into trouble," said Mr. Stoddard. "You can't know that the pain will be gone forever."

In June 2004, the F.T.C. began court proceedings against Mr. Stoddard and his company, Smart Inventions, on a charge of making false claims. The action is pending. Mr. Trudeau says he did not make that claim about Biotape.

Critics contend Mr. Trudeau's book is also misleading. The New York Consumer Protection Board noted earlier this month that Herbert Ley, who is quoted in a promotional blurb, never read the book - he died in 2001. Mr. Ley, a commissioner for the Food and Drug Administration in the 1960's, made the quoted comment in the 1970's, and his name is misspelled on the book jacket.

Many alternative medicine experts agree with the core principles in "Natural Cures." But they too say Mr. Trudeau stretches the facts.

"There's enough truth in what he's saying that it gives him credibility with people who are looking for answers," said Dr. Dean Ornish, founder of the Preventive Medicine Research Institute in Sausalito, Calif., and a clinical professor of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco. "But a lot of what he says is either nonsense or not proven through credible means."

Dr. Sidney Wolfe, director of health research at Public Citizen, an advocacy group often critical of drug companies, said one problem with the book is that it has no references or index, which would help others to verify its claims. Mr. Trudeau said that inclusion would have made the already lengthy book too long.

Dr. Ornish said the text is peppered with unexplained assertions; for example: "A hospital in Mexico has virtually 100 percent success rate in eliminating cancer in a matter of weeks by giving intravenous ozone and hydrogen peroxide."

"Don't you think," asked Dr. Ornish, "that if there was a hospital that was curing cancer, we would have heard about it?"

Some, though, do not care about clinical trials or the judgment of the medical establishment. "I am so grateful I read this book," said Ms. Boruk, the allergy and headache sufferer. "It's changed my life."

posted by Dr. Frank Stech  # 1:25 PM