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  Patrick Williams waves off the barbs tossed at his profession. He told USA Today that life coaching is an entirely valid approach to modern living, destined to “change the face of psychotherapy, helping people live a better life without the stigma of needing a diagnosis or a visit to a psychotherapist they don’t want or need.” But that brings us to what is arguably the most serious risk in the entire equation: Coaches who take all comers are almost sure to get a few with serious maladjustments that require intervention from skilled mental-health professionals. Experts worry that untrained or minimally trained coaches may fail to recognize when they’re dealing with someone who is truly troubled—or, as Psychotherapy Networker editor Richard Simon writes, someone who needs more than “a good lesson plan and an enthusiastic cheerleader.”

  This is why it’s critical for life coaches to make the distinction between coaching and actual psychotherapy—and to make that distinction explicitly. Alas, too many personal coaches depend on dwelling in that gray area between informal and formal help. “It’s unrealistic,” says Benjamin Dattner, “to expect a marginal life coach to bring up caveats that may cost him business, or may make a client think he needs several levels of help and helpers. The temptation is for the coach to want all that business for himself.” In other words, not only do coaches shrink from making the distinction, but they actively imply just the opposite—that they’re there to “fix what ails you,” whatever that may be.

  Even those at the top of the nascent industry show little enthusiasm for self-examination. If anything, they appear to revel in each new coaching inroad. ICF’s own site features a link to a Washington Post article, “A Coach for Team You,” about the large numbers of people who “are skipping the shrink and hiring a life coach instead,” as the article’s subtitle put its. If large numbers of Americans with serious psychological problems are consulting coaches instead of qualified therapists, clearly there’s more to be concerned about than just what it wastes in dollars.

  7

  KILLER PERFORMANCES:

  THE RISE OF THE CONTREPRENEUR

  A failure is a man who has blundered, but is not able to cash in on the experience.

  —Elbert Hubbard

  Imagine, if you will, the sort of career one might fashion out of being stabbed, set ablaze, and shot no less than thirteen times. Drawing a blank? Meet Joseph Jennings. The former gangbanger and admitted drug dealer speaks to hundreds of schools each year as the founder and chief motivational theorist of Turning Point Inc. Jennings has traded being manhandled by cops for being backslapped by some of the nation’s premier civic leaders—starting with George W. Bush, who in 2002 added Jennings to his Presidential Advisory Council on AIDS/HIV.

  Jennings makes no effort to hide his unsavory past; in fact, it’s very much his stock in trade. “A lot of times, the kids want proof. They’ll say, let’s see some bullet holes,” the burly six-footer told me. “So I usually wear short-sleeve shirts. I carry the X-rays around, too.” Jennings’s tacky self-published autobiography, Prisoner of the American Dream, depicts him on its cover holding an assault rifle in each hand. The same basic image appears on Jennings’s ultraslick Web site for Turning Point.

  In a medium always looking for new wrinkles and methods of market differentiation, Jennings personifies one of the hottest and most controversial trends—what one might call contrepreneurship. The crimes differ, but what Jennings and his vocational think-alikes have in common is an instinct for profiting from the activities that once landed them in society’s doghouse, if not its Big House. Caterpillars reborn as butterflies, these self-styled pitchmen (and a woman or two) inhabit a postmodern alternate universe in which battle scars and prison stretches merit prominent placement on a résumé and somehow render one uncommonly qualified to expound on fulfillment and success. The cast includes:

  MICHAEL FRANZESE. If Jennings covers the gangbanger demographic, Franzese has carved out a comfortable niche as a Mob turncoat. As a bookmaking honcho in the Columbo crime family, back in 1986 he was ranked number eighteen on Fortune’s list of “The Fifty Biggest Mafia Bosses.” But he ended up in prison, where he says he found God; Vanity Fair dubbed him the “born-again don.” Since 1996 Franzese has been a fixture on the lecture circuit and at camps run by pro sports teams, who pay him to warn athletes about the dangers of gambling and other addictive, untoward behaviors. Franzese may be best-known for the 1997 pay-per-view special he produced, Live from Alcatraz, which featured top rappers and other celebrities in an effort to raise money for antidrug campaigns.

  ANNE KELLY. Kelly is the founder and leading on-air personality of Recovery Radio. An erstwhile stand-up comedienne, Universal Studios tour guide, and singing-telegram performer, Kelly became a fixture on commercials and infomercials before she began taking more than a dozen Vicodin per day and “washing them down with 90 proof schnapps.” Eventually she hit bottom. (Hitting bottom is a prerequisite for Recovery speakers; merely having your life go to pieces won’t do.) Kelly, who likes to describe herself as a “homeless double felon,” characterizes her seminars as “inspirational, motivational hours of pure hope.” The keynote image on Kelly’s Web site (perhaps inspired by Jennings?) is a small pile of Vicodin against the backdrop of a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, and behind that, an ambulance.

  TROY EVANS. Not every motivational speaker has an official bio that begins: “On November 12, 1992, Troy Evans was sentenced to 13 years in Federal Prison. He was convicted of five armed bank robberies, in three states, over a six-month crime spree, and was sent to the Federal Correctional Complex in Florence, Colorado. His neighbors included such notorious criminals as Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols.” When Evans emerged from prison more than seven years later, he had two college degrees and, he says, a will to inspire. And so he developed a seminar presentation titled “From Desperation to Dedication: Lessons You Can Bank On.” Among his more inspiring subtopics: “Playing on the Most Important Team” and “The Prison Inside You.” His patter, like that of many felons-cum-philosophers, is suffused with a certain pragmatic amorality that emphasizes “getting on with it” above all else. “It’s not important how we come to the events in our lives,” he will say, dismissing those five armed robberies in one pat line, “but how we deal with them.” Of his incarceration, Evans’s materials observe that he was “plucked from the ‘free world’ to a world of steel and concrete,” as if to imply that his loss of freedom had nothing to do with all that money he took.

  STEVE ARRINGTON. Contrepreneurs tend to have colorful backgrounds, and Arrington’s doesn’t disappoint. He is a former navy frogman (specialty: bomb disposal) and chief diver for the Cousteau Society who once was honored by Ronald Reagan for saving the life of a drowning boy. He landed the job with Cousteau two years after his release from a California prison, where he’d been serving a five-year stretch for a drug arrest—but not just any drug arrest. Arrington had gotten himself mixed up in the infamous John DeLorean sting. In the backgrounder he has prepared for school principals, Arrington says simply that he speaks “from the perspective of someone who unfortunately made a marijuana mistake that directly led to my becoming a defendant in the John DeLorean drug trial.” That statement leaves out a few steps (as well as any mention of the other drug that caused the whole DeLorean fuss). He made his “marijuana mistake” while still in the service, when he was caught selling a small amount of pot to another sailor; that ended his navy career and led him to an old millionaire friend, Morgan Hetrick, who hired him as a pilot and an aide-de-camp. Soon Arrington was piloting a small plane to a jungle hideout and picking up a quarter ton of cocaine from Hetrick’s contacts in the Medellín drug cartel. Arrington then made a Florida-to-California drive for Hetrick in a car with more than sixty pounds of coke hidden under the backseat. The coke was meant for DeLorean. That’s when he got busted. He says he was “relieved,” as he had been looking for a way out “without ending up dead.” In jail, he started to write a book that would warn young people away from drugs (th
e book would be published in 1996 as Journey into Darkness). He began making antidrug, personal-fulfillment speeches for churches, schools, and civic groups. In 1993 he left Cousteau to tour nationally and deliver multimedia presentations with such themes as “High on Adventure” and “Drugs Bite,” incorporating snazzy clips of shark encounters and other high-seas derring-do. In his material he says, “My goal is to motivate youths to reach for their dreams and not make choices that can lead to nightmares.” Today, he claims to have spoken in over fourteen hundred schools in forty-nine states. He also offers educational scuba-diving tours to Fiji.

  RON COHEN. Cohen landed in prison on three separate occasions, for a total of eleven years, because of the Ponzi schemes through which he separated Dallas socialites from an estimated $80 million. Today, Cohen is a $150-per-hour consultant to a burgeoning roster of white-collar criminals, prepping them for how to cope with prison life. (Sample insights: “Leave the Rolex home” and “Don’t start asking about a furlough or a conjugal visit the day you surrender yourself.”) His Client Advisory Group operates out of a motel because, he says, “It’s tough for an ex-con to get a rental.” Cohen is credited with the neologism “Club Fed,” which is used to describe U.S. prisons that boast such amenities as satellite TV, lavish buffet dinners, and workout facilities that few yuppie health clubs can match.

  What the contrepreneurs get out of this is clear. Ron Cohen’s $150-an-hour fee might not stack up well against the millions he used to embezzle, or even Tommy Lasorda’s going rate, but it’s a quantum improvement over the “Would you like fries with that?” wages for which so many repeat offenders must settle. Michael Franzese would rather talk to the Minnesota Vikings than a federal grand jury.

  But why America buys in . . . now that’s the question.

  One possible answer is obvious enough. “It’s sexy stuff,” says Chuck Sennewald, a legendary figure in loss prevention who is not generally a fan of the movement but nevertheless perceives the appeal. “It’s sexy, and it gets your blood going. People pay attention.” Sennewald told me that he can see where a speaker’s points, “if he has any,” would resonate more when they’re communicated “in a format like that, with bullets whizzing by and cop chases as a backdrop.”

  The rise of the lawbreaker/evangelist also bespeaks the American penchant for second chances. If these once-wayward souls have turned a glorious corner in their lives, it just naturally makes us feel better to help them celebrate it—to see them, hear them out, nod and smile at the uplifting things they say to us. Apart from anything useful that such people may contribute to the culture, the redemptive aspect alone has won the contrepreneur movement its share of kudos. Michael Ellis, a New Orleans defense attorney who has channeled his share of work to Ron Cohen, points out that on the whole society has become increasingly hard on the ex-con. “Post 9/11,” Ellis told me, “you have the specter of background checks not only to get jobs and housing, but just to fly someplace.” Amid that environment, Ellis asks, “How can you begrudge a person leaving jail for trying to make an honest living at what he knows best?”

  Above all, perhaps, the career paths of Cohen, Jennings, and the rest illustrate the lengths to which society will go in its search for a fresh new spin, almost any spin, on overcoming life’s daily challenges. Today, it’s as if surviving an ordeal—even when it was self-induced—equips a person to teach the rest of us how to quit whining and make the most of life: If so-and-so can cope with such-and-such, well then, my everyday struggles don’t amount to much. As with the traditional twelve-step Recovery movement, pain or dysfunction of almost any kind seemingly gives people a franchise to expound on the lessons of that pain.

  “Not to be overly judgmental, but what it reminds me of is the old days, before there were Son of Sam laws” was an early take on the matter from Sam Knott, whom I interviewed several times on crime-related stories after the Christmas 1986 murder of his daughter, Cara, transformed him into a vocal advocate for victims’ rights. “You’d have people who’d break the law, do horrific things, then they’d do books about it or sell the rights to their story and make a fortune. It was almost like doing the crime was a business strategy. Why do people like that deserve a platform ahead of people who always followed the straight and narrow?”

  It’s a good question, especially since the phenomenon isn’t just confined to SHAM; contrepreneurship is visible throughout American society. IRS cheats reemerge as highly paid tax seminarists. Card sharks pitch themselves to Las Vegas as consultants. Shoplifters teach retailers how to enhance loss prevention and trim employee “shrinkage.” Computer hackers draw six-figure consulting retainers from Fortune 500 companies that want to stop other hackers from crippling their systems.1 The motivational-speaking circuit seems unusually eager to hear what the contrepreneurs have to say, and has provided a solid foundation from which they can build upward after their wrongdoing.

  This, in turn, has caused some vexation among traditional consultants and other speakers who have managed to get through their entire careers without going to jail even once. “These guys are lifelong con artists, and this is just today’s con,” says Pat Murphy, a twenty-five-year veteran of the loss-prevention business and the CEO of the Web site LP Today. “My personal opinion is that they’re still doing much the same thing they did before. It’s their last laugh on the rest of us.”

  The director of the ethics program at the Wharton School of Business, Professor Alan Strudler adds, “It’s hard to miss the irony. [When they speak in a corporate setting], these fellows get top dollar from many of the same companies who won’t even hire for the most entry-level jobs without doing a background check.”

  UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL: JOSEPH JENNINGS

  In a realm not lacking for characters, Joseph Jennings stands as a special case, and an instructive one for understanding how these SHAM artists gain traction.

  For two decades beginning in adolescence, Jennings enjoyed a heady if nerve-racking lifestyle financed by drugs and gangbanging. He portrays himself as the product of a tough childhood orchestrated by a domineering father who taught him, above all, “how to survive.” Jennings steadily ascended his neighborhood’s thuggish pecking order, in part through sheer brazenness. Not content with the normal risks of drug dealing, he began hijacking shipments bound for competitors. By his early twenties, his drug business had furnished him with a large home and swimming pool, fancy clothes, gold jewelry, a Rolls-Royce—“anything I desired,” he told me, not without some pride. Eventually he moved to Southern California, where he rubbed elbows with Hollywood and music-industry types (whom he now declines to identify because, he says, he was their supply chain to mind-altering substances and other illicit items).

  Jennings’s personal epiphany took place while he plotted a murder, and a flamboyant one at that: He intended to use a .45-caliber submachine gun to kill a social worker who’d had the audacity to question his fitness as a parent. But the night before he was supposed to do the deed, his pregnant wife began to hemorrhage. On the way home from the emergency trip to the hospital, Jennings found God. God told him it was time to go straight. (For the record, baby and mother were both fine.)

  Jennings’s speaking career “started off like any other adventure,” he recalls. “You knock on doors.” He landed some local gigs, and before long the doors on which he was knocking belonged to school-district superintendents. Today he estimates that he speaks to about four hundred thousand kids a year, in as many as ten schools per week. “Things have come along,” Jennings admits, when asked how he’s doing financially. “In the beginning I drove everywhere. Now I fly.” He charges $950 per assembly. Patron organizations like the Detroit Lions bring him in to speak to multiple area schools, where he spreads his tough-love gospel of responsibility and personal choice.

  “In every assembly,” he says, “there are kids who’ve thought about committing suicide in the last thirty days. Probably half the audience doesn’t have a biological father at home. You’ve got girls
who’ve been raped ten years ago; their self-esteem is so low. A lot of young blacks are still operating under a slave mentality. They don’t want to read; they think manhood is about having babies. You have to attack that mind-set.”

  Does he think he can achieve that in one talk? Jennings replies somewhat obliquely, by criticizing society’s other quick fixes, like those urban recreational leagues now in vogue: “You take a twelve-year-old killer and you give him a basketball, you know what you have? A twelve-year-old killer with a basketball. As soon as he’s tired of playing basketball, he’s gonna kill. You have to change his heart.” And does Jennings really believe he’s the right man for the job? “Look, brother,” he says, “what we do is a start, at least. Nobody else is doin’ it.”

  Asked whether he ever senses any skepticism about his fitness to be speaking in schools, Jennings says yes, but only in the so-called good schools—and not for the reasons you’d expect. He says the resistance he encounters there is less about any skeletons in his closet than about the skeletons in theirs. “You have to realize, I would say probably 60 percent of the schools I go to are all white,” he says. “The problem in the white community is, they prefer not to talk about it. It’s about denial.” He recalls one particular school where “all hell broke out after I spoke. Turns out 65 percent of the girls started talking about how they’d been molested. People got upset. Why? Because I brought it up! Not because fathers and grandfathers were raping their daughters!”

  Some incidents have been more inspiring, Jennings says. He tells the story of the time he was speaking in Florida and a white football player rushed up to him after his performance. The boy was in tears. “He told me, ‘You saved me, you saved me.’ It was almost frightening. And he said, ‘Saturday we have a prom, and in my drawer I have a .38, and after the prom I was going to blow my brains out.’ And he said, ‘I heard you say it’s OK, you can change your mind about things.’ And he did.”