True Crime Campfire - False Profit: A Folk Hero's Fall from Grace

Episode Date: April 3, 2020

Greed can come in many forms. It’s not always about money. Some of us get greedy for attention, or drama, or sweets, or sex. In fact, there are probably as many faces of greed as there are people. But because we tend to think of greed as an insatiable hunger for money, it can be easy for the other kinds to fly right under our radar. And that can make us vulnerable. In the story we’re about to tell you, we have two kinds of greed. There’s that traditional, wolfish desire for cash—especially somebody else’s. But then there’s a subtle, insidious greed—a single-minded, self-centered obsession with enlightenment. A quest for spiritual growth that would end up destroying scores of lives, and toppling a beloved folk hero. Sources:CNBC's "American Greed," Episode "Lights! Camera! Fraud!"https://archives.fbi.gov/archives/albany/press-releases/2013/conspirators-sentenced-to-84-months-and-55-months-in-fraud-conspiracy-regarding-the-birth-of-innocence-movie-projecthttps://www.sevendaysvt.com/vermont/is-mac-parker-the-hero-or-the-villain-in-his-film-financing-drama/Content?oid=2139947https://www.ramtha.com/Follow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfireFacebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail] a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.

Hello, campers. Grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. Greed can come in many forms. It's not always about money. Some of us get greedy for attention or drama or sweets or sex. In fact, there are probably as many faces of greed as there are people. But because we tend to think of greed as an insatiable hunger for money, it can be easy for the other kinds to fly right under our radar, and that can make us vulnerable. In the story we're about to tell you, we have two kinds of greed. There's that traditional wolfish desire for cash, especially somebody else's, but then there's a subtle, insidious greed, a single-minded, self-centered obsession with enlightenment, a quest for spiritual growth that would end up destroying scores of lives.

and toppling a beloved folk hero. This is False Prophet of Folk Heroes Fall from Grace. So campers were in Vermont, late 1990s. Mac Parker was a local celebrity, a farmer in storyteller who performed for huge crowds. One reporter described him as Vermont's Garrison Keeler, though I'd do him one better than that, because in none of the recordings I've seen of him, does he make the kind of homicide-inducing mouth noises that Garrison Keeler does. And I know I'm not alone in this. No, you are not.

He's charming, but I also want to smack the taste out of his mouth. Sorry, Garrison. So he had that going for him, at least. His performances were cute, wholesome songs and rhymes about four. farming and funny stories, you know, heartwarming stuff, folksy. People love this guy. When he performed at conferences, he'd have farmers in tears. He was that good at capturing all the joys and challenges of farming life. He comes across to me as a kind of rural Ned Flanders, minus the mustache, real soft-spoken with kind of a slow, thoughtful, mellow way of talking. And looking at him,

listening to him talk, you wouldn't think that this guy had a duplicitous bone in his body. He just oozes non-threatening. Kind of like Mr. Rogers. That's how they get you. In an interview with the show American Greed, which is one of our sources for this case, Mack said storytelling was my way of both

being a part of and giving back to this community and culture that I loved. Aw, it makes it sound so nice. So in addition to being a beloved New England celebrity and entertainer, Mack was also hugely popular in his little Vermont hometown. His friends were completely devoted to him and his wife, Juliana, who suffered from chronic fatigue syndrome and had

awful flare-ups from time to time. And in 1999, Max started talking to his friends about a film project he wanted to do, a movie called The Birth of Innocence. So just based on the title, I got to be honest, I hate it already, KT. Yeah, me too. Yeah, it just sounds like a bunch of fluffy nonsense. Give me something with a juicy murder or some explosions or, you know, something like that any day, or at least some cute cats. Like if it was about the birth of kittens, I'd be all over it. That kind of innocence, yes. But anyway, he didn't ask me, so there you go. Mack told his longtime buddy composer Horace Williams, something just took me by the collar and I had to do it. He wanted Horace to work on the film as a composer and editor, and Horace

was into it. His read on the situation was that Mack was getting tired of being tight cast, as, as Horace put it, the Mark Twain of Vermont. He wanted to go in a different direction, kind of branch out a little bit. So I get that, although I would think I would love to be known as the Mark Twain of anywhere or anything, but whatever, we've all got to spread our wings sometimes. And people do get to feeling like they're in a rut when they've only done one kind of thing in their careers sometimes, especially entertainers, you know. Yeah. Mack described his vision for the birth of innocence like this. It's a film about the deeper truth of who we are. It's a simple reminder that each and every one of us has an unlimited power

and creative potential. So in case you haven't figured it out, basically campers, we're in New Age territory here. So picture lots of pan flute music and crystals and white guys with long hair, white guys with white people dreads, bare feet, you know, and you're getting the gist. And in 1999, Mack said about tapping his friend's

creative potential. And by that, I mean, they're bank accounts. So the project was supposed to, to cost about a million dollars and take three years. I want you to remember that, campers, one million dollars, three years. And this is important to keep in mind, too. When he needed investors to get this movie going, he didn't seek out wealthy venture capitalist types.

He went to the salt of the earth people that he claimed to love the most, the farmers and small business owners he had lived with and worked with all his life. The people who came to his shows and bought his videos, these weren't people who could afford to gamble with their life savings and this is the amazing thing despite the fact that Mack didn't have a formal presentation

despite the lack of a written prospectus or anything official like that people bit that was the level of credibility and trust that he had with these people somebody on American Greed called it trust capital and that's exactly what it was he had built his brand for years

as kind of the voice of the people the voice of the farmers and they just couldn't imagine him lying to them or being careless with their money or anything like that, so they bit. Despite the fact that he was offering a 15% return on investments. Oh no. 15%, which is just bonkers.

I mean, totally unrealistic and should have raised a huge glowing red flag for potential investors. But, as we've said many times before and we'll probably say many times again, people are really damn good at convincing themselves of the things they want. want to believe. And who wouldn't want to believe you're going to get a 15% return on your investment, right? Sure, I do. Yeah, no kidding. There's often an element of greed on both

sides of these con artist cases, I think, and that's not to victim blame, because I think most of us could very easily end up in the same boat as all of these people who got hosed by Mac Parker. But it is something to keep in mind, as we've said so many times, is a cautionary tale, that if something seems too good to be true, y'all, it probably is. Not saying 100% always, but probably. So an older couple named Armand Bryson and his wife Petey, who seemed like the most delightful people, like they're in that episode of American Greed, and I just want to hug them both the entire time.

Like, they're the grandparents. Everybody wants to have. They were among the first to invest with Mack Parker. They lived just down the road from him. They'd known him for years. Their grandkids were huge fans of his videos. And Armand had been a farmer for over 40 years, and Petey was a retired school teacher. So these were not wealthy people.

but they had saved a nest egg. So Mack sat down with him over coffee and made his case, told him a little bit about the film, creative potential this, enlightenment that, blah, blah, blah, truth, blah, blah, growth, whatever. Blah, blah, white people dreads. I don't know. I don't have any idea if there's any white people dreads in it. It just seems likely to me. Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah. Then he laid that 15% return on them. And between that and Mack's considerable clout in this part of the country, as the Mark Twain of Vermont, Armand and Petey felt like they couldn't say no. But that said, Armand did have a nagging little worry in the back of his mind. I mean, this was their life savings, or a big chunk of it anyway, and he was getting up there in years, and there wasn't a lot of time to make that money back if they lost it. So he said to Mac Parker, look, I cannot lose this money.

This is my retirement. Whatever you do, do not lose this money for me. And Mac reassured him, don't worry, you will never lose your money, I promise. And the paper that they signed even said in black and white, you can be certain you will be fully repaid. Okay, red flag number two. Because as far as I know, no investment is fully guaranteed. There is always going to be an element of risk. So if somebody is guaranteeing you that there's no risk, you need to keep your head on a swivel.

Or better yet, just walk the other way. But this was good enough for Armand and Pedy, bless their hearts, because again, this is Mac Parker we're talking about. And they wrote him a check. initially for $50,000, but before it was all over, they'd have invested $250,000, pretty much their entire retirement nest egg in Mack's Birth of Innocence movie. And Max soon realized he was really damn good at reeling in investors. This was a natural talent that he had. And his fundraising methods were as folksy as his performances. They didn't happen in conference rooms. They happened at kitchen tables or coffee shops. He told American Greed, I would make a point of looking lenders directly in the eye and saying, I promise you that this money will be repaid.

I mean, look, if Mr. Rogers came to you and asked you to invest in his movie, wouldn't you be tempted? I would. It was Mr. Rogers. And soon, I mean, the money started rolling in. They were getting their 15% interest every month. Every investor he brought on board thought they were part of a very small, select elite group of just a few people hand chosen by Mac. But when the shit hit the fan a decade later, they would be stunned. to find out how many of them there really were and just how much money Mac had managed to collect. Work began on the movie in 2002, and Mac sent frequent letters to his investors to keep them updated on the progress. It was always great news, and Mac used his storytelling skills to great effect

to capture what an amazing experience this movie was, and how groundbreaking it was going to be, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. In one of the letters, he wrote, There is a grace and power and a momentum behind the project that is unmistakable and a joy to experience. This movie was going to change the way people thought, man. And despite the whole thing sounding suspiciously like a product description for Gwyneth Paltrow's new room spray on goop.com, the investors were pleased. They were getting their 15% returns every month. Now, y'all know how a Ponzi scheme works, right?

It's simple. You reel in investors and promise them nice, healthy returns. Then you reel in more and use the new investors' money to pay the returns for the old investors. You're not actually investing the money. You're just robbing Peter to pay Paul. And you have to constantly raise new money to keep your previous investors happy. You keep that going until it gets too big to work anymore and the house of cards collapses. At which point, you either flee and leave everybody in a lurch or somebody exposes

you and you go to jail. No particular reason I'm mentioning that now. Just, you know, it's interesting stuff. Right, right. It's just good to know. So word was getting around about the movie and how well it was going and the nice returns the investors were getting and more people were getting interested. Some prominent citizens joined the ranks, including Jerry Greenfield, yes, of Ben and Jerry's ice cream. Oh, Jerry. It was just the kind of socially conscious project he liked. Oh, man, Jerry, bless your heart, honey. Just stick to making chunky monkey. That shit is so good, y'all know. But then I never met a flavor of Ben and Jerry's that I didn't Mike, like they're all heaven.

Now, I'm going to be obsessing about ice cream for the rest of the short thing. Yeah, I know. We don't even have any ice cream in the house. No, we don't either. Oh, that's right. Before long, Mac was raising a shit ton of money. Sometimes upwards of $100,000 to $150,000 a week. Cheese and frickin' crackers.

Now, remember what we told you a little while ago, Campers? At the start, Mac told his investors that this project is going to cost $1 million and take three years. Yeah, not so much, it turns out. The project dragged on and on

and on, and some of the investors were starting to wonder when the hell this thing would be done. But Matt kept sending the letters. Everything is going great, we're getting there. The movie is in post-production year after year.

We're in post-production. Well, for God's sakes, how long can post-production take? People were confused, but because they trusted Mac, they accepted what he was telling them. Finally, Armand Bryson, his wife, P.D., and a bunch of other investors got to see a draft of the film at a private screening. P.D. was not impressed, by the way. It was a lot of images of beaches and fields and grim-looking children and old people. and a girl with curly hair standing on a hilltop with the wind running through her hair. Petey was like, why isn't anyone smiling?

She thought it was bizarre. Petey, come on, girl. You know, you can't be walking around smiling all willy-nilly if you're on a quest for enlightenment. Don't you know anything? God, Petey. There's a serious spiritualiness going on here. You got to take it serious. Or, I mean, I guess you could smile, but it has to be like an inscrutable.

Mona Lisa-like smile that lets everybody know that you're way further along than they are and have spent way more money on crystals. Otherwise, you might as well just not even be enlightened in the first place. Just don't even bother. And, okay, I have seen one of the trailers for this thing, which did eventually get finished

and campers, I just... Okay, let me put it to you this way. If you ever need to self-induce a coma, now's your lucky day. Because all you would need to do is watch the three-minute, 37-second trailer for the birth of innocence, and it will shut down all measurable brain activity within probably the first 30 seconds. I guarantee you, if you put you on an MRI, it would show like flatline. And I put the time in because I literally could not believe

how short it was after I finished watching it. Like, that was only three minutes and 37 seconds. Are you kidding me? Like, it felt like a half an hour. Yeah, but in enlightenment time, it was half an hour. That's right. It's like geologic time. I literally almost couldn't get all the way through without falling asleep. Like I was nodding off, like just watching this thing. It's like a soporific. So I mean, you know, maybe it's some people's cup of tea, especially if you're an insomniac. But if it's not yours, may I suggest the born identity?

That was a fun movie. It had like characters and lines and like a plot and stuff. This one just seems like a lot of people standing around looking vague while a narrator tells us how we've all forgotten how to live. well we have Whitney I guess so I felt very shamed by the narrator oh I will see here's me sitting here with my heart beating and everything I thought I was living

but I'm not because obviously I don't have enough crystals no you gotta buy more yeah goop.com that's our sponsor for this show oh god never that is a joke over my dead body oh my god over my dead body

Gwyneth Paltrow we don't have enough money please don't sue us So, P.D. and the other investors were maybe a little confused, maybe not quite sure what the hell kind of movie they'd gotten themselves involved with. And they were puzzled about why it was taking so long to finish. But they all still trusted Mac Parker. New Age Ned Flanders would never do them dirty. That's exactly what he is. Okay. Fast forward to 2008. The Birth of Innocence has been in production for eight years when the big recession hit. Mack's investors started to worry, as everybody did at the time.

But despite the huge fallout from the stock market crash, Mac assured his investors that their money was 100% safe. Not only that, he encouraged them to invest. invest more. He encouraged them to talk their friends into investing. Birth of Innocence was a quote, safe and lucrative investment.

He wrote this to his investors in December of 2008. This was in the thick of the financial crisis campers. Mac Parker had a gift for talking people around. He knew what they wanted to hear. And he probably

also had an instinctive understanding that people want to be convinced that good things are true. And when you want to be convinced, you've already done half the work for your manipulator. Mr. Folksey managed to lull these people into a false sense of security in the middle of the worst financial crisis in decades. And nobody was asking a lot of questions. It was just, sure, Mac, how much more do you need? One of the new investors who came on during the financial crisis was a guy named Jerry Rule. Oh, my God, this poor dude. I know.

This guy had been going through hell. He'd run a successful garbage hauling business for 20 years, but then a whole shitstorm of bad luck hit him. First, he got into a bad motorcycle accident. He shattered one of his femurs. He almost died of blood loss, and he spent a week in intensive care. he recovered but he was disabled now and having trouble running his business on top of that he and his wife were going through a divorce and then about six weeks after jerry's accident his wife suddenly died of an infection jeez louise this was a total shock given her age and jerry's kids were devastated at the loss of their mom i can't even imagine god all that in such a quick amount of time just hellish yeah this guy this guy

has had the worst run of bad luck so far. So now, Jerry is a disabled single dad struggling to keep his business running. He was in trouble. But then, his biggest competitor offered him a lifeline. They wanted to buy his business. Jerry was sad to do it, but he didn't really feel like he had a choice. So he signed the papers and walked away with $2 million. That's a lot of money, but Jerry also had kids to feed and clothe and put through college.

Plus, his ability to work was really limited now because of his injuries. So now he wanted to find a way to make that money grow as much as possible. Yeah, and before long, Mack Parker heard about Jerry's windfall and came around for coffee. Now, I want to make this very clear campers. Mack knew Jerry's situation. He knew about his accident, his disability, his kids losing their mom, out of the blue, all of it. And he still chose to do this. So, screw you, Mr. Frodgers. You know, I love a good pun. Mr. Frodgers. And bless Jerry's heart, he was actually wary

at first because Mack offered him a 20% return, which is even 5% more than the crazy promise that the original investors got. I guess at this point he was trying to sweeten the pot so people wouldn't balk at investing during a recession but you know jerry despite that nagging little voice in the back of his head he was in a tough spot and he kept thinking i can't work as much as i used to i'm my kid's only financial support now and that 20% was just too good to pass up he had bought a motel with part of his two million dollars and every red cent that was left went to mac everything he had left oh my god it's just it makes me stick to my stomach so yeah it's It's just, it's nauseating.

So in 2009, Mack told his composer, editor buddy Horace Williams, that a financier was coming to visit and planning on investing a big chunk of money in the film. And supposedly he was driving all the way from Oregon to Vermont, which struck Horace as a bit odd. Like, why would you drive that enormous distance instead of flying? I mean, that's really far. So it seemed like he's maybe a bit of an odd bird. And then Mac dropped a bombshell. He said, oh, by the way, the film was his idea. And Horace is like, I'm sorry.

And Mac said, yeah, birth of innocence was this guy's idea back in 99. He was the one who first suggested I do it. So, okay, well, this was the first Horace had ever heard of this guy at all. And the first time Mac had ever said a word about the film not being his own idea. And Horace had been working on this thing for like five years now. So this was weird as hell. And it was about to get quite a bit weirder. Because Max said, oh, and by the way, you should know that.

that this guy, he's really spiritually enlightened, really advanced. He's almost gotten to the point where he can walk through walls. Walk through walls. And Horace was like, oh my God, the new investor is Casper the friendly ghost?

Yes. I can only imagine how poor Horace Williams felt hearing this. He probably, like, heard helicopter blades and the apocalypse now music start up in his head and just like went into the thousand yard stare. Because, I mean, his life flashed him before his eyes. He had spent

years of his life countless hours dedicated to this movie like this is his job. And now he's finding out that all along it's been the brainchild of a guy who claims he can walk through walls. Not good. Not good. So Horace told American greed that his reaction

to this astonishing statement was to say, uh, Mac, knock knock. Hello? So sing it with me now, campers. Red flags busting out. all over. Yet again, we've got red flags busting out all over. And soon, Horace had the pleasure of meeting this fella.

This man Mack described as his spiritual advisor. That's another red flag. His name was Lou Citerio. And Horace, let's say, was not impressed with Lou. The day he rolled into town, he paced around Horace's studio, waving his arms, blathering on about his spiritual beliefs. Horace said it sounded like he was reciting from a script that he'd prepared. Stuff like, the greatest act of love is to love yourself into forever.

Oh, boy. And so on. I suspect Lou loves himself very much into forever, judging by what we're about to find out about him. Okay, everyone has their talents, right? But if, like, a yoga instructor came to me with an idea about inventing a perpetual motion machine with no engineering background, I'd be skeptical. So this spiritualist was like, oh. I'm going to make a movie I mean Mac was an entertainer

but this guy no not so much he's chiropractor it was his idea his idea and he had had heavy influence like it was going to come out soon that he had been pretty much pulling the strings from day one which is probably why this movie was so weird and like unentertaining

in any way shape or form so by now some of the investors were finally starting to get nervous Mac says one of them asked him if he was running a Ponzi scheme. So people are obviously starting to like sense the red flags and he says, I told him no, it wasn't a Ponzi scheme. I didn't even know what a Ponzi

scheme was. Oh, God. Uh-huh. Max Folksey Charm must have been waning a bit by that point because in October of 2009, the Vermont Department of Financial Regulation got a call from a concerned investor. So the regulators

called Mack in for a meeting and they said okay, look, we have some let's call them concerns about what you're doing here and whether it's you know legal or not so we're going to need to look into some things and it'd be a real good idea for you to stop fundraising until we can

figure all this out right simple enough and Max said sure no problem I understand makes perfect sense everything's fine I'll just hold off yeah do we think he stopped raising money campers he did not Mr. Fragers kept right on truck in he approached

a friend of his and Juliana's a business woman named Sherry Goodwin made his usual pitch promise his usual high rate of return and sherry considered mac and juliana really good friends and she remembered how hard it was to finance her own dream when she first got her business started so she wanted to help so she handed over a hundred thousand dollars and when she went to sign the contract that mac handed her

she noticed that he had backdated it to september 30th we're into october already and mac told her it was to give her an extra month of interest payments and she thought that was just so sweet and thoughtful of him but of course in reality he backdated the papers to September 30th because it was on October 1st that the state regulators had told him

to stop raising funds so he's just a little weasel trying to get away with something and unsurprisingly it didn't take long for the state to find out he was still raising money and so they stepped in and froze his bank accounts and when Sherry Goodwin found out about this naturally she freaked out

and she called Mack and she fired a million questions at him questions that she now realizes she should have asked before, handing over a check for $100 grand, like, how much money have you raised and how many investors are there? And Mac was like, I'm not sure, actually. I'm not, what? I don't know. The man had millions of dollars running through his hands by now, and he wasn't sure. Just cheese and crackers. Yikes. I'm sure if for any of the investors, that would just give you a sick feeling in the pit of your stomach. Yeah. So the regulators started digging deeper, joined now by the IRS, and Camper's, remember how this movie was supposed to cost $1 million and take three years?

Well, now we're about nine years in, and guess how much money Mac Parker is raised and from how many investors? Hold on to your marshmallows, because by October of 2009, New Age Ned Flanders had raised $28 million from about 700 investors. 700 people 700 people and the investigators soon realized that less than 5 cents on the dollar of that 28 million had actually gone to the production of the movie

and a crazy amount of it had gone into the pocket of Mack's spiritual advisor Mr. Lusitario almost $4 million of it in fact so now they realized that this guys ended up to his neck so who the hell was Lusitario and why was Mac Parker funneling so much investor money into his pockets.

So it was becoming clear to the investigators that Lou had been a silent partner in this film project from day one. And when the investors found out about this, they were just bowled over. Armand Bryson said, nobody would have given him a dime if they had known that he had a silent partner, especially this particular silent partner who is clearly a loon. Mack had met Lou Stereo in the late 80s when somebody had recommended his kiro. and quote, new age body work and energy work services to Mack's wife Juliana for her chronic fatigue. And according to Mack, none of Juliana's doctors had been able to help her, but after a few sessions with Citerio, she felt better.

And soon Mac started getting treatments too. Now, look, y'all, I have chronic illness myself, too, in fact. And I am not going to dogg on anybody who seeks out alternative forms of medicine, whether that's a chiropractor or a Reiki practitioner or an herbalist or whatever. Because when you're not getting enough relief from your doctors, you'll try anything. I completely get that. And sometimes it works great and sometimes not, but you'll try it because, of course, you will. And if it works for you, you go for it, fam. So please do not interpret the amount of scorn that you're going to hear us heap upon this jackhole lucetario as any kind of dis on alternative medicine.

Because it is not. It is a diss on him. Because he is a prick of epic proportions. But that said, Lou wasn't just providing nutritional advice and energy healing and chiropractic work. He told Mack he could guide him spiritually. Matt quoted him of saying If you want to understand the laws of God These higher potentials that all of us have

I can teach you this Yeah Lou convinced Mac that the reason he could heal Juliana When no one else could Was that he had godlike talents He was He was just so far ahead Of the average person in spiritual enlightenment

And Mac was intrigued Well, let's see his heart. Yep. And in 1999, Lou told Mack that it was time for him to take an important step in his spiritual development. Lou wanted Mack to go with him to a seminar at the Ramtha School of Enlightenment. Ah, I'm intrigued. What is this Ramtha School of Enlightenment, Katie?

I cannot wait to tell you. It's a New Age religion, basically, based in a little town in Washington State. Uh-huh. They hold retreats and seminars and spread their particular brand of woo-woo far and wide online. Their leader is a Barbara Streisand-looking blonde woman named Jay-Z Knight. Which I refuse to believe is her real name. Probably not. Jay-Z claims she can channel the spirit of Framtha, a 35,000-year-old warrior who, for some reason, is super enlightened, I guess.

Maybe just by virtue of being, you know, dead. No. When you die, I think God takes away the dumb parts of your brain that you dedicate to watching cat videos and eating Taco Bell. I hate those are. Those are my favorite parts of my brain. What are you saying? No. But he takes those out and just stuffs enlightenment in.

Well, that sucks. Something else to dread about death. Right? Listen, if Taco Bell is a part of your enlightenment, I don't want it. So, whatever. their website is a treat though you can check it out yourself although it shouldn't surprise you that most of romtha's teachings ain't free yeah and you can only see the prices if you create an account and log in at which point i suspect you'd be on their mailing list for the rest of your

life possibly future lives as well because you never know with these culty new age types they can own your ass for eternity but i suspect it's like ridiculously expensive i mean if you're going to have a new age, like, religion. What's the point if you're not going to charge, like, $10,000 per class, right? Right. Absolutely. One of the Ramtha quotes on the website is, whatever you think, whatever you come to realize, lifts and expands consciousness everywhere. Just let those frufey little pseudo-profound cliches wash over you campers. Ah, isn't it nice? There are educational materials have titles like,

In the beginning, there was the void, and the void contemplated itself. That just sounds like the name of an indie band, or an indie band's new album. It does, and so does, a snowfall of gods. Okay, that's the name of the band itself. It's like, next up, on college radio, a snowfall of gods with their new hit, In the beginning, there was the void, and the void contemplated itself. Oh, this one's nice. Fall in love with your wonder.

That's the song, All the Purist fans of the indie band Hate. They sold out with that one. There's one called The Akashik Record, The Mind of God, and the Quantum Field, which is interesting, because remember cult leader Terry Hoffman from season two? Yep. She was obsessed with the Akashic record as well. Yep. And this one is my personal favorite. Could it be that you are already dead?

No. No, I think I'd know. Actually, you know what? Hang on a second. I can help with this. So campers take two fingers. Now lay them carefully against your wrist. Do you feel a pulse?

Yes? Congratulations. You are not already. dead. Oh, man. And you can also perform a backup check by laying a hand on your chest again carefully. Okay, is it moving? Yes. Congratulations. You are not already dead. Dang it. So I spent all that money for nothing? Anyway, y'all didn't you have to pay anything for that. No, not a dime. Whitney's wisdom is free campers. Okay. So Lou Caterio wanted he and Mack to go for a bros retreat at this Ramtha school.

But there was a catch, because isn't there always? In order to show Lou, he was really serious about his spiritual growth, Mac had to raise $150,000 and give it to Lou. Or else, no rampa retreat for him. I imagine this was Lou's way of testing Mac to see how much he could ring out of the guy. Yeah, definitely. how much he could get his new disciple to do for him. So, Mack sold the rights to the video recordings of some of his storytelling performances and raise the money.

In Toulouse Pocket, it went, and they did their retreat at the ramp of school, which, by the way, is a setting the American Greed narrator described as palatial. So it sounds like Miss Jay-Z Knight does very well for herself. And for the kind of prices I suspect they charge for these retreats, it better be palatial. They better be serving caviar with flakes of gold and expensive wine to all their students. But I also suspect that they teach their students to live life like ascetic monks, eating rice and veggies while the real enlightened ones are eating steak. And while they were there, getting all worked up into a frenzy of spiritual enlightenment, or whatever. Lou told Mac he'd had a vision. Mac was going to make a movie. He was going to call it the birth of innocence. It was going to change lives. And of course, Mac would have to raise the

money to get it done. Lou said, don't worry about your friends, your investors. Don't worry about the money. Everyone will be repaid. And the rest was history. Mack said about draining as much money as he could out of his community, the people who supported his career over the years. The people who had come to his shows, bought his videos, loved him as a local hero. The people he said he loved. Meanwhile, Lou was tightening his psychological grip on Mac. By the end, according to Mack's lawyer, Mac felt almost like an abused spouse. He was so under Cotario's thumb. Lou had a strong personality, to say the least. And the dynamic between them was very much master and student. We said there were multiple kinds of

greed, right? Well, Lou and Mac represent two different kinds. Lou wanted money, and I think adulation. As for Mac, he was greedy for personal growth. I think he had. I think he had. I think he had spiritual FOMO. He wanted to sit at the table with the cool kids. He wanted to be able to channel ancient warrior spirits. He wanted to be able to walk through walls. He didn't want to be Mark Twain anymore. He wanted to be Deepak Chopra or something.

And Lou made sure he knew that if Lou didn't get what Lou wanted, Mac wouldn't get what he wanted either. No spiritual enlightenment for you. Unless, you keep me happy. And, you know, one would think that Mack might be capable of seeing the inherent contradiction in that, but guess not. So in the summer of 2010, federal investigators got a warrant to search Mack Parker's house. And among the evidence they discovered there was a series of voicemails from Lucetario. And these made a number of things very clear.

First, that Lou was heavily involved in all this and in frequent contact with Mack Parker and his family. second that he was treating the pool of investor money as his own personal cash machine Mac had given him blank checks for the bank accounts with the investor funds and in some of the voicemails Lou lets Mac know he's putting 10 grand five grand whatever amount he wants into his own bank account over and over again just helping himself to investors money investors who did not know he existed

which is just ugh the betrayal of that is astounding and in a lot of the voicemails Lou waxed eloquent about his own spiritual quest and the X-Men-like superpowers he was supposedly developing for one thing Lou claimed he learned how to leave his body

little trick he called dissolving he said in one of the voicemails grab one square toilet paper and you raise that sucker and that sucker's heavy compared to just raising my hand it's so light

it's so awesome my brain's about to explode My body's starting to just dissolve more and more, but it's okay. Everything's cool. Yeah. Cool. I know if I found my body dissolving, I would totes be chill about that. You know, I wonder if it ever occurred to Lou or to Mack Parker, for that matter,

that for somebody as allegedly enlightened as he was, Lou sure seemed to like money. The records that the investigators found show that he spent lots of time skiing and tell your ride. He spent five grand a month. month on supplements, $100,000 on luxury hotels, tens of thousands on skin care products, all adding up, as we said earlier, to almost $4 million. Hmm, doesn't seem very enlightened to me somehow. And Mack was using investor money for his family's expenses, too. Now, he didn't indulge the way that Lou did, because I don't think he was in this for the money,

he lived pretty simply. But he did use about a million dollars worth of investor funds for just household expenses. So, yeah. The rest of the money went to pay investor returns. That's the way Ponzi schemes work, remember, and a wee little fraction of it went to the actual production of the movie. But, you know, money, it's meaningless in the grand scheme of the cosmos, right? And having a real damn job, I would imagine gets in the way of one's personal spiritual quest.

At least that seemed to be Lou's attitude. And any time Mack would express concern about how much money he was raking in from these people that he called friends and how little of it was going where they thought it was going, Lou would say, look, Mac, buddy, grasshopper. Everybody's going to get paid back, no problem. Don't worry about it. Well, how? How is everybody going to get paid back?

Well, Lou was working on a little something. He had a plan. He was working on a little something he called popping. Now, popping was essentially time travel. No big deal, right? Soon, Lou said, He'd be able to pop into the future, just far enough to see the winning lottery numbers. And then he would just pop back, give the numbers to Mac, and Mac would buy a ticket and win millions of dollars.

Bada Bing, Bada boom. Everybody makes out like a bandit. Now, I can't see a flaw in that logic. That is what I call a plan. Flawless, right? Pretty flawless. You know, I would think, though, that whoever is in charge of enlightening people and giving them superpowers or whatever would frown on cheating and theft. But, I mean, what do I know? I spent two hours today trying to get enough money in Animal Crossing to buy a bigger house. So I'm even materialistic in video games.

Yeah, I think you're being unfair. I don't think it really counts as cheating per se if you're using your like uber spiritual powers to do it. Because ultimately you're trying to help people, right? Yeah. I have a question, though, because if you're intending to time travel into the future to get the lotto numbers to bring back to Mac. Would you then be seeing Mac winning the lotto numbers? I suppose if you wanted to pop forward and watch. Huh. Interesting. I'm just curious. Time travel breaks my brain. I don't even know. I know. This was his plan. So needless to say when Max investors found out about all this,

it hit him like a wrecking ball. For a while, a lot of Max investors had stood by him. They knew he was being investigated, and a lot of them had talked to the feds and been questioned the stuff, but many, many of these people had completely refused to believe that Mack had intentionally misled them. Some of them actually spoke out publicly on his behalf, calling the investigation a witch hunt and vouching for his character and all this. But once the news about Lucetario broke and popping and dissolving and all this and walking through walls, that changed, as you can well imagine. Armand and Petey, who were both in their 70s by this point, had lost their life savings, about $250,000.

Jerry ruled the disabled single father whose kids had just lost their mom had given Mack this is going to kill you $400,000. Oh, God. And they were just a few of the 700 people. I mean, this devastated whole families. And it hurt a lot worse because it was such a personal betrayal.

I mean, even the ones who hadn't been close friends with Mac Parker, everyone had at least felt like they knew him from his performances and videos. that had been a part of their lives for years and he was just such an easygoing guy he seemed so gentle and kind and nice so getting hosed by this guy would feel like getting blasted in the ass by Bob Ross

you know it would come that far out of left field so cautionary tale you've got to be really careful about folksiness campers you know give the side eye to folksy because remember what Gavin DeBecker says and the gift of fear charm is a verb it's a skill and folksiness is most definitely a type of charm and it can disarm you to the point where you might end up giving

a dufus like Mac Parker your life savings and he was most definitely a dufus I mean I have no doubt about that I mean raise your hand if you would have bought one molecule of lucetario's horseshit about walking through walls and dissolving anybody no raise your hand if you would have been reassured by his plan to just pop round to the middle of next week

and grab a winning set of lotto numbers No, not seeing any hands up, didn't think so. But doofus or not, Mac Parker knew he was deceiving these people. He looked them right in the eye and he lied to them and he admits that. So it may very well be that he really did believe the movie would happen and that everybody would get paid back in the end. That's what he says, that he really believed everyone would be made whole. He believed in Lou. But he still knew he was taking these people's money.

money under false pretenses. So I don't give a shit either way. Me neither. In March 2012, a grand jury indicted both Mack Parker and Lucetario on a slew of fraud charges. Horace Williams, by the way, the composer and editor of the film, is completely innocent in all this. We want to make that very clear. Yeah. He was paid a fee for his work and never had a hand at any of the fundraising stuff. In 2013, Mac agreed to cooperate with the feds and to testify against Lou, who he now says he realizes was a fraud with no special powers.

It's a little late there, buddy. Bless you're hard, honey. Jeez, Louise. Oh, God. And once Lou got wind of that, he pled guilty and was given a seven-year prison sentence. It's not enough, but it's not enough. But it's something. I'm sure he's in there trying to work out how to walk through walls and get out.

But as of now, it doesn't seem to be going well. At Mack's sentencing, Armand and Petey spoke about how they were now forced to go back to work instead of retiring, despite being in their late 70s. Oh, God, that is just, that is just infuriating. Mack left them with nothing. Yep. After years and years, you have 40 years of farming. farming, which is hard work. And so is school teaching and painstakingly saving that money.

And this asshole just took it and gave it to this idiot lucidario. Farming will ruin your body. Oh, yeah. The man is almost 80 years old. It's disgusting. This guy should never have seen daylight again, neither of the two of them, in my opinion. Jerry Rule told the court that he was a shell of the person he used to be, that his kids were the only thing keeping him going. Oh, God, bless his heart.

Yeah. The U.S. attorney had recommended that Mack get a three-year sentence as a way to compensate him for his cooperation in the case against Lou. But after hearing the victim impact statements, the judge, Judge Christina Rice, said, nah, fuck that, and added another year and a half to his sentence. So he ended up with four and a half. Not nearly enough, in my opinion, but good for that judge. She wasn't having any of his crap. Yeah, and they can only do so much within the sentencing guidelines for whatever they're pleading guilty to. So I think she did what she could. Max's own takeaway from the whole thing was that he, quote, gave away my own internal compass.

I gave away listening to my own guidance, to my own sense of right and wrong, to my own common sentence. Don't you think? A little bit? Just a bit. Just a bit. He believed a guy could walk through walls. That's nothing. Yeah.

he says he's learned his lesson. I assume he's out of prison now, but we couldn't find anything about what he's up to these days. He wrote a novel, but that was in 2012 while all this was going on before he went to prison. Yeah, and I haven't read it. And I don't plan to because I'm going to take a hard pass on taking any life lessons from this dickhead.

Thank you very much. That's the nerve of this asshole to write a novel. You can take your little stories and your little life wisdom and you can shove them right up your ass. I'm sorry, no. His and Lucitorios and Romptha's brand of enlightenment strikes me as meaningless and cliché. Because here's the thing, and I'm all for spiritual growth, but a lot of the stuff they say is so vague, you can just make it mean almost anything you want. Like, okay, this is one of Mac Parker's descriptions of birth of innocence. He said, this is a film about that sweet and sweet.

precious and deeper place that we all have inside of us. It's a film about that deeper truth, and it's a reflection. It's a mirror that holds that up to you and says, I know you're in there. Okay, what does that mean? What does that mean? It's either so vague as to be almost meaning less because you can interpret it so many ways, or it's so obvious that it's like, well, duh, and it hardly needs to be said in the first place. And a lot of the romp the quotes that you can find on Jay-Z Knight's website are exactly the same way. And like I said, I'm all for spiritual growth. I'm all for getting to know yourself and thinking hard about the world around us and our purpose in it. That is well worth doing. But the thing is

you've got to actually ask hard questions. You can't just gaze down at your own navel and so much of the like rom-the stuff it's about getting to know you. Well, how about we focus on how we can make the world better? How about we not always just be turning inward all the time? You know, maybe that's the problem is we're also freaking self-centered. You can't just navel gaze. It can't all be about like feel-good language and clichés about loving yourself it's harder than that you know it's grittier than that damn it I can work out about this stuff and Deepak Chopra actually talks about this he calls it fake enlightenment and he's right you know well no one wants to work hard to feel good and like like I said like loving yourself is really important like I get that but you're not going to achieve that just

from like being in an echo chamber with a bunch of other people and kind of smiling vaguely and saying really cliche stuff that doesn't really mean a whole lot like you've got to get in like i said it's gritty you know you got to do the work it's like how people go to therapy and they just expect that their problems are going to just magically disappear well that's not how it works the therapist doesn't fix you they guide you and you do it yourself and it's hard and it takes time you know it's not it's you're not going to buy crystals off a goop and like put them on your windowsill and like suddenly feel like a million dollars the next day like you've got to get your hands dirty And yeah, it hurts.

Yeah, exactly. Going to therapy does not feel good because you're confronting parts of yourself that aren't pretty, that are damaged, that you need to weed out the bad stuff. And it hurts. It doesn't feel good. But at the end of the day, you're going towards a goal. And what kills me, what kills me about this kind of shit is exactly what you said about these feel good buzzwords. And it makes me so angry because. Literally, you could walk into a home goods right now and find some bullshit $10

poster. A frickin' men. That's precisely what I'm saying. Yeah. It's a mirror that hold that up to you and says, I know you're in there. Are you fucking kidding me? What does that mean I know you're in? Well, a fucking course I'm in there.

Like, everybody's in there. What are you talking about? Give me something I can use. This is just like granola live, laugh, love. That's all the frick it is. It's just live, laugh, love for freaking hippies. Well, and like, you have these buzzwords in every single subculture, right? You have the live, laugh, love for the, the Karen's, the wine moms.

And then for like the business people, you've got the people that'll be like, we've got to take the big data hyperlocal and get to the personalization of the synergy. Corporate speak. It's awful. But yeah, exactly, like the stuff you're going to hear if you go to like a team building retreat or something. And campers, you really have to train yourself to sift out the bullshit. Yeah. Because sometimes people know the language, and that's where cults come in and cults start to drag people in is because they get you speaking their language.

Yeah. And you need to be aware that when somebody says something that sounds good, that sounds pretty, but then when you think about it, it doesn't actually mean anything, that's a huge red flag. Yeah, and then it just becomes about the group dynamics, and anybody who puts a toe out of line is shunned, and suddenly you're stuck in a situation where you either tow the line or you're treated like garbage, and you've gotten so insulated into this group that now you don't have an outside support system, and there you go. We got Scientology, we got Jonestown, you know. And honestly, I don't know about this rump the School of Enlightenment, whether it's on anybody's radar as a potential cult, but it certainly seems to me to be the type of place that might. Just from looking at the website, it's like, yikes. And I'm sorry, if anybody tells me they're channeling the spirit of a 35,000-year-old warrior

that supposedly knows the secrets of the universe and they're charging money to come and hear that, I have some questions. I'm sorry, I find that suspicion. My first question is how fucking dare you. And it's always some, like, blonde white lady. It's always a trickin white person. Every time. Yeah.

It's always. It's always some, like, blonde white lady. And, like, listen, Mac Parker is certainly not on the waiting list for Mensa. He was a, he's really a hymbo. He's so dumb. Guys, I, like, we, we watched interviews with him because he did appear on American Greed, by the way. You guys can watch it there. But he just didn't seem to grasp even after he'd been caught.

Oh, absolutely not. I think he set, he used a lot of lip service as, yes, I understand that's bullshit. But did he? Like, you get to the point of spending six figures to go to New Age sleepaway camp. Mm-hmm. And not one thing raises a red flag for you. I mean, he was so under this guy's influence, but use your brain, dude. And he talks about like, oh, I know I, you know, I gave up my own sense of what was right.

and true for this other person, which is what people who escape from cults say all the time. In fact, there was a quote, if you remember from season two, our episode about Terry Hoffman and the cult of conscious development. One of her former followers said almost that exact same thing, like

almost word for word. Exactly. So, you know, I think he does have some clarity about it, but whether he really gets the harm that he did to these people, I give him props for admitting, I know I committed a crime, I know what I did was wrong, but you're about to see here in a minute that there are a couple things that make me

a little suspicious that he's not maybe as remorseful as he claims. Just be careful. When you're, I mean, listen, I own crystals. I don't believe they have any healing properties. They're pretty. They're pretty. And maybe they do.

Fine. Like, I don't care. I was just using that as an example of like the accoutrements that a lot of people who probably don't know shit about it. They're expensive is the thing. And when a Paltrow sells them. So, fuck her. Don't sue us, Miss Paltrow, ma'am.

But my point is, is that, you know, you have these people that can say the right words and are seeking enlightenment. When in reality, how much money do you have to fucking pay to go talk to Jay-Z Knight? Yeah. How much money do you have to pay to get a psychic reading from Sylvia Brown? Ugh. You know? Yes. Rest and not peace.

Or take a Scientology class or whatever. And here's the thing, at the end of the day, one of the most surprising, I think, and also in a weird way comforting lessons of my adult life has been to figure out that nobody has it figured out. You know what I mean? Like, this hero worship that it can be way too easy to fall into, which is exactly what Mack Parker did with this lucidario guy,

is a really slippery slope. because then you might end up substituting somebody else's judgment for your own and what I have learned in getting to know some people who when I first met them seemed like they really had it figured out they had their shit together like nobody had ever seen they're just messes just like everybody else once you get to know them you see there's insecurities there and God bless them for it I've got them too that to me it's comforting to know that we're all just kind of figuring it out and there's levels of course some people have it figured out a little more than others but nobody is going to be able to

just tell you the secret it's just not going to happen we're all just figuring it out as we go along so trust yourself you know trust yourself think for yourself the greatest gift you can give to yourself is just realizing that no one's perfect yeah and if somebody says that they can give you perfection look at them sideways don't because they're lying yeah so anyway let's get off our soapboxes. At one point, a documentary filmmaker was making a movie about Mac, but it got put on hiatus back in 2014, and to the best of my knowledge, it hasn't been made. Which is, I'm sure, a great loss to the world of cinema. Speaking of which, Birth of Innocence did get finished. Oh, goody. Not by Mac Parker, by Horace Williams, and a Hollywood filmmaker

named Martin Gigi. You can watch on Amazon video or Vimeo, if you're bored enough. Based on the two trailers we've seen of it, I would recommend it as a damn effective sleep aid or possibly a tool for self-hypnosis. Mack Parker tried to fight Horace and Gigi for the rights to the film, by the way. Which makes me really question his whole spiel about wanting to finish the movie so he can pay back his investors. Fighting to keep control of the movie did nothing but delay its completion

and put it at risk of never being finished since Mac barely had a penny to his name at that point. Seems like his ego may have been more important to him than his investors after all. It kind of makes you wonder how sincere that remorse really was. Anyway, we hope Mac Parker has learned his lesson and we feel nothing but sympathy for the hundreds of people he screwed over with this nonsense. Be careful out there, campers. Before you hand over your money, make damn sure you know who you're dealing with and get everything in writing.

Amen to that. So that was a wild one, right folks? You know, we'll have another one for you next week. But for now and more than ever, lock your doors, light your lights, and stay safe until we get together again around the true crime campfire. We hope you're staying safe and healthy out there. You can follow us on Twitter at T.C. Campfire, Instagram at True Crime Campfire, and be sure to like our Facebook page. If you want to support the show and get access to extras, please consider becoming a patron at patreon.com slash true crime campfire.