A Life Wasted

Fall and Rise Again 1983

Things went well for a while, but we were living in a house of cards. So much cash went through our accounts that it gave the false impression of success. I didn't waste money. We lived in a modest rural house and both Mary and I drove used cars that were several years old. Yet there's nothing cheap about growing a business and I was hell bent on growing ours. I believed the microcomputer industry would grow beyond expectations and those involved could get rich. I had no concept for just how far it would grow, and my idea of rich was a million or two. I had no idea that names of people I called stupid and losers would go down in history and that their riches wouldn't be measured in millions but in billions. The one thing I did understand was that there would never be a better time to grow than now. The best way to describe my business model was to imagine a guy at a roulette wheel winning with every spin. With every win he'd say, "Let it ride." That was me in business. I bet everything on the next spin of the wheel. I was hot and knew it, so I kept betting it all to grow while the time was right. But as any gambler will tell you, hot streaks die hard.

The death of Computer Centre One was announced one Sunday morning when I got a call at home from one of my programmers. He suggested I check out a specific page of the Sunday paper. The news was so bad that he wouldn't tell me what it was. I bought the paper and looked at the page in shock. K-mart (this was pre-Walmart days) had a full page ad advertising the Commodore 64, something Commodore swore to me and all its dealers would never happen. But what really stung was the price. K-mart was selling the Commodore 64 $199. Less than half what I paid for it as a high volume dealer. This wouldn't have bothered me had I not become the highest volume Commodore 64 dealer in the world. Well, I was before this Sunday. K-mart would hold that title before the day was out.

There was a perfect storm of circumstances that killed my company. First, I had a large inventory of Commodore 64's that I'd paid more than $400 each for. Some I had bought from Commodore direct, but several hundred of them I'd bought from other Commodore dealers. Dealers like me that didn't want to sell them, but dealers who weren't willing to break Commodore's rules like I was. I never really knew how many 64's I had at the time, but it was an order of twenty-five of them that put the nail in my preverbal coffin. Part of buying and reselling every C-64 I could get my hands on was an order of twenty-five from a Commodore dealer in New York City. The computers were shipped by UPS, COD, which I paid with my company check. The 64 had a dead on delivery rate of about fifteen percent so we were always careful to check them before re-selling them. The guy in New York had assured me he did the same thing and that all the machines he was shipping me worked. The first five we checked were dead. I called the New York dealer. He said if the they didn't work it was my fault. I said I was returning them and stopping payment on his check. He started screaming so I hung up the phone. I called my bank and put a stop payment on the check.

I put the matter out of my mind until a few days later when my friendly banker called and asked me to drop by. Now. The bank was across the street so I walked over. The banker was furious when I arrived. He told me he'd never seen anyone able to F-up a growing company as fast as I had. Thinking he was talking about the Commodore 64 fiasco I agreed it was a mess but assured him we'd get through it. He screamed at me and said I was done. He said the FBI had visited him with a warrant and frozen all my accounts. He relayed that I was being investigated for bank fraud steaming from a stop payment I'd put on a check from New York. I was shocked. I argued that my accounts can't be frozen but he said they were. Business and personal. He said they'd be frozen until the FBI told him otherwise. I got the the phone number of an FBI agent in New York. 

I couldn't reach the FBI agent on the phone right away so I called the computer dealer that the problem began with. The guy was as big a jerk as the last time we talked. He said I had twenty-four hours to wire him the $22,000 I owed him or I'd go back to prison. That he said "back to prison" rather than sent to jail told me a lot. For one he'd run a background check on me and found out I was on parole. At that time only law enforcement were able to do that. This got my attention. I hated what this guy was doing, but I'd gladly pay for his garbage computers to make this go away. I told him this, but I couldn't do anything right now because my bank accounts were frozen by the FBI. He said it wasn't his problem. Get his money and he'd make it all go away. Don't do it, and I'd be arrested by the close of business the following day.

I dismissed my employees and went home. I told Mary what had happened and that I wasn't going back to jail. I needed some time to sort it all out. Believing I could still sort this out if I had the time to raise the money I rented a U-Hail trailer and loaded it up with Commodore 64's. They were worth less than half what I paid for them, but I had hundreds of them. So I hit the road and began trying to selling the machines at a heavy discount. With K-mart now selling them for less than $200 even hobby shops were leery of them. In a month K-mart's price would drop to $175. Later in a dealer lawsuit I would learn that each C-64 cost Commodore $6 to produce. I think that upset me more than anything.

So I hit the road in a desperate attempt to redeem myself and keep from going to jail. By leaving the area I violated parole thus guaranteeing another prison stint. As all of this sunk in I grew bitter for the first time in my life. After all, I'd not done anything wrong. If anything, I'd done everything right. I had worked my butt off and used my brain chasing the American dream. The irony is that I ran for no reason. It was all a con. The FBI wasn't investigating me. I hadn't broken any laws. Bent a few, perhaps, but broke none. The Commodore dealer in New York either had an FBI agent helping him or someone able to impersonate one well enough on the phone to fool my banker. Later the banker would claim I misunderstood him. He claims to have told me the FBI threatened to have my account frozen, not that it was frozen. I know what he said because he was very clear about it and loud enough that I couldn't misunderstand. Regardless, my account was never frozen. The guy in New York told me that I had 24 hours to pay his money or I'd go back to jail and he knew my "account was frozen". So it was some form of con originating with him. I was never able to to sort it all out.

A few weeks later Mary received our bank statement which had a considerable amount of money in it. She spoke to the bank manager and got his side of the story. All the checks had cleared except the one I stopped payment on, so all that was left was ours. Mary's name was on all the accounts so she went to the bank and paid off my business loan, then closed everything out. Being the honest person that she is, my wife then used the money to pay off the company's debts and even settled with a customer who I'd committed to a large programming job that was not possible due to my sudden departure. She even explained everything to my parole officer. The next time I called she told me to come home. That everything was settled. We were broke again, but she didn't care. She just wanted me home.

Broke and disheartened we decided to go back to Virginia Beach. It was early 1983. This part is a little embarrassing for me to admit, but in Virginia Beach I took a job working for an Apple Computer store. This is embarrassing because I've never made a secret of how much I didn't like Steven Jobs, his company and all his products. I hear they make good phones, but I wouldn't like them. Regardless, there weren't many computer companies around then and the Apple Store had an ad in the paper. Being desperate they hired me. This was when the Apple IIe came out. The Apple IIe sucked just like all Apple products. It is also when the Apple Lisa was released. If you've never heard of the Apple Lisa there's a logical reason for this: It sucked and it cost nearly $10,000. It will come as no surprise that I didn't last long at the Apple Store. They said I had a bad attitude. They might have been right.

*Authors daughters note: I LOVE apple products and don't know what his issue was/is. Dads even admitted he would probably have to get an iPhone if he was home so he could FaceTime his children and grandchildren.