Waaaaaay back on January 31 of this year (this
sure has been a long year so far, hasn't it?) I published a long-ish post
about a letter that serial scammer Kevin Trudeau, aka KT, aka
Katie, wrote to the Honorable Judge Robert Gettleman, the judge
who had presided over Trudeau's civil court battles for years. My
post was in response to a January 26, 2020 report in the Chicago Sun-Times about
the matter.
Specifically, Trudeau asked Judge Gettleman to give him a rundown
on how much money Trudeau still owes for his misdeeds, and to
whom he needs to pay that money when the time comes, and what he
might legally be allowed to do to make a living upon his release
from prison.
Quite a few months later, the Sun-Times
piece apparently drifted into the awareness of Katie's former
b.f.f., fake doctor/cancer quack/right-wing ranter/conspiranoid Leonard Coldwell (most
recently highlighted on this Whirled for his covidiocy), who is often
late to the party when it comes to the events of the day. Late or
not, you can bet that LoonyC had something to say about it. On June 5, 2020, he puffed out
his little chest and Facebook-posted the link to the Sun-Times
article, along with this comment:
Biggest conman ever we got him 10 years
in Prison. You mess with me you go away.. And Trudeau its [sic]
not even over yet I am not done with you.
Oooo, scary, right? Katie would most likely be
quaking in his prison-issued slip-on shoes, if only he were able
to see Facebook, which, by all reports, he absolutely is not.
A couple of Coldwell's Facebook followers took the bait, begging
to know what had happened between Coldwell and Trudeau. One
follower wrote of being on a Global Information Network
(GIN) cruise in 2011, when it seemed that Kevin and
"Dr. C" had been the very best of friends.
But so far Lenny hasn't responded to the queries.
Well, Coldwell follower who asked the original question -- and
anyone else who either doesn't know the story or is simply in the
mood for a recap -- here's a capsule history of Kevin Trudeau and
Leonard Coldwell. Let's just say that a lot has happened since
2011. I've written many thousands of words about the matter on
this blog over the past eight years or so, but I know your time
is valuable, so here you go.
A tale of two scoundrels
Leonard Coldwell (born Bernd Klein, though he legally changed his name in Virginia in 1998) left his native Germany for the US in the late 1990s, for reasons that have never been entirely clear. And in case you are wondering, he has never been a real doctor
in any sense of the word, either in Germany or in the US, even
though the foundation of his "career" has been his
self-claimed expertise in health issues, particularly cancer.
(Here's a long-winded look at his
"credentials.") Once in America, Coldwell struggled for a few
years to make it as a motivational speaker/natural health
"expert." But, according to information provided to me
by someone who was in the very best position to know, he wasn't
very successful and was often on the verge of financial disaster
-- that is, until Kevin Trudeau promoted him and his body of
"work" in Trudeau's first Natural Cures book.
That was a true turning point for Coldwell. The extent to which
Leonard Coldwell owes his "success" (such as it is) to
Kevin Trudeau cannot be overstated.
Or as my pal Jason "Salty Droid"
Jones so eloquently put it in his first blog post about Coldwell in August 2012:
In spite of [his] impressively
fake :: fake credentials … Leonard Coldwell was never able
to make much of himself...
...Then came Kevin Trudeau circa 2005. Trudeau was using a popular lead gen book :: infomercials … and every other trick in
the Scamworld book “they” don’t want you to know about
to separate people from their money … writ large. Trudeau
made fake doctor Lenny Coldwell his B-team bitch :: that
changed things for Coldwell … and they’ve been together
unhappily ever after.
With leads coming in from KT’s bullshit :: Coldwell could
focus on manipulation and exploitation … which is far
easier than generating the initial leads. Lenny needs easy
jobs :: because he’s dumb … and he sucks at stuff.
A Salty Droid Dateline 60 minutes 4 PHDs exclusive
investigation has revealed that Leonard Coldwell set up
remote servers with family in Germany in order to process
email leads generated by Kevin Trudeau’s fraudulent
activities. Leonard would reply to emails as “Dr. Hohn”
{who is a real person … and actual doctor} … and refer
victims to his own products.
Such elaborate measures were prolly required because America’s
Federal Trade Commission was crawling up the ass of Trudeau’s
operation. I suspects they even sniffed out this fake Dr.
Hohn situation. But they suck :: so they accomplished
jackshit … and Trudeau and Coldwell scam on unabated....
Of course notoriety works both ways. Coldwell was
most likely making much better money than he'd ever made because of
his association with Kevin Trudeau (or, as Jason described it in a 2014 post, "swimming in
Kevin Trudeau's wake with [his] mouth wide open") -- but on
the other hand, neither Jason nor I would have ever heard of
Coldwell, or written about him, if not for that association. I
had been blogging about Trudeau for years before I'd heard
of Coldwell.When Trudeau launched his huge GIN scam in 2009,
he brought Coldwell right along as one of the club's main shills,
eventually making him one of its sanctioned speakers. In exchange
for agreeing to perform at a certain number of live GIN events
per year, Coldwell was given a yearly salary of $200,000, in
monthly payments of nearly $17,000 a month. (Here is the portion of his contract that he has shared publicly.)
Granted, that salary is far from being extravagantly large in the
public speaking biz; actual A-list celebs and VIPs, which Lenny
never has been and never will be, can command tens of thousands
of dollars, or even hundreds of thousands,
for a single appearance. In other words, Coldwell's claims that he is the "World's Highest
Paid Speaker" are... a bit
exaggerated. At any rate, his GIN gig was supposed to be a
ten-year contract -- a fact that Coldwell later used as a
foundation for his gripe about being cheated, conveniently
overlooking the fact that most contracts are rendered null and
void if either party violates the terms of said contract, which
Coldwell seems to have done on several occasions. But I'm getting
ahead of myself.
As part of the perks of the "job," Coldwell got to fly
first-class or business-class to GIN events, stay in the best
hotels, go on all of the lavish GIN cruises, stuff himself at the
buffets and get drunk on expensive booze, and take every
opportunity to promote his own shtick (often violating the spirit
of his contract) -- and all on Kevin Trudeau's dime. Well,
technically, it was on the dimes of countless suckers who poured
money into the GIN coffers in hopes of somehow becoming as
fabulously wealthy and successful and deliriously happy as Kevin
was always claiming to be, but in any case, it was all comped for
"Dr." C.
In addition, Coldwell was, by his own admission on
a teleconference call on October 14, 2012, given a downline for
GIN's massive multi-level marketing scheme, which formed the
basis of GIN's huge and fraudulent money grab. (I wrote about
that in this January 2013 post; see
under the sub-head, "Axes of evil"). Coldwell didn't
earn the downline, and in the teleconference call he claimed that
he didn't seriously work it. But he did apparently work it in his
own way, such as by posting various promos for GIN (and of course for himself).
The point is that while so many other rank-and-file members spent
so much time and energy and money to earn and work their own GIN
downlines, Lenny's was just handed to him.
All in all, it was a great gig for a formerly struggling and
unknown fake doctor.
Coldwell did apparently gain a following within
GIN, and later claimed that he was the very soul of the
organization. (On this Whirled, we begged to differ.) In the
glory daze of what was later shown to be a completely contrived
bromance, Trudeau and Coldwell spent a lot of time publicly
stroking each other off, figuratively speaking. Trudeau promoted
Coldwell as his "personal physician in Europe." He
fake-interviewed him in videos like this one to
promote Coldwell's shtick. Coldwell relentlessly promoted
Trudeau, or at least he promoted GIN, touting it as the best way
to wealth, success and happiness. On various promotional
propaganda Coldwell and/or Trudeau claimed to have been good
friends for more than 20 years. It all was so lovely, and so
phony, while it lasted.
For various reasons, though -- partly financial
but mostly personal, from what I have been told by folks in a
position to know -- the bromance collapsed. One major factor was
that GIN was bleeding money, and Kevin needed that money to cover
his legal fees and his lifestyle (more on that below). He had
to cut expenses, which included cutting the number of live events
and, apparently, getting rid of speakers who had become dead
weight. Reportedly there were also complaints about Coldwell's
behavior at some of the live events. And reportedly Kevin's own
ego was a factor; he didn't like sharing so much attention with
Coldwell, who, though full of shite, was undeniably entertaining and knew how to get a crowd riled up.
Kevin himself implied that Coldwell's shtick was getting
redundant.
And then there was the fact that, as mentioned above,
Coldwell was apparently using GIN to promote himself in a manner
that violated his contract with GIN. (He later claimed that GIN
offered to settle with him, or "saddle," as he spelled
it on his Facebook post about the matter, though who knows, he
may have been talking about horseback riding or some perverted
pony play.)
In any case, Coldwell's separation from GIN was
emphatically not because he had just suddenly
"discovered" that GIN was a scam and Trudeau a scammer,
as he later tried to claim. Coldwell most likely would have
gladly stayed on the GIN teat for years longer, but Trudeau fired Coldwell from GIN in the spring of 2012. It was shortly after the GIN Dream Weekend in Vegas in April 2012.
Coldwell's first responses to being booted out were
tentative and rather restrained (for him, anyway), though undeniably rambling and incoherent, with insinuations that there
might be a chance of reconciliation, or at least a chance of
saving GIN, with Lenny at the helm of the salvation effort. (I
provided links to his "let's save GIN" posts when I first wrote about them, but his ramblings on that topic have since been deleted.) But it soon became apparent that
reconciliation wasn't going to happen, and that GIN had booted
Coldwell out for good -- and that's when he began a series of
increasingly vitriolic attacks on Trudeau's character and the
scamminess of GIN.
As it happened, and as I indicated above, I'd
already been writing about the scamminess of GIN and Trudeau for
several years, but nobody reads this blog so it didn't make a
dent in the scam; I just thought I'd mention it again. At any
rate, due to a combination of members' ignorance of, and their
willful blindness to, Trudeau's scammy past, Coldwell was able
with some success to brand himself to disillusioned GIN and
ex-GIN members as a heroic whistleblower.
He really got their attention with a ruse that he
kept up for months: a spurious claim that he had initiated a
class action lawsuit against GIN/Trudeau and that anyone who'd
lost money in GIN and wanted to join him could most likely get
all of their money back and possibly more. All they had to do was
send him their name and contact information. He dangled the
lawsuit as a come-on to get people to sign up for a "Life After GIN" event/boot camp in Charleston, South Carolina,
promising he would give attendees detailed information and
updates about the lawsuit, as well as another opportunity to get
in on the cash grab. People did sign up, and paid good money to
attend, though quite a few reported being disappointed when there
was very little said about the lawsuit at the "boot
camp."
Not surprisingly, like pretty much every lawsuit threat or actual
lawsuit in which he has been involved, absolutely nothing ever
came of this "class action suit." But no doubt Coldwell
was able to beef up his mailing list considerably, which was of
course the whole idea
But it was the whistleblower ruse that Coldwell exploited most
enthusiastically. His cohorts in this undertaking were former GIN
member Abe Husein, who gained
considerable media attention for himself by hollering about how
he had been cheated by GIN and fooled by Kevin's grandiose
promises (though Abe himself had tried to cheat the system); and
former GIN marketing huckster Peter Wink. (In early 2013,
Coldwell and Wink formed their own version of a GIN scam, the ill-fated IBMS Masters Society, which is still limping along, though noticeably
Winkless).
Meanwhile, Kevin Trudeau had been in legal trouble with various government
agencies for many years because of his
deceptive/fraudulent marketing practices. (This was after he had served a couple of years in a federal prison for credit card fraud, back in the early 1990s.) The Federal Trade
Commission (FTC) in particular had had its eye on him for a very
long time. He'd been to court numerous times, had been fined, had
paid fines, had signed consent orders in which he promised to
cease his deceptive practices, and had repeatedly violated those
orders.
At the time Trudeau launched GIN, he was in pretty deep,
with a multi-million dollar fine and a civil case and later a
criminal case looming over his head. In fact many of the
millions of dollars that gullible GIN members were pouring into
the GIN coffers were going straight to Trudeau's lawyers. Much of
the rest of it was going towards the noble cause of subsidizing
Trudeau's lavish lifestyle.
But it is important to know that both the civil
and the criminal cases centered on Trudeau's deceptive marketing
for a diet book, The Weight-Loss Cure 'They' Don't Want You
to Know About. It was this matter specifically that
ultimately resulted in a criminal contempt conviction and his
ten-year prison sentence. It had absolutely nothing to do
with Kevin Trudeau "messing with" loony Lenny Coldwell.
The ten-year sentence was decided upon by the judge who
presided over the criminal case, Ronald Guzman. Judge Guzman had originally wanted to sentence Trudeau
to 20 to 25 years in prison, based upon federal sentencing
guidelines that took into consideration Trudeau's two previous
felony convictions and the size of the fraud in the diet book
case. (These sentencing guidelines were carefully explained in
numerous court documents and also reported in the media at the
time.) Judge Guzman eventually agreed with prosecutors, however,
who claimed that a ten-year sentence would be sufficient since
nobody who bought the diet book was financially ruined simply by
having bought the book. In other words, and it can't be stressed
enough: LEONARD COLDWELL HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH KEVIN TRUDEAU'S
TEN-YEAR PRISON SENTENCE.
No doubt Coldwell provided information to
authorities that may have helped nudge the cases along, but so
did countless other people. Back in the pre-trial days, the FBI
was visiting ex-GIN members and former GIN principals left,
right, and sideways. I even got a call from the FBI
during the post-trial, pre-sentencing phase, and I have never
been even remotely involved with Trudeau or with GIN, except to
blog about them. In the end, though, Trudeau received a sentence
that was far less than the maximum allowed by law and than the
presiding judge had originally wanted to impose. If Lenny wants to take credit for Trudeau's prison
sentence, he needs to accept responsibility for its relative
leniency.
* * * * *
So that's the story, in a nutshell (emphasis on
the "nut" part), about what happened between Leonard
Coldwell and Kevin Trudeau. Trudeau is in prison not because he
"messed with" Coldwell but because he thumbed his nose
at various authorities who had been trying for years and years
and years to get Trudeau to stop scamming consumers. And for a
few years, Coldwell himself was complicit in Trudeau's scams. Moreover he is still, to this day, selling GIN CDs on his IBMS
web site (at $99.00 a pop!). So he is
anything but a hero in the Kevin Goes To Jail narrative.
But it's not surprising that Coldwell would try to inflate his
own role in this narrative -- he has a long history of grossly
exaggerating his own significance, after all, not just about his "accomplishments,"
but specifically regarding GIN and Kevin Trudeau as well. So I think that it's important for those who want to
know the real history to search for answers outside of Coldwell's
social media fever swamps.
And I think it's also worth pointing out that despite all of the
time and energy Coldwell has put into denigrating Kevin Trudeau,
he will never have nearly as many fans as Trudeau has, and will
never enjoy anything even close to the level of hero worship that Trudeau, even though he's
been imprisoned for years, continues to inspire. I am pretty sure that at some level Lenny knows that,
and it must be galling.
Bottom line: I don't think that Kevin Trudeau has very much to
fear from his former "personal physician in Europe."
