An Unexplained Death

by Mikita Brottman

  Although this description of the Oxford Club may bring to mind an elite society where gentlemen sit around drinking claret and chatting about cricket scores and private financial opportunities, the “Club” is, for the most part, a newsletter that gives advice on investments, living abroad, and how to avoid paying income tax. In the 1980s, under the name Royal Society of Liechtenstein, it was one of more than a dozen direct-mail financial newsletters recommending assets whose investors, according to a New York Times article published in 1992, “frequently found themselves holding worthless shares.”

  The Royal Society of Liechtenstein was founded by Joel S. Nadel of Boca Raton and his sidekick Mark Ford; one of their earlier direct-mail ventures included an audiocassette tape on which a man with an English accent who called himself “Charles Lloyd” described the exclusive assembly as “one of the least-known organizations in the world,” whose sole purpose was to “amass substantial wealth for its members.” Those interested in joining were told to send a check for $100, along with a membership application form, to “our U.S. dispatch address.” The recording concludes:

  If I do not receive your application within thirty days, I will eliminate your name from our invitation list, and you will never hear from me again. This is Charles Lloyd from the Royal Society of Liechtenstein. Please destroy this tape now.

  In April 1991, after a U.S. Postal Service investigation into an illegal sweepstakes program run by Nadel and Ford, the government froze $6.6 million of Nadel’s assets. In June, he paid $100,000 to settle a two-year-old SEC complaint that he had violated securities laws by failing to tell his newsletter subscribers that several stock promoters, since convicted of fraud, had paid him to tout their companies. One of the businesses that Nadel was paid to promote was Goldcor, a “gold-extraction company” whose founders claimed they had invented a way of turning a twenty-mile strip of black volcanic sand in Costa Rica into gold. “The sands that are removed from the beach are replenished by tidal action only after a few days,” ran the pitch.

  It was, of course, all a huge scam, costing an estimated three thousand investors a total of at least $50 million, of which $13 million was never recovered. In August 1991, two days before he was due to stand trial, Goldcor’s president, Richard Brown, fifty-one, was found at his home in Daytona Beach, Florida, shot in the left side of the back of his head. No gun was found at the scene. His death was “probably a murder,” concluded investigators, though it could theoretically have been a suicide. Brown’s death, like Rey Rivera’s, was ruled “undetermined.”

  Sand cannot be turned into gold. High profits come only from long and substantial investments. In this case, the old farmer’s adage proves correct:

  Fruit out of season

  Death without reason

  In response to subscriber complaints that the Royal Society of Liechtenstein was not a society and had nothing to do with Liechtenstein (which, being a principality rather than a country, actually has a “sovereign” rather than a “royal” family), Nadel and Ford rechristened their project the Oxford Club and, shortly thereafter, sold it to Agora. Ford was hired by Agora as an “executive consultant,” and his talent for embellishment launched the company’s meteoric rise as a marketer of investment newsletters. From Boca Raton, under the pseudonym “Michael Masterson,” Ford began publishing a series of financial and business self-help books, and established various Agora-affiliated and Agora-owned businesses, including several publishing companies, a stock promotion business, a program training people how to write promotional newsletters, and a travel agency devoted to arranging subscribers’ trips to conferences and to the foreign destinations where they might eventually retire.

  Mark Ford, now known as Michael Masterson, is Porter Stansberry’s personal mentor.

  * * *

  Over the years, Stansberry invited a number of people he knew and admired from high school to join Pirate Investor. In spring 2003, Brad Hoppmann, another member of the Winter Park high school water polo team, moved from Florida to Baltimore to work for Stansberry; Hoppmann bought a house on Lanvale Street, in the genteel neighborhood of Bolton Hill. Other friends of Stansberry’s who moved to Baltimore to work for one of Agora’s subsidiaries include Steve Sjuggerud, Aaron Brabham, and, in early 2004, Rey Rivera.

  For Rey, it was never intended to be a long-term job. Porter sold him on the idea of moving out to Baltimore for thirty days to work on a special writing project. At first, Rey wasn’t enthusiastic. He had settled in California, and Baltimore did not sound like his kind of place. He needed sunshine and access to the ocean. On the other hand, he was not getting any younger. It was too late for him to make it in the world of competitive water polo, and he had been unable to generate any studio interest in “Virtuoso,” his screenplay about the piano player. In Baltimore, he could make money. He also knew that a nine-to-five job would give him the discipline to work on his screenwriting every day. He hoped eventually to support Allison and their future family from his creative work.

  When he first moved to Baltimore, Rey lived in the Peabody Court Hotel in Mount Vernon, the historic district a mile or so north of the harbor where Agora is located. Initially, Rey planned to fly back every week to see Allison, who was working as a financial controller for a company in LA that distributes professional hair care products to salons all over the country. She was not happy about Rey moving to Baltimore, but for thirty days, she felt she could deal with it.

  Yet to those who knew him well, Rey’s move seemed to come completely out of the blue. Rey’s friend B. tells me that Rey said he was going to work for a man who told him he could make a lot of money out there. B. thought Baltimore seemed a very strange place to move, since Rey was such a California guy. B. was not in favor of the move, though he didn’t say so. But according to B., all his friends thought it was weird.

  Another friend of Rey’s I talk to on the phone—an old buddy from Florida—asks me whether I have a theory about his death.

  I tell him that I do not have a fully formed theory, but I have been considering some possible scenarios. As I am speaking, he interrupts me.

  “Are you nervous right now?” he asks.

  I tell him no, I am not nervous.

  “This is going to sound weird,” he tells me, “but I’m going to say it anyway.”

  There is a long pause.

  Then he says: “Be careful.”

  * * *

  At first, things go pretty much as Rey and Allison planned, apart from the fact that they miss each other more than either of them had anticipated, and the project Porter had hired Rey to work on turns out to be a lot more demanding than he had originally expected. Stansberry thinks it will probably take more like ninety days. Rey continues living at the Peabody Court Hotel and flying back to visit Allison every month, when she’s not in Baltimore.

  One weekend, on a return flight to Baltimore, Rey and the woman next to him start to chat. The woman, Cynthia, is a generation older than Rey; still, they have an almost instant connection. They talk about the cities they have both lived in: Madrid, Los Angeles, Baltimore. After their conversation on the plane, Cynthia feels as though she has known Rey all her life. When they get back to Baltimore, Rey visits her, and he brings Allison when she’s around. Allison has an aunt who lives in Ellicott City, a small town about ten miles outside Baltimore; Cynthia also lives there, so they always drop by when they’re in the neighborhood. Cynthia calls around to see Rey whenever she’s in the city. They have things in common and enjoy each other’s company. Cynthia starts to feel as though she loves him like a sister.

  “Rey was this really big, handsome man with a huge big bright smile,” Cynthia tells me. “He was very predictable and very reliable. He had enormous confidence.” I ask her for some of her favorite memories of him. She doesn’t have to think for long. “Once,” she tells me, “I was sitting outside by the harbor drinking coffee, and I saw this person smiling, walking toward me wearing lime green. And I thought, you have to have a lot
of confidence to wear a color that bright. And this person got closer and closer, and then I saw him, and I realized, oh, of course, it’s Rey.”

  Meeting Cynthia is a relief for Rey because apart from the people from Florida who now work at Agora, he knows nobody in the city. This is tough, because Rey is the kind of guy who makes friends easily and is used to being part of a crowd. For some reason, he seems unable to make any really close connections in Baltimore. He thinks it might be because he is flying to LA so much. Things are tough for Allison as well.

  After ninety days, Porter Stansberry is so pleased with Rey’s work that he offers his friend the chance to write his own financial newsletter, something Rey has never done before. Actually, he knows little or nothing about the money market. Still, he gives it a shot, and the sample he produces turns out to be so successful that Porter offers him a full-time job. Rey accepts, for the moment; while their long-term plans remain unclear, he and Allison decide that flying coast-to-coast is getting too expensive. It makes more sense, they realize, for Allison to join Rey in Baltimore. After some renegotiation of her own job, Allison is offered the new role of regional sales and brand manager, a position that involves traveling to meetings and sales conferences all over the United States with potential vendors. In her new role, it makes very little difference where she’s based.

  And so Allison moves to Baltimore, Rey moves out of the Peabody Court, and they both move in with Porter Stansberry. No longer inhabiting a “third-floor walk-up in the slums,” Stansberry has moved into a nicely renovated row house in Baltimore’s up-and-coming Canton neighborhood, a stretch of redeveloped industrial waterfront. Still, the house is a little cramped for the three of them, and craving more privacy, Rey and Allison move in with Allison’s aunt in Ellicott City and start looking for a place of their own.

  Rey and Allison Rivera

  VIII

  IF YOU WERE not looking carefully, you would notice nothing unusual about the elegant old residences in Mount Vernon that make up Agora’s headquarters, mansions that include some of the most architecturally significant buildings in Baltimore. All that connects them is the fact that most of them bear discreet iron plaques by the front door bearing the single word Agora. Also, if you look closely, you might notice that the woodwork on the doors and window frames gleams with fresh polish, and the leaded glass in the windows has been cleaned and restored. These properties include the former Marburg mansion at 14 W. Mount Vernon Place, the former Christian Science Building at 702 Cathedral Street, the former headquarters of the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland at 105 W. Monument Street, and the former Grand Lodge of the Order of the Sons of Italy at 808 St. Paul Street, currently the headquarters of Agora Financial.

  The mansions give the company an era of permanence and respectability, yet Agora is, relatively speaking, a young organization. It is basically a holding company for various publishers of financial, health, travel, and special-interest books and newsletters, some of which are free, though most charge a subscription fee. Many contain investment advice for our “chaotic financial times,” and suggest ways in which readers and subscribers can increase their personal wealth by buying certain types of stocks and shares. Under the Agora umbrella are more than sixty subsidiary companies, which publish newsletters (all with a strongly independent-libertarian slant) on travel, financial management, taxes, real estate, and health. As of 2017, Agora has thirteen affiliates in the United States, one in Ireland, one in South Africa, and four in England. Bill Bonner is still president of the company.

  Stansberry Research is one of many subsidiaries of Agora that send subscribers emails giving investment advice. The newsletters published by Stansberry Reasearch are headed by different high-profile employees: accountants, investors, traders, venture capitalists, and bankers. These are the “Stansberry Analysts,” thirteen white men in dark suits; their grinning but humorless headshots are lined up on the Stansberry Research website like the Apostles at the Last Supper. Their master, Stansberry himself, is conspicuously absent.

  The Disciples include Stansberry’s old Florida friend Steve Sjuggerud, founder of True Wealth Systems; Dan Ferris, editor of Extreme Value; David Eifrig, editor of Retirement Millionaire; and Brett Aitken, lead analyst for Stansberry Alpha. Every newsletter follows a particular formula, building apparent credibility through a numbing overload of technical details, always pushing an us-against-them mind-set. “They” are the “mainstream financial media,” the “White House,” or the “Wall Street fat cats,” and “we” are, by implication, white American males, getting on in years, distrustful of government, politicians, banks, mass media, the Internet, and computers in general.

  One of Agora’s most profitable branches is the health division. Its franchises include Dr. Marc S. Micozzi’s Insiders’ Cures (a monthly subscription newsletter) and daily e-dispatches (recent examples include “Cancer risks are statistically zero for smoking one or two cigars per day” and “Watch out for dangerous half-truths on the Internet”) and Dr. Fred Pescatore’s Logical Health Alternatives (“The infinite energy secret hiding in the world’s most exclusive vineyards”). The rhetoric is all about independent thinking, but the promises are familiar: “explosive sexual power,” “lightning fast pain relief,” “antidotes to aging.” On offer is nothing more than the usual generic nutritional supplements endorsed by charismatic-looking physicians. Many of the products seem to be aimed at older people in pain, or those suffering from a terminal illness. Significantly, each franchise has a legal department that employs a compliance editor, who ensures that the newsletters are litigation-proof. As a result, their “terms and conditions,” in very small print, always contain the words: “The contents of this site should not be construed as personal medical advice or instruction. If you choose to utilize any information provided, you do so solely at your own risk.”

  On his podcast Stansberry Radio, in a 2014 interview with Bill Bonner, Porter Stansberry confesses that the biggest secret to his success, taught to him by Bonner (“the wisest man I know”), is that “you’ve got to give the other guy what he wants,” with the important caveat that “often, what he wants is not what he says he wants at all.” As an example, Stansberry refers to the “health group” at Agora.

  Part of what the health group sells from time to time is weight-loss strategies. And the science of weight loss is purely mathematics.… There’s no mystery to it at all. You take in less calories, you burn more calories, you will lose weight every time.… And yet, Bill, as you know, the people buying weight-loss products don’t necessarily actually want to lose weight. What they are really looking for, of course, is the excitement and the hope of losing weight. And what they want is, they want someone who can hit that emotional button for them again and again and again and again.… What they want is to become the hero of their own story.

  How does Porter Stansberry become the hero of his own story? How, for that matter, does Rey Rivera?

  * * *

  When a death is unexplained, we tend to sympathize with the deceased, even if we never knew them—partly because their absence dominates the story (they are everywhere), and partly because they no longer have agency. Omnipresence and vulnerability can be an intoxicating combination, and in the case of Rey Rivera, the deceased was also remarkably handsome.

  Movies, media, lifestyle magazines, and real estate advertisements all encourage the primitive feeling that, since beautiful people seem especially blessed, their lives should also be happy and lucky. I sometimes think that, since I consider myself an average-looking person, I should not have a life that others find enviable and alluring. Rationally, I know this is not true; obviously, I have as much right to happiness as anyone else. But, like most ordinary-looking people, I have always overvalued physical beauty in others. When I realize that someone who looks the way I do can have lived such a fortunate life, while someone as handsome as Rey Rivera could die so horribly and at at such a young age, it feels as though the planets are out of line.

&n
bsp; For all his imposing stature in life, Rey Rivera is now passive and defenseless, unable to speak for himself. His side of the story has to be told by those who knew him, and when someone dies young and in tragic circumstances, nobody has anything but good things to say about them. Nonetheless, I cannot help but believe that Rey Rivera really was a great guy. Like all of us, he had his flaws: his temper, his impetuous personality. But there was another flaw, too, which more than one person mentioned, using almost the same words every time: “Rey was terrible with money.”

  Which makes it even more surprising, perhaps, that Porter Stansberry should give Rey his own financial newsletter to edit. After some back and forth, they decide to call it The Rebound Report, since Rey was a huge basketball fan, and because the newsletter would focus on companies that were “on the rebound”—that is, after doing poorly and losing money, looked as though they were about to turn around.

  At first, Rey is concerned that he knows absolutely nothing about finance. He is certain that anybody who so much as glances at The Rebound Report will know he’s just guessing blindly, the way passengers in a car instinctively know when the driver is lost. But Stansberry reassures Rey. He is hiring Rey not for his skill as a financial analyst, but for his talent as a writer. After all, Stansberry himself has no business background and knew very little about investment when he started out. In fact, according to papers filed by the SEC, nobody who works at Pirate Investor seemed to know much about financial matters.

  In its original judgment against Pirate Investor, an attorney representing the SEC cross-examined David Nelson, one of Stansberry’s “experts,” about how seriously the newsletters’ investment advice was taken in general. He presented the following interview extracts in his notes: