by Larry Lawton
“When I talked about going to prison and what will happen to him in prison, he was lost. The boy just couldn’t grasp the consequences. In essence, he was too young for the program.
“You can teach a child not to touch a hot stove,” said Lawton. “You can tell him he’ll get burned. But at too young an age will he understand what getting burned means and what a scar would mean for his future? Absolutely not.”
At that point Lawton determined that his program would not work for children under the age of eleven.
“I want to make sure that when I’m speaking to a child that he will understand the consequences of his actions,” said Lawton. “It’s not enough to know the difference between right and wrong. Everyone knows it’s wrong to steal, to do drugs, to disrespect people, but do they understand the consequences of stealing and robbing? I found that most children under eleven don’t understand and children eleven and older do.
“It’s not enough to talk to a child about right and wrong. You must also talk about the consequences of his actions. If you can do that, you have a much better chance of saving that young person.”
Lawton also saw that kids in their early 20s could be helped and set on the right path as well as teens, and he made the decision to include young adults in his program as well.
“Just because a person turns a magical number, say age eighteen, it doesn’t mean he’s an adult,” said Lawton. “Young people mature at different ages, and the older generation needs to understand that and stop with the ‘When I was your age’ shit. Times have changed. From technology to labor, a child today will know ten times more than his parents.
“Parents need to educate themselves on the things a child will know. A child will spot bullshit a mile away. I tell the truth, and often the truth isn’t pretty, and the kids respect that.”
Lawton often will start by asking an audience of kids, “Can you hide a knife up your ass?’ Inevitably the kids will giggle nervously. Then Lawton will tell them, ‘I did.’ And he will explain why and how, and that will set the mood. Lawton has not only spoken truth to these kids, he has opened his heart to them, and they respect him for that.
“I never judge kids, no matter what they did,” said Lawton. “I am not there to judge them. I am there to help them change and make better choices in the future.”
Lawton tells them, “I don’t care what you did before you entered the room. You can change, and change starts now.”
In talking to these at-risk kids, Lawton also determined that one of the biggest hurdles to change is a drug addiction.
“We have to address that first,” said Lawton. “I’m not talking about a kid who smoked pot once or got drunk a couple of times. I’m talking about the kids who have an addiction. I’ve seen kids as young as eleven with drug addictions. Those kids need to detox and get help for their addiction. Only then will they understand what I’m talking about and then understand the consequences of what they are doing.”
For the first few months of the Reality Check Program, Larry Lawton was a one-man gang. In no time speaking was becoming a full-time job. But Lawton wanted to be able to expand the program to reach kids he couldn’t speak to personally. He needed an angel to back his program in order to make it grow. Finding one wouldn’t take long.
CHAPTER 16
The Reality Check Program Takes Off
Larry Lawton was doing well getting at-risk kids to enroll in his class when his friend Joe Fraumeni said to him, “You need help and a business mind behind this. Your program is getting too big to be run by one person.”
“I knew Joe was right,” said Lawton. “Yes, I could do this out of my house, but would I be doing the most I could to help people? Probably not. A friend told me that if I didn’t grow the company, I would be doing a lot of kids a disservice. He said, ‘Larry, you have a talent and a gift. You can help millions of people. You need to grow and let it go where it’s supposed to go.’ With that comes responsibility. I told Joe I was open to the idea of taking on a partner.
He said, “I want to introduce you to someone who used to work for me.”
Fraumini set up a meeting for Larry with a man by the name of Joe Reilly. Lawton had gone to bars Reilly owned so Reilly knew him, but not well. They sat down for dinner at a waterside restaurant in Melbourne called Ichabod’s, and they hit it off. They were both from New York, and Lawton began telling him stories of prison and what he had been through and how relating his experiences was making a difference with these at-risk teenagers.
“I really think I can make something big out of this,” said Lawton.
Near the end of dinner Reilly asked him what he was looking for.
“I’m looking for an investor and a business partner,” Lawton said. Lawton hadn’t asked Reilly to be that person. He just said he needed “someone.”
They got up to leave. Reilly said to Lawton, “Hold off looking for an investor. I want to do a little research. I’ll get back to you.”
A few days later Reilly called back and asked for another meeting. They returned to Ichabod’s, and during the meal Reilly showed Lawton a list of pros and cons with respect to investing in his company. Lawton could see Joe had done his homework.
“I’ll invest $100,000 for ten percent of the company,” said Reilly.
“Only if you come in as my partner, and if you do that, I’ll give you another ten percent,” said Lawton. Reilly said he had recently sold his drug-testing company and was to leave it in three months. They talked about the possibilities: a movie, a TV show, a series of DVDs, and this book.
Reilly said, “Larry, there’s no way you can be everywhere all the time. It’ll be the downfall of the company. The first thing we have to do is develop a DVD about the program.”
“Joe totally got it,” said Lawton. “He saw the big picture and understood where we could go with it.”
They agreed to become partners.
(After about a year, Reilly offered another $100,000 for an added seven percent, bringing his total holding to 27 percent of the company.)
“With Joe’s money it was time to rent an office space and start a real company,” said Lawton. “Although I was gaining credibility and more and more people were calling to ask me for help with their children, I was still just one guy working out of my mom’s house.”
Lawton found office space in a building not far from where he was living. The building was old and rundown, but it served the purpose. He was tucked away on the second floor in a corner office. His rent was two hundred dollars a month.
His first hire was his girl friend, Vivian, but after a month of mixing work and romance, the relationship fell apart, and she left. He then hired Erica, a woman who had worked for Reilly in his drug-testing business. Erica was young and savvy on the computer. Erica allowed Larry to spend a lot more time giving classes.
Lawton was asked by radio talk show host Carol Nelson to appear on her show on WMMB in Melbourne with several of the at-risk kids he had counseled. He and three teens discussed the hard issues parents have to deal with when it comes to their children: drugs, making bad choices, truancy, and a lack of respect, among others.
The show turned out to be a smash with the audience. Lawton turned out to be a natural on the radio. Eventually Lawton would have his own weekly show.
By early in 2009 Joe Reilly was ready to start work. He and Larry decided to make the 67-minute DVD now known as the Reality Check Program DVD. They hired an old pro by the name of Chuck Bennett to produce the film and do the voice-over. There was no script. Lawton did it from his heart, and on the video it’s easy to see his raw emotion spilling out.
Taping the DVD was a grueling process for Lawton, who had to relive the pain of the harsh moments during his eleven years in prison. When it was finished, Joe Reilly threw a launch party at his home, and more than a hundred guests attended.
Stewart wanted to do a piece on a Montana prison. The prison had just been built and hadn’t yet been open, and the idea was for Larry to give viewers a tour. Stewart wanted Lawton to wear his cut-off tee shirt to better show off his tattoos and big arms. With his bald head and goatee, Larry looked like a crazed ex-con, perfect for the bit.
Initially Lawton wasn’t sure he should do it. Lawton was a serious guy. He wasn’t a comedian, but he figured this would be fun, and he agreed to fly to Montana to meet Stu Miller, one of the producers. Miller gave him some funny lines to say and told him to “look mean.”
He did the piece, and a few weeks later The Daily Show called him back. They liked Lawton so much in the Montana bit that they wanted him to fly to New York and play a convict who yells at a group of Harvard and MIT MBA students who were refusing to sign an ethics oath. Lawton was given a suit that was designed for him to rip away when he entered the room. Underneath were his red tee shirt and his tattoos. Again he looked like a crazed ex-con. When he started screaming at the students, he scared them but good. The bit was based on the Bernie Madoff scandal, and Lawton used words like Harry Potter, British fuck, and Susan Boyle in his diatribe, and it was hilarious. Skit member John Oliver cracked up laughing.
As part of the skit Lawton showed the cast, producers, and staff how to make a shank, make a fire using batteries, and explained how to hide the shank in his anus.
The skit aired on August 12, 2009. It was a hit, and since then more than 150,000 people watched it on The Daily Show website.
“One of the Harvard students in the skit, Leland Chang, is now a Cambridge councilman,” said Lawton. “We keep in touch to this day.”
During the summer of 2009 Larry was still living with his mom. Joe Reilly owned a furnished three-bedroom, two-bath condo on the beach which he rented to a regular winter tenant. Joe asked Larry if he wanted to rent it for the summer. He was thrilled. Larry would wake up at the usual time of 6 a.m. and watch the sun rise over the Atlantic Ocean. The Kennedy Space Center was only ten miles away, and he watched the space shuttle whenever it blasted off.
“Living in this condo showed me what freedom was all about,” said Lawton. “It’s the little things that didn’t cost anything. Sitting on the beach soaking in the sunshine. Watching the waves hit the beach and seeing dolphins frolic a few yards off the beach. I’d sit on the beach, smoke a cigar, and just relax. It was the best six months I had since I’ve been out.”
That summer Lawton also met his future love. He was going to a gym in Palm Bay, working out strenuously as he had in prison. He’d wear headphones while he was listening to the radio, and he’d sing some of the songs, and he was hard to miss. One of those whose eye he caught was Theresa Nunez. Theresa was drinking coffee in the gym while Lawton was talking to friends, who introduced them. Theresa told Lawton she was a school teacher, and as she talked about her students and her love of teaching, Lawton was struck not only by her beauty but by her passion for helping young people.
It was just Lawton’s luck that Theresa was married, so at first they were just friends when one day in November she called Larry crying. She was going through some tough times with her husband, and she wanted to talk. They talked for hours.
“I knew then that Theresa was perfect for me,” said Lawton. Theresa was separated in November and they started a relationship. Her divorce came two years later.
While Lawton was living in the condo his ex-wife Missy was going through a tough time with her longtime boy friend, the father of her second child. When Missy and their daughter Ashley needed a place to stay, Larry decided to rent a place in Melbourne. It had rooms on two floors, perfect for two families.
What made this arrangement work was that Missy and Theresa got along famously. It certainly could have been an episode on Jerry Springer: “Ex-wife lives with ex-husband and ex-husband’s girl friend comes over a lot.”
For three months they all lived together, and when Missy and her boy friend reunited, she and Ashley moved back to Ft. Lauderdale.
*
Once the DVD was completed, the question became how best to market it.
“You can have the best product and idea in the world, but if you can’t get anyone to look at it, it dies in a garage or attic,” said Lawton. “Our mission was helping people, and our marketing strategy was to build a strong foundation around what I do. What really makes a company, product or business great is having a product that works and is needed. I knew we had that. Helping people is what drives me every day. When I see a kid change, a parent cry with happiness as I get through to her kid, it’s the most rewarding thing you can imagine.
“One of our top priorities was to gain credibility by going on TV and radio shows and to get written about in the newspapers. “
Their first order of business was to update the Reality Check Program website. They were frustrated because they were paying $500 a month to a woman who had control over the content. When they wanted to add articles, they had to do it through her, and so they changed to a company that allowed them to post articles themselves.
“I’m a workaholic,” said Lawton, “and I wanted to be able to learn the system myself. I was always a writer. In a sense that’s what law work is, putting words on a piece of paper and telling a story. I love to write and do my own articles. In prison I’d write articles for magazines and make a few bucks. All the articles you see on the site I have written myself.”
Lawton took a course in web design, and he and Joe started buying website domain names.
Joe Reilly searched for planning conventions and association seminars to attend. They went to the Police Chief’s convention and to the Sheriff’s convention, the school administrator’s convention and other similar national conventions. The word of the Reality Check Program was starting to spread.
In 2010 Lawton was asked to film a pilot for a reality TV show. A man by the name of Richard Wortman, the vice-president of development for Cheri Sundae Productions , called to talk about it. At first Lawton was skeptical, because he thought Cheri Sundae Productions sounded too much like a maker of porn films, but after Joe Reilly did some research, he saw the company was legit. Richard had seen Lawton on The Daily Show and wanted to develop a reality TV show around him.
Lawton flew to California to meet Wortman and his team, including John Johnston from A Current Affair with Maury Povich. Johnston recruited cameraman Billy Cassara, who works for 60 Minutes, 20/20, and whose father-in-law was Don Hewitt from 60 Minutes.
They made a sizzle reel for the show, which is called Lawton’s Law. Lawton was getting more calls to do TV and radio, each an opportunity to spread the word of the Reality Check Program.
In early 2010 Lawton was honored by the Brevard County Commission for his work with at-risk teens. Commissioner Andy Anderson called him to say he had heard about his work from his constituents, and he wanted to honor him with a resolution on local TV. For the one and only time, Lawton wore a tie to the meeting.
The resolution reads:
Around that time Lawton also was asked to host a weekly show on a local Brevard County radio station. The catch was that Lawton and Reilly would have to finance the show, money they could recoup by selling ads to sponsors. They decided to give it a try, and in the past couple of years have been able to attract some very prestigious guests including Congressman Bill Posey, Sheriff Jack Parker, Judge David Silverman, Department of Justice Director Dennis Greenhouse, actor Lane Garrison from the show Prison Break, and various mayors, ex-cons, teens, and parents.
The radio show has given Lawton exposure and clout in and around
Brevard County. As a result of the show he has been asked to speak and tell his story of survival and how he helps at-risk kids to many social and business groups in the area.
One meeting Lawton was invited to attend was a forum at the Brevard County Commissioner’s chamber concerning crime and how to make neighborhoods safer. Among those scheduled to speak were Norman Wolfinger, the state attorney for Brevard and Seminole counties, various sheriffs, and Lawton.
Lawton was surprised to discover that as far as he could see, the purpose of the meeting was to embarrass state attorney Wolfinger. While Wolfinger was speaking, Police Chief Tony Bollinger of Titusville got up and called him a liar. At the same time a number of the other police chiefs walked out.
“The meeting was a witch hunt,” said Lawton, “and I was very uncomfortable.”
Lawton ended up speaking for a few minutes on finding solutions to the crime problem, and when he left he was feeling really upset over what he saw. Lawton didn’t agree with everything the state attorney did, but he knew one thing: Norm Wolfinger cared about kids.
As far as Lawton was concerned, this was no time for politics. He decided he was going to do what he thought was right and not worry about the fallout.
He called Wolfinger on the phone to express his support, and Wolfinger asked him to come by the next day. Lawton talked about the compassion Wolfinger had for kids whenever he saw him in action, and at the same time noted what he considered to be the unprofessionalism of Police Chief Bollinger.
Grateful for his support and impressed by Lawton’s work, Wolfinger authorized his attorneys to make the at- risk kids who come before them watch the Reality Check DVD. He ordered that the program be placed on every plea form and pre-trial diversion program. As many as a hundred offenders a month go through Lawton’s program.