Remember Bob with the ear-to-ear grin, and his rather plain looking, goofy-grinned wife? The TV commercials would make you think the reason for both grins was a product called Enzyte.
Smiling Bob’s real name is Steven Warshak, and he is (or was) the owner of Berkeley Premium Nutraceuticals, Inc. and TCI Media, Inc. Goofy wife is Bob’s goofy mother, the coowner of Berkley and TCI. Her name is Harriet.
Berkeley was an incredibly profitable company. All that green flowing in was the real reason for both the Warshak’s grins. Berkley distributed Enzyte, an herbal supplement the commercials claimed enhanced Bob’s sexual performance. Those ads, while entertaining, were apparently misleading. Enzyte didn’t work as claimed (surprise!), and wanna-be Bobs complained.
Bob and Harriet got sued and charged with criminal fraud… they lost on all counts… lost all of that money that kept them smiling on TV and got them chunked in the pokey to boot.
No more smiling Bob. TVland mourned.
But wait! Bob and goofy mother struck back with an appeal, which they won based on 4th Amendment arguments. Both are smiling again.
If this ruling makes it to SCOTUS, I wonder if Clarence Thomas will be smiling…
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4 Comments:
Huh. I'd wondered what happened to ol' Smiling Bob. The commercials were certainly entertaining, even if the product was bogus. If it really worked, Big Pharma would have snapped it up early on and made even more of a fortune than Bob & Harriet did.
Ah, no. The convictions for mail fraud, wire fraud, bank fraud, and conspiracy were all sustained. Only the conviction for money-laundering was overturned.
Both Smiling Bob and his mother will be resentenced, but they're still going to prison (if they are not there now).
Well... maybe. The pair are not yet in the pokey and depending on the re-sentencing, they may serve only a short stretch. The forfeiture of assets stands, so they don't get to keep the money, but compared to the 25 years they were facing whatever comes next will be a quite likely be a cake walk.
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