Evening With a Princess

Last night I spent the evening with a princess, a Mafia Princess that is, Antoinette Giancana. She was promoting her new book along with one of her co-authors, “JFK and Sam: The Connection Between the Giancana and Kennedy Assassinations.”

For those of you who didn’t grow up in Chicago and probably don’t have any happy childhood memories of the Mafia, Sam Giancana was the head of the Chicago crime outfit. His name shows up all over the place in Sinatra biographies and JFK assassination conspiracy theories. He also had a lot of high-profile affairs with broads like Phyllis McGuire of the famous ‘50s singing group, the McGuire Sisters. Sam, aka “Momo,” got whacked the night I graduated from high school in June 1975, while he was cooking sausages in his basement. His daughter Antoinette, aka “Toni,” wrote a best-selling book about growing up in the mob called “Mafia Princess.” The book was made into a fabulous made-for-TV movie starring Susan Lucci and Tony Curtis. If you haven’t read the book or seen the movie, I highly recommend both.

Toni struggled with the liquor and the pills for a time as she tried to reconcile the fact that her pop was a thieving, brutal killer who ordered torture killings of his associates and enemies, such as sticking ice picks into their testicles and letting them bleed to death. Like Victoria Gotti, Toni alternately reveres and is repulsed by her father’s notoriety. Eventually, Toni settled down in Downers Grove and raised five beautiful sons, and has led a crime free life.

The book signing was held at The Book Stall in Winnetka, a hoity-toity North Shore suburb. I went with my friend Karol. Karol and I both bitterly disagree on who shot JFK and we have a lot of screaming arguments about it. The JFK assassination conspiracy was all the rage when we were in high school – that and the Eagles. Anyway, it wasn’t until the mid-1970s when all these theories started surfacing after Geraldo aired the Zapruder home-movie in its 30-second entirety for the first time on network television during an ABC special.

Since then, I’ve probably read every book and watched every hackneyed documentary about the Kennedy assassination and came to the conclusion many years ago that OSWALD ACTED ALONE. I think many Americans have a hard time accepting this fact because Oswald was such a pathetic low-life, and JFK was larger than life. But you’d think after 40-plus years that some 90-year-old ball sack on his death bed would finally ‘fess up and go on record as being one of the participants in the Kennedy assassination. Instead, we got guys doing three-hour videos deep in the bowels of prisons telling tales about how they were the hit man behind the grassy knoll in exchange for some vending machine Cheetos, a Diet Coke and a pack of cigarettes, conning a bunch of gullible writers. I mean, I’d cop to betraying Jesus Christ if I were in that situation. That’s just what these theories are – theories – and nothing credible has surfaced which changes the fact that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone when he assassinated John. F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963.

I was a little taken aback when I met Toni. I expected to see the same hot, bouffant-haired cutie who posed for Playboy in the late 1980s, but instead was confronted by an elderly woman in her early seventies. WHERE THE HELL WAS SUSAN LUCCI, I wondered. She reminded me of one of those nuns who has given up wearing the habit, dressed plainly in black, no make-up and sporting wire-rimmed glasses. (Hey, I’m describing myself!) The only inkling of her notorious past was the diamond encrusted “Toni” pendant that she wore around her neck. She was a hell of a nice lady though, winked at us, talked about how she saved all of her chump change in a can in her pantry and then took herself out for a fancy lunch on her birthday, which is June 23. “That’s my booze and my lunch.”

The book store was packed. Everybody there, myself included, had obviously spent way too much personal time reading books about the Kennedy assassination and Chicago mob history. We were a well-versed and informed audience. Toni introduced herself as “Antoinette John-cana.” The book’s third co-author, Dr. Thomas H. Jobe, a psychiatrist, wasn’t there, which was unfortunate because we certainly could have used a psychiatrist last night. Dr. Jobe helped Toni recall deeply repressed memories that connected the dots of her father’s involvement in the Kennedy assassination.

In a nutshell: Momo ordered the hit on JFK. According to Toni, her father told her: “I’m going to send a message they’ll never forget.” She also recalls other statements he made, including: “Some day they are gonna get their lunch, in other words, somebody is gonna take after them and really destroy them, and it won’t just be me, it’s also going to be others that are going to lead the Kennedy demise.”

More JFK and Sam fun facts:

- Toni referred to her father as “Sam.”
- She says her father was “assassinated” by the CIA on 6/19/75, a week before he was to testify before the Church Committee, which was convened to reopen the government's investigation into the Kennedy assassination. According to Toni, Sam was going to “drop a dime on the CIA” that contracted her father to help assassinate Castro early on in the Kennedy Administration, which included the Bay of Pigs fiasco and a plot to kill Castro with an exploding cigar. "I'm still bitter about it," she said.
- There were six black cars – a combination of CIA, FBI and Oak Park police – parked in front of her father’s house 24/7. “Usually these cars would leave one at a time to go to lunch. But during the day of 6/19/75, all the cars left at the same time for several hours, allowing enough time for the CIA hit man to enter my father’s house and hide there.”
- Toni knows the exact spot in the house where the CIA hit man probably hid throughout the day. “My father used to hide in there and jump out and scare me.”
- Sam was responsible for procuring 1,000 additional votes in Chicago's mob-controlled downtown wards during the close 1960 presidential election. I asked Toni about Mayor Richard J. Daley’s involvement in boosting Kennedy votes in city wards, Toni replied: “He was in on it, too.”
- Joseph P. Kennedy, the president’s father, visited Sam in 1959 to get the mob's help in fixing the 1960 West Virginia primary and the Chicago vote.
- Toni’s ex-husband met with old Joe Kennedy who allgedly told him that his son's administration would go "easy on your operation." “But a little guy named Bobby Kennedy turned the cards," Toni said. "My father and his friends expected some respect in return. Bobby really zapped it to the mob to where it just escalated to where something had to happen.”
- When asked what would have happened if RFK lived to be elected president in 1968, Toni replied: “If I were a guy, it’d be a short stay for Bobby."
- Toni and Dr Hughes both purported that "Joe Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy were as corrupt and evil as the mob." Bobby tried to whack Carlos Marcello, head of the New Orleans crime family. Dr. Hughes said that RFK deported Marcello and his attorney to Guatemala in 1961, whisking both off in a military plane. They were eventually left for dead in an El Salvadorian jungle, until they were able to find an airport after walking thirty miles through the the jungle. Marcello suffered three broken ribs and "was in great pain." “Bobby didn’t even allow Carlos to phone his wife and let her know he wasn’t coming home, or grab a toothbrush. That’s wrong.”
- Giancana's daughters hosted a party for their father at his home in Oak Park the evening of 6/19/75, after he was deported from Mexico wearing just his pajamas and slippers. When the guests left, one of Sam's daughters returned to the house to retrieve her handbag and saw one of the party guests, Butch Blasi, skulking around the door to her father's basement hideaway. Sam was discovered by his caretaker after midnight shot once in the back of the head, and six more times in a circle around his mouth.
- According to Toni, her father left the door unlocked to his basement hideaway for the convenience of his three daughters. The front and back doors to the home were always locked. “Who would be stupid enough to rob Sam Giancana’s house?”
- The co-authors claim that the government planted the gun that killed Sam, which was later found in the Thatcher Woods with with Butch Blasi’s prints on it.
- Toni shuddered and shook her head when I asked if her father knew Jack Ruby, who she said was sent "quietly sent to Dallas to look after the mob’s interests.” (Considering that Ruby left his daschund in his car while he went to the Dallas police station to finish off Oswald, I'd say that Ruby was derranged himself.)
- Following the publication of “Mafia Princess,” Toni said she received “a lot of letters from prisoners,” including one from the mysterious hit man behind the grassy knoll, who apparently is alive and well and serving a sentence in Stateville.
- Toni, Dr. Hughes and Dr. Jobe interviewed the former Giancana associate nicknamed “Dead Eye” on video for three hours in Stateville in 1994. “If you listened to the tape and saw his body language, you knew he was telling the truth.”
- “Dead Eye” is James Files, who was just 21 when he hid behind the grassy knoll and is said to have fired the shot that spewed JFK’s brains all over Jackie’s pink suit. (I plan to write to him in prison.)
- Toni also said that her father was not involved in the alleged murder of Marilyn Monroe, who o.d.’d in August 1962. “It was Bobby. My father was not involved in the Nembutal suppositories. My father cared for a lot of women. He had a soft spot for Marilyn and thought she was misunderstood, used and abused. He did not believe in abuse toward women.” (I guess Sam was just kidding around when he almost broke Shirley MacLaine’s arm twisting it behind her back, and then slapped Sammy Davis Jr. across the room when he tried to intervene.)
- Toni says that the Oak Park police need to do a reenactment of her father’s murder, “the way they did [last week's Metra] train crash in Elmwood Park.”
- Toni still works “45 hours a week” as a sales associate at Expo Design in Oak Brook.

The evening ended when Toni and I get into a heated exchange about her father's affair with Judith Exter Campbell, the mistress Sam and JFK both shared simultaneously during JFK’s presidency. Exter Campbell got pregnant by JFK in 1962, and had an abortion paid for by Giancana at Grant Hospital in Lincoln Park. Sam reportedly offered to marry her so the baby would have a last name. I’ve read in various accounts, Exter Campbell’s included, that she and Sam were “just friends.”

“No, it was sex,” Toni said. “Her bras and panties were all over my parents’ house. I still resent him for it.”

I asked her about Judith’s pregnancy and why her father offered to marry her. “Why would he do that,” she shot back.

“Well, maybe to blackmail the president, honey!”

“The baby could’ve been my father’s. They didn’t have DNA back then.”

The book signing ended abruptly. I think Toni and Dr. Hughes were both sick of me by then. I’m sure that in the future, they’re going to monitor who is sitting in the front row. I probably won’t read the book, but just give it to my neighbor, who fronted me the money to buy her a copy because she wanted the “Mafia Princess’s” autograph.

Anyway, I’m over the Kennedy Assassination.

Why is this turkey pink?

For years I’ve stared at the famous Norman Rockwell painting “Freedom from Want.” You know the one, the old lady presenting a golden brown turkey to her guests, her man standing proudly beside her, and the goofy guy in the lower right hand corner smiling in anticipation. I’ve often wondered about the people in this painting. I think of a freakishly warm Thanksgiving afternoon, the old lady who’s slaved in a kitchen for eight hours making yams and fluffy dinner rolls with lard, the turkey, undercooked, and her guests lined up in front of the bathroom a few hours later saying, “Well, that’s another Thanksgiving dinner Ma’s ruined.”

Undercooked poultry has been a long-standing Thanksgiving tradition in my family. I was probably in my thirties before I realized that turkey wasn't supposed to be pink on the inside. I could never figure out why some years, I spent the entire Friday after Thanksgiving sick in bed with a belly ache and the shits. One year, I threw up in my friend’s bushes and couldn’t figure out if I was hung over, sick with the flu or had food poisoning.

In recent years, my sister-in-law, God bless her, has commandeered the turkey, and we’ve had lovely, fully-cooked poultry ever since.

Like a lot of holidays, Thanksgiving has lost its meaning over the years. It used to be day where we thought about the Pilgrims, who fled here in pursuit of puritanical religious freedom. Now, we’re too busy trying to choose which celebrity wake-up call we should get so we can be sitting in the parking lot of some big box store at 4 a.m., waiting to trample our fellow man so we can grab one of six plasma TVs for some incredibly low price. I feel sorry for all those retail employees who have to prepare dinner for their families, wash the dishes, entertain their ungrateful relatives, and get up 2 a.m. so they can be at their posts when the doors open at dawn for Black Friday, making $8 an hour waiting on assholes. Whoever came up with the idea of opening stores this early should be shot.

A few days before Congress broke for the Thanksgiving holiday, both the House and Senate voted to give themselves a raise, the same day they voted to cut food stamps and extensions for unemployment benefits for the displaced middle-class. Who cares, right? As long as Chimpy and the rest of the First Family were able to enjoy their maple-whipped mashed taters and deep-fried turkey in Crawford, Texas. I wonder if Chimpy farted after dinner?

I think the best Thanksgivings I spent were the ones where I had to work. I’m happy to work on any major holiday. Hell, I’d be happy to work on any ordinary weekday, period. During the early 1990s, I was the public relations director for a non-profit organization in Chicago that took care of the elderly. Every Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter, we held big parties for hundreds of lonely and isolated seniors, and prepared home-cooked meals for volunteers to deliver to shut-ins. The food was good, too, not institutional cafeteria food.

My job was to drum up media coverage for the events, and secure volunteers to work the parties and deliver the food. One year I made up a bunch of fake statistics about the amount of food we’d be serving the elderly, like if we piled all the dinner rolls one on top of the other, it would be as high as the Sears Tower, or lined up all the turkeys, they would cover the entire twenty mile stretch of Lake Shore Drive. The media instantly picked up all my fake statistics and incorporated them into their newscasts and newspaper stories. You think someone would have questioned their validity, but unless a Metra train wipes out 15 cars at a train crossing, or the mayor of Chicago drops dead of a heart attack the day before Thanksgiving, it’s a pretty slow news day. Of course, the newscasters and ink-stained wretches repeated my fake statistics as if they thought them up themselves. I’m surprised I didn’t get fired. But everyone was happy, and the old people were always glad to get out of their horrible substandard housing for the afternoon.

But I moved on from that job and my holidays went back to being dysfunctional. Probably the most memorable Thanksgiving I spent was in 1996. I was flying out on Thanksgiving Day to visit my brother in Denver. We were going to surprise my niece and nephew, who were 6 and 3, and didn't know I was coming out. My friend Karol gave me a ride to O’Hare and we smoked a big fattie on the way. We were so stoned that we circled the airport three times before we figured out where the departure dropoff was. I was sitting on the plane and had already polished off the American Airlines Bistro turkey sandwich lunch before we even left the terminal. As we were about to taxi out to the runway, a flight attendant got on the p.a. system and told us there was a security threat on board the aircraft and we were to evacuate immediately. She told us to leave everything behind, purses, coats, carry-on bags, and get the hell off the plane.

I always wondered how I would respond in a life-or-death situation and now I know. I freaked out. I was sitting by the window and practically trampled the person next to me trying to get off the plane. The woman in front of me was struggling with her two toddlers. She was trying to pick both of them up and carry them off the plane. No way was I going to let this bitch hold up the evacuation. I yelled at her, “Give me your kid,” and grabbed her son. I was like one of those passengers on the Titanic that grabbed stray children and pretended they were their own kids so they could get a seat on one of the lifeboats.

All of the other passengers got out of our way so we could save the lives of these precious children. The mom and I ran like hell through the pedway, which was lined with Chicago cops and mean looking dogs. They told us to keep running. The woman with the two kids actually turned out to be pretty nice. We made it back out to the terminal and I had some money in my pocket, so I asked her if I could buy her a drink. It was funny because passengers were running off the plane and we all headed immediately to the bar.

Security told us we could retrieve our belongings, which had been taken off the plane and were lined up in the terminal. The strangest thing was that my coat, carry-on bag, purse, and unwrapped Christmas presents for my niece and nephew were all placed neatly in one spot together. Like, how did they know? The pilot came out and told us that someone had phoned in a bomb threat to the Chicago police department. I called my brother in Denver to let him know the plane had been delayed. His narcissistic bitch wife answered the phone and started screaming at me about how I fucked up her dinner. I’m sure it was a lot of work pouring water into the Stove Top stuffing, like it was my fault there had been terrorist threat made against the plane.

Everybody was in the bar getting smashed when Fox News showed up. It was just one camera guy so I went up to him and told him what had happened. He asked if he could get me on camera. Fortunately, I happened to look fantastic. I was even wearing makeup and this cool hat that looked like the one Ingrid Bergman wore in “Casablanca.” I didn’t look like shit the way I usually do. Fox cut out my best sound bite, when I said, “It was scary, and I used to live in a really bad neighborhood.” Instead, the news clip had me repeating, “It was really scary,” ten times in a row, and I sounded like a retard. A bunch of my friends saw it,and said I looked stoned. My dad taped it, so it’s on my reel.

We ended up taking off a few hours later after American Airlines got us another plane. I didn’t get into Denver until 10 o’clock that night. The original plane had departed from Puerto Rico that morning, so there was some concern that the FALN was responsible for the bomb threat, but I think it was some non-custodial parent who was pissed that his or her kids were flying off for the holiday. Anyway, we were lucky the plane didn’t blow up mid air.

Norman Rockwell would have loved it.

PDD remembers Nov. 22, 1963

‘Anybody here, see my old friend John …’

It is the most solemn day of the Kennedy Liturgical year. A Sacred-Bleeding-Heart-of-Jesus, calendar-square etched in black Magic Marker. It is Good Friday, Yom Kipper and Ramadan all rolled up into one big mess of a sorry sad day. Today marks the 42nd anniversary when Lee Harvey Oswald, Momo Giancanna, H.R. Haldeman or whoever the hell it was hiding behind the grassy knoll in Dealy Plaza, blasted Jack Kennedy off the planet.

Before Sept. 11, 2001, the assassination of President Kennedy was the most shocking event that Americans experienced. There was no swelling of patriotic pride such as that after 9/11. Most Americans felt ashamed and embarrassed in November 1963, to live in a country that would murder its own president in cold blood like some rouge nation.

I can still remember my own mother proclaiming: “The whole world is going think we’re a bunch of nuts.”

For those of use who were around on Nov. 22, 1963, now middle-aged baby-boomers and senior citizens, this PDD is dedicated to you. Oh, and Caroline, too.

So rev up “Camelot” on the old Victrola and read on with “vigah.”

“They put two graves in Arlington …”

According to ‘Dear Abby,’ if you were at least four years old in November of 1963, you never forgot where you were when you first heard the news that President Kennedy had been assassinated. If you were as young as poor John-John, who turned three the day of his father’s funeral and said he had no memory of his tender salute to his father’s passing coffin, let alone of his father, you probably don’t remember a damn thing.

Besides J.D. Tippet, the Dallas police officer who was gunned down by the patsy Lee Harvey Oswald as he fled the Texas School Book Depository, there was another victim on the day that Kennedy was shot: a fast-rising comedian who plunged into automatic celebrity hasbeendom the moment the third (or fourth) bullet hammered through the president’s skull.

Vaughn Meader was a fledgling standup comic on the Greenwich Village coffee house scene when he threw out a punch line in JFK’s voice in 1961. The audience loved it, and soon Meader added some JFK-press conference schtick to his act. His star began to soar, with regular gigs on Ed Sullivan and a cover story in Newsweek. His first comedy LP, a musical spoof entitled “The First Family,” became an overnight sensation. One of the album’s cuts featured the president teaching 5-year-old Caroline the proper pronunciation of the word “vigah,” while other actors and actresses portrayed various members of the First Family.

These were heady times for young Mr. Meader, who had grown up in children’s homes in Maine. When the press asked the president what he thought of his “Myna bird,” JFK quipped that Meader “sounds more like Teddy than myself.” Jackie was less subtle, ordering JFK’s press secretary, Pierre Salinger, to pen a nasty note to the comic asking him to cease and desist in mocking Caroline and baby John. (Meader claims he never received Jackie’s poison-pen letter.)

On Nov. 22, 1963, Meader had hailed a taxi in downtown Milwaukee when the cabbie asked if he “heard about Kennedy in Dallas.” Thinking it was a joke, Meader replied, “No, how does it go?” It was no joke. Meader bought a bottle of Scotch and headed back to his hotel room, his career in tatters. Meader was quickly out of work. Though he tried to revive his career in the years following Kennedy’s death, the public could not forget the comic’s old act that made fun of the martyred president, and rejected Meader’s new material. Meader dabbled in coke and smack until 1968, when he somehow pulled himself together and returned to Maine, where he became a modestly successful songwriter.

The evening after Kennedy was laid to rest on Nov. 25, 1963, Lenny Bruce told an audience, “they put two graves in Arlington Cemetery, one for John Kennedy and the other for Vaughn Meader.”

One of the most cosmic cases of bad show-biz timing ever.

The wit and wisdom of JFK

While he didn’t live long enough to write his presidential memoirs, Jack Kennedy left behind enough knee-slapping, one-liners from press conferences and rubber chicken dinners to fill a book, “The Wit and Wisdom of John F. Kennedy.”

On the Green Bay Packers – “Ladies and gentlemen, I was warned to be out here in plenty of time to permit those who are going to the Green Bay Packers game to leave,” Kennedy told a carnivorous crowd at 1960 campaign appearance in Green Bay, Wis. “I don’t mind running against Mr. Nixon, but I have the good sense not to run against the Green Bay Packers.”

On chimps in space – When announcing to assembled reporters that the United States had successfully sent a chimp into space on Nov. 29, 1961, JFK said, “This chimpanzee who is flying in space took off at 10:08. He reports that everything is going perfectly and working well.”

On children – After trying to elicit a kiss from the shy 4-year-old daughter of a friend who resisted his charms, Kennedy said: “I don’t think she quite caught that strong quality of love of children that is so much a part of the candidate’s make-up which has made him dear to the hearts of all mothers.”

No doubt had Joe Kennedy Jr. survived World War II, Jack would have been a hit in the Catskills.

Strange but true similarities between 11/22 and 9/11

Add eleven and twenty-two and you get thirty-three, divided by three which equals eleven. Add one plus nine plus six plus three, which equals nineteen. One plus nine equals ten. Now, add two plus zero plus zero plus one equaling three. Add to nine equaling twelve minus one equaling eleven. Nine plus eleven equals twenty subtracted by two, making eighteen. Add one plus eight to get nine. Twenty-two divided by two is eleven, which makes 9/11. 9/11. 11/22.

The ‘zero factor’

To this day my mother claims the only reason she voted for Nixon was because her father once told her that every U.S. president elected during a year ending in zero died in office. But does a death curse really threaten those U.S. presidents elected to office in years evenly divisible by twenty?

With the exception of Ronald Reagan, who came literally within an inch of losing his life after Jodie Foster-stalker John Hinckley’s 1980 assassination attempt, all U.S. presidents elected in years ending in zero since 1840, have either died violently or of natural causes while in office.

According to legend, Tecumseh, a famed Indian chief, put a curse on the Great White Fathers after suffering a crushing defeat at the hands of William Henry Harrison at the Battle of Tippecanoe in 1811. Harrison, who went on to become president in 1840, died of pneumonia shortly after delivering his inauguration address coatless in sub-zero weather.

The only other president to have died in office not elected in a zero year was Zachary Taylor, who was elected in 1848 but died in 1850 of a stomach ailment. While no Indian curse has ever been documented, the coincidence of presidential fatalities is as creepy as an episode of John Edwards' "Crossing Over."

While some claim Ronald Reagan broke the chain of zero-year voodoo, others say the curse is only sleeping, which we can only hope if you catch my drift. Following is a list of the U.S. presidents who all died under the curse:

1840 – William Henry Harrison (pneumonia)
1860 – Abraham Lincoln (shot in head)
1880 – James A. Garfield (shot in back)
1900 – William McKinley (shot while shaking hands with well-wishers after making speech)
1920 – Warren G. Harding (stroke – may also have been poisoned by wife)
1940 – Franklin D. Roosevelt (massive cerebral hemorrhage in fourth term while on vacation with mistress)
1960 – John F. Kennedy (shot in head)

Conspiracy or lone gunman – you decide

Take the kids on a virtual tour back to Nov. 22, 1963, including live Web cam views of Dealy Plaza from the sniper’s perch on the sixth floor of the Texas Book Depository, the infamous grassy knoll, and video clips of local Dallas TV newsman Jay Watson chain-smoking through an interview with reluctant amateur filmmaker, Abraham Zapruder, on the Dallas News Web site.

Don’t forget to send a postcard!

By the way, OSWALD ACTED ALONE !!!

Part 2 - How I Discovered the True Meaning of Hell at The Learning Annex

When we left off, I had just been trained in the Basic Structure of the Sales Procedure and had deeply offended Bill Zanker, president and founder of The Learning Annex, by swearing in front of his kids. PDD continues its exploration of America's newest evil empire and the underpinnings of The Learning Annex Real Estate Wealth Expo, coming to a town near you.

I arrived fifteen minutes early for my shift on Saturday morning. The main lobby of the Stephens Convention Center was jammed with people waiting to get into The Learning Annex Real Estate Wealth Expo. Most of them had purchased day or weekend passes for $49 and $179. Those who bought $499 VIP passes had front row access to the keynote speakers and free massages in the VIP lounge, where they could get away from the wretched, Avian-flu gestating masses.

Besides Trump, who was speaking on Sunday evening, the other featured keynote speakers included such motivational hotties as Tony Robbins, the No. 1 Peak Performance Coach; "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" Robert Kiyosaki, who would reveal surprising secrets that the rich know about money that the poor and middle-class do not; and former heavyweight boxing champion George Foreman, who would inspire others to achieve HUGE successes in in their own lives.

I had to hand it to Bill Zanker. He certainly had his fingertips on the pulse of the paycheck-to-paycheck living middle-class. The fact that the expo was being held at the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center should have been a clue to those attending that the whole thing was a set-up. For years, Stephens has managed to duck several federal investigations into his alleged ties to organized crime. His self-named convention center was a perfect venue for The Learning Annex.

As if the 50,000 lemmings lined up at the gates weren't enough, the main lobby was quickly filling up with parents pushing 3,000 squalling babies in strollers the size of Buicks for a baby show that was being held in another area of the convention center. I immediately decided to get the hell out of there before I got trampled in a Tony Robbins stampede and high-tailed it to Conference Room 29 to begin my new career as a credit card assistant.

The room manager still hadn't shown up, so I assigned myself the task of standing in a pedway and directing expo attendees to the main lobby. Despite the huge directional signs pointing the way, several people still asked me for directions. Almost immediately, I got into a perky contest with a 19-year-old student from De Paul University, who was a lot more natural at it than I was. There was no way I was going to get duked any extra cash standing next to Miss Merry Sunshine. I moved down a couple hundred feet from her and continued shepherding people to the main lobby.

Eventually the room opened and I met the room manager, an extremely nice guy from The Learning Annex's San Francisco office, who treated our sales team decently the whole weekend. I asked him if he invested in real estate and he told me he had a hard enough time just trying to make his rent. He immeidately put me to work taping off the side sections of chairs, as attendees made their way in for the morning's first seminar, "How To Market, Sell (FOR BIG PROFITS) on Ebay." After I finished taping, I went back to stand outside the conference room and continued to greet people. I was relieved to see that I wouldn't have to compete with anyone else in being perky, and gave my most winning yellow-toothed smile as I welcomed people to the seminar and informed them that plenty of great seats were still available.

The first seminar went well enough. It was hosted by a guy named Lynn Alder who spoke for 90 minutes on how to quickly build wealth selling and buying real estate on Ebay with little or no money down while you sat on your ass. Every time I thought he was going to reveal some insider secrets about navigating the auction proces, he invited the audience to sign up for his seminar. Normally, the seminar cost a couple grand, but as a special favor to The Learning Annex he was offering it at a discounted rate of $795. Considering that most of the information he was dishing out is available in "Ebay for Dummies," which you can buy on Amazon for $8.99, it was an incredible bargain. Our crack team of sales assistants performed like a well-oiled machine, managing the swarm of people rushing to the back of the room to sign up for Alder's class.

My new friend Barb rolled in at 10 a.m., bursting with energy from her two-hour ride on the L. She was wearing the same pre-requisitie black pants and white-collar, button-down shirt that was the weekend's required dress code. There were hundreds of us walking around dressed like this, as if we were extras cast in a disaster flick. The second scheduled speaker was Jay Mitton, "the Father of Asset Protection." Mitton, I would later learn, had received a cease-and-desist order from the Florida attorney general's office to stop hawking his "Legal Tools for RE Investors" bootcamp. Because of "the incident in Florida," Mitton's personal assistant, Robert Bluhm, would be filling in. Barb immediately stationed herself outside the door and started greeting the next group. She had a slight speech impediment but was incredibly perky as she beckoned people to "get up close and personal with Robert Bluhm." Actually, I liked Barb and wouldn't mind running into her again some day. I felt terrible later for teasing her when I told her that everyone was looking for her after she had ducked out for one of her many snacks.

Robert Bluhm got up and began his 90-minute spiel. He actually used phrases like "tell ya what I'm gonna do," as he talked about setting up family limited partnerships and bullet-proofing your business assests against lawsuits, levies and divorces. The "Cutting Edge Strategies for Tax Reduction" bootcamps were going for just $2,599, marked down from the regular cost of $4,995. As an added bonus, those who signed up received a 100-pound suitcase of complimentary home-study materials.

It was time for lunch and my feet were killing me. The only time I had sat down the entire morning was when I went to the toilet. I bought some nachos with glow-in-the-dark cheese, the only food item left after I stood in line for 35 minutes at one of the concession stands, and sat down at a table with 20 strangers. A homeless woman who had obviously found a day pass that someone had discarded in the parking lot, was fascinated with my nachos. She kept asking me if she could have some. I finally told her to get her fucking hand out of my food, but ended up giving her the rest since they tasted like shit anyway. When I finished lunch, I ducked outside for a smoke and ended up talking to this older woman and her son who asked me where they could get a refund to the expo. "It's just an infomercial. I could have stayed home and watched this junk on TV," the woman complained. I promised to relay her comments to Bill Zanker.

The rest of the afternoon was more of the same - late night infomercial "gurus" shrieking about real estate and how we all had to protect ourselves from the Man, scaring people who had lost their jobs and scraped together the last of their money to dump on worthless classes and overproduced DVDs filled with phony testimonials from welfare moms and ministers who became millionaires in 90 days using the gurus' simple wealth-building techniques, all offered at unbelievable, one-time-only, Learning Annex discounts. The sales assistants got on each other's nerves as our asses became gridlocked behind the sales table, listening to people complain about how cold the conference rooms were, which were kept at 55 degrees, so they'd stay awake during the boring double-talk.

The final speaker of the day was Russ Whitney, king of the late night infomercials. Russ Whitney started out working in a slaughter house in upstate New York where made $5 an hour slaughtering pigs before he set out to become the youngest self-made millionaire in the country. Today, he is the founder of "a financial empire comprising many successful companies." Russ brought his own sales team, goons with sinister male balding patterns who watched the audience like hawks. The goon squad unleashed two of its top lady shylocks, Donna and Stephanie, dressed in their best Condoleezza Rice power suits, who called our team of assistants into a huddle. Our mission was to push an 8-day domestic and international land development bootcamp that would take place in Florida and Costa Rica, where no doubt Russ Whitney planned to flee from the feds. The bootcamp was $39,999, but was being offered that day for just $13,990. In addition, those who signed up would receive add-ons that included a DVD of Russ Whitney's first class, "Millionnaire University," three free teleconference calls with transcripts, and phone calls for life with a certified Whitney Education Group instructor - an incredible value of $7,000. In exchange for our help, we were each given a free Russ Whitney promotional DVD of student testimonials, and one of his books, "Millionaire Real Estate Mentor," both of which I gave to the woman minding the coat room.

The room quickly filled up with Russ Whitney groupies before I had a chance to tape it off, the only task I excelled at the entire weekend. Russ seemed to have quite the following, including a mentally retarded couple who were beside themselves with excitement at meeting an actual infomercial celebrity. The goon squad seemed to know them, Stephanie exclaiming, "There's my smiley guy." Smiley Guy was pushing his wife who must have weighed 400 pounds in a wheelchair, who was buried beneath 20 bags of sales brochures they had collected from the exhibitors' booths. I pulled away a couple of folding chairs in the back row to accommodate the woman's wheelchair, which was a big mistake because they didn't stop bugging me for the rest of the afternoon.

Smiley Guy told me they had unsuccessfully applied for subsidized housing, but because of his wife's disabilities, they were discriminated against. "The system's working against us," he said. In addition to being crippled, his wife was legally blind. I couldn't believe these two retards had money to invest in real estate. Maybe Russ Whitney was a genius after all. They showed me an article from the Chicago Tribune about housing for the handicapped. "This is going to knock Russ's socks off," they told me. Smiley Guy kept complaining to me how the crowd was "jostling my wife." I suggested that if she stayed put and quit wheeling around all over the place, people would stop bumping into her.

A few minutes before the seminar began Russ Whitney himself barrelled into the room on a Segue, almost crashing into the retarded woman in the wheelchair. He had one of those hairbrush crewcuts and a mustache that stretched over his lip like a caterpillar. I don't know if it was one of his goons or a Learning Annex executive who yelled at me to start seating the SRO crowd into the few scant seats that were available. All I can say is after listening to Russ Whitney talk for two hours, if you fall for his line of bull you need a mental health examination. I did a Google search on him and at present there are at least 50 class action lawsuits against his companies filed by unhappy consumers who lost their life savings taking one of his get-rich-quick real estate classes.

Russ had people eating out of his hand. He could have been selling road-kill and people would have happily paid $13,990 for it. One woman even brought him beer on the stage as he talked about his unhappy childhood, his wicked stepmother, and his time in prison serving an armed robbery sentence, interspersed with his simple, borderline legal techniques for generating wealth quickly. People literally ran to the back of the room when it was over to sign up for the 8-day domestic and international land development bootcamp. Even Bill Zanker showed up and started screaming at us when the credit card machines went down and we had to take imprints of people's credit and debit cards by rubbing pencils over the numbers on the sales forms. It was a fucking madhouse. Russ still had his mike on and you could hear him cajoling the little people who were lined up to get his autograph.

Sunday morning I considered not showing up for the second day. Our room manager told us we didn't have to be in the room until 9 a.m., so I blew off the first two hours of my shift. I figured I was in it this far, so I might as well go all the way. Russ Whitney was giving his seminar again, although this time, the audience was a little more skeptical than the day before. Russ was decked out in an Armani suit because it was "the Lord's Day." He kept cajoling Jesus to "strike me down if I'm lying." If ever there was a moment for a freak, baptismal electrocution accident, it was then. Toward the end of his spiel, Russ ordered us to shut the doors and not let anyone out of the room. He started screaming at the audience that he gave them two hours of his precious time, so they could give him two minutes of theirs. He told people that sooner or later they would have to take a shot at wealth and to spread a downpayment for the bootcamp over several credit cards or "take a loan out from mom and dad." He led the audience to the back of the room and started shoving sales forms in their faces as he ripped their credit cards out of their hands.

Finally it was all over at 5 p.m. and we packed up the room. I still had two hours left on my shift so we took all the cleaning supplies back to the exhibit room behind the main keynote hall where Trump was appearing. For the next two hours, I counted paper clips and clipboards with Barb, and untangled power cords from the credit card processors that the other room managers had thrown into boxes. None of the other workers I talked to had gotten duked any extra cash. It was just another one of the weekend's many lies.

By 7 p.m. I had enough. I told my room manager that I had to get home to my fictitious children. I decided to stick around and watch The Donald, who was running late. Some other scheister named Scott Scheel had been speaking on the main stage for three hours and people were starting to boo him. Thanks to my work pass, I was able to get all the way to the front of the hall behind the VIP seats. Signs for The Donald were being passed out among the audience, "You're fired," "Trump for President" and "We love you, Donald." Bill Zanker climbed up on the main stage screaming, "Thank-you, Chicago." He was creaming in his pants because he made at least $20 million off this crowd of gullible fools. Then Robert Kiyosaki got up and began his introduction of The Donald.

Everyone in the hall was on their feet. I was standing about 50 feet from the stage and have to admit, it was pretty damn exciting. All of a sudden the ceiling exploded with fake Monopoly money that rained down on the audience with pictures of The Donald's face. The FUN girls poured out on to the stage as Trump made his rock star entrance. "The Apprentice" theme, the O'Jays "For the Love of Money," blasted through the convention center. The scariest part was seing Trump's comb-over up close. It looked like the tail fin on a '57 Chevy. There was no telling where The Donald's comb-over started or ended.

I can see why The Donald is so popular. He is very funny and charismatic, although he really didn't say anything substantial. He made some cracks about the FUN girls and told them to "get out of here" and made everyone sit back down. He'll probably end up being president some day. I decided to leave before the room manager caught me and made me stay and count Learning Annex pens. As I walked out of the convention center, Trump began his talk saying how "New York is an even worse jungle than the jungles on 'Survivor' produced by the brilliant Mark Burnett, who is also producer of 'The Apprentice.'" He told the audience to "think big, really big" and advised everyone to get a pre-nup.

I learned quite a bit from my weekend with The Learning Annex. I always considered myself a hard worker, but sitting on my ass in corporate America and writing news stories for community newspapers is easy compared to how hard most people in this country have to work at low paying jobs. For example, I never even bothered asking the room manager if it was all right to take a break. I just took one. I talked to many people working at the expo who stood in the same spot for 16 hours without a break. I have a much greater appreciation now for people who work in fast food, retail, hotels and the millions of other service jobs out there. I had forgotten how easy it is to become demoralized working one of these jobs, and developing a shitty attitude.

I also learned that a majority of the real estate "gurus" who spoke at the real estate wealth expo are currently under indictment for defrauding consumers. (Gee, do you think Bill Zanker knew anything about this?) Somebody ought to look into it. Anyway, I'd rather have Russ Whitney's first job, slaughtering pigs, than work at any future events sponsored by The Learning Annex.

Part 1 - How I Discovered the True Meaning of Hell at The Learning Annex

You can learn a lot at The Learning Annex: how to talk to your cat, reversing the aging process through Chinese medicine, designing fabulous floral arrangements for money, or writing and pitching a screenplay. Anything your heart desires can found in one of those ubiquitous boxes stuffed with free, urine-smelling catalogs on any street corner in America. In many instances, changing your stagnant life only costs $29.99 for a two-and-a-half hour personal growth seminar. But I never thought I would discover the true meaning of hell at The Learning Annex, and get paid $11 an hour while doing it. Following is Part 1 of PDD’s exploration of America’s newest evil empire – The Learning Annex.

It is 6:45 on a dismal, gray Saturday morning in Rosemont. Already the lines of disenfranchised dreamers are snaking through the main lobby of the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center when I show up to clock in for my weekend gig as a credit card assistant at The Learning Annex Real Estate Wealth Expo, an event which promises attendees “One Weekend Can Make You A Millionaire.” Before the weekend is over, we will all be slathered in snake oil, as if partaking in some giant orgy for the desperate middle-class, presided over by the king deal-maker himself, Donald Trump.

I’d been dreading the expo for weeks ever since the group interview I attended a month earlier with the event hiring manager, whose Eminem "Ass Like That" ringtone kept going off on her cell phone every two seconds. There were several job assignments to choose from: greeter, usher, registrar, sales assistant, credit card assistant, card processor and roustabout. I checked any box on the application that might assure me of some ass-sitting time so I wouldn’t have to stand on my feet for 14 hours, even if I wasn’t qualified for it. Having not worked in the low-wage job industry for over 30 years, any useful skills I may have acquired from working fast food, retail or as a Ground Round clown were quashed by the equal amount of time I had spent in corporate America getting the life-blood sucked out of me, up until which 18 months ago I was unhappily, but gainfully employed.

I indicated that I had skills in using a credit card processing machine, even though the last time I had processed any consumer’s credit card was during the 1970s as a cashier for Venture Discount using a manual card imprinter. Even then I had a hard time sliding the plate over the credit slip without ripping the carbons to shreds. After the interview, I began praying that I wouldn’t get an e-mail notifying me that I’d been hired as one of 500 expo workers so I could attend the Hollywood Collectibles Show at the Purple Hotel in Lincolnwood, which was being held the same weekend. Unfortunately, I received an e-mail a few weeks later informing me that I had been selected for an “elite work crew” and to show up for a mandatory training session the Thursday evening before the show. I was faced with an important career decision: meet Edd “Kookie” Byrnes or make $11 an hour working two 14-hour shifts so I could get the brakes fixed on my car.

When I showed up for training at the Stephens Convention Center, half of the folding chairs in the back rows of one of the expo halls had been cordoned off with masking tape. I would soon learn how important masking tape was at The Learning Annex, since I would spend most of the weekend taping off the side sections of chairs in Conference Room 29, so that the front and center rows would get filled up first for a series of seminars with catchy names like “$9K A Month Cash Flow,” “Earn $3,000 to $10,000 a Month,” “Free Money From the Government,” “Make Huge Profits With Other People’s Money,” “Effortless Wealth,” and “How To Think Like A Millionaire.” Interestingly enough, there was not one seminar being offered on ethics, but then who needed honesty or integrity when the goal was to get filthy rich with as little effort as possible.

During the training session, I began to have second thoughts about lying on the application about my prowess using a computerized credit card processor, since I have no other discernable survival skills, let alone not knowing how to add or subtract. I definitely felt on the wrong side of 40 sitting amidst a group of nubile young hotties who’d been hired to wear fishnets and tank tops with the word “FUN” emblazoned across their breast implants to rile up the mostly male crowd of horny, wannabe millionaires attending the expo.

After yelling “great” a few times, we were informed that The Learning Annex Real Estate Wealth Expo was the Most Ambitious Event of its Kind in the Entire World. Our mission was to create an Energetic, Friendly and Professional Environment. Every Learning Annex staff member was Extremely Important and we were promised the Most Exciting Weekend of Our Lives. It was going to be Hard Work, but damn it all, we were going to have FUN.

Most of the doors were locked on our tour of the Stephens Convention Center, a maze of pedways, corridors and hard concrete floors. We were directed back into the expo hall for our training on the Basic Structure of the Sales Procedure. My job was to grab people’s credit cards while they were signing up for grossly overpriced home-study materials and wealth-building “bootcamps” and hand them over to the card processor before they had a chance to think about how they were being ripped off. After the card was processed, I was to hand it to the product fulfillment assistant who would check the order forms to see if they had been completed properly, and then fork over a 50-pound bag of product.

After completing our training on the Basic Structure of the Sales Procedure, we were treated to a pep talk by the big man himself, Bill Zanker, president and founder of The Learning Annex, who started his personal growth empire after seeing a man with dirty hands giving back rubs in a San Francisco park while attending film school. Zanker, who’s all about incentives we were told, promised that we’d all walk out with a few extra hundred dollars in our pockets since there would be anonymous Learning Annex executives walking around duking us if we were spotted not slouching or being unfriendly to expo attendees. “If you don’t, it means you weren’t doing a good job,” Zanker said. “It’s up to you if you want to declare it.”

When Zanker finished his motivational speech, we were invited to stay and watch the evening’s episode of “The Apprentice” that was featuring a segment on The Learning Annex, which was paying $1.5 million to Donald Trump to be the expo’s keynote speaker. There was a huge television screen at the front of the room and people cheered and booed as various contestants schemed and brown nosed and accused each other of being “tight ass Jews.” I never really watched “The Apprentice” so I had no idea what was going on, my tastes in reality television running more along such sophisticated lines as “Dog Bounty Hunter” and “Growing Up Gotti.” I was sitting next to a woman named Barb, who’d I be working with on the same sales team. Barb lived way the hell out by Midway Airport and was shaped like Frosty the Snowman. She took three trains to get to the convention center. Barb was totally into “The Apprentice” and kept heckling this one contestant named Markus, to whom The Donald would utter his famous catch phrase, “You’re fired.”

Barb asked me if we should “clock out” since the training session was over and we were just sitting around watching television. I told her rather loudly, “Hell no, I was promised a two-hour training session, and I’m going to bank every fucking hour that I can working this crappy gig.” Unfortunately, I didn’t notice that Zanker was sitting right in front of us with his young children, who turned around and shot me a stare of death for swearing in front of his kids and maligning his personal growth empire.

Like the many low-end jobs I had worked in high school and college, I had already screwed up by being insubordinate, and the expo hadn’t even started yet. I was determined right then and there to make it up to Mr. Zanker. I was going to get duked some extra cash by being perky, even if it fucking killed me.