The ads just ooze intentional cheesiness, none more so than “Enzyte Christmas.”
In the (unlikely) event you’ve never seen it, picture an office holiday party: reindeer sweaters, cubicles festooned with garlands, and antler-headed colleagues engaged in photocopier high jinks. Into this jolly tableau strides Smilin’ Bob—just your average middle manager with a bigger-than-average grin—in a Santa suit. “Not long ago, Santa decided he needed a little more room in his sled,” goes the smarmy voice-over, as a whistling theme song plays in the background. “So he made a call to Enzyte about natural male enhancement. And after a few short weeks, what did he get?” The camera cuts to a group of women who titter and leer in Bob’s general direction. “Why, not only a sleigh full of confidence and a sack full of pride, but it looks like Bob got the one thing that every lady likes: the joy of a gift that keeps on”—big pause—“giving.”
And that’s just one of eighteen Smilin’ Bob ads, all of which share the same objective: to sell a truckload of Enzyte, the once-a-day tablet that touts itself as “the effective, reliable way” to “the strongest, most powerful erections imaginable.” There’s the airport ad, in which Bob smiles his way through security (“Bob is not traveling as light as he used to!”), the one where Bob jumps off a diving board (“Bob has a big new spring of _con_fidence, a generous swelling of pride”), and the one at the bowling alley (“Bob is throwing them hard and straight”). Smilin’ Bob never speaks, but the voice-over explains that he is “doing well. Very well indeed.”
Retro in style and slyly inexplicit, the ads let Bob’s smirk suggest what Enzyte can do, and millions of men have responded—even after the man who created Bob lost his business, his home, his fortune, and ultimately his freedom. Since then, that man—Steven E. Warshak, Federal Inmate #04431-061—has kept as quiet as the star of his commercials, refusing all interview requests. Here, for the first time, he attempts to explain himself.
The problem was growth, Steve Warshak tells me. First it made him a threat, he says; then it made him a target.
We are alone, except for two distant prison administrators, in the huge sterile visiting room of a medium-security facility in the Appalachian Mountains of West Virginia. I have come to ask Warshak, 43, about what prosecutors call his “diabolical” nature, a nature exhibited—to quote the judge who sentenced him to twenty-five years behind bars—by the “massive fraudulent undertaking” for which he was convicted in August 2008.
Warshak was the founder of Berkeley Premium Nutraceuticals, a Cincinnati company that sold a wide range of supplements but made most of its money on one blockbuster product: Enzyte. Warshak sold countless men on the simple idea that happiness was just a little blue pill away. His pill had a six-letter name, just like the prescription drug it was designed to evoke. But unlike Viagra, Enzyte was “natural” and could be ordered without a prescription in the privacy of one’s home.
At last year’s trial, prosecutors alleged that Warshak had exploited that desire for privacy to bilk his customers out of more than $100 million. The scam was simple, they alleged: Get a customer’s credit card number by offering a free sample (pay only the postage!), then charge the card again for more product than the customer ever ordered. Enzyte was marketed to men who didn’t want to go to the doctor, the government argued, and thus were likely to be ashamed of their sexual inadequacy. Warshak figured he could steal from these customers with minimum risk, prosecutors said; embarrassment would keep them from complaining.
Like most convicts, Warshak maintains his innocence. But his argument is more creative than most. He says he is being unfairly punished for something that as a free man he claimed to know a lot about: getting too big too fast.
“We were a million times more successful than I ever dreamed of being,” he tells me, settling into one of 144 blue plastic chairs that are bolted to the linoleum floor in rows of twelve. His voice is soft, his manner overly polite. He looks athletic, even boyish, despite touches of gray at the temples of his dark hair. Behind wire-rimmed glasses, his brown eyes are alert and, at moments, warm—beseeching, even. But for the prison khakis with warshak printed on a white iron-on label over his heart, he could be your kindly neighborhood dentist.
“You learn as you go, and you make some mistakes,” he says of the company he and four friends and relatives started in his basement in 2001. “We started out like rookies. We weren’t Harvard MBAs. We outgrew our systems almost every six months. We had some growth issues.”
A warning: In Warshak’s world, these kinds of boner-related double entendres seem to pop up all the time. But this one holds a particular irony. Growth—or at least the promise of it—made Warshak a very wealthy man.
His background was in marketing, not physiology. Raised in the suburbs of Cincinnati by a factory worker and a stay-at-home mom, he was an unexceptional student in high school and then at Ohio University—but he was great at selling. His first company sold ads displayed at hockey rinks. But Warshak had grander visions. In 1999 he noticed that every men’s magazine was selling potency in some form or another, so he turned his attention to herbal supplements. “It was never a passion of mine to make sexual-health products,” Warshak says. “If the marketplace had wanted pencils, we would have sold pencils.”
Enzyte wasn’t Warshak’s first supplement, but it quickly became his best seller. He invested heavily in advertising, commissioning the Smilin’ Bob campaign and buying airtime on channels like CNN and ESPN. By 2004, Berkeley had annual revenues of more than $200 million, at least half of it from Enzyte. That was also the year that the FBI, the FDA, the Postal Inspection Service, and the IRS teamed up to investigate the company that had prompted thousands of complaints to the Better Business Bureau. Soon a grand jury would name Warshak, four of his colleagues, and Warshak’s 75-year-old mother, Harriet, in an eighty-four-page indictment that alleged petty theft on a vast scale. (Warshak was charged with 112 counts of mail fraud, bank fraud, credit card fraud, money laundering, and obstruction of justice.) Several unindicted co-conspirators—among them Warshak’s sister and her husband—would eventually cooperate with the government in hopes of receiving lesser sentences.
Warshak opted not to testify in his own defense. Most days during the trial he sat impassively, his blithely handsome face betraying neither remorse nor anger nor fear, even as prosecutors painted him as a con artist who preyed on people’s insecurities. But during my nearly four hours at Federal Correctional Institution Gilmer, a cluster of gray cinder-block buildings on a treeless plot three hours south of Pittsburgh, Warshak proves expansive. He tells me how Berkeley quickly grew from a start-up to a complex operation that employed 1,400 people in round-the-clock shifts, and how the number of calls from prospective customers jumped from 26,000 in 2001 to 7.8 million in 2004. He will acknowledge that, amid this avalanche of interest, the company was overwhelmed at times. But he will insist that he is not guilty of a single crime.
“I get it: We’re all tired of poor customer service. But I’m the only one spending my life in prison over it,” he says, alleging that an overzealous government has repeatedly twisted his words and actions. In flusher times, Warshak told anyone who asked that he was building the Pfizer of the supplements industry—classy and credible, with fifteen products ranging from vision care to heart health.
As Warshak talks, his two defining characteristics emerge: earnestness and extremely porous logic. He can’t be guilty of fraud, he says. Why? Because he didn’t believe he was doing anything wrong. Enzyte must have been a good product, he asserts. The proof: It was hugely popular. “The products were definitely effective,” he says, citing the government’s lack of proof to the contrary. “Enzyte was a brand that millions bought and rebought. It was quality.”
The prosecution didn’t do much to debunk these obvious syllogisms, drilling down on Warshak’s business practices, not on his products’ efficacy. “It’s not illegal to sell snake oil if people are willing to buy it,” says Special Agent John Maser, the lead FBI investigator on the case. Adds assistant U.S. attorney Karl Kadon, one of the prosecutors: “We focused on the activity that is criminal: the way they sold it.”
The rumors are true! Ladies love a man with confidence. Regain Your Confidence TODAY**!** read one of Warshak’s Web sites, which boasted that Enzyte users enjoyed improved length and girth, roundness, and expanded tissue mass. At about $1.50 apiece, the pills—a compound of herbs, minerals, and vitamins—were cheaper than Viagra (especially if you bought two months’ worth and got one FREE!).
From the start, Warshak tapped into the rich vein of performance anxiety that makes us willing to do—or buy—almost anything to measure up. He was hardly the first entrepreneur to strike gold there. But thanks both to luck and to his shrewd reading of the Zeitgeist, he picked the optimal moment to begin mining sexual performance for profits. When he entered the herbal-supplements business in 1999, Viagra was just a year old, but already the idea that regular men—not just porn stars—could (and should!) benefit from chemical vasodilators had become commonplace. Meanwhile, natural health was growing into a booming industry. (By one estimate, it now takes in $40 billion a year.) And it was largely unregulated.
At first Warshak’s ads followed the same crude script of his competitors. cum like a raging bull! read one for a short-lived product called Trinatin, a “powerful sexual intensifier” supposedly developed in Pamplona, Spain. The ad urged customers to “Watch your lover’s astonished look as you shoot power-packed gobs of cum up to 13 feet away!” An ad for another Enzyte precursor, this one called Biogen-14, promised you’d be “Harder Than Chinese Arithmetic—With No Side Effects!”
But by the time Warshak introduced Enzyte in 2001, he had “decided that’s not who we wanted to be.” He began investing in anything that made the product seem upscale, from those national TV ads to fancy packaging and glossy brochures. Next he invented what he called the three stages of male sexuality. Stage 1 was young men, whose libido needed no help; stage 3 was elderly men, who might have a medical issue and need a prescription. But stage 2, he liked to say, was the domain of healthy guys in their prime who could use a little boost. Men aged 30 to 50, he decided, would be Enzyte’s sweet spot.
The stage 2 concept was genius in that it let Enzyte customers tell themselves they were still plenty virile even if they secretly worried they’d lost a step. The Enzyte pitch cloaked self-consciousness in a reassuring wrapper of self-improvement—an approach that found full expression in Smilin’ Bob.
The campaign was directed by Randy Spear (yes, his real name), a former creative director at Leo Burnett in Chicago. When Spear heard what Warshak was selling, he balked. This kind of product usually was sold via DR—industry parlance for direct-response advertising (the kind of “Dial now! Operators are standing by!” dreck that runs on late-night TV). Spear didn’t do DR and told Warshak so. Warshak couldn’t have been happier. He explained that his strategy was to brand Enzyte as the reputable, mainstream herbal alternative, and that his target audience was much bigger than Viagra’s 50-plus market. It was the millions of men who fell, as he and Spear did, into stage 2.
Spear got busy imagining a campaign that would speak to men like them. The breadth of his audience—and the restrictions on what herbal supplements can claim to do—required one thing: simplicity. Then it hit him. What if Enzyte’s pitchman never said a word? What if he simply grinned, communicating with his face what Berkeley wasn’t allowed to spell out in words? What if he were not a stud or an aging sports hero (Mike Ditka would soon be pitching the erectile-dysfunction drug Levitra) but a working stiff? What if the only thing above average about this man was the size of his smile?
“Bob is honest, lighthearted, upstanding,” Spear says. “We just wanted you to see that this guy, in his world, he was doing fine.”
All eighteen ads were shot on film, not video, and Warshak bought premium airtime whenever he could. Overall, he says, he spent more than $125 million on TV ads (most of it for Enzyte). “Once we hit TV, the response was overwhelming,” Warshak tells me. He says that at its peak in 2004, Berkeley received 65,000 calls a day.
Though his recipe was “proprietary,” he acknowledges that some of Enzyte’s key ingredients—horny goatweed, ginseng, maca root, and zinc—are in similar products. “We didn’t invent anything,” he allows at one point. “We just created better marketing.”
For Spear, the first indication that Smilin’ Bob had become woven into the cultural fabric came when he saw a woman wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with a bootlegged image of Bob’s grinning face. Similarly, someone unrelated to Berkeley created the first Smilin’ Bob Facebook page. (Now there are twenty, plus a Twitter feed.) “None of us did it,” Spear says. “It had become iconic.”
Anthony Colbert couldn’t seem to escape Smilin’ Bob. Every time the securities lawyer from Richmond, California, turned on his TV, there was Bob driving a bright blue NASCAR stock car around a track.
“Catch the action as Bob slices through the competition like a warm knife through butter!” the announcer boomed as Bob floored it. (The car wasn’t just a prop; Warshak actually sponsored an official NASCAR Enzyte team.)
“I thought the ads were funny,” says Colbert, now 46, who adds that it was the offer of a free sample that persuaded him to pick up the phone. “There was no deep problem. For me, it was kind of ‘Why not?’ ”
Why not indeed? It’s an explanation for ordering Enzyte that I’ve heard from several men. Ask a man to describe the mind-set that made him dial 1-877-4ENZYTE and it always seems to boil down to this: If it might help and can’t hurt, what have I got to lose?
Your money, it turns out. “I went to the Web site,” Colbert recalls. “I read carefully what it said about charging my credit card for shipping only. Then, a couple of months later, another charge on my credit card.”
What happened to Colbert wasn’t uncommon. In fact, witnesses would testify at Warshak’s trial, it was routine. Off and on for years, once Berkeley got its hands on your credit card, it would sign you up—without telling you first—for what’s called “continuity”: automatic monthly billing for shipments of whatever you’d received that initial “free” sample of. In the end, according to a class-action lawsuit filed in Ohio, each customer didn’t lose much—usually about $100. But the sheer volume of Enzyte buyers made the profits pile up. (Warshak settled the Ohio suit in 2006 for $4.7 million and resolved the claims of another five states with a $2.5 million settlement.)
The prosecution’s witnesses included twenty-one people who’d ordered Berkeley products and found irregular charges to their cards. There was a truck driver who worked the Florida-to-Houston route. A farm-loan manager from Virginia. A legal assistant from Georgia who bought Enzyte for her husband and Avlimil, a female-libido-enhancement pill, for herself. There was Colbert, the lawyer in California, and Jimmy Brown, a firefighter and active-duty National Guardsman from Hope Hull, Alabama. Brown testified that his credit card had been charged $69.95 a month without his knowledge during the six months he’d been deployed to Iraq. Vern Meyer Robb, a retired engineer who’d spent forty years with General Motors, had a similar tale to tell.
When I reach Robb at his home near Knoxville, Tennessee, he tells me to speak up. “I can’t hear too well,” he says matter-of-factly. “I’m 85 years old.”
Robb, who flew thirty missions over Germany as a crew member on a B-17 bomber during World War II, says he ordered Enzyte after seeing a small ad in the back of Money magazine. “At that time, Viagra was about $10 a shot. So this sounded like a good thing.”
Robb followed the directions—one pill a day. “I didn’t notice anything except I developed a stomach ache,” he says. “So I thought, well, maybe I might need more. So the next day I took two. And all I did was get a bigger stomach ache. So I just figured, well, it was another scam, and I fell for it.” His suspicions were confirmed when his credit card was charged without his permission a month later.
Warshak’s nondisclosure of Berkeley’s continuity program was the precipitating event, prosecutors would successfully argue, in what became a sort of falling-dominoes progression of criminal acts—what assistant U.S. attorney Anne Porter dubbed “a cycle of fraud upon fraud.” The first domino began to wobble when customers started complaining about how hard Berkeley sometimes made it to get a refund. (One Berkeley employee testified that the company required unsatisfied Enzyte buyers to submit a notarized letter from their doctors verifying that their penises hadn’t grown.) Frustrated by Berkeley’s obstinacy, customers then went to their credit card companies to cancel the transaction (what’s known as a chargeback).
Warshak sent numerous e-mails to his top ecutives saying that automatic monthly billing was the “lifeblood” of the company. And you can’t run a continuity program without being able to charge people’s credit cards. So when Berkeley’s chargebacks started to soar (something credit card companies frown upon), Warshak got creative. Instead of “dinging” a customer’s credit card once for a monthly supply, he told employees to split the bill into two or three pieces and “double-ding” or “triple-ding” the card—falsely inflating the number of transactions and thus lowering Berkeley’s chargeback ratio.
Other allegations that emerged during the trial were perhaps less criminal but just as squirrelly. Customer complaints were directed to a supervisor named Michael Johnson, a man who doesn’t exist. Print ads claimed that Enzyte was developed over thirteen years by Dr. Fredrick Thomkins, “a physician with a biology degree from Stanford,” and Dr. Michael Moore, “a leading urologist from Harvard.” Those men don’t exist, either. A top Berkeley employee testified that Warshak once directed him to falsify data to show that Enzyte users’ penises grew an average of 24 percent. And in one e-mail, Warshak encouraged his people to engage in some rather cold-blooded sales tactics. “I don’t care if the card is taken from grandma’s purse so junior can buy some Enzyte,” Warshak wrote when an employee asked whether a customer could charge a credit card bearing someone else’s name. “If the card is good, I want to ship.”
But the government’s most damning piece of evidence was an e-mail written by Warshak’s nephew Jason Cossman, in which Cossman sketched out a plan to wring more money out of dissatisfied customers. He suggested that after customers canceled, sales reps should call them back, pretending to be “a company contracted by a hospital to do health surveys.” If the ex-customer revealed they used to take a Berkeley product, the faux survey taker should suggest another cheaper product that “the hospital is promoting” (leaving out that it also happened to be made by Berkeley).
“the poor customer bites, thinking he’s gettin a deal, even though he’s actually getting taken by my company for the second time around!!!!!!” Cossman wrote. “the scheme is beautiful. dreamed it up after many a bong hit one night. these customers are fish in a barrel, man. you already spent the media dollars to get em in the barrel when you bought the enzyte spot. dont let em get away so easy. exploit the shit out of them.”
At 1:24 a.m. on February 25, 2005, Warshak forwarded that message to five Berkeley ecutives, adding this in the subject line: “the student has become the teacher—our company was built on this kind of creative thinking… thanks for the wake-up call jason!”
Less than three weeks later, on March 16, 2005, fifty armed agents raided Berkeley’s offices, seizing computers, business records, and eventually every dollar of Warshak’s personal family funds, totaling $24 million.
“That was something he didn’t really count on,” said Kadon. “It’s one thing to fight civil lawsuits.… But when you cross the line and the Postal Inspection Service and the FDA start looking into criminal acts, I think that was the bridge too far: his not realizing that you can only steal so much and then, all of a sudden, people start caring.”
When I begin to list some of the evidence against him, Warshak doesn’t flinch. He says a trust fund the government alleged he used to launder money was in fact legit, set up by a fancy Washington, D.C., law firm for estate-planning purposes. He’s got an explanation for the nonexistent Michael Johnson. (“No one who sells sexual products gives out the real name of the customer-care director.”) He knows his endorsement of his nephew’s e-mail looks bad but claims it was a misunderstanding. (“I didn’t really read it. It was late at night.”) He denies the claim that customers seeking refunds were told to get a notarized my-dick-hasn’t-grown letter from a doctor, calling it a flat-out lie. He admits he pushed his salespeople to be aggressive. But he also cites a statistic that he says indicates customers were more knowledgeable about Berkeley’s automatic-billing policy than prosecutors alleged: 1 million people successfully canceled the continuity program in the window between receiving a “free” sample and getting charged for their next shipment.
Repeatedly, Warshak tells me he can’t be guilty of the felonies that landed him in jail because he was only doing what other companies do. He sounds like a schoolboy caught throwing a spitball. All the other kids did it, so why am I the only one getting punished? It’s the same brand of tangled illogic that underlies his fundamental defense: Because the rapid expansion of his company coincided with the company’s criminal behavior, Warshak says one caused the other—and should be seen as a mitigating circumstance. At Warshak’s sentencing hearing last fall, U.S. district judge S. Arthur Spiegel flatly, and testily, rejected that premise.
“Steven Warshak was blinded by his arrogance, greed, and his ability to exploit others,” Spiegel said. “Not only is Steven Warshak corrupt, but he corrupted members of his own family…and good people who worked for him.” Warshak’s theory that “the problems were all the result of growing pains” was a bunch of hooey, Spiegel said. “The jury did not buy it, and the court does not either, for a minute.”
“Obviously, I am not a perfect man,” Warshak writes to me from prison. “I am not a great man. But I am sure that I am a good man.”
The prosecution would object to that. In the months before trial, the government argued that Warshak had a long history of bad behavior. In a court filing, they described how Warshak had sent invoices to hundreds of restaurants around the country in 2001 claiming $390 “past due.” Not a one had any relationship with Warshak or his company. (He said he goofed, sending invoices when he meant to send solicitation letters.) The filing also noted that in the late ’90s a rival herbal-supplements company, curious to compare ingredients, used a credit card to buy a product Warshak was marketing called THC-Free, which supposedly masked evidence of marijuana in your urine. Within a year, the government said, Warshak charged the rival’s card at least two more times without authorization.
Prosecutors believed that THC-Free had paved the way for Warshak’s foray into the male-enhancement business because it proved how lucrative it was to sell a product whose buyers, by definition, were reluctant to complain. “We believed there was a connection,” said Kadon, imagining Warshak’s thinking: _“Gosh, what if you could do this on a larger scale?” _
Warshak says that even after he was convicted on ninety-three of the 112 counts, he expected to be sentenced to two years, tops. Then Judge Spiegel slapped him with twenty-five—the same as Bernard Ebbers, the former WorldCom CEO, who masterminded an $11 billion fraud that bankrupted the company.
When I ask the prosecutors why they came down so hard, I get an answer I don’t expect: Warshak was a threat to American capitalism. “When you go online, when you call and give up your credit card number, all of this is a trust system that is at the core of the American consuming economy,” Kadon tells me. “If you lose faith in that, if it stops working, welcome to the Third World economy of your choice. That is the overarching federal interest in this: People need to believe that if they use their credit card, they’re not going to get ripped off.”
The boner-pill purveyor needs to do a quarter century behind razor wire to keep the Internet safe for commerce? Really? That rings about as true as Warshak’s early thirteen-foot ejaculation claim.
So what is it, then? Warshak and his supporters are convinced that the severity of the sentence is tied to the product he was selling—and to where Berkeley was based. This is southern Ohio, they argue, one of the most conservative places in the country. “If Steve would have run his business in California, it would have been different,” says Randy Spear, the commercial director. Indeed, not long after Warshak’s conviction, the Santa Monica, California–based company Mantra Films, maker of the Girls Gone Wild video series, reached a settlement with customers who claimed they were enrolled in a video club and billed without their knowledge. In other words, undisclosed continuity.
“It’s the exact same issue,” Warshak tells me, noting that Mantra “grew quickly, had billing problems, then settled with the FTC and were able to move on. But in my case, the government erased the line between a civil issue and a criminal issue. They criminalized a legitimate business.”
Warshak’s attorneys have filed an appeal arguing that his conviction (and that of his mother, who got a two-year sentence but has not been imprisoned because she is battling cancer) should be overturned on several grounds. Among other things, they say the government violated the Stored Communications Act by ordering Warshak’s e-mail provider to prospectively “preserve” e-mails that investigators otherwise wouldn’t have been able to obtain (because they would have been deleted). The ACLU of Ohio, the Center for Democracy & Technology, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation have filed an amicus brief supporting Warshak’s appeal, arguing that the government essentially conducted a “backdoor wiretap” that violates the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution (which guards against unreasonable searches and seizures). Warshak has also won another important ally: Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz, who co-wrote his appeal. If Warshak is granted a hearing by the U.S. Court of Appeals, Dershowitz plans to argue on his behalf. At the very least, Warshak’s lawyers want a reduction in his sentence, which is made more onerous by the fact that there is no parole in the federal system. “In the range of sentences meted out under the guidelines for white-collar-fraud defendants with no prior criminal records, the twenty-five-year sentence imposed on Warshak ranks among the most severe ever,” his appeal states.
Those arguments, in addition to Warshak’s claim that the government suppressed evidence favorable to him, form the foundation upon which Warshak is betting his future. But he’s also trying a different tack. In July, he wrote a twenty-five-page letter to attorney general Eric Holder asking him to investigate the case. “Although I feel the above issues kept me and the others accused from receiving a fair trial, I do still believe in the ‘totality’ of the justice system,” Warshak wrote. “Even though the process may be flawed at times, I am hopeful that the end result will be correct.”
Holder has yet to respond.
Toward the end of our prison interview, I ask Warshak a question that’s unrelated to his criminal convictions but nonetheless cuts to the heart of the enterprise: Were you an Enzyte user? He says no. I press him, saying I’m surprised to hear it. At the age of 43, isn’t he smack in the middle of the target demo? Isn’t he a classic stage 2?
“I don’t smoke. I ercise. Maybe I’m not as far down the path as some men,” he says. But if “firmer, stronger, fuller-feeling erections” were only a pill a day away, why wouldn’t he partake? Hasn’t he ever felt like he could use a little boost? I mean, haven’t most men? “I’m very well-adjusted,” he says. “You’d have to ask my wife. I’ve always been very comfortable in my own skin.”
I’ve talked to Warshak’s wife—an ob-gyn who stands wholeheartedly behind her husband, even as she raises four children alone. But frankly, neither she nor Warshak can convincingly explain why, if the product was so damn good, the man who peddled it—tweaking men’s fear of failure, offering them hope in an all-natural wrapper, making them think “Why the hell not?”—didn’t take it himself.
After Warshak’s conviction, Berkeley Premium Nutraceuticals went bankrupt and was sold to Chuck Kubicki, a Cincinnati developer who renamed the company Vianda. But Enzyte never went off the market. The company’s new management team has told Spear they want to keep Smilin’ Bob alive. As recently as late summer, Bob popped up on Comedy Central in the middle of the afternoon. It was the Santa ad again, and there was Bob in his big red suit, with a long line of women waiting to sit on his lap. “Yeeees, with things heating up on the old North Pole,” says the narrator, “it looks like there’s no mistaking this Santa for an elf anymore.”
Steve Warshak may not be doing so well these days, but Smilin’ Bob sure is. Very well indeed.
Amy Wallace (@MsAmyWallace) is a Los Angeles–based writer. This is her first story for GQ.