praises him as a fundamentally good-hearted person: “When Kevin found someone in genuine need or who was ready to move forward, he’d help.”
Ed ForemanEd Foreman, a former US congressman, thinks of Trudeau as a protégé.
Foreman, who has also known Trudeau for decades and considers himself a mentor, was an oilman and former US congressman when he met a young Kevin Trudeau, also in the late ’70s.
He remembers him as an “enthusiastic, attractive, heads-up wanting-to-learn-type fella.”
At the time, Foreman, who ran a concrete and gravel company, had developed a training program for his employees that numerous corporations sought to emulate. Under contract to Ford, he began heading motivational sessions for dealerships around the country. Trudeau heard him speak in Boston, and then traveled to Texas to attend a three-day "Success Life Course." The message was "happy, positive, constructive thoughts bring about constructive productive results," Foreman says. "Kevin took to that quite well."
Trudeau’s various forays into self-help also brought him considerable success with the opposite sex. “He was not the most handsome guy in the world,” Van Liew recalls. “He had a little pudge. He couldn’t drive yet. But he sure had a way with women! They glommed all over him. He once told me, ‘I bought all the books on how to talk to a woman. Everyone buys the books but they don't read 'em. I read 'em and I believed them. I did what they said. And it worked.’
“He learned how to make every person in the room, male or female, feel special,” Van Liew adds.
http://www.businessinsider.com/kevin-trudeau-interview-2014-12
Trudeau has it pretty good on the inside, all things considered. FPC Montgomery is one of the jewels of the federal prison system. A home to white-collar convicts and other low-risk offenders, it’s a minimum-security facility. Situated on a working Air Force base, the prison has no guard towers, ribbons of razor wire, or clanging steel doors. It’s just a set of buildings within a gracious and impeccably landscaped military compound that also includes a golf course, a shooting range, and several greenhouses.
Bureau of PrisonsFPC Montgomery, where Trudeau is serving a 10-year sentence.
Trudeau’s room, he says, is “more like a barracks or dorm than a cell.” He sleeps in a top bunk, since the lower bunks are generally reserved “for the older guys.”
Among his fellow inmates are the former Illinois congressman Jesse Jackson Jr., several mayors, and Jeffrey Skilling, the former CEO of Enron, whom Trudeau calls “a nice guy,” adding, “Like everyone here, he’s just looking to do his time and go home.”
Movies are screened nightly, and there are TVs everywhere, including one flat-screen housed in an outdoor gazebo. Although some of Trudeau’s old infomercials still air frequently and are often spotted by his fellow inmates — a source of some excitement — he mostly steers clear of TV, preferring to read, he says. (Empowerment tomes are his preferred genre.)
Trudeau works in the prison kitchen, a sometimes frustrating experience for a guy who has done as much as anyone to bring the organic-food revolution to a mainstream audience. “They have a greenhouse and a bakery, and yet everything is canned!” he says incredulously. “Why not let inmates make their own food and learn a valuable trade?”
As for his own extremely valuable trade — motivational speaking — he says he’s been forbidden from doing education on any real scale. “People ask my advice and I give it, but that’s it,” he says.
Sitting behind a Formica conference table, one leg crossed casually over the other, Trudeau is wearing a custodial-green button down over a brown T-shirt, and slacks, all crisply ironed. His simple digital wristwatch is a comedown from the luxury timepieces he once favored (“It’s a Rolex!” he jokes), but it does the job.
He’s in good shape for 51, lean and well-tanned, with a touch of sunburn on his nose and cheekbones, a walking advertisement for those natural cures he touts.
The only somewhat discordant note is his hair. Silvery and fluffy under a green baseball cap, it flares out over his ears for a clownish, almost Wonkaesque effect.
“I said he looks like a 1960s hippie with that hair!” says Mary Miller, a close friend and the proprietor of ichingsystems.net, who visited Trudeau in prison not long ago.
“I told him to cut it and get himself cleaned up and look like the leader he is,” says Foreman who also made the trek to Montgomery.
Trudeau says he just felt like trying something new. “In the business I’m in, you have to be presentable all the time,” he says cheerfully. “This is my first opportunity to try growing it out.”
It looks pretty silly now, but a year down the road, Trudeau may come to resemble a classic guru, the sort you might encounter in a New Yorker cartoon set on a Himalayan mountaintop — just in time for what he expects will be a triumphant release.
That is, if things go his way on appeal.
Repairing his reputation will take more than a new hairstyle, though. The legal troubles have done irreparable damage to an extraordinary if long-checkered career. Convincing the pubic you hold the secrets of success even as you’re doing hard time is quite a feat, even for a salesman of Trudeau’s impressive talent.
It’s a frustrating situation, especially when he compares his public profile to that of Steve Jobs, for example, still a beloved figure despite his cutthroat methods.
“This amazing businessman...
http://www.businessinsider.com/kevin-trudeau-interview-2014-12