Behind the scenes: Koscot, the Interplanetary Scam.

First off, my apologies for not posting an article in nearly a week. It's become traditional that the last week of the month--in this case wrapping around into the first of the new month--is usually my most intensive phase of work on videos for my YouTube channel. And, today, March 2, 2024, in fact just about an hour before this article dropped in your inbox, my new video went up, titled "Koscot: The Interplanetary Scam." It's an in-depth look at the fascinating story of one of the most audacious and brazen multilevel pyramid schemes in American history, the companies bizarrely named Koscot Interplanetary, Inc. and Dare to be Great!, Inc., and their founder, the bigger-than-life Glenn W. Turner. I've wanted to do this video for more than a year now, and today it's finally a reality.

As you'll see, there are so many levels to this story that it's hard to encompass them all even into two hours. But the stories of Turner and his scams are uniquely embedded in their time and wholly dependent on the historical context surrounding them. Koscot, founded in 1967, was ostensibly a cosmetics company, but the presence of the word "Interplanetary" in its name was an attempt to associate it with Walt Disney's projected EPCOT Center, then on the drawing board in Orlando, Florida, Glenn Turner's home base. EPCOT was an acronym, standing for Experimental Community of Tomorrow, and "Koscot" was intended to be the "Cosmetics Company of Tomorrow," with the K standing in for the C to make it more distinctive. What it really was, though, was a scam. When it started operations in August 1967, as steel coffins containing American servicemen's bodies were flooding back from Vietnam, Koscot had no cosmetics at all to sell. For nearly a year into its existence Turner and his sales kingpins made their money entirely from recruiting and initiation fees. Koscot was a pyramid scheme so pure that even defenders of modern multilevel marketing companies reluctantly admit constituted fraud. Turner eventually scammed nearly $50 million out of his victims.

Turner himself was a character out of a comedy movie. Born with a cleft lip and palate, which rendered his folksy Southern drawl into a lisp that made his voice instantly memorable and highly mesmerizing, Turner emerged from the Depression-era Deep South with few prospects and scanty education. In the 1950s and early '60s he became the embodiment of the then-coalescing culture of American salesmen, which had its own language, ideology and value system. How Turner discovered pyramid schemes and how he built his own into a uniquely undiluted and unapologetic exemplar of this form of financial fraud is the main story arc of the video. I also hope it sheds some light on what was going on in the American economy and culture at the time. While many MLM hucksters have come and gone over the decades and many still exist today, a character like Turner could only have come to national and international prominence in the decade of the 1970s. This is a '70s story if there ever was one, decked out in orange double-knit polyester, calfskin boots and bushy sideburns.