Book scam story stranger than fiction

Richard G. Myers specialized in scams with a literary bent. Charismatic and debonair, the published author and former prison inmate talked women out of disability checks and inheritances, and parted men from their retirement savings, according to lawsuits filed against the former Sandpoint resident. The heart of his schemes was a forged letter from Oprah Winfrey, purportedly expressing interest in featuring one of his novels on her show.

Myers promised a fast financial return to people who invested in “Little Jack,” a family-values thriller about a Christian Air Force pilot on a secret mission in the Libyan desert. He told investors he needed cash to print 400,000 copies of the book before he appeared on the show. Oprah’s Book Club had brought instant fame to many obscure authors, so many people believed that their original investments would multiply several times over.

Inland Northwest residents poured at least $160,000 into the fake Winfrey deal and related book schemes over a five-year period ending in 2004, according to contracts and canceled checks kept by investors. In March, the legal department of Winfrey’s company, Harpo Productions, sent a letter to Myers’ Sandpoint address, warning him to stop the false representations or face action for trademark infringements.

Several investors have since sued to get their money back. But Myers has vanished.

His last contact with an investor was 13 months ago. Myers’ wife, Susan Yeager, said she doesn’t know her husband’s whereabouts. He’s traveling in a camper and may be somewhere in Oregon, she said last week.

Yeager, named as a co-defendant in some of the lawsuits, claims to be a victim, too. “I was there when he was supposedly talking to Oprah,” she said. “I believed it was all true.”

People who sank money into Myers’ Oprah Winfrey scheme express chagrin over being fooled.

“I didn’t think it was the great American novel,” said Kat Bloom, a Greenacres woman who put $20,000 of her inheritance into the scheme. But a Winfrey endorsement didn’t seem that far-fetched, she said. Myers wrote the book with a prominent Mormon writer, Brenton Yorgason, publishing it in Utah in 1998 as “The Garrity Test.” Myers planned to reprint the book under the title “Little Jack.”

The strongly patriotic plot involves terrorists and weapons of mass destruction. The war in Iraq made the book seem timely, Bloom said. She said she could also envision a celebrity like Winfrey being intrigued by Myers’ tale of meeting his wife by letter while he was in prison, which is where he wrote the manuscript.

“If I knew what I know now … I’d run,” Bloom said.

Lured by promise of quick return

During the 1990s, Myers published four religious-themed books with Yorgason, who has since severed professional ties with him. Myers, 52, also has an extensive rap sheet with drug and fraud charges.

Myers pleaded guilty in 1986 in Utah to forging prescriptions for Hycodan, a narcotic cough syrup, according to court records. He was also charged with several financial crimes, including bilking investors out of $100,000 during the 1980s. Myers eventually served six years in a Utah prison for theft by deception.

Myers had an easy charm and spun tales of his prison time with an air of reform, investors said. He was adept at tailoring his pitch to different audiences, whether it was an elderly couple he met at cardio-rehab classes, or the attorney representing him on domestic violence charges, said Guy Bafus, a former Coeur d’Alene resident who now lives in Edmonds, Wash.

Bafus met Myers through family connections – his ex-wife was a cousin of Myers. The retired postal employee invested $57,000 in Myers’ proposal to start a book publishing business. Myers falsely used the name of another company, with which he had no connection, to make the proposition seem legitimate, according to a suit Bafus filed in 2003. Myers also forged invoices from a Utah publisher to give the appearance that copies of books had been printed, the suit said.

Myers never appeared in court to defend himself, resulting in a $136,000 default judgment. But Bafus hasn’t been able to collect.

Bafus has spent the last two years tracking down other investors and assembling documentation on Myers’ scams. He also contacted Harpo’s legal department, resulting in the cease-and-desist letter sent to Myers. Bafus plans to present the information to the FBI in Spokane next month, in hopes the agency will consider charges against Myers.

George Brynjulson, a retired hardware store owner, invested $30,000 in the Oprah Winfrey scheme. “It all sounded legitimate, as far as I was concerned,” he said.

Brynjulson, 86, met Myers four years ago, when his Hayden house was for sale. Myers initially expressed an interest in buying Brynjulson’s house, but soon was spinning business propositions. Brynjulson turned down an opportunity to invest in Myers’ brother’s company, a shady dot-com that eventually bilked investors out of $500,000, according to a lawsuit later filed against Robert K. Myers by the state of Idaho.

But the book proposal caught Brynjulson’s attention. Stung by stock market losses, he was drawn by the promise of a quick return on his money. Brynjulson sold his Piper airplane, then wrote Myers a check.

Details of the deal seemed to add up. Myers showed him a letter, purportedly from Winfrey, expressing interest in his book. Myers’ wife gushed about the “big phone call” from Winfrey, Brynjulson said.

Later, Brynjulson and other investors would notice that Myers’ story appeared scripted out of a 1999 People Magazine article, describing how an Oprah Winfrey endorsement launched the careers of numerous lesser-known writers, including former Eastern Washington University professor Ursula Hegi. Hegi’s “Stones From the River” was a 1997 Winfrey pick.

On closer examination, the Winfrey letter was clearly fake, Brynjulson said. Myers appeared to have inserted a paragraph into a standard form letter with Winfrey’s signature. The letter had two distinct typefaces.

Brynjulson sued Myers and his wife in August, and won a $50,000 default judgment against the couple. Whether he’ll get any money back remains to be seen.

Bloom, the Greenacres investor, is also suing Myers. In addition to the $20,000 inheritance she put into the Winfrey scam in 2002, her husband, Bill, invested $10,000, and an elderly relative, Dorothy Price, also invested $10,000.

At the time, Myers lived in the couple’s neighborhood. “It all sounded so reasonable,” Bloom said. “He said he just needed $35,000 to put the whole thing together.”

Within weeks, Bloom, her husband and Price were supposed to get their money back plus profit. But Myers always had a ready excuse, Bloom said: He couldn’t go to Chicago (where Winfrey’s show is produced) because he was down with a virulent case of flu; his agent was on a cruise and couldn’t represent him; his mother died; Winfrey wanted him to rewrite the book to jibe with the current events.

“I provided him with a cell phone, partly so that I could keep track of him,” Bloom said. “It’s kind of like when a bank loans a company money. You’re in so deep you keep working with them, because you figure it’s the only way to get your money back.”

On that premise, Myers stayed at the couple’s lake house for several weeks when he was having family problems, Bloom said. They also paid $800 to bail him out of jail in Oregon.

Myers assured them that if the book deal fell through, he would make things right with an inheritance from his wealthy father, she said.

Their last contact with Myers was in 2004. He called them, asking for money for a trip out of town. Bloom spent $50 filling up his gas tank. She never saw him again.

‘Your new best friend’

C.J. Winter met Myers in the parking lot of her apartment building in Depoe Bay, Ore., during a period when Myers was living apart from his wife. Before long, she’d taken him into her confidence and was loaning him money from her meager disability checks.

“He’s a charmer. He’s very good at what he does,” Winter said. “I was vulnerable, and he was moving into an apartment below mine.”

Myers introduced himself as a writer. Winter, recently diagnosed with a disability, was looking for a flexible job. Soon she was his proofreader and secretary.

Myers promised Winter a key role in his negotiations with Oprah Winfrey, according to journal entries and documents that Winter kept from 2003 to 2004. He confided in her about his marriage. He plied her with compliments, wrote her a song and offered to pay her way to Hawaii for a vacation.

He also ruined her credit and bled her for $12,000 in unpaid loans and business expenses, according to a lawsuit Winter filed in August. Winter said she was so broke she had to go to a food bank for groceries.

“There was just that kernel of truth embedded in a mountain of lies,” Winter said. “You wanted to believe that he was your new best friend, that he would make all these neat things happen.”

Weldon Goede also thought he’d found a close friend. The retired Odessa, Wash., wheat farmer loved to work in his yard. A widower with cancer and lung disease, Goede relied on an oxygen tank to breathe, but still managed to be a cheerful and dependable presence in the Post Falls neighborhood where he spent his last years. One day, he struck up a conversation with a stranger – Richard Myers. The two men were soon discussing issues of religion and faith.

“Weldon attended Coeur d’Alene Bible Church regularly,” said his niece, Paulette Farmer. “He was so sure that he’d found a new friend.”

The casual conversations in Goede’s yard progressed to a dinner invitation at Myers’ home and eventually a business proposition. Goede invested $25,000 in the Oprah Winfrey scheme in 2002, and also lent Myers $3,700, according to documents compiled by his niece.

“Weldon was extremely trusting,” Farmer said. “He was raised in an era, a neighborhood and a town where you settled deals with handshakes.”

Goede was hurt when his friend disappeared with his funds, his niece said. Farmer tried to track down Myers, with no luck. Goede died at age 80 in 2004.

“I was really disappointed that Weldon had to struggle with that when he was so ill,” Farmer said. “You shouldn’t have to be perplexed and confused and disheartened that someone who was your friend would do that to you.”

Spokane attorney Gail Schwartz met Myers in April 2003, when he hired her to represent him in a criminal case. Attorney-client privilege prevents Schwartz from discussing the case, but court records indicate it was for domestic violence. “He’s a very smooth talker. You meet him and you think, ‘Oh, this is a nice guy,’ ” she said.

Schwartz learned that Myers was a writer. Soon she was telling him about her dream of publishing a nonfiction book about her Japanese-American parents and their experiences during World War II.

Her Japan-born father was drafted and spent the war as a Japanese language instructor to Army officers. He weathered a period of unprecedented anti-Japanese sentiment in relative freedom and comfort, while Schwartz’s America-born mother spent 3½ years in an Arizona internment camp.

Myers offered to co-write Schwartz’s book for $30,000. She told him that was too much, but wrote him a $2,500 check to help him get started.

“I guess it was kind of silly of me, because he had never paid his legal bill,” Schwartz said.

Myers failed to show up for court appearances. Eventually, Schwartz couldn’t reach him at all. She plans to sue him for $5,000 in unpaid legal fees and the book advance.

“I don’t expect to get it back,” she said, “but I think he should be stopped.”