Photography by Kevin A. Roberts
St. Louis County Courts Building, January 23, 2012. A tall young man in a tan suit walks straight into the judge’s chambers. “I need this warrant rescinded,” he announces, waving it aloft. The judge nods and tells him to put it in a memo. He’ll later say that after he dropped a few tips about commodities, the judge suggested they have a drink together after court.
Over the next month, the young man enters his name—Dustin Mitchell—as attorney in three other cases, arranging continuances and talking with prosecuting attorneys. He stands 6-foot-3 and uses every inch, feeling no need for a kindly stoop toward the lesser mortals around him. Even his face is sure of itself, every line strong and straight, no furrow to the brow or wobble to the chin. He flirts with support staff and passes out cards for Berkshire King Mitchell & Sottile, PC. One day, when he knows the judge won’t be in court, he shows up in cargo shorts and a T-shirt. He chuckles afterward, saying that the clerk, with a swallowed giggle, made him a sticker that reads, “I will not come to court in shorts.”
Another day, he breezes into a senior judge’s chambers clad in jeans and acting like an old friend who’s just dropped by to chat.
“Are you a lawyer?” the clerk asks.
“A recovering one,” he tosses back.
*****
Mitchell’s representing two friends in court just to help them over a rough patch, he says. His real focus is his network marketing and his campaign for Missouri lieutenant governor. It will be self-financed, he declares on Facebook, urging his supporters to give their money to fight Alzheimer’s (his favorite cause, because the disease struck his grandmother). He puts up a 12-photo album of his “Campaign Trail.”
He comes across as open, funny, and engaging: a Jewish, gay Republican who can laugh at all three categories. His résumé’s amazing: He mentions buying a Missouri winery before he was old enough to drink legally, taking a supervisory position with the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services at 21, becoming the youngest member of the White House Small Business Advisory Council and honorary chairman of President George W. Bush’s 2007 dinner with the National Republican Congressional Committee. (The dinner was great fun, he says with a twinkle, but he was glad when it was over: “After-parties in D.C. are so uncomfortable in an Armani tux.”)
Mitchell has owned a long list of startup companies, selling everything from commercial printing to kitchen cabinets. He ends many of his online biographies (on LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+, Naymz, Yatedo, PROskore…) with warm, acceptance-speech thanks to those he says have made his success possible, including the former minority floor leader of the Missouri Senate, Maida Coleman; U.S. Magistrate Judge Nannette Baker; Municipal Judge Michael Murphy; former state Treasurer Sarah Steelman; and President George W. Bush.
He can spin a sentence into a suit coat for a naked emperor. In conversation’s footrace, he drops new names every week, golden apples to distract rivals and skeptics. Online, he confides that he’ll be with Anderson Cooper at a CNN after-party. He deftly manages to link his holding company, Berkshire Hathaway Information Technology Development Group, to the man himself: “Dustin Mitchell and Warren Buffett finally in partnership for the advance of technology!” He posts bold headlines about his network marketing company, Assurance Inc.: “After lengthy negotiations Assurance Inc. and Google Inc. are partnering to provide one-to-one assistance to individuals using or transitioning to Google Apps.”
He is Horatio Alger from Rolla, Mo.; a door-to-door salesman in cyberspace. He sums up American optimism at its purest—and its least realistic. He says his grandmother grew up poor, but she gave him the confidence to chase success. “She taught me that I can be anything I want to be. She definitely hammered that into me. Maybe a little too much.”
And so he acts on impulse, before self-doubt can sink in.
“Capitalism is a calling,” he says. “It flows through my veins.”
*****
In second grade, he catches tadpoles and sells them in Blue Bonnet spread tubs for a quarter apiece—which works great until people start asking for a refund because their frogs died. In fourth grade, he spends the entire summer turning his backyard into a haunted graveyard, surrounded by a 12-foot-tall wall of linked black Hefty trash bags, but sells only one $2 ticket.
It’s at Rolla High School that his American dream starts to take shape. In Judge Mary Sheffield’s teen court program, he plays the prosecuting attorney with such vigor, she has to tell him to go be a jury member for a while. When Marcia New’s business class forms a company to sell donuts and cappuccino in the cafeteria, he goes up to New and says, “Whatever comes in, I’ll give you half.” He starts his first company, Centennial Productions, paying other kids $10 an hour to do Web design for clients he charges $40 an hour.
In late April 1999, the end of his junior year, news breaks of the Columbine High School massacre in Colorado. Somebody asks online, “Do you think such a tragedy could happen at your school?” He keys a single word: “Yes.” But he doesn’t post it as himself.
“One of my friends, Jae Jasper, they told him the day after the shooting that he couldn’t wear his black trench coat anymore,” he explains later. “Which was obviously a violation of his rights. I was talking with him. I said, ‘Watch this,’ and I signed it with his name.”
When the school authorities finally trace the innocuous comment to Dustin’s home computer, they suspend him. Outraged at this violation of his freedom of speech, he stalks out of the principal’s office vowing to get a lawyer. The American Civil Liberties Union takes up his case. Denise Lieberman, then legal director of the ACLU’s Eastern Missouri chapter, finds her young client to be bright, articulate, passionate about justice, and fascinated by law. He wants to see all the pleadings.
The case settles out of court, which disappoints him. But he stays in touch with Lieberman, showing up to exultantly announce that he’s joined the Mormon church, and then, with equal exultation, that he’s gay. Between these two announcements, he leaves home and spends his senior year living with a Mormon family in Kennewick, Wash. He wears a three-piece suit to Kennewick High School every day, goes to business meetings before his first class, shows up at the Kiwanis Club meetings his assistant principal attends. He finds himself a Ferrari-driving mentor who works with Market America—a network marketing organization that uses the Internet to recruit, train, and sell niche products and services.
In 2001, Dustin returns to Missouri. He starts a string of companies, some registered, some not: Dustin Mitchell Companies, The Printing Co., The Marathon Group, The Printing Professionals, H2OMO Artesian Bottled Water, Busy Bee Cabinetry, Pre-paid Legal Services Inc., even a publication called Outlook Magazine. But he’s also now working—with significant success—for Market America.
To do network marketing successfully, it’s said you have to reprogram your brain, cleansing it of all negativity and energizing it with nothing but positive thoughts. Mitchell’s vivid imagination, verbal acuity, drive, and wide-open emotional need conspire to make him a master. He learns to listen: “People only talk about three things: what’s happening, what’s rotten in their life, or the weather. People love to complain. If you tell me you have back pain and fibromyalgia and I say I have something that might help you—we used to have a nutraceutical called OPC-3, it was amazing—I say, ‘Would you be willing to try it? And if it doesn’t work, you don’t owe me anything.’ People say they’re having trouble making ends meet. ‘Well, what if I could show you a way to work an extra 10 to 15 hours a week and that would help?’”
Every year on his birthday, February 2 (he’s an Aquarius, bearer of the slippery stuff), he sits down with a foam-core board and a pile of glossy magazines and makes himself a vision board. There’s always a Mercedes-Benz, maybe an Aston Martin or a yacht. He sticks on the charities he wants to give money to that year, and how much. He adds travel destinations: “I’ve never been to Disneyland, and since I love everything Disney, I have a picture of that.”
*****
Mitchell’s twenties are wilder than St. Augustine’s, and his mother, a good-natured and practical woman who kept the family solvent managing an Applebee’s in Rolla, is worried. Money proves as addictive for him as booze, and even less reliable: “You start visiting Chicago for new clothes, buy the Benz, pick up an expensive loft, find a social club or two not picky enough to keep you out,” he recounts, describing himself making more than $250,000 a year but “digging in the coin holder of the car for $5 to pay for parking. Not to mention routinely arriving home at 3:30 a.m., drunk, pulling my pockets inside out, wondering, sort of abstractedly, where it was all those twenties went—as well as my house keys, which on one occasion I eventually realized I’d given to a homeless man on the Landing.”
Soon he’s got a string of evictions for unpaid rent, small-claims lawsuits for unpaid bills. He’s racked up a couple of charges for driving while intoxicated, driven on the highway with his license revoked, pleaded guilty to theft of a credit card and to passing a bad check, gotten a shock incarceration and a few suspended impositions of sentence. He drinks a lot and screws a lot of people.
“There never was a lack of people who wanted to sleep with me or hang out with me at the clubs, so I’d buy them drinks,” he’ll write later. “One-night stands don’t make most people feel good. Oddly, they did serve to boost my ego and attitude that I could have anyone or anything I wanted. I felt like a character in Les Liaisons Dangereuses.”
Eventually, he tries Alcoholics Anonymous, but pronounces it “sadder than being an alcoholic, listening to people: ‘My name is Tony and I’m an alcoholic.’ Then would come the story, how he cheated on his partner and beat his kids. Sometimes I wondered if people were making things up so the rest of us wouldn’t feel so bad about our own lives. It was a little too much of a cult for me, the Church of Self-Denunciation.”
Finally, he falls in love with a sweet man named Michael Smith. Mentors who’ve been watching him with dismay open out-of-the-blue wedding invitations and breathe a sign of relief. Maybe this is all he’s needed to settle him down.
The wedding’s at Central Reform Congregation (Dustin’s Jewish now), and it’s lovely. The newlyweds add two female Dobermans to their household, then a pet python that Dustin falls in love with at PetSmart. He names him Kaa, for the snake in The Jungle Book. “He takes showers with me,” Dustin giggles, “and blows bubbles in my ear.”
Michael takes Dustin’s last name, and they work together, for a time, on Assurance, Dustin’s own version of Market America. Their products include printing, security systems, identity-theft protection, nutraceuticals, Pinook digital massage units, and SlimBeans weight-loss coffee.
Dustin makes dramatic announcements on Facebook:
“Have $25? I can turn it into $350 within 2 weeks.”
“Our offices in Chile have sent out first import of copper bullion.”
“For a limited time only purchase a Hawaii vacation for two for only $495.95 when you buy the package through the Assurance Inc. amazon.com store.” Or buy “a Rolex Mens Platinum President Silver Diamond Dial—$48,000 at shopwithassurance.com.”
He links, with righteous indignation, to articles about Ponzi schemes and scam artists. He posts that he’s been nominated for the 2011 Presidential Citizens Medal, that his company’s been nominated to Forbes’ list of “America’s Most Promising Companies.” He reports his location: “Owners Box and we kick major ass!” from Busch Stadium. “At Millionaire Airfield at Lambert International Airport.” “At Louis Vuitton.” “Signing commission checks—at Assurance Inc.”
Every few posts, he announces a grand act of philanthropy. In one, he says he is donating $15,000 to local law-enforcement agencies to help establish a task force, so they could find sexual predators who targeted children. “Consider donating with me,” he urges. He becomes chairman of a new nonprofit, Hope for Alzheimer’s. He announces that he’s set up a foundation, The Power in You, and urges Facebook friends to donate to help earthquake and tsunami victims.
He hungers to make money and give it away: eventually, 90 percent of it. He quotes McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc: “The more I help others to succeed, the more I will succeed.” He gives webinars, saying, “What you think about, you become. If all you think about is debt, I promise you, all you’re going to learn how to do is attract more of it.”
He writes a book called Economy of the Future, announces its imminent publication, and starts another called The Mediocrity Epidemic. Mediocrity makes him crazy. He defines it as “planing out…not living up to your full potential. People content going from work to home, home to work, digging themselves into a rut. Credit-card debt, sitting watching television. They wake up so deep in that rut, they can’t get out. You might as well just put dirt on top of them, because they’re dead.”
On May 30, 2010, he unfriends nearly 400 people on Facebook “because too many people lulled themselves into a false sense of competence, by refusing to better themselves.”
As for Dustin, he’s flying higher and higher.
Every January 1, he writes himself a check from his corporate account, and on the memo line, he writes, “A job well done!” On the back, he lists his goals. Every morning, he takes out that check, stands in front of the mirror, and reads the goals aloud to his image.
On January 31, 2012, he files papers with the state for Berkshire Hathaway Information Technology Development Group Limited Liability Company. Its Facebook page reads, “Headquartered in Clayton, Missouri, USA, Mitchell Buffett Virtual Holdings serves clients in Asia, Africa, Australia, Europe, North America and South America.” It lists products including copper, gold, silver, platinum, palladium, tin, zinc, diamonds, rhodium, ruthenium, osmium, iridium, rubies, sapphires, emeralds, and international currency. Facebook pages the company “likes” include Pinook Digital Massage Units, SlimBeans Weight Loss Coffee, and Dustin Mitchell for Lieutenant Governor.
Dustin’s also announced that he’s “purchased the rights to and will be producing the first ever Miss Gay Continental North America Pageant” at the Mandarin Oriental, Las Vegas hotel, November 2 through 4, 2012.
But by then, he’ll be in prison.
DISCOVERY
Fact-check Mitchell’s American dream, and it falls apart fast. This, it turns out, is the dark side of American optimism: a resilience that spits in the face of the facts, a can-do attitude that breaks the rules, a Dale Carnegie selling of the self, wrapped up as a deal and a promise. Everything is selling, selling is winning, and the possibilities are as big as you can dream them.
Until reality cuts in.
He’s found to be practicing law without a license when the bar number he’s given—“just pulled one out of my ass”—doesn’t bring up his name in the court’s database. Puzzled, the clerk calls Paul Fox,
St. Louis County’s director of judicial administration.
Mitchell assures Fox that he’s having problems with the bar number, they’ve given him the wrong one, but he’s getting it corrected. What throws Fox is when he hears Dustin say that Judge Teitelman of the Missouri Supreme Court is looking into it.
The chief justice of the Missouri Supreme Court is looking into a typo?
Fox calls Jefferson City, aiming lower on the totem pole. Why yes, someone says, they’ve spoken to Mr. Mitchell and are looking into his bar number. He hangs up slowly. It still doesn’t sit right. In their conversation, Fox casually asked Mitchell where he went to law school. Now he calls Washington University School of Law.
It has no graduate by the name of Dustin Mitchell.
That’s enough for Fox to turn the case over to the Clayton Police Department. Officers go to Mitchell’s home; he refuses to let them in because they don’t have a warrant. Meanwhile, by a sort of fated coincidence that in anybody else might look like self-sabotage but in Mitchell looks more like insouciance, he’s left his wallet behind at the courthouse. When he shows up to retrieve it, the police are waiting.
This time they’ve got a warrant—for his arrest. His only stall? “I need to lock the Mercedes.” It’s parked illegally in front of the courthouse.
Why did he dare to show up?
“Well, I didn’t know they had a warrant,” he says reasonably. “Otherwise, I’d have probably gone to court and had the judge rescind it!”
He’s not entirely joking. After he’s released on bond, he shows up in Fox’s office “with a withdrawal memo, as if he were still an attorney,” the administrator says, exhaling a little snort of amazement. “Hand-delivered it to me like it was some official action.”
The charge would have only been a misdemeanor, not a felony, if Mitchell hadn’t taken money for one of the cases. But that client was the son of a friend, Rich Baretich, and the boy was heading down a path of DWIs all too familiar to Mitchell. So to make sure he took the legal consequences seriously, Mitchell had the son make payments (totaling $1,000 at the time of Mitchell’s arrest). “When we got all of this crap straightened out, I was going to give it back to you so you could buy him a car,” Mitchell eventually explains to the startled father—who says he thought Mitchell was a real lawyer, doing this pro bono.
Rich Baretich remains convinced that Mitchell was only trying to help, and distressed that he took such an unnecessary risk, when he could’ve just given the boy some advice. But he’s not sure why Mitchell didn’t just explain his intentions at the outset, even hand the cash over to Baretich for safekeeping…
Maybe depositing those checks made it all feel more real.
*****
Mitchell pleads guilty. In June 2012, I write to him at the Moberly Correctional Center. “Thank you for your letter,” he replies by mail. “It is the sixth request that I’ve received this past week.” He says he’ll make an exception for SLM.
OK: Why did he claim on his résumé, before Fox even called, that he graduated from Washington University School of Law? “It says that on my LinkedIn profile, and I don’t know how to change it,” he tells me by phone. “I don’t have my password. I had somebody else help me.”
Aw. So what about making the 2009 Princeton Review as one of the Top 30 Business Owners Under 30? (It says that on his online bio, too.) “Oh, did I?” he asks, brightening. “I don’t know. I remember that now.”
After we hang up, I check on the bachelor’s in psychology and public policy from Washington State University. He didn’t get that, either.
Teen court? “That was true,” says Judge Mary Sheffield, who now sits on the Missouri Court of Appeals. He didn’t exactly help her found the program, as he told me. But “he volunteered, and he did a very good job.”
I look up his “friend” from Rolla High School, Jae Jasper—the one whose name he signed to his famous Internet post.
“I didn’t even know who the kid was,” bursts Jasper, who was a year behind Mitchell. “I got up for school one day, made it through two periods, and had officers escort me off campus. They had me clean out my locker to make sure there weren’t any weapons. I told them I didn’t know what the hell they were talking about.”
Jasper says he didn’t actually meet Dustin until 2005. “He randomly messaged me on an Internet chat. He said, ‘Hey, this is going to sound really weird, but…’ and he had me meet him at an Applebee’s in Rolla. He said something about making amends, but when I got there it was more of him bragging about the fact that he basically got away with the whole thing.”
Jasper left as soon as he’d drained his coffee cup. “I’ve got a really good bullshit meter.”
Mitchell’s response to Jasper’s version? “He is lying for attention.”
I ask Mitchell which winery he—bought? Co-owned? The versions have varied. He says it shared vineyards with St. James Winery (“Pete’s done an amazing job.”) But St. James CEO Peter Hofherr remembers no one named Mitchell and says crisply, “We have never shared vineyards with anyone.”
Oh, it was Ferrigno Winery, Mitchell tells me, but it’s closed now. “We were just too small,” he says sadly.
Susan Ferrigno has a fleeting, snowflake sort of memory of someone offering to do marketing. “Kind of a glad-hander? Smooth?” She calls her now–ex-husband in Costa Rica to ask, then calls me back.
“Dick said a young man named Dustin Mitchell did visit the winery, and he was proposing some kind of marketing idea. I think there were two visits, and the second time, he asked for money to get this enterprise going for marketing the wine. Dick felt as though he was just a little too slick, so he said no.”
What about that impressive supervisory position with the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services? It was through the city’s health department, Mitchell says: “A team of seven or eight people went out to nightclubs and surveyed people about their drug habits, their sexual promiscuity, their education.”
Nothing called the White House Small Business Advisory Council shows up in searches—except on the website of some business owner in Utah. The NRCC does not return multiple calls asking whether he was honorary chair of its 2007 President’s Dinner, but he did attend, and the NRCC does give lavish honorary titles to donors.
The Forbes nomination loses a little gloss when I learn that a company can nominate itself to that list, and Mitchell was begging fans to “go to this link and continue to nominate us.” The same goes for the Presidential Citizens Medal (“the more nominations I receive the higher my chance of selection”).
Mitchell is no longer involved in Hope for Alzheimer’s. His other foundation, The Power in You, isn’t registered in Missouri.
“What about the limo?” I begin, and Mitchell eagerly tells me that when Sarah Steelman decided to run for the U.S. Senate, he rented a limo to take her to lunch. “She wanted money,” he explains. “I wanted to posture myself and be in a position where I was asking the questions.”
And what did he want from her?
“Who doesn’t want a senator?”
All the limo’s driver wanted, though, was his $800. Mitchell says it was a mix-up; his credit card had been stolen, so the payment was canceled. “If he would’ve just called me, we could have taken care of it.”
Instead, the limo owner called another limo guy, Vince Schneider, who’d sued Mitchell in 2008 for $2,728 in unpaid bills. “Eight trips,” Schneider tells me. “He talked some big story that he was going to start using a limo all the time. I think he said he had some medical condition where he couldn’t drive. He was going to buy a plane at Signature Air, I remember that one.” Schneider sued for the money and got paid. “And all of a sudden he friended me on Facebook and LinkedIn!”
Within the gay community, “at first, people took him seriously,” says a regular at Just John, a gay nightclub in The Grove. “It probably took about a year and a half, and then it almost became a joke. ‘Well, Dustin Mitchell says it’s true…’”
What about the story of him trying, early in 2012, to make a citizen’s arrest because he’d been “illegally detained” until he paid his tab? “Sorry to disappoint you, but no, that’s not true,” Mitchell writes. “I assume you mean JJ’s, which I’ve not visited since 2005. It’s kinda like the rumor that I was shot at Attitudes Nightclub, that I have Federal warrant’s [sic] for my arrest, or that I’m Illuminati. It did make me laugh, though. Thanks for that.”
The bartender at Just John chuckles. “Oh yeah, it happened. It was me he tried it on. He had run up a tab for him and two other guys he was trying to impress, and when we tried to run his credit card, it was declined. It was over $100. I said, ‘Look, you can’t leave until you pay this tab.’ Somehow he got money transferred or got another credit card, and he paid. I was the door guy. He said, ‘Can I talk to you outside for a minute?’ and then he grabbed a hold of me and tried to spin me around to put my hands behind my back. He said he was arresting me. I said, ‘Oh, f—k no, you’re not.’”
A week after Mitchell’s release from prison this January, comments flew on Facebook, many from prominent nonprofit execs in the gay community:
“Who will he be next? Batman. Yes, he will be Batman.”
“He could be a fake priest, but that’s already been tried.”
“Hope he’s selling the 8 day all inclusive Hawaiian vacations again for $150…”
As for Mitchell’s books, neither is listed in Books in Print. (He says he hasn’t settled on a publisher yet.) He’s excited, though, about other media opportunities: From prison, he wrote, “The television network Bravo has contacted me soliciting my interest level in doing a reality show.” A few months later, he said he had an offer “to be part of a reality show on Lifetime.”
*****
“I don’t like closing in,” Mitchell says. “If I had a preference, I’d have people around me 24/7.” Although he’s made enough enemies for 10 cat lives, he also has quite a few “Who hasn’t padded a résumé?” admirers and a handful of staunch friends. “I’m very protective of myself, so I don’t build a lot of extremely close friendships,” he explains. “It takes a lot for me to let someone in.”
The criteria for admission? “I’m a pretty good judge of character. Being genuine, probably. I can generally tell if somebody has ulterior motives.”
His best friend is Gretchen Shepherd, a 56-year-old librarian, teacher, and network marketer in Seattle. She sounds like the good-hearted sort, maternal about Mitchell’s emotional impulsiveness but fascinated by his intellect and charisma. He’s been nothing but kind and loyal to her, dropping everything to stay by her side and offering to pay for her husband’s airfare when she fell ill at a conference.
“Dustin is a good person at his core,” says Paul Agrippino. “Good intentions, maybe not the best methods. I feel he has been vilified by some because of mistakes in judgment. For most it would be overlooked, but he doesn’t do anything small. So it’s either a huge success or a colossal mistake that isn’t soon forgotten.”
Even Baretich still considers Mitchell a friend. “It’s hard to find someone who’s not negative! Dustin just tries so hard to help people, and doesn’t always think of the consequences… I don’t see much harm done. Who got the most harm is himself.”
And then there’s Michael, who knows him best. According to the sacred banns of Facebook, he and Mitchell “divorced” in January 2012. But Michael’s stayed loyal to a point, helping his ex manage his life while he was in Moberly Correctional Center. “I do love him,” he says, “but who do I love? The lies or the real person?
“He could shit in a bag, set it on fire, and then sell it,” Michael continues, his voice weary. “When you’re sitting in front of him, it’s a theatrical show. He knows the psychological workings of the brain—which is why it’s so hard to get him help. But even after all is said and done, I still love him, and I wish nothing but the best for him. I honestly wish people got to know the true Dustin Mitchell. I wish we didn’t live in the world we live in now, because we’ll never get to see him, with society being the way it is. We don’t help people.”
After Michael left him, Mitchell says he pretty much fell apart. “In a way the whole practicing law for free thing lifted my spirits some,” he remarks. “It made me feel more worthwhile.”
*****
Has Mitchell become so positive, he’s banished all possible negative consequences from his mind?
“He doesn’t want to recognize consequences, because then it might change his attitude and it might constitute a failure,” Shepherd theorizes. “So by not recognizing consequences, he eliminates in his mind the possibility of failure.”
Clearly, there’s no lack of gray cells. “I think he’s probably super intelligent,” says one longtime observer. “So intelligent, he forgets reality.”
So does he believe his own résumé? “I think there’s always a tiny part of him that knows that’s not the way it is,” an old friend says. “But in order to create that illusion, you kind of have to believe it yourself.”
The friend shrugs. “He likes puttin’ on a show. Maybe he’s just so busy putting on the illusion that he doesn’t have enough time to really do it.”
Then there’s the attention and excitement: the sympathy and bonding when he announces a personal crisis online; the potential for gain or glory in his entrepreneurial projects; the notion that he’ll be able to help others (and thereby get more gain and glory). Mitchell gets a charge out of dazzling people, bringing them hope, imparting (often excellent) advice. What he’s done to his résumé (we use such gentle words—“pad,” like a teddy bear; “embellish,” like Irish lace) matches his sense of himself far better than the raw facts do.
Mitchell mainly reads nonfiction—the book Conspiracy of the Rich, and magazines like Forbes, Money, Entrepreneur. But he loves Harry Potter.
“I once heard a comedian say, ‘Trying to please my girlfriend is like trying to find Platform 9 ¾,’” he says. “Story of my life!”
*****
On January 4, the day after he’s released from prison, Mitchell shows up at SLM’s office, as promised, for a photo shoot.
“They’re already blowing up my phone,” he grins, waving it aloft. “Last night, people were calling till 3 a.m.” I wince at the thought, but he’s not complaining. “I don’t turn it off,” he says. “It sleeps with me.”
He empties his pocket, lest it bulge in the photo, and hands me an Applebee’s receipt, a car key, and a half-inch-thick wad of folded $100 bills. Subtle.
“Hey, what’s the latest on that reality-TV show?” I ask.
“I’m pretty sure if they increase the money I’m going to do it.”
What network was that for again? He smiles. “Can’t tell you. Top secret until I sign a contract.”
His eyes hold steady. His pitch stays low and even. He makes no nervous gestures, fills in with no “ums” or quick fake grins.
After the shoot, we go to lunch at Schlafly Bottleworks. I ask whether there’s anyone who ran his campaign for lieutenant governor, or encouraged him, that I could interview.
“No,” he says. “I don’t use my friendships. Because I am so used to having people try to do that to me.”
I ask how he prepared to act as a lawyer.
“I’ve racked my brain on that question,” he says. “I don’t know. From the business side, I used to read a lot of statutes… I pick up on stuff. And I have this habit of, when I want to do something, I just do it.” He’s ambivalent, understandably, about his own impulsivity: It defines him, and it trips him up.
“I wasn’t pretending to be anybody else,” he points out. “I just signed my name. There was no ‘persuading’ anybody, like the Post-Dispatch said.” (The Post story enraged him, and he says they mixed him up with another Dustin Mitchell and his lawyers will be suing for $15 million. Later, I email him the Post’s coverage, asking him to point out any errors. He promises to get back to me but never does.)
While we talk, his phone beeps merrily, and it rings once (older female voice, ending with a “Love you”—his mom?). He says he’s got a business meeting set up this afternoon in Frontenac. The phone beeps again, and he excuses himself to glance at the screen.
“Awesome,” he says, and holds up a graph with a line rising on the diagonal. “I made that purchase this morning.”
It’s an impressive 7 seconds. I steer us back to his brief, altruistic law career. With Baretich, he says, “I never planned on disposing of his case myself. I got him another lawyer.”
“And how did you tell him he’d need another lawyer?” I ask.
“I got arrested.”
My lips twitch. I take a quick swig of root beer, then ask what his future plans are. He’s told me he always likes to have plans.
“I think my next move, I’m probably going to pursue a bachelor’s in mortuary science,” he says. “The baby boomers are going to start passing away: In two years, the death rate will start increasing and steadily increase until 2050.” He’s going to start purchasing funeral homes, he says. And he’s already looked into a partnership between Assurance and “a national leader” to sell prepaid funerals in every state.
But couldn’t somebody just go to a funeral home and pay for their funeral ahead of time?
“You could,” he says. “But our independent owners have developed a niche, because their customers know and trust them.”
Mitchell’s brilliant at relationship-building; he can make a stranger feel like his best friend in half an hour. Yet when he talks about his deepest loves and sorrows, an odd distance creeps in. His letters from prison were drenched with agonized longing for his “husband”—he’d write the word, then go back and squeeze a tiny “ex” up high at the beginning. But at lunch, he can’t resist flashing a photo on his phone of a new relationship possibility, a young man so beautiful, I peer closer in spite of myself.
In one letter, he confided that when he knew his grandmother was close to death, he was so overwhelmed with grief, so convinced he could not bear her leaving him, that he gulped down half a gallon of antifreeze and cranberry juice. He mentions the suicide attempt again at lunch, his expression bleak—except now, it’s antifreeze and Welch’s grape juice. Seems like a detail you’d remember. But maybe it was cran-grape.
He talks, with immense sadness, about the death of his infant nephew. But his Facebook post at the time couldn’t hold the tone: “Ok I’m off to bury my nephew. Do not call me between 9:30-3PM. YES I will be back in time for our HUGE Attitudes Nightclub Jägermeister Birthday Bash…so don’t worry.”
He is resilient, that much is obvious.
“What bothers you?” I ask.
“Nothing. I make the world that I want. I create it. I don’t allow external sources to do that. Most people don’t realize they have that sort of power and control over their lives.”
“What’s your idea of a perfect day?”
“One where I don’t get arrested,” he says with a wink.
Midway through lunch, he looks over my shoulder. A small smile curves his lips. “Watch this,” he says under his breath. He rises, takes a few steps, and slides the leather check sleeve off a neighboring table. “I’ll take care of it.”
The two middle-aged women who’ve been squabbling over the check look up, stunned.
“Wait a minute! Who are you?” one calls after him, delighted but bemused. He just smiles. She hurries over and takes the check back: “No, no, no, please don’t do that. You are very, very, very sweet. And I’d love to have your business card.”
“’Cause he’s got lots of money!” her friend blurts. The friend’s an architect; she’s an interior designer.
“I always could use an interior designer,” Mitchell says. “I don’t have a business card, but I’d love one of yours.” (Note: He doesn’t pretend to fumble in his pocket or say he’s just run out. Later he explains that he rarely gives out his card: “I want the contact to be on my terms.”)
“What a gentleman,” the architect says, with approval.
Mitchell looks up, meets the interior designer’s eyes. “I have a friend in Salt Lake I need to introduce you to. Bill Marriott.”
“That’d be great!” she says, and hurries away before the coach changes to a pumpkin.
I look at Mitchell. “Bill Marriott, huh?”
“He’s a good friend,” he assures me. “Mormon church.” He leans back, arm outstretched. “Wasn’t that fun? I just made a relationship. And if I can help her when she needs something, she’ll do something to help me.” He laughs. “Especially if I send her to Bill Marriott.”
EPILOGUE
On January 7, 2013, Dustin Mitchell creates a new “Dustin Mitchell business person” Facebook page for himself. He uses an old photo of himself, a good one, his soft purple polo shirt vivid against sunlit green grass. But the photo’s a horizontal, so when it’s cropped to be his profile picture, only the edge of his face is visible.
“Dustin Mitchell is a serial entrepreneur,” the description reads. (Later, he’ll add “divorced.”) “He lives in Seattle, WA with his two doberman’s [sic] Harrah and Tori, and his python Kaa.”
On his old Facebook page, the one that repeats his name parenthetically in Japanese, he posts, “Until my computer get’s [sic] shipped to Seattle I won’t be on facebook. SO text me or call me” and gives his number. I email: You’ve moved? No, no, he says, just visiting.
On January 16, he starts yet another Facebook page: “So if you are a real friend add me at: www.facebook.com/iamdustinmitchell.” On the new page, he’s gone back to his eerie-hip duotone photo, a black-and-white shot of himself against, of course, blue sky. He says he is employed by the National Republican Congressional Committee.
Soon he’s posting about the “Dustin Mitchell Foundation for Alzheimer’s Research,” demanding that people who owe him money pay up or he’ll sue, and enthusing about his new condo and synagogue. For some unfathomable reason, he posts a link to the St. Louis County Justice Center. He friends “Dustin Mitchell” and likes “Dustin Mitchell Business Person.”
It’s like there are slivers of him all over the Internet, and they kaleidoscope together again and again, the picture slightly different every time.
