Hella Nation - Evan Wright [63]
As the business grew, Langdon and his wife purchased a $700,000 home in Carefree, Arizona. They were soon awash in all the bling needed for the late-twentieth-century American Dream, from Rolexes to powerboats and Jet Skis to Mercedese AMGs, customized BMWs and Porsches. For Langdon, exotic cars gave him additional entrée into the world of pro athletes. In his first contact with police, Langdon would brag that the 2002 Porsche Turbo Carrera he was driving was one he had just bought from a friend, Arizona Diamondbacks pitcher Juan Cruz.
While Langdon was a gifted salesman, his business skills were wanting. When the HGH market changed, Langdon failed to adapt. The problem was the very success of HGH. The drug had become so sought after, pharmaceutical manufacturers no longer needed entrepreneurs like Langdon to market the product. In addition, the number of middlemen trying to get in on the action had skyrocketed. To deal with the competition, Langdon cut prices so low he began losing money on every sale he made. “What Langdon got into was a downward spiral,” says Dr. John Musil, who runs Valley Services, a Scottsdale pharmaceutical wholesaler. “He became one of the biggest, but he was no longer making any money.”
In early 2000, Langdon lost a lucrative supply contract with an Internet HGH seller. According to a Phoenix doctor I spoke to, Langdon invited him out to lunch about this time. As the doctor recalls, “Troy said, ‘Gee, I just bought this new Acura NSX sports car last week, and suddenly my relationship with this online HGH company has ended.’” The doctor says that Langdon sounded him out on the possibility of writing illegal HGH prescriptions for thousands of customers Langdon hoped to sell to directly, but he declined. Later, Langdon’s brother-in-law, who worked for his parents’ Cactus Pharmacy, would admit to police that he forged HGH prescriptions at Langdon’s direction. When I visited the pharmacy and asked him about this, he would neither confirm nor deny it.
At the time of Langdon’s business disintegration, he fell into the thrall of an oddly charismatic ne’er-do-well named Sean Southland, two years his senior. When the two met in late 1999 in a VIP room at Christie’s strip club, Southland carried with him a sheaf of slick brochures advertising a company he had recently founded, Sea Castle Ventures. The idea behind Sea Castle was a sound one, to make the world of luxury yachting—previously available only to the superrich—affordable to the merely affluent through the sale of time-shares. (George Hernandez, a Los Angeles yacht broker whom Southland subsequently retained, told me that the idea was actually kind of brilliant, saying, “Sean’s idea could have made him the Bill Gates of time-shares.”) His prospectus for Sea Castle outlined a bold plan: to launch twelve mega-yachts, anchor them in prime harbors from Cancún to Nassau and ultimately to earn a projected $300 million annually for investors wise enough to get in on the scheme early. Though the business was just getting under way at the time Southland met Langdon, he flashed ads he’d recently taken out in yacht magazines, advertising Sea Castle with the slogan “Your Ship Just Came In.”
Langdon says that as soon as he met Southland he felt they were “two peas in a pod.” That Langdon felt a keen sense of familiarity with Southland, as well as what he would later term “profound admiration,” is no surprise. Both were natural hucksters, but where Langdon functioned within a realm where real products were exchanged for money, Southland functioned almost at