Hella Nation - Evan Wright [64]
When they first met, Southland was living in a small apartment in a building managed by his mother. It was his mother who provided the initial investment of $10,000 into Sea Castle that enabled him to print up brochures and take out ads in yachting magazines. Since the early nineties Southland had embarked on a variety of careers—police officer, U.S. Army soldier, gun-sight salesman, tow-truck operator—which had all ended either in his dismissal or his leaving under abrupt, unexplained circumstances. By 1999 he was surviving on handouts from his mother and wages his wife earned working as an airline hostess and stripper.
Though Southland and his wife were raising two young children together, he had recently begun dating a Russian immigrant whom he had persuaded to take a job as a stripper at Christie’s Cabaret. The Russian stripper girlfriend would later admit she had helped engineer his encounter with Langdon in the belief—which later proved not quite accurate—that he had a lot of money and would be able to finance Sea Castle.
As Southland later explained, “Troy knew he was in a diminishing business. He looked to Sea Castle as the future.”
For Langdon the future that Southland offered would prove extremely costly. Shortly after their first encounter, Langdon put Southland on salary and gave him the title of director of marketing at Peak Physique. He also made out a check to Sea Castle for one million dollars. Southland was wise enough not to cash the check (given Langdon’s increasingly precarious cash flow), but he would use it as a sales tool, flashing it to other investors as proof of the venture’s worthiness.
The two became inseparable. Southland started taking HGH with Langdon. They worked out together every morning at Langdon’s home gym, admiring the muscles on each other’s bodies as they grew. They spent evenings together at Christie’s Cabaret and weekends at Lake Powell partying on boats and Jet Skis. Langdon’s wife became best friends with Southland’s girlfriend. In a photograph commemorating an outing at the lake, the two women stand flashing their breasts at passing boaters. Langdon and Southland stand by their sides laughing. “Not a day went by that we didn’t see each other for over a year,” says Southland of his relationship with Langdon.
Even today, as they face felony charges and possibly even murder charges stemming from their partnership, Langdon speaks of Southland in inspirational terms, saying, “There are few people I’ve ever met who have the qualities Sean has, who wants what I want for myself, for my family. Sean has what I aspire to become.”
Through 2001 and 2002, Southland sold individual shares of Sea Castle for as much as $50,000 each. He focused on strippers and hairdressers he met through his girlfriend. A few borrowed money from their parents in order to meet the $50,000 minimum. Flashing his brochures and the million-dollar check from Langdon, and warning potential investors that he had just one share remaining to sell, Southland often closed the deal with people of little means by arguing that their relative poverty was precisely why they needed to get in on the ground floor. “It’s easy for rich people to invest in something like this,” he would say. “But I’d rather make a poor person rich than a rich person richer.”
The statement was true, as long as the poor person in question was Southland himself. As the money rolled in, he went on a spending spree. While he shared Langdon’s love of exotic cars, boats and Jet Skis, Southland’s tastes also ran to Prada suits, French wines, marble statues from Italy, and a white grand piano for his girlfriend (before she became a stripper she was a classically trained pianist). Initially, the luxury goods piled up in the cramped apartment Southland still occupied with his two children and wife. Langdon solved this problem by helping Southland purchase a $700,000 home in a gated community on the sixteenth hole of the Wildfire