Toner Room Fraud
Kirpal Singh

A perennial philosophy that I currently live by is that the purest form of deception is separation from self and from other. By the time I started working at Guru Ram Das, Inc. (GRD), I was already engaged in self-deception and was therefore fertile ground for what followed…

I initially moved from Espanola to Los Angeles in 1987 to work for a fledgling publishing company run by SRSK. My wife and I also rented a room from him.

I was soon recruited by SSSSK to work at GRD, which was started in the late 70’s by BSK and HJSK. Directed by YB, they studied phone room techniques from Mark Lamm. Using Mark’s system, they initially sold pens to school principals. Sometime during the 80’s, they switched to selling copy machine toner. There was a big fight about this and BSK left. Sometime after that, SMSK, SSSK, and HJSK left to start their own toner room. They recruited me for their business and then called YB, who suggested they set up a meeting with my wife and me.

At the meeting I asked them if they were engaged in telemarketing fraud. According to HJSK, they were an upright, legal company that was registered with the California Attorney General. (At the time, I didn’t understand the distinction between legal and legitimate.) So, satisfied with the answers they gave me and faced with the probability of losing my living arrangement as well as my only job at the time, I started working at GRD.

The toner room business scam had been started in the 1950’s by Hungarian immigrants to the U.S. GRD toner room salesmen typically called small businesses and told them they were shipping them toner for their copier machine. They would ask the hapless person who answered the phone what their address was and who to attention the shipment to. They billed that business six times the going rate for the product and most people paid it.

GRD had several other ways they made so much money: First, they had a supply of drug-free, cheap labor from the ranks of unemployed ashram members. Second, when their enormous phone bills were due (this was before cheap long-distance rates,) they would move to another address or another town, leaving the phone bills (and sometimes the rent bill) behind. Also, they had discovered the advantage of dumpster diving: they would raid other phone rooms’ dumpsters to get lists of information about that business’s paying customers. This information, which included names, phone numbers, addresses, and copy machine model numbers, was like cash in the hand. However, some of these phone rooms figured out that GRD was selling toner to their customers and they sent goons with hurt feelings and guns, which was enough to dissuade the crew from this activity.

GRD was a mixture of intense competitive pressure along with a weird form of comradery. I could not reconcile the two from the get go. I was either going to be the low rung on the totem pole or join the competitive fray. My wife and I moved out of Siri Ram’s house as fast as we could.

By intimidating other salesmen, by February of 1988, both KSK and SRSK had the most lucrative areas of the country sown up – county and city governments. I found out from DASK that management had no position about these calling areas, so, as part of my calling pattern, I tried some city and county offices and, lo and behold, I started winning some of the sales contests!

About a year later, I was calling my paying customers and I found out that another company was selling them typewriter ribbons (another product that I sold.) With a little bit of sleuthing, I figured out that SMSK was buying copies of everyone’s invoices from SGSK, one of the GRD salesmen. This was a subtle version of dumpster diving and it was less easy to track, since SMSK was not selling toner but another product and had been at it with SGSK for about three years. So, I called a secret meeting with SGSK, and, within short order, he stopped selling the leads. Then I started selling typewriter ribbons to SMSK’s former leads.

I figured out another angle – on Friday or Saturday night, I would enter GRD with a key, and use a fire escape ladder to enter the office where the invoices were. Leaving the door unlocked but closed, I left the building, went home, copied the invoices and returned them to GRD.

This went on for about a year. Sometime towards the end of this period, I visited the Espanola ashram. An old buddy told me that someone had approached him to plant a listening device at YB’s ranch house. Upon my return to LA, I promptly advised YB of the situation. A week or two later he confirmed to me that my report was “correct in every detail.” So, for a few weeks, in the stratospheric realm of YB and his entourage, my shit didn’t stink. This is the source of the rumor that I was part of the inner circle.

A few weeks later, in the middle of the night as I was collecting the leads at GRD, I heard the back door open. Having no time to collect the fire escape ladder, I quickly left the building. The following Monday morning I was at GRD to attend a meeting. Before I even sat down, HJSK punched the living daylights out of me while DASK and SRSK just sat there. I staggered out and went to the hospital, where I was x-rayed and treated. Next, I called the LA police to press assault charges against HJSK, naming DASK and SRSK as witnesses.

Then I called DASK and told him that if I or my family were threatened, I would contact the IRS and provide them with enough information to hang him and HJSK for tax fraud and evasion. (All those millions of dollars that went for YB’s lavish lifestyle could not, by any stretch of the imagination, be accounted for as business expenses.)

YB promptly called me to his ranch in Espanola. He asked me what was the thing I feared the most. My answer was, “mediocrity.” With his penchant for knowing exactly how each person in this drama measured their self-importance, he somehow got me back working at GRD. I agreed to drop the charges (nothing was mentioned of the tax evasion but it was understood somehow that a detente was in effect,) HJSK wouldn’t sue me for damages, and sometime in the future I would get to quarterback another kind of game. I went back to GRD, stopped selling the leads on the side, helped train new people, brought in ancillary products to increase profits, and started winning the sales contests again.

The Canadian Lottery Scam

I met GBSK sometime in the late 80’s. In spring of 1991, he proposed to me that his new business could help me set up a Trust. The trust could be used to own real estate, bank accounts, and other assets. As the Trust Creator, I could protect myself from public scrutiny by appointing an Independent Trustee. The Trustee would pre-sign a letter of resignation that I would hold onto, and, at any point, I could compel the Trustee to resign, giving me control. So, I bought a trust from GBSK and made him the Independent Trustee. The trust was not used until a few months later.

In September 1991 I answered an ad in the Los Angeles Times and worked a day for an Orange County telemarketing outfit named RJN Marketing. They were promoting a prize structure that didn’t make sense to me at the time (and still doesn’t) but was somehow legal. It was a kind of Publisher’s Clearinghouse Sweepstakes – they even used Ed McMahon in their pitch. During the day I worked at RJN, I got hold of their FedEx ID number and used it to get a list of six months’ worth of their paying clients. When I got home, I called up two of the clients and told them that they had won the Canadian version of the Sweepstakes – all they needed to do was to pay a deposit on the taxes by sending my company a check.

The next day two checks totaling over $1100 rolled in.

I’ve never tried heroin or crack, so I can’t compare the experience, but the rush I had that day put me in the throes of an addiction that took the severest of consequences to break… I was on a roll. I set a target for about $5000 a day, which translated into about $100,000 a month.

About six months later, in February, 1992, I was in downtown LA picking up a consignment of about $10,000 in gems from Andrew Sarosi. On the street by the parking lot, I was accosted by two men who started asking me questions about my turban. It didn’t feel right and I had heard some scuttlebutt about Columbians doing takedowns in the jewelry district. I started yelling at the guys in the middle of the street and they backed off.

I got a call the same day from someone an RJN marketing that was pissed off about my using their leads. He even mentioned something about my trips downtown. It wasn’t that hard to put two and two together. If I kept picking up the FedEx checks from my mail drops in LA, I’d sooner or later run into goons hired by RJN. Looking back, of course I should have said that I had a good day at the carnival and why not hang up my hat for a few months. Noo, Noo, Noo said my greedy, addicted self. We must find another way, hey, hey, hey…

By the following month, I thought I had the answer to the RJN goon situation. I contacted GBSK and offered him $1,000 per week to do a daily pickup at a Mail Boxes Etc. in Carmel and to then courier a package to me in LA. He accepted the offer, not knowing what the actual contents of the deliveries were. Just a few weeks later, someone called the Monterey County District Attorney’s office with a complaint. They followed up on it by raiding GBSK’s office.

In the next few days, GBSK and I spoke on the phone and he told me that the investigators were in the office when I called asking where the daily package was. He was going through a lot of hardship and asked me what was going on. I thought it best not to tell him anything else at that time. I immediately sent $10,000 to an attorney named Rosen in Monterey to represent GBSK. I asked Rosen for the name of a good attorney in LA and he gave me the name of Dan Raiskin.

That’s when the real “fun” began…

The magnitude of what I had done was just beginning to dawn on me. I contacted attorney Raiskin to see what could be done. I asked whether we could just give the money back. He said that, after the fact, the crime was a crime, whether the money was returned or not. He suggested that I take the cash out of all the accounts and store it in a safety deposit box. He said to hire a couple of off duty police officers as security guards to do the haul. I wasn’t thinking very clearly and went ahead with his scheme, with the exception of leaving $30,000 in a personal account at an unrelated bank.

On June 8, 1992 I received a call from YB’s secretary in New Mexico. I was “wanted” at the ranch by YB, so I flew the next day to Albuquerque, rented a car, and drove to Espanola. YB told me that he had spoken with an FBI agent who said they were monitoring my calls. As proof, he said that I had made calls from a phone booth on Robertson Blvd. In retrospect, I believe he had me followed for a while. He wanted to know how much money I had made. I suggested that he shouldn’t know any information about what I did. Anyway, YB said that if I gave him $25,000 in cash, he would “protect” my family. I agreed to that and flew back to LA. (Once RDSK and YB got wind of what was going on, they alerted DASK, and the next time I arrived at the Gem Room, I found that my keys no longer opened the door.)

I flew back to LA after meeting with YB and had lunch with GSSK. When I returned home, a friend of mine came running out of the house and said there were police inside doing a search. They also had a search warrant for my “body” and that of another friend who was inside the house and was the Trustee on one of the Trusts that I used to open bank accounts.

I drove away immediately in our van, leaving the Lexus for my wife. The bank with all the cash was a few blocks away. I went there intending to take the money to my attorney, who (at least that’s what he said and I believed it) was going to give it to the authorities to cut a deal for me. It turned out that the money had already been seized. I slept that night in the Ashram and then went the next morning to the bank where I had left $30,000 for a “rainy day.” I was going to take that money and give it to my wife for her and my son.

As the bank was cashing out my account, Sue Stryker (District Attorney of Monterey CA) walked in and arrested me.

Kirpal spent three years at San Quentin Prison for his part in the Canadian Lottery Scam.