David Bendah: The Prince of Get Rich Quick

It’s the heigh of midday traffic on San Diego’s Mission Gorge Road, and David Bendah is on his car phone dispensing the secrets of easy money. “Jojoba farming,” Bendah says. “Start a jojoba farm in your backyard. Do you know how much jojoba oil goes for? Seventy dollars per gallon, okay? Girls love it in their shampoo. You will be a millionaire in no time.”

Lost in his schemes, Bendah lets his white Rolls-Royce spirit drift perilously close to the oncoming traffic. Toyotas, Chevys and other mortal vehicles honk frantically, but Bendah doesn’t notice. He’s returning another call. “Machine guns,” he says, “Yes, yes, 149 percent yearly profit.” With the receiver in one hand and a cigarette in the other the tiny, Israeli-born millionaire can barely keep his car under control. “Why are you questioning me?” he asks the caller, jerking the steering wheel and pumping the pedals with his size-9 Reeboks. “I’m giving you free advice. People pay me millions of dollars for this advice.”

David Bendah is not just bragging. Though he’s only 29, Bendah has made millions with just that kind of loony financial advice. His company, Lion publishing, sells get-rich-quick Books through the mail, touting investment opportunities in magazine ads with screaming come-ons like this: “Build a $20,000 coin collection from pennies. “Sell Platinum from Auto Catalytic Converters.” “Cash in on Arab money.” If his moneymaking books — more than 80 are available — were sold in bookstores, many could make the New York Times best-seller list. Bendah earns $6 million a year, primarily from the bags of $12.95 checks that pour into Lion Publishing every day.

And he predicts his latest his latest how-to, The Secrets of Getting Free Money, which offers inside tips about free grants and low-interest loans, will be his biggest seller of all. If you are a Jewish orphan who wants to study aeronautical engineering, Bendah says, the University of California has a $400,000 scholarship fund set aside for you. Or say you need cash and your last name happens to be Gatling. Did you know there’s a $1.2 million foundation out there, started by the man who invented the Gatling machine gun? “People are legally changing their names to Gatling to get hold of this money, okay?” Bendah says.

To his cult of followers, David Bendah is a financial genius, a master entrepreneur. You’d never guess it to look at him. With his five-foot-six-inch frame and dirt-flecked eyeglasses, he looks more like a computer-science dropout. He’s also given to whiny adolescent braying: “I am one of the smartest people in the United States,” he likes to say. “Companies spend millions of dollars and months doing surveys and tests to make marketing decisions that I feel in my gut in an instant.”

But in just a few years, David Bendah has gotten very, very rich selling people their dreams. Each day he gets over 800 phone calls — from the desperate, the curious, the dissatisfied, the lazy, the frightened, the vaguely hopeful and the hopeless dreamers. Bendah refers to all of these people as the “moron market.” He knows he shouldn’t give them free advice, but he can’t help himself. He doesn’t understand why everyone in the world can’t make money as easily as he does.

At the precise moment that David Bendah is helping yet another caller — this time explaining how a person can get over a hundred Visa cards — he whips the Rolls across two lanes of oncoming traffic and pulls into the parking lot of the anonymous-looking two-story concrete bunker that houses Lion Publishing. Out front, a neighboring hardware store is holding a dollar raffle, with a chain saw as the prize. A blond model in a black string bikini and five-inch heels parades around with the prize, but Bendah is riveted by the sight of dollar bills flying out of people’s pockets. The blonde points the chain saw seductively at him.”Vroom, vroom,” she says.

“This is tremendous,” Bendah whispers. “This is just tremendous.”