Selling the Bro Dream: Are Frat Boys Peddling Vemma Suckers?

In the beginning, BK Boreyko didn’t set out to find anything new. Nine years ago, after New Vision was dissolved, the avuncular father of six turned an old idea into his next company. Whereas before he sold vitamins, now he decided instead to try to sell a beverage, called Vemma, that already had them. Vitamins you can drink! Then one day, spurred by what he saw as a glut of unhealthy energy drinks flooding the market, Boreyko put those same ingredients into something he called Verve, a highly caffeinated product like Red Bull, but, in his mind, just as healthy as his flagship drink. What came next he didn’t expect, but maybe should have: Kids who liked the energy drink but had never given multilevel marketing a second thought started buying Verve and reconsidering. Kids like Morton. “Alex and one of his mentors are really the ones who started this whole YPR movement,” says Boreyko.

YPR stands for “Young People Revolution” or “Young Professional Revolution,” and it’s part of the reason Vemma has attracted an inordinate amount of attention. YPR is the easily hashtagable acronym Vemma uses to describe the tidal wave of young recruits coming into the company, in part thanks to Morton. Today, Vemma claims to have roughly 350,000 distributors and customers, many Morton’s age or younger. Last year, the dean of a business school sent a letter to administrators at more than a dozen other colleges warning them about what he saw as a possible pyramid scheme aimed directly at impressionable undergrads. “I learned that Vemma is looking for MLM distributors among students,” he wrote in an e-mail accompanying the letter. “I have no doubt that this is happening all over the country.”

The dean was right. Back in Sloppy’s car, on his way to a McMansion in a Phoenix suburb filled with another hundred waiting kids, at least one as young as 15, Morton is trying to think of a way to get himself and his 50,000 Facebook followers excited. “I should pay someone to do this for me,” he says, while scrolling past a friend request from someone in Indonesia. Morton settles on a hype video, which has clearly defined criteria: 40 seconds of atmospherics – usually a shot of an open road with music playing in the background – and then a minute or two of frenzied talk, in this case about the upcoming annual convention in Las Vegas. “Y-y-y-y-y-y-yooooooo! Vemma world, YPR world, wassup, baby!” he says, his phone held a foot in front of his face. “Twenty-five days till convention, man. Twenty-five days to make the rest of your life the best of your life. . . . We’re gonna make so much money. We’re gonna go down in history as the kids that saved the entire generation, guys. It’s time to be proud. It’s time to step up, baby! And let’s go all the way.”

Along with the 250,000 frequent-flier miles he racked up last year, staring into a camera and acting excited has been one of the keys to Morton’s success. After leaving Arizona State, he worked in real estate for a year before being introduced to Vemma when he was 21. Just a year later he was preaching the gospel onstage in a YouTube video that’s now been viewed almost a half-million times. “Salaried jobs should be illegal, dude,” he says in the clip. “You’re God’s highest form of creation. Why on Earth would you let somebody else tell you when to show up to work, when to eat lunch, when to pee, when to go home?” That contempt for traditional careers has meant a very lucrative one for Morton, though how lucrative depends on who you ask. Vemma insists Morton is not a millionaire. Morton’s own website, not to mention just about every one of his speeches, insists that he is. What’s not in dispute is his willingness to offer a near constant stream of encouraging words, both online and off. At the end of a very long Sunday, after talking in front of more than 200 people at two different home events, to dozens of others on Skype calls, and exchanging an unknown number of text messages, Morton takes out his phone to tap out one last note on his Facebook page before going to sleep, which he’ll do while listening to audio of his favorite motivational speakers. “You beat 40,000,000 sperm to be alive therefore you’re a CHAMPION,” he types. “Start acting like a CHAMPION. Act like you DESERVE to WIN. The universe doesn’t give you what you want, the universe gives you what you DEMAND. #YoungPeopleRevolution.”

Roughly a month later, in a suite on the 25th floor of the Mirage, overlooking the Las Vegas Strip, Morton takes a sip of Vemma’s newest energy drink. He scrunches up his face. “Tastes too much like pineapple,” he says. As it’s grown, the company has expanded its line of products, including a hair-and-nail tonic introduced just a couple of weeks earlier at a press event in New York City headlined by Jenny McCarthy. The former View co-host is but one of a handful of celebrities tied to Vemma. Dr. Mehmet Oz, recently called to Congress to be questioned for promoting “miracle” weight-loss products, has featured cans of Verve on his show and lists the drink among recommended fatigue fighters on his website. (Boreyko says Vemma has donated nearly $1.1 million to a charity founded by Oz.) Perpetually chipper weight-loss reality-TV-show hosts Chris and Heidi Powell are paid spokespeople, as are the NBA’s Phoenix Suns, who get $450,000 a year for the privilege of calling Verve the team’s “official energy drink.”

Morton sits at the Vemma suite’s dining–room table with two of his cousins, Brock and Case, who are also distributors of the energy drink. So is Morton’s only sibling, his sister (women in Vemma are often referred to as “ladybosses”), along with his mother and father. This family-oriented focus is seen as a benefit of multilevel marketing within the industry, and a detriment to those outside it. When G. Robert Blakey, the principal draftsman of the RICO statutes used to prosecute mob members, was hired to study Amway’s business by a group suing the company, he wrote that it “is run in a manner that is parallel to that of major organized-crime groups, in particular the Mafia.”

Morton’s girlfriend, Chiarelli (with whom he will soon part ways), is also in Vemma, but she’s in the room only briefly before a new crisis arises. “Oh, no!” she says. “The piercing in my bellybutton just closed.” While she runs to the bathroom, Morton and his cousins begin spitballing the upcoming talks they’re going to give at the convention. Tonight is YPR night, and Morton is a keynote speaker. He sent a shock through the social media accounts of Vemma’s young, self-professed entrepreneurs a few weeks ago by posting a clip from The Wolf of Wall Street on Instagram as a way of announcing that the infamous stock swindler Jordan Belfort was going to speak at the convention. Belfort is a folk hero for some within Vemma. “I’ve seen that movie more times than I can count,” says Morton. Unfortunately, the rumor wasn’t true.