The Pez Outlaw

Okay. Ready?

Cheers, you guys.

Oh, ta... tastes awful. Oh, that's cold.

I always say to you, "Are you mad?"

Doing a movie about Steve? Okay.

In my... you know, in my eyes, you are...

You are making a movie about a loser.

So, uh, why are you doing that?

I met Steve Glew about 20 or 25 years ago.

I did not even know what Steve was... was doing.

No one knew him. No one knew where he came from.

No one that you asked had any idea who the hell he was.

But everybody wanted what he was selling.

I mean, I was handling amounts of money

that I had dreamed of.

And doing a deal for $500,000...

I had no idea that he had made millions of dollars.

I remember reading something and thinking,

is my dad a criminal?

I learned to protect my space.

I saw people follow me all the time.

I was paranoid beyond belief.

When I'd get home,

and open that bag, it was diamonds.

It was gold.

Pez.

I won the lottery.

It's like printin' money.

Welcome to the wonderful world of Pez.

Those colorful little candy dispensers

many of us purchased for pennies years ago.

Well, pennies make dollars, folks.

What... what is that, a Pez dispenser?

You want one?

Some Pez are quite rare.

And how much is this worth?

Between three and four thousand dollars.

People inside the Pez cell

think that this thing has already peaked,

and it has not.

That's good.

I've been waiting to tell this story for 20 years.

When we moved out here, we became back-to-earthers.

We had goats, we had chickens, we had pigs,

we had a cow or two.

Yeah, you couldn't imagine living anywhere else.

Right there. It was where the grey barn was.

- Silver barn is. - Yeah.

I wear three pair of socks,

and I keep a paper towel with me at all times.

It just helps you cope.

My whole life, I'd been poor.

Poor is when you don't have enough money.

When your house payment's only $125 a month.

Um, yeah, we lived in a ratty old house

that snow came in, till we wrapped it in plastic.

Literally, a big sheet of plastic.

The expectations in my life were

This guy won't amount to nothin'.

He's a joke.

But I've always had an inner person that...

that knew there was more.

Uh, that I could achieve more.

At that point in our life, um,

we didn't have two pennies.

And if you did have two pennies,

it was because you weren't paying something else.

There was never excess money.

You used to make, like, $11 an hour as a...

As a skilled tradesman who knew his stuff.

My job was mind-numbingly boring.

I worked for almost 25 years

as a machinist in a factory.

I would set the cut, and, uh, while the cut was running,

I'd have plenty of time to think.

And I'd think about, uh, something better.

Tom Clancy was his author of choice.

He's in books, submersing himself in that story and...

And kind of living that adventure.

Because he hated his job.

Target acquired...

I mean, I suffered through it.

Don't get me wrong.

But I always wanted out.

I always was waiting,

every minute of every day,

to figure anything out

that would get me the hell out of there.

Yeah, I was pretty miserable,

until I found cereal boxes.

And I just really loved them.

I'm a cereal box guy. Always have been.

Being compulsive obsessive,

it's not the box, it's the stack.

There's a sense of joy when you find

something you hold special.

There it is.

The screwier a box is, the better it is.

I love cereal boxes.

They're just fun. Cap'n Crunch.

And they're a part of my childhood.

We were the generation that ate the sweet cereal.

And I eat the sweet cereal still.

Steve, uh, was never shy about things.

He'd be running up and down the aisles, like,

"Oh, look at this box variation.

Look at this, or look at that."

And he was very passionate about what he did.

Steve figured out a way of working the system

of mail order premiums.

Like, send ten box tops for this free craft radio.

Frisbees, sports item, cars.

I was getting all kinds of stuff.

I learned to take those out and sell 'em,

and it was generating revenue back into the family.

And it was thousands and thousands of these items.

He totally skewed their system, and...

And he did it often enough that they actually changed

corporate policy about... About premium redemption.

You know that little disclaimer?

They say "one per household."

That's me. I did that.

I mean, it... it was the first

effort of "push it till it breaks."

We started going to toy shows,

and I was yankin' down 300 bucks a show.

Thank you. One dollar. Thank you. Just one.

After they closed the window on cereal premiums,

it seemed like the end of the road.

But I had enough product for one last toy show.

That's when everything changed.

Everything.

It was very, uh, film noire.

I remember the moment completely.

Pez.

Oh, my God, oh, my God,

I want one of them, I want one of them.

Oh, my God.

I could sell these and do really, really well.

Toy world is full of people.

They go, "Shh, shh, don't tell anybody."

Where did you get those?

Kolinska.

It was... it was haunting.

'Cause it's like "Rosebud" from, uh, Citizen Kane.

Rosebud.

And she leaned over and told me,

"You want the good stuff?

You gotta go to Kolinska."

It was like the temptation

of the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

The collectors loved...

things that weren't available to the open market.

Things that you couldn't go down

to your grocery store and pick up.

They wanted what was available in Europe.

And so I was like, "Dad, let's see what we can get,

you know, right from the factory."

I don't go places.

I mean, Europe... Europe is this thing

that rich people only do, and...

not something in my world.

Welcome aboard. Welcome aboard the spacious...

I was about 20 years old.

I had never been out of the country.

But there was no way I was gonna just

let that dream die anyway.

I kind of took the reins

and contacted a... A local travel agent.

This needs to happen

in order to take that next step.

How bad do you want that next step?

A new concept in air transportation.

I don't know.

I don't know, yeah, okay. Let's go.

He got me a passport.

Next thing you know, we had tickets.

Next thing you know, we're on a plane.

Well, I heard that he was making a trip to Europe,

and I thought he was insane.

He didn't speak any foreign language.

There was no internet, he had no contact people

on the ground, he was just some hillbilly

from Michigan who got on a plane...

and then just landed somewhere.

You know, the state of Europe

was vastly different back then than it is today.

The Berlin wall hadn't been down very long.

The wall has suddenly become irrelevant.

Something, as you can see, almost to party on.

How do you measure such an astonishing

moment in history?

He was operating out of this capitalist scheme,

but he had no idea what he was doing.

But, you know, he has that,

like, magical little troll quality.

When you're doing this, and you're fully invested,

it's either win or lose.

Live or die, you know?

So we always had everything on the line.