Class Action Park

- It's not really fair to ask the question,

"What was Action Park?"

Basically, so it was a waterslide park.

But in truth, it was so much more than a waterslide park.

- Action Park was the chaos summer park

with very little oversight, too much alcohol,

whistles blowing, people screaming,

motors running.

It was an energy, you know?

You knew you were jumping into the firepit.

- The most dangerous theme park of all time.

- There was a waterslide that held one person

that went in a-- like, in a flip.

- It looked like a bunch of kids built it,

because that's what it was.

- We'll be back with more "Headbangers Ball,"

coming from Action Park in Vernon, New Jersey,

the biggest water park in the world.

- I think the very reason people were attracted

to Action Park was because they could get hurt.

That was the allure of it.

I mean, who wants to sit on a Ferris wheel?

- It was a place where death was tolerated,

where death was put right into the number situation.

- Every member of my family was injured in that park

at some time or another.

They called it Traction Park.

Class Action Park.

- Class Action Park, the lawyers called it.

- It starts out with people having fun,

and by the end,

crimes have been committed.

Cover-ups have happened.

The story hasn't been told truthfully.

To me, that's probably the worst thing of all.

male narrator: In order to truly understand

a place like Action Park,

we need to go back to New York in the 1970s.

Wall Street. Everything was changing.

Bankers and brokers were transforming

into masters of the universe.

- A ton of money starts to enter the industry.

It is the place to be.

And that is part of what creates the environment

that makes it perfect for someone like Gene Mulvihill.

- Gene Mulvihill was Wall Street in the 1970s.

He was Gordon Gekko before there was a Gordon Gekko.

- He's this mix of P.T. Barnum, Donald Trump.

It's not just that he's a businessman.

It's the personality that he's bringing to it too.

narrator: Gene ran a brokerage firm

called Mayflower Securities,

and every time he'd make a sale,

he'd blast a bugle through the office

while the champagne bottles crack open.

- This was the era of the penny stock,

of the pump-and-dump scheme.

- Penny stocks? - Yeah.

narrator: Penny stock scams

are when salesmen take worthless stocks

and trick unsuspecting investors into buying them.

- Come on. Who buys this crap?

Enters Robert Brennan,

fraudster, penny-stock king,

and best friend of Gene.

Brennan gets his start as a salesman

at Mayflower Securities, working for Gene,

and within a few years,

he's the president of the company.

narrator: Under Gene and Brennan's leadership,

it wasn't long before Mayflower

got suspended by the SEC for doing

what "The New York Times" referred to

as "selling worthless securities

in a bankrupt electronics company."

Gene was effectively kicked off of Wall Street.

So he did what anybody in this situation would do:

buy up two ski resorts in Vernon, New Jersey,

Great Gorge and Vernon Valley.

- Located within the magic 45-mile radius

of metropolitan New York City,

Vernon Township occupies

67.9 square miles of prime land,

with a population of better than 20,000 people.

Also located in Vernon is Wawayanda State Park,

and that's just the beginning.

- So many big, larger-than-life people

looked to Vernon in the '70s, and they saw possibility.

It's got all of this amazing outdoor terrain.

You can ski in the winter.

You can hike or bike in the summer.

- You would never think it was in New Jersey.

For a country boy like me,

it was an amazing place to grow up.

Everybody seemed to know each other.

It was like this little idyllic small town.

narrator: In the early '70s, none other than Hugh Hefner

opened a Playboy Club in the hills of Vernon.

Gambling had just taken over Atlantic City,

and Hef believed it was on its way

up to North Jersey soon.

- And he wanted to build the hopping spot,

the casino that would draw people

from all over to New Jersey.

narrator: Vernon had already been catching the eye

of outside investors,

but the opening of the Playboy Club

took things to a whole new level.

- Every weekend, there was some celebrity coming.

People like Tony Bennett would come to sing,

or Wayne Newton used to come.

And Vernon was absolutely

poised to be the next Orlando, even Vegas.

[Wayne Newton's "Daddy, Don't You Walk So Fast"]

narrator: Since he couldn't negotiate

with New Jersey weather and its short ski season,

Gene became a pioneer in artificial snow.

He went so far as to construct

the world's largest snowmaking machine

out of a jet engine.

- So the thing with Gene's ski resort is,

there were summer months.

He had downtime. So what do you do?

Well, Gene started building rides.

- So he was looking for something to do with it

in the summer, and he got the idea

of starting an amusement park,

but he wanted to kind of take

the idea of where you get on your skis

and you go down and you control how fast

and where you go to the amusement park.

male announcer: And we reflect on the sounds and sights

of children's joy at Action Park.

Everything here is strictly do-it-yourself.

narrator: To get his park built,

Gene turned to his old buddy Bob Brennan,

always there to find cash or investors

anytime Gene had a wild new idea.

- They were saying that New Jersey could compete

with Orlando as a theme park destination,

and that's not that crazy.

narrator: Enough people were sold on the vision,

and things started to take off.

- Action Park was one of the very first

modern water parks in the country--in the world.

Nobody knew what a water park really was.

They had to invent it.

- Build it higher. Make it faster.

Do something that nobody's ever seen before.

That was what my father was all about.

narrator: They were designing it on the fly,

essentially throwing ideas at the wall

and seeing what stuck.

Some worked okay.

Others not so much.

And in 1978,

Action Park was born.

- When we would all pile into the car

to go to Action Park, it was always a little manic,

everyone just kind of on the edge of their seat,

just all jacked up

about the excitement that was about to ensue.

- Like, older teenagers would take you.

So that right there is already dangerous,

because they're just gonna make you do things that they,

as 17- and 18-year-olds, feel comfortable doing.

- I remember my parents did not want me

to go to Action Park,

but we got lucky because there was this family,

they grew up up the street from us,

and their dad brought them to Action Park.

I think my parents were like,

"Fuck, someone else is offering it for free."

And these kids, classic '80s, children of divorce,

they don't live with their dad, and my parents knew,

"We can't say no. We can't say no."

I remember my parents both, on my way out the door,

being like, "Please be smart.

Like, please be really careful and use your best judgment."

narrator: Action Park was divided

into three main sections.

You had Alpine Center, home of the Alpine slide;

Water World, filled with fantastical waterslides;

and Motor World, an area dedicated

to exhaust-spewing engines and go-karts.

And, of course, splitting the park down the middle

was a major highway, Route 94.

- One of the first things you saw

when you walked into Action Park

was the infamous Cannonball Loop,

which for years, it was like a myth