[3] Turner was a son of a sharecropper in a South Carolina tobacco farm[4][5] and an unwed mother[citation needed].
He was born with a cleft palate and a hare lip; surgery to correct them left a scar for which he was bullied until he dropped out of school in the eighth grade.
[3] By the spring of 1969, Turner was living in a large home on Lake Maitland near Orlando Florida, and "had eight Cadillacs and a Rolls-Royce, three Learjets and a closetful of tailor-made suits and alligator shoes".
[3] In 1972 he started but did not finish a "$3.5 million white stone castle with a helicopter landing pad" on Bear Gulley Lake, also near Orlando.
... At the meeting Turner's proteges would run to the stage in their flashy suits and fancy shoes, with $100 or even $1,000 bills pinned to their lapels.
[3]When some salespeople found customers in short supply, Turner encouraged them to “'fake it until you make it,' by wearing expensive clothes and waving around $100 bills to lure in others".
[13] The first major lawsuit was filed in October 1969, by "14 Koscot distributors in Tennessee, Kentucky and Indiana" over Turner's failure "to pay promised dividends.
[3] Disillusioned recruits testified against Turner or his companies, and one judge cited the phrase 'fake it until you make it', as "evidence of malfeasance".
"[3] Turner, attorney F. Lee Bailey, and eight others were also indicted by a federal grand jury on conspiracy and mail fraud charges.
In 1975, Turner pleaded guilty to a single charge of violating securities laws and was given probation, avoiding prison but financially beaten, "his empire in ruins.
[7] Another reported him sentenced to seven years in prison in 1987, after being convicted along with Edward Rector, on charges of conspiracy, fraud and operating a pyramid scheme.
[17][12] Columnist Helaine Olen noted that despite having been "all but omnipresent in American life", at the peak of his success, his death met with almost no media or public attention.
Also commenting on his conspicuously quiet passing, Jim Ridolphi tells of friends who spent their weekends "traveling the backroads of the Carolinas in a high energy house party" selling Turner's Challenge product.
But Turner and the 21st century figures like Elizabeth Holmes, Sam Bankman-Fried, and George Santos demonstrate that it can be easy to fake it, but much more difficult to make it.