I think that Hendrickson himself was something of a success, and enjoyed a certain amount of prosperity, as long as people were buying his books. (And he wasn't in jail.)Joey Smith wrote:When you read the stories of the CtC warriors, it is just one loser after another. No successful people in that group, such as it is (and rapidly growing smaller).
The only "successful people" in the tax denier world are people like Lynn Meredith, and Irwin Schiff, and Eddie Kahn, and the principals of Global Prosperity, and Peter Hendrickson, who can make a significant amount of money bilking the gullible, but they drink their own Koolaid (or the fraud is a little too blatant) and eventually they go to jail.
So yes, at the end of the day, they're all losers. But what's weird is that the marks themselves, the pigeons who paid good money for worthless crap, the Subvets and Patrick Mooneys and other Lost Heads, are never able to face the fact that they were had, and that they were the chumps and not the champs.
Which perhaps only proves the truth of WC Fields's immortal line, "You can't cheat an honest man." It is the very dishonesty of the tax denier crowd that makes them so vulnerable to scams like Hendrickson's.