September 1, 2024 • 26 mins
In this episode of Bleeding Daylight, Rodney Olsen speaks with Guy W. Gane Jr., a man who has experienced the extreme highs and lows of life. Once a successful stockbroker with a luxurious lifestyle, Guy's world came crashing down in a single day, leading to the loss of his reputation and a lengthy prison sentence. He shares his remarkable journey from wealth and success to incarceration, and how he emerged from adversity with a transformed mindset and renewed faith.
Guy's story is one of resilience, learning, and redemption. He opens up about the devastating impact of his downfall, the harsh realities of life behind bars, and the lessons he learned during his time in prison. Now a master coach, sought-after speaker, and published author, Guy uses his experiences to inspire and guide others who are facing their own challenges. This conversation delves into the pivotal moments that shaped his path and the hope he found in the darkest of times.
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Episode Transcript
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(00:08):
Wherever there are shadows, there are people ready to kick at the darkness until it bleeds daylight.
This is Bleeding Daylight with your host, Rodney Olsen.
Welcome, thanks for listening.
Join the conversation on this and other episodes by connecting with Bleeding Daylight on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok or other social media platforms.
(00:33):
You'll find all the links at bleedingdaylight.net, as well as dozens of other episodes of Bleeding Daylight with some remarkable people telling their own stories.
From living the high life to a ruined reputation and a long prison sentence, today's guest has seen the highs and lows of life.
(01:03):
Joining me today is Guy W.
Gane Jr., a master coach, sought-after speaker and published author, whose life embodies the heights of success and the depths of adversity.
Once enjoying a luxurious lifestyle, Guy's world changed dramatically in a single day, leading to the loss of his reputation and his freedom.
(01:25):
Emerging from that experience with a transformed mindset, Guy now shares his journey of resilience and faith with others.
I'm so pleased to welcome him to Bleeding Daylight.
Guy, thank you so much for your time.
Thank you for having me.
It's an honor.
It's been said that the higher you climb, the further that you have to fall, and you fell from a pretty great height.
(01:45):
Tell me about those heights.
What was life like before your dramatic change in direction?
Years ago, I remember watching the movie Wall Street, and one of the characters had said it would be better to never have had money than to have money and have it all taken away.
I didn't understand that at the time, but I certainly understand that now.
I had been a stockbroker for my career, and I'd been in the financial field for 34 years, actually.
(02:11):
Toward the end of my career, there were some changes that were being done here in the investment world.
I decided to start a new company with two investment banker folks that I knew.
I've had multiple offices here in the United States.
The first few years, I think in any business, you're trying to get known, you're trying to get things to move forward, you want things to happen.
(02:31):
So for the first few years, it was a little difficult as I built my, really my reputation, if you will, up.
As time went on, and I was doing such a good job with my clients that they not only continued to do business with me, but they referred their friends, they referred family.
So consequently, I had many, many clients.
By the end of my career, I was dealing with millions and millions of dollars, well over a thousand clients.
(02:53):
I would do seminars actually every six to eight weeks, and I had done that for a number of years.
Financially speaking, I was doing phenomenally well, consistently making a half a million dollars a year.
I could have made more if I wouldn't have given business away to my brokers.
I had offices in New York City, an office down in Florida, another office up in Maine, just opening up another office in Boston when everything happened.
(03:17):
I had a very, very enjoyable life.
And even despite all of the things that have happened since, I have to tell you, Rodney, I feel very blessed.
I really do.
I didn't like going through the lows, but it made me into another person.
It showed me another direction that I needed to go to.
I've always had a very strong faith in God.
I know a lot of people when they go through adversity, if they even are believers, they think, well, God did this to me.
(03:40):
Well, God didn't do anything to anybody.
He gives us free will, free choice.
I had a very, very enjoyable life.
I had a beautiful home.
I had beautiful cars, could go on vacations whenever I wanted, anything you could think of.
But I never really felt that money was an idol to me.
That was something that I always felt very blessed to have had what I did.
(04:02):
So I used to share a lot.
One of my brokers came to me shortly before everything happened, which is really kind of why I remember this.
He came to me and he needed $1,000.
He wondered if he could borrow $1,000.
I said, sure.
But I didn't say yes.
I said, is that going to be enough?
Which is kind of crazy, you know, because I don't know too many lenders that would say, well, you're actually asking for this amount, but is that going to be enough?
(04:26):
It was my way I felt to give back to people.
Unfortunately, at that point in my life, you know, things turned around pretty drastically.
As you mentioned, within a day, things did change.
Tell me about that day.
What actually happened on that one day that turned your life around?
I actually came to my office in Buffalo a little bit later in the morning that particular day.
(04:48):
We were used to having a lot of cars in our parking lot.
We owned the building.
We were the only ones in the building.
So it wasn't like there were other businesses there.
When I came in, I noticed all of these cars there.
I noticed the postal truck was there.
I noticed the police car was there.
But we were near a corner and it was not uncommon to have accidents and, you know, they would pull over into our parking lot.
(05:08):
There was nothing really that gave me any indication.
As I pulled into the parking lot, a gentleman came to my door, opened up the door, and he said, who are you?
And I looked at him.
I said, well, you know, I'm Guy Gane.
Oh, Mr. Gane, we've been waiting for you.
And it was somebody from the federal government.
That is really where things started.
They brought me into my office.
(05:29):
They actually put me in my kitchen.
I had a kitchen in my office, our office building.
They had my staff that was in Western New York in our conference room.
They proceeded to take papers, computers, and they just ransacked the office, which is what they do.
I had no idea what was going on.
It wasn't until a few weeks later that I actually found out what was going on the next day after they had left.
(05:51):
And they were there all day, Rodney.
Like I said, I got there a little bit later in the morning.
It was about 10 to 11.
I remember that.
That date was Thursday, May the 15th of 2008.
They had been there, I guess, for about an hour or so.
They didn't leave until after five o'clock, but they cleaned out my office, took all of our paperwork, as I said, and computers and took my cell phone.
The next day when my staff and my brokers came in, I said, we're obviously under investigation.
(06:16):
I said, whatever you do, tell the truth because we've got nothing to hide.
Little did I know that we did have things to hide.
I didn't, but some of my brokers, as it turned out, three of them had been misleading some of our investors.
We had some big changes that had gone on in the investment industry back in 2003.
And it took a couple of years for them to enact some different rules and regulations.
(06:40):
So by 2005, the regulations that were coming down were really going to directly affect what I was doing.
As a stockbroker, I could buy and sell stock, which is what I did for my clients.
I really didn't do that a lot.
I would only do that for a client who was already a client because what I did was actually manage people's money.
And I did that on a day-to-day basis.
(07:01):
When the markets were strong, I tried to make sure that their money was in investments.
And when the markets were weak, I tried to have their money in growth.
Now, I was using mutual funds and variable annuities primarily to do that.
And there was no fees to go back and forth between growth and money market and back and forth.
And my average trades during a year, any particular year, averaged out between 70 and 90 times going, again, back and forth like that when these regulations have changed.
(07:31):
As it turned out, a lot of the big mutual fund companies, the families of funds, were allowing the big money managers, these were guys with billions and billions of dollars, they were allowing them to trade after hours.
Now, here in the U.S., the stock market is open from 9.30 in the morning until 4 o'clock in the afternoon.
So, when I had to make a transaction for my clients, I had to do that and have that in by quarter to four.
(07:54):
Otherwise, it wouldn't end the next day.
Once the government found out, the industry changed.
And now, all of a sudden, we were not able to just arbitrarily transfer money back and forth as I had been doing.
They had limited us to 10 to maybe 15 trades a year depending on the company or the fund that we were dealing with.
Totally destroyed my business.
(08:15):
So, I started thinking about, what am I going to do?
Either going to let employees go, I can't deal with my clients really anymore.
What I did is I was a little bit different than most brokers at the time that were charging commissions.
I actually charged a management fee to my clients.
Even though I could never promise, and none of us in the investment business could ever promise a profit, what I could promise my clients is that I won't charge you a fee unless I made you money.
(08:41):
I couldn't manage the money that way any longer.
I was thinking about what else to do.
And I happened to be up in Maine.
I had a place there that I would stay every summer.
I was walking along the beach.
I had noticed a house that was for sale that I had actually looked at a few years prior.
And I started thinking, well, that house is probably worth more than what they were asking for me.
(09:05):
And as I walked along, I thought, well, you know, most real estate along the shore, it's going to be appreciating.
I thought, well, that's not only true for the ocean.
It's true for a lakeside or a pond or a creek or a canal because people like water.
So, I started thinking, well, there must be some real estate investment trust out there that's dealing with waterfront property.
And maybe that might be an option.
(09:27):
At least I can give my clients.
So, when I went back to the house later that afternoon and I checked to see who was doing that, it turned out nobody was doing that and I was stunned.
Well, it turned out that that's what happened.
So, when I went back to my office in Buffalo a few weeks later, I spoke with some of my staff.
I spoke with investment bankers and everybody loved this idea.
(09:47):
Two investment bankers and I, as I mentioned, decided to start a new company.
But as time went on, one of my partners had said, why don't we let our brokers offer an investment to their clients?
Well, at this point, we did not have this new company started yet.
We had formed it.
What we were doing is raising money for operating expenses for our existing companies.
(10:10):
That way, I was not going to have to lay people off.
My brokers could stay and so on.
You know, Rodney, that little voice that all of us hear told me not to do that.
Don't allow the brokers to do that.
Don't start raising money that way.
But I didn't listen.
I just said, okay, we'll go ahead and do that.
And that was a big mistake because as it turned out, three of my brokers had been misleading and outright lying to the investors and telling them that the money was being invested in waterfront property, telling them that our money was being invested in dormitories.
(10:43):
In the state of Maine, we were working on a project with one of the big universities in Maine to actually build dormitories for them.
But none of that was where that money was going.
The client, the investor, did get documents saying this money was being used for operating expenses of our company, not investments, but people don't remember that.
(11:04):
It was ironic, Rodney, because the day that the government came in, all of this money that we had raised, and by this point, we'd raised about $5 million.
All that time, I was trying to find permanent financing, not only to continue to grow, but to get everybody their money back and so on.
And it was ironic because the day that the government came in, I had appointments with the investor.
(11:26):
I had sold a portion of the company to an investor who was giving us the money that everybody would have been paid back.
But because the government came in when they did, and I had my feelings that they knew something was going on.
I don't know that for certain, but unfortunately, nobody got their money back.
The government, when they came after me, it actually was a few months later.
(11:48):
And in the meantime, I had actually had a heart attack, and I had actually died.
They brought me back with the paddles.
I really thought, well, it can't get any worse.
I mean, you die and come back.
I mean, how much worse can it get?
Well, a few weeks later, after that had happened, I found out.
I argued with the government that I was innocent, that I had not done what they were accusing me of.
(12:09):
They would not free my money up, took all of my assets.
I had to end up going to a public defender who, from almost day one, kept telling me, you got to plead, you got to plead.
I said, I'm not going to plead to something I didn't do.
And in fact, as time went on, I ended up taking two polygraph tests and passed them both.
A few years later, I still got indicted.
(12:30):
About a year and a half after that, I got sentenced to a 13-year prison sentence.
There's a story behind that time when you had the heart attack.
Tell me what went on at that time.
Once I had gone to prison, I had to go to the medical department, and I spoke with a doctor there.
I had all of my medical records sent to the prison.
When I sat down with this doctor, he said, I've seen you had a heart attack.
(12:50):
I said, yeah, I did.
He said, I'm a cardiologist, but I retired.
He said, I do contract work now.
I'm not for the government.
He said, I see they brought you back with the defibrillators.
I said, yeah, they did.
And he said, you know, they work less than 2% of the time.
I said, really?
I didn't know that.
I thought they worked all the time.
He said, no.
He said, most people think that they work all the time, but they don't.
(13:12):
It's less than 2%.
He said, God has a special plan for you.
And I said, yeah.
I said, I got 13 years.
He said, no.
He said, God has a special plan for you.
I'd never forgotten that, obviously, all of these years later.
I came to realize that there were things that I would never have known.
Guys would come into prison, white-collar offenders, bankers, doctors, lawyers.
(13:34):
And what I came to find is guys would come to me and kind of cry on my shoulder.
They had just got in there, and I remembered what that was like.
And I would say to them, well, now you've been blessed, and you don't realize you've been blessed.
And they'd look at me like I had three heads.
And I said, now you know who your friends are, and now you know who really loves you.
Because, you know, Rodney, I had literally hundreds of quote-unquote friends.
(13:57):
When everything happened, those people were nowhere to be found.
Remember before I mentioned all of the money I had loaned out to people?
And, you know, I always felt if you loan money, it's more of a gift, because if you get it back, you know, you're not going to get mad at people because they probably won't pay you back.
At that point, I really needed as much money as I could.
I mean, I was broke.
I had nothing, literally nothing.
(14:19):
I couldn't even get a return email, leave alone a phone call, from some of these folks that I had helped out.
The first couple of years I was in, I was in with child molesters, with rapists, with bank robbers, with murderers.
It was really tough.
But I learned a thing or two about life, being in there.
And I was able to observe people.
And I've always relied on my faith to really kind of pull me through.
(14:44):
But there, it really was very, very important to me, because the first night that I got to prison, I had my argument with God and called Him every filthy name you could think of.
And as I was laying in my steel rack, crying with my shirt over my face, because I didn't want the other guys to see me.
I remember that was about 11.30 at night.
And it was just one of those defining moments that I think my healing started.
(15:08):
But I had to leave my home.
I had to leave my children.
And anybody that goes to prison, it's awful to go through.
But the real victims are your family.
In the U.S., we have 5% of the world's population.
And we have 25% of the prison population of the world here in the U.S. I came to find different types of people that looked at things in different ways.
(15:31):
And I was just in one of those situations where I had a man up.
I used to be a weightlifter.
As I got really busy, I was too busy to really work out anymore.
So I really let myself go for a few years before I got into trouble.
Going to prison, when you walk through those doors, Rodney, you're either the predator or you're the prey.
I decided that I had to get strong again.
(15:53):
I had to start working out again.
And I was not going to be the prey.
I certainly was not going to be a predator.
Now, I'm not saying everybody gets attacked.
And I'm certainly not saying everybody is a predator.
But those two are really the way it is there.
Being an older gentleman, I had seen guys my age get picked on pretty badly.
I told people, I said, if somebody comes at you, in whatever way you think that they can come at you, you have to defend yourself, even if you get beat up.
(16:20):
Because if you don't, you will be picked on and abused for the rest of your time in prison.
You mentioned that when you go to prison, when everything falls away, you get to learn who your friends are.
And I guess it's no surprise that you lost a lot of friends.
But were there any friends that stuck around that surprised you?
(16:41):
Yes.
Actually, it was kind of ironic.
The day I got sentenced, some of the clients that I had actually came to the court and spoke to the court and said, Mr. Gain never lied to me.
I don't want to lose any money.
But Mr. Gain never lied to me.
He never once misled me.
Of course, the court did not want to hear that.
But I was very blessed because a lot of people stood by me.
(17:02):
I'm not going to kid you, I lost certainly many, many more that stayed with me.
But I knew a lot of guys there, Rodney, white-collar guys, they had nobody.
Sometimes their families didn't even talk to them anymore.
The families are really the ones that suffer.
Your name is in the paper.
All of the things, the misdeeds that they accuse you of are in the paper, as it was for me.
(17:23):
They did actually 10 standalone articles on me from the time that the government came in until I left, accusing me of all kinds of things.
So my reputation was destroyed.
And I had a good reputation.
But as I say, I think the families are the real victims when it comes down to it.
You changed your resolve and decided that you would actually use this for good.
(17:45):
What direction did that go when you were released?
That's a good question, actually.
I was actually in prison for nine years.
There was a change in the law.
And because I was over 60 at that point, I was able to get out a little bit early.
I went home on home confinement.
By that point, my wife and I had divorced.
Unfortunately, she had a nervous breakdown about a year and a half after I was in.
(18:09):
When I came home, it was surreal.
Because those nine years that I was gone, Rodney, the iPhones had come out at that point.
Instagram was just coming out at the time I was leaving.
iPads had just come out a year before.
There was so much that had changed.
Technology had been so dramatically advanced by the time I got out of prison that I was lost.
(18:31):
I mean, Zoom, I had no idea what Zoom was.
I remember looking at the television.
It looked like I could put my hand in.
It looked like glass.
I couldn't believe how clear it was.
It was very different.
I had nightmares almost every night when I came home.
While I was in prison, there were a few things that really helped me.
One was that I was the music minister for our churches.
(18:54):
And the other thing was I wrote my books.
There really was kind of something that was a defining moment for me.
For many years before I ever got in trouble, I kept thinking, I'd like to write a book.
I'd like to write a book.
And I just never had the time.
I was so busy.
In prison, I had the time.
So I had a friend of mine there who kept encouraging me, why don't you write your book?
(19:15):
And he kept on me and kept on me.
And so finally one day I picked up a pad of paper and I started writing.
And I wrote the book Chrysalis, Awakening to God's Path, Protection, and Power in Your Life.
And I ended up writing.
About a year later, I wrote another book.
Then when I came home, I wrote another book as recent as last year.
I'm working on another one right now.
(19:36):
It took me two years to write Chrysalis.
But what the book was about, Rodney, is why was it that the things that we want rarely come out, but what we don't want always seems to happen.
You know, we don't want bad things to happen to us, but they do.
And we want the best things to happen, and they rarely do.
Well, I came to realize that the reason that that happens is what we put our focus on.
(19:59):
For me, this book is a book that in Jesus Christ's own words, shows not to doubt.
Jesus taught over and over again not to doubt, to believe, to have faith.
And what I did in this book is give the examples, many examples of what Jesus had taught, as well as, you know, biblical figures.
I really felt it was a higher calling that I frankly did not think I was worthy to do.
(20:24):
I kept questioning that.
How can I sit here and write these things?
But, you know, Rodney, I've said this to many people over the years.
I did not write Chrysalis entirely.
I wrote maybe 20% of the book.
The rest of it was just, and I say this humbly, was inspired.
Because when I would reread the book, I would say, wow, this is a pretty good idea.
I should start doing this.
(20:45):
I remember the things that I wrote.
But even today, when I look through the book again, I think, wow, this is pretty insightful.
My second book was Unchained and Unbroken, Life Lessons and Strength Training from a Jailhouse Gym Rat.
And that one was more about prison and working out how to get strong, supplements, diet, all of these type of things.
(21:05):
As I said last year, I published a book called Manage Money, An Avenue to Wealth.
I took what I would do as a financial advisor and condensed it into very easy reading so people could manage their money on their own the way I did.
It's been quite a journey.
And I'm wondering as you look back, even though, as you say, you did your best to tell your clients the truth, but unfortunately you came unstuck when others that you were associated with weren't doing the same.
(21:37):
When you look back across it, would you want to go through all that you've been through again, or would you want it to turn out differently?
I would want it to turn out differently.
But, you know, there's a saying that the Romans had, a wise man learns by the experiences of another, a fool by his own.
The government was right in coming and investigating our company.
(21:59):
They were 100%, right?
Despite the fact that I didn't know.
I should have known.
I was the president of the firm.
I should have known.
But when you have a company, and I don't care if you've got 30 people like I did in that office, or if you've got thousands of employees, you're the one that's responsible.
And had the government said to me, look, this is your company, you're responsible for what your people have done, I would have had a plea right away.
(22:23):
I ended up pleading, by the way.
I wanted to go to trial, but then I started finding out, if I went to trial, I found this out almost too late, if I went to trial, they could double and triple, which they do routinely, the amount of time they were going to give you in a plea deal.
I wish the government would have said, you're responsible.
But instead, what they did is, they put out to the media that I was the ringleader.
(22:45):
I was the guy that instructed everybody to do everything.
I was the guy that did this and that.
My reputation, as I said, was ruined.
If I had to do it again, with what I know now, it would have never happened.
But, you know, we're looking at what comes first, the chicken or the egg.
Back then, I did what I thought was the best.
It wasn't good enough, and I understand that.
(23:06):
You know, the people that lied and said that, you know, I instructed them, I understand.
I mean, they were looking at jail time.
If you can blame somebody else, that's a human tendency, drowning man syndrome almost, where the person that's drowning will sometimes drown the person that's trying to help them.
Honestly, I hold no animosity to anyone.
The government, these folks that said what they said, it doesn't matter.
(23:30):
You know, we can't blame other people.
We can't blame God.
We can't blame outside forces that, oh, they did me wrong, or they did that.
We have to learn by the mistakes that we make, and I've learned by them.
And what I've tried to do in my coaching is to coach people and give them the ideas that I had that made me very successful to pass that knowledge on to those folks.
(23:55):
The thing is that what I've learned is that you have to keep your eye on the ball.
I don't care how big your company is.
Now, I can't speak for Jeff Bezos, obviously, but he's got over, I think it's somewhere around 500,000 people that work for him.
How is he going to keep his eye on those people?
He has to rely on his management, on his lower management, his mid management, his upper management, to keep an eye on things.
(24:18):
But I'm sure that Bezos and every other businessman has a way that they do that.
They just don't blindly, you know, go out of town as I did, go to meetings, go here, go there, do this and do that, and not pay attention.
And I didn't.
I use the analogy of a captain with a ship.
The sailor is not the one that gets in trouble if the ship runs aground.
(24:38):
It's the captain.
It's rightly so.
I was in charge of this company.
It was my responsibility to know, but I had to learn that lesson.
But that lesson, I try to pass on to other people that they don't have to go through what I went through.
If people are interested in reading your books or being able to hear more of what you're doing, where's the easiest place for people to find you?
(25:00):
There's actually a couple of places.
As I said, my books are available on Amazon, or they can order the books from me.
My email address is Guy at GainWisdom.com.
That's Guy at G-A-N-E Wisdom.com.
My website is very easy.
It's GainWisdom.com.
But people can get a hold of me, as I say, at Guy at Gain Wisdom.
(25:21):
If someone would like to get my book, the first 10 people that email me, I will send the e-book managed money to them for free.
There's no charge for that.
Guy, it's been a delight to speak to you, and I'm sure that many people are going to appreciate the fact that they can learn from your mistakes and short-circuit that world of experience.
(25:42):
But thank you so much for spending some time with me today on Bleeding Daylight.
Thank you so much.
It's been an honour.
Thank you for listening to Bleeding Daylight.
Please help us to shine more light into the darkness by sharing this episode with others.
For further details and more episodes, please visit bleedingdaylight.net.
Wherever there are shadows, there are people ready to kick at the darkness until it bleeds daylight.
This is Bleeding Daylight with your host, Rodney Olsen.
Welcome, thanks for listening.
Join the conversation on this and other episodes by connecting with Bleeding Daylight on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok or other social media platforms.
(00:33):
You'll find all the links at bleedingdaylight.net, as well as dozens of other episodes of Bleeding Daylight with some remarkable people telling their own stories.
From living the high life to a ruined reputation and a long prison sentence, today's guest has seen the highs and lows of life.
(01:03):
Joining me today is Guy W.
Gane Jr., a master coach, sought-after speaker and published author, whose life embodies the heights of success and the depths of adversity.
Once enjoying a luxurious lifestyle, Guy's world changed dramatically in a single day, leading to the loss of his reputation and his freedom.
(01:25):
Emerging from that experience with a transformed mindset, Guy now shares his journey of resilience and faith with others.
I'm so pleased to welcome him to Bleeding Daylight.
Guy, thank you so much for your time.
Thank you for having me.
It's an honor.
It's been said that the higher you climb, the further that you have to fall, and you fell from a pretty great height.
(01:45):
Tell me about those heights.
What was life like before your dramatic change in direction?
Years ago, I remember watching the movie Wall Street, and one of the characters had said it would be better to never have had money than to have money and have it all taken away.
I didn't understand that at the time, but I certainly understand that now.
I had been a stockbroker for my career, and I'd been in the financial field for 34 years, actually.
(02:11):
Toward the end of my career, there were some changes that were being done here in the investment world.
I decided to start a new company with two investment banker folks that I knew.
I've had multiple offices here in the United States.
The first few years, I think in any business, you're trying to get known, you're trying to get things to move forward, you want things to happen.
(02:31):
So for the first few years, it was a little difficult as I built my, really my reputation, if you will, up.
As time went on, and I was doing such a good job with my clients that they not only continued to do business with me, but they referred their friends, they referred family.
So consequently, I had many, many clients.
By the end of my career, I was dealing with millions and millions of dollars, well over a thousand clients.
(02:53):
I would do seminars actually every six to eight weeks, and I had done that for a number of years.
Financially speaking, I was doing phenomenally well, consistently making a half a million dollars a year.
I could have made more if I wouldn't have given business away to my brokers.
I had offices in New York City, an office down in Florida, another office up in Maine, just opening up another office in Boston when everything happened.
(03:17):
I had a very, very enjoyable life.
And even despite all of the things that have happened since, I have to tell you, Rodney, I feel very blessed.
I really do.
I didn't like going through the lows, but it made me into another person.
It showed me another direction that I needed to go to.
I've always had a very strong faith in God.
I know a lot of people when they go through adversity, if they even are believers, they think, well, God did this to me.
(03:40):
Well, God didn't do anything to anybody.
He gives us free will, free choice.
I had a very, very enjoyable life.
I had a beautiful home.
I had beautiful cars, could go on vacations whenever I wanted, anything you could think of.
But I never really felt that money was an idol to me.
That was something that I always felt very blessed to have had what I did.
(04:02):
So I used to share a lot.
One of my brokers came to me shortly before everything happened, which is really kind of why I remember this.
He came to me and he needed $1,000.
He wondered if he could borrow $1,000.
I said, sure.
But I didn't say yes.
I said, is that going to be enough?
Which is kind of crazy, you know, because I don't know too many lenders that would say, well, you're actually asking for this amount, but is that going to be enough?
(04:26):
It was my way I felt to give back to people.
Unfortunately, at that point in my life, you know, things turned around pretty drastically.
As you mentioned, within a day, things did change.
Tell me about that day.
What actually happened on that one day that turned your life around?
I actually came to my office in Buffalo a little bit later in the morning that particular day.
(04:48):
We were used to having a lot of cars in our parking lot.
We owned the building.
We were the only ones in the building.
So it wasn't like there were other businesses there.
When I came in, I noticed all of these cars there.
I noticed the postal truck was there.
I noticed the police car was there.
But we were near a corner and it was not uncommon to have accidents and, you know, they would pull over into our parking lot.
(05:08):
There was nothing really that gave me any indication.
As I pulled into the parking lot, a gentleman came to my door, opened up the door, and he said, who are you?
And I looked at him.
I said, well, you know, I'm Guy Gane.
Oh, Mr. Gane, we've been waiting for you.
And it was somebody from the federal government.
That is really where things started.
They brought me into my office.
(05:29):
They actually put me in my kitchen.
I had a kitchen in my office, our office building.
They had my staff that was in Western New York in our conference room.
They proceeded to take papers, computers, and they just ransacked the office, which is what they do.
I had no idea what was going on.
It wasn't until a few weeks later that I actually found out what was going on the next day after they had left.
(05:51):
And they were there all day, Rodney.
Like I said, I got there a little bit later in the morning.
It was about 10 to 11.
I remember that.
That date was Thursday, May the 15th of 2008.
They had been there, I guess, for about an hour or so.
They didn't leave until after five o'clock, but they cleaned out my office, took all of our paperwork, as I said, and computers and took my cell phone.
The next day when my staff and my brokers came in, I said, we're obviously under investigation.
(06:16):
I said, whatever you do, tell the truth because we've got nothing to hide.
Little did I know that we did have things to hide.
I didn't, but some of my brokers, as it turned out, three of them had been misleading some of our investors.
We had some big changes that had gone on in the investment industry back in 2003.
And it took a couple of years for them to enact some different rules and regulations.
(06:40):
So by 2005, the regulations that were coming down were really going to directly affect what I was doing.
As a stockbroker, I could buy and sell stock, which is what I did for my clients.
I really didn't do that a lot.
I would only do that for a client who was already a client because what I did was actually manage people's money.
And I did that on a day-to-day basis.
(07:01):
When the markets were strong, I tried to make sure that their money was in investments.
And when the markets were weak, I tried to have their money in growth.
Now, I was using mutual funds and variable annuities primarily to do that.
And there was no fees to go back and forth between growth and money market and back and forth.
And my average trades during a year, any particular year, averaged out between 70 and 90 times going, again, back and forth like that when these regulations have changed.
(07:31):
As it turned out, a lot of the big mutual fund companies, the families of funds, were allowing the big money managers, these were guys with billions and billions of dollars, they were allowing them to trade after hours.
Now, here in the U.S., the stock market is open from 9.30 in the morning until 4 o'clock in the afternoon.
So, when I had to make a transaction for my clients, I had to do that and have that in by quarter to four.
(07:54):
Otherwise, it wouldn't end the next day.
Once the government found out, the industry changed.
And now, all of a sudden, we were not able to just arbitrarily transfer money back and forth as I had been doing.
They had limited us to 10 to maybe 15 trades a year depending on the company or the fund that we were dealing with.
Totally destroyed my business.
(08:15):
So, I started thinking about, what am I going to do?
Either going to let employees go, I can't deal with my clients really anymore.
What I did is I was a little bit different than most brokers at the time that were charging commissions.
I actually charged a management fee to my clients.
Even though I could never promise, and none of us in the investment business could ever promise a profit, what I could promise my clients is that I won't charge you a fee unless I made you money.
(08:41):
I couldn't manage the money that way any longer.
I was thinking about what else to do.
And I happened to be up in Maine.
I had a place there that I would stay every summer.
I was walking along the beach.
I had noticed a house that was for sale that I had actually looked at a few years prior.
And I started thinking, well, that house is probably worth more than what they were asking for me.
(09:05):
And as I walked along, I thought, well, you know, most real estate along the shore, it's going to be appreciating.
I thought, well, that's not only true for the ocean.
It's true for a lakeside or a pond or a creek or a canal because people like water.
So, I started thinking, well, there must be some real estate investment trust out there that's dealing with waterfront property.
And maybe that might be an option.
(09:27):
At least I can give my clients.
So, when I went back to the house later that afternoon and I checked to see who was doing that, it turned out nobody was doing that and I was stunned.
Well, it turned out that that's what happened.
So, when I went back to my office in Buffalo a few weeks later, I spoke with some of my staff.
I spoke with investment bankers and everybody loved this idea.
(09:47):
Two investment bankers and I, as I mentioned, decided to start a new company.
But as time went on, one of my partners had said, why don't we let our brokers offer an investment to their clients?
Well, at this point, we did not have this new company started yet.
We had formed it.
What we were doing is raising money for operating expenses for our existing companies.
(10:10):
That way, I was not going to have to lay people off.
My brokers could stay and so on.
You know, Rodney, that little voice that all of us hear told me not to do that.
Don't allow the brokers to do that.
Don't start raising money that way.
But I didn't listen.
I just said, okay, we'll go ahead and do that.
And that was a big mistake because as it turned out, three of my brokers had been misleading and outright lying to the investors and telling them that the money was being invested in waterfront property, telling them that our money was being invested in dormitories.
(10:43):
In the state of Maine, we were working on a project with one of the big universities in Maine to actually build dormitories for them.
But none of that was where that money was going.
The client, the investor, did get documents saying this money was being used for operating expenses of our company, not investments, but people don't remember that.
(11:04):
It was ironic, Rodney, because the day that the government came in, all of this money that we had raised, and by this point, we'd raised about $5 million.
All that time, I was trying to find permanent financing, not only to continue to grow, but to get everybody their money back and so on.
And it was ironic because the day that the government came in, I had appointments with the investor.
(11:26):
I had sold a portion of the company to an investor who was giving us the money that everybody would have been paid back.
But because the government came in when they did, and I had my feelings that they knew something was going on.
I don't know that for certain, but unfortunately, nobody got their money back.
The government, when they came after me, it actually was a few months later.
(11:48):
And in the meantime, I had actually had a heart attack, and I had actually died.
They brought me back with the paddles.
I really thought, well, it can't get any worse.
I mean, you die and come back.
I mean, how much worse can it get?
Well, a few weeks later, after that had happened, I found out.
I argued with the government that I was innocent, that I had not done what they were accusing me of.
(12:09):
They would not free my money up, took all of my assets.
I had to end up going to a public defender who, from almost day one, kept telling me, you got to plead, you got to plead.
I said, I'm not going to plead to something I didn't do.
And in fact, as time went on, I ended up taking two polygraph tests and passed them both.
A few years later, I still got indicted.
(12:30):
About a year and a half after that, I got sentenced to a 13-year prison sentence.
There's a story behind that time when you had the heart attack.
Tell me what went on at that time.
Once I had gone to prison, I had to go to the medical department, and I spoke with a doctor there.
I had all of my medical records sent to the prison.
When I sat down with this doctor, he said, I've seen you had a heart attack.
(12:50):
I said, yeah, I did.
He said, I'm a cardiologist, but I retired.
He said, I do contract work now.
I'm not for the government.
He said, I see they brought you back with the defibrillators.
I said, yeah, they did.
And he said, you know, they work less than 2% of the time.
I said, really?
I didn't know that.
I thought they worked all the time.
He said, no.
He said, most people think that they work all the time, but they don't.
(13:12):
It's less than 2%.
He said, God has a special plan for you.
And I said, yeah.
I said, I got 13 years.
He said, no.
He said, God has a special plan for you.
I'd never forgotten that, obviously, all of these years later.
I came to realize that there were things that I would never have known.
Guys would come into prison, white-collar offenders, bankers, doctors, lawyers.
(13:34):
And what I came to find is guys would come to me and kind of cry on my shoulder.
They had just got in there, and I remembered what that was like.
And I would say to them, well, now you've been blessed, and you don't realize you've been blessed.
And they'd look at me like I had three heads.
And I said, now you know who your friends are, and now you know who really loves you.
Because, you know, Rodney, I had literally hundreds of quote-unquote friends.
(13:57):
When everything happened, those people were nowhere to be found.
Remember before I mentioned all of the money I had loaned out to people?
And, you know, I always felt if you loan money, it's more of a gift, because if you get it back, you know, you're not going to get mad at people because they probably won't pay you back.
At that point, I really needed as much money as I could.
I mean, I was broke.
I had nothing, literally nothing.
(14:19):
I couldn't even get a return email, leave alone a phone call, from some of these folks that I had helped out.
The first couple of years I was in, I was in with child molesters, with rapists, with bank robbers, with murderers.
It was really tough.
But I learned a thing or two about life, being in there.
And I was able to observe people.
And I've always relied on my faith to really kind of pull me through.
(14:44):
But there, it really was very, very important to me, because the first night that I got to prison, I had my argument with God and called Him every filthy name you could think of.
And as I was laying in my steel rack, crying with my shirt over my face, because I didn't want the other guys to see me.
I remember that was about 11.30 at night.
And it was just one of those defining moments that I think my healing started.
(15:08):
But I had to leave my home.
I had to leave my children.
And anybody that goes to prison, it's awful to go through.
But the real victims are your family.
In the U.S., we have 5% of the world's population.
And we have 25% of the prison population of the world here in the U.S. I came to find different types of people that looked at things in different ways.
(15:31):
And I was just in one of those situations where I had a man up.
I used to be a weightlifter.
As I got really busy, I was too busy to really work out anymore.
So I really let myself go for a few years before I got into trouble.
Going to prison, when you walk through those doors, Rodney, you're either the predator or you're the prey.
I decided that I had to get strong again.
(15:53):
I had to start working out again.
And I was not going to be the prey.
I certainly was not going to be a predator.
Now, I'm not saying everybody gets attacked.
And I'm certainly not saying everybody is a predator.
But those two are really the way it is there.
Being an older gentleman, I had seen guys my age get picked on pretty badly.
I told people, I said, if somebody comes at you, in whatever way you think that they can come at you, you have to defend yourself, even if you get beat up.
(16:20):
Because if you don't, you will be picked on and abused for the rest of your time in prison.
You mentioned that when you go to prison, when everything falls away, you get to learn who your friends are.
And I guess it's no surprise that you lost a lot of friends.
But were there any friends that stuck around that surprised you?
(16:41):
Yes.
Actually, it was kind of ironic.
The day I got sentenced, some of the clients that I had actually came to the court and spoke to the court and said, Mr. Gain never lied to me.
I don't want to lose any money.
But Mr. Gain never lied to me.
He never once misled me.
Of course, the court did not want to hear that.
But I was very blessed because a lot of people stood by me.
(17:02):
I'm not going to kid you, I lost certainly many, many more that stayed with me.
But I knew a lot of guys there, Rodney, white-collar guys, they had nobody.
Sometimes their families didn't even talk to them anymore.
The families are really the ones that suffer.
Your name is in the paper.
All of the things, the misdeeds that they accuse you of are in the paper, as it was for me.
(17:23):
They did actually 10 standalone articles on me from the time that the government came in until I left, accusing me of all kinds of things.
So my reputation was destroyed.
And I had a good reputation.
But as I say, I think the families are the real victims when it comes down to it.
You changed your resolve and decided that you would actually use this for good.
(17:45):
What direction did that go when you were released?
That's a good question, actually.
I was actually in prison for nine years.
There was a change in the law.
And because I was over 60 at that point, I was able to get out a little bit early.
I went home on home confinement.
By that point, my wife and I had divorced.
Unfortunately, she had a nervous breakdown about a year and a half after I was in.
(18:09):
When I came home, it was surreal.
Because those nine years that I was gone, Rodney, the iPhones had come out at that point.
Instagram was just coming out at the time I was leaving.
iPads had just come out a year before.
There was so much that had changed.
Technology had been so dramatically advanced by the time I got out of prison that I was lost.
(18:31):
I mean, Zoom, I had no idea what Zoom was.
I remember looking at the television.
It looked like I could put my hand in.
It looked like glass.
I couldn't believe how clear it was.
It was very different.
I had nightmares almost every night when I came home.
While I was in prison, there were a few things that really helped me.
One was that I was the music minister for our churches.
(18:54):
And the other thing was I wrote my books.
There really was kind of something that was a defining moment for me.
For many years before I ever got in trouble, I kept thinking, I'd like to write a book.
I'd like to write a book.
And I just never had the time.
I was so busy.
In prison, I had the time.
So I had a friend of mine there who kept encouraging me, why don't you write your book?
(19:15):
And he kept on me and kept on me.
And so finally one day I picked up a pad of paper and I started writing.
And I wrote the book Chrysalis, Awakening to God's Path, Protection, and Power in Your Life.
And I ended up writing.
About a year later, I wrote another book.
Then when I came home, I wrote another book as recent as last year.
I'm working on another one right now.
(19:36):
It took me two years to write Chrysalis.
But what the book was about, Rodney, is why was it that the things that we want rarely come out, but what we don't want always seems to happen.
You know, we don't want bad things to happen to us, but they do.
And we want the best things to happen, and they rarely do.
Well, I came to realize that the reason that that happens is what we put our focus on.
(19:59):
For me, this book is a book that in Jesus Christ's own words, shows not to doubt.
Jesus taught over and over again not to doubt, to believe, to have faith.
And what I did in this book is give the examples, many examples of what Jesus had taught, as well as, you know, biblical figures.
I really felt it was a higher calling that I frankly did not think I was worthy to do.
(20:24):
I kept questioning that.
How can I sit here and write these things?
But, you know, Rodney, I've said this to many people over the years.
I did not write Chrysalis entirely.
I wrote maybe 20% of the book.
The rest of it was just, and I say this humbly, was inspired.
Because when I would reread the book, I would say, wow, this is a pretty good idea.
I should start doing this.
(20:45):
I remember the things that I wrote.
But even today, when I look through the book again, I think, wow, this is pretty insightful.
My second book was Unchained and Unbroken, Life Lessons and Strength Training from a Jailhouse Gym Rat.
And that one was more about prison and working out how to get strong, supplements, diet, all of these type of things.
(21:05):
As I said last year, I published a book called Manage Money, An Avenue to Wealth.
I took what I would do as a financial advisor and condensed it into very easy reading so people could manage their money on their own the way I did.
It's been quite a journey.
And I'm wondering as you look back, even though, as you say, you did your best to tell your clients the truth, but unfortunately you came unstuck when others that you were associated with weren't doing the same.
(21:37):
When you look back across it, would you want to go through all that you've been through again, or would you want it to turn out differently?
I would want it to turn out differently.
But, you know, there's a saying that the Romans had, a wise man learns by the experiences of another, a fool by his own.
The government was right in coming and investigating our company.
(21:59):
They were 100%, right?
Despite the fact that I didn't know.
I should have known.
I was the president of the firm.
I should have known.
But when you have a company, and I don't care if you've got 30 people like I did in that office, or if you've got thousands of employees, you're the one that's responsible.
And had the government said to me, look, this is your company, you're responsible for what your people have done, I would have had a plea right away.
(22:23):
I ended up pleading, by the way.
I wanted to go to trial, but then I started finding out, if I went to trial, I found this out almost too late, if I went to trial, they could double and triple, which they do routinely, the amount of time they were going to give you in a plea deal.
I wish the government would have said, you're responsible.
But instead, what they did is, they put out to the media that I was the ringleader.
(22:45):
I was the guy that instructed everybody to do everything.
I was the guy that did this and that.
My reputation, as I said, was ruined.
If I had to do it again, with what I know now, it would have never happened.
But, you know, we're looking at what comes first, the chicken or the egg.
Back then, I did what I thought was the best.
It wasn't good enough, and I understand that.
(23:06):
You know, the people that lied and said that, you know, I instructed them, I understand.
I mean, they were looking at jail time.
If you can blame somebody else, that's a human tendency, drowning man syndrome almost, where the person that's drowning will sometimes drown the person that's trying to help them.
Honestly, I hold no animosity to anyone.
The government, these folks that said what they said, it doesn't matter.
(23:30):
You know, we can't blame other people.
We can't blame God.
We can't blame outside forces that, oh, they did me wrong, or they did that.
We have to learn by the mistakes that we make, and I've learned by them.
And what I've tried to do in my coaching is to coach people and give them the ideas that I had that made me very successful to pass that knowledge on to those folks.
(23:55):
The thing is that what I've learned is that you have to keep your eye on the ball.
I don't care how big your company is.
Now, I can't speak for Jeff Bezos, obviously, but he's got over, I think it's somewhere around 500,000 people that work for him.
How is he going to keep his eye on those people?
He has to rely on his management, on his lower management, his mid management, his upper management, to keep an eye on things.
(24:18):
But I'm sure that Bezos and every other businessman has a way that they do that.
They just don't blindly, you know, go out of town as I did, go to meetings, go here, go there, do this and do that, and not pay attention.
And I didn't.
I use the analogy of a captain with a ship.
The sailor is not the one that gets in trouble if the ship runs aground.
(24:38):
It's the captain.
It's rightly so.
I was in charge of this company.
It was my responsibility to know, but I had to learn that lesson.
But that lesson, I try to pass on to other people that they don't have to go through what I went through.
If people are interested in reading your books or being able to hear more of what you're doing, where's the easiest place for people to find you?
(25:00):
There's actually a couple of places.
As I said, my books are available on Amazon, or they can order the books from me.
My email address is Guy at GainWisdom.com.
That's Guy at G-A-N-E Wisdom.com.
My website is very easy.
It's GainWisdom.com.
But people can get a hold of me, as I say, at Guy at Gain Wisdom.
(25:21):
If someone would like to get my book, the first 10 people that email me, I will send the e-book managed money to them for free.
There's no charge for that.
Guy, it's been a delight to speak to you, and I'm sure that many people are going to appreciate the fact that they can learn from your mistakes and short-circuit that world of experience.
(25:42):
But thank you so much for spending some time with me today on Bleeding Daylight.
Thank you so much.
It's been an honour.
Thank you for listening to Bleeding Daylight.
Please help us to shine more light into the darkness by sharing this episode with others.
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