Cook began as a real estate wizard, teaching people how to find "distressed sellers" from whom they could buy properties with little or no money down, spend a little time fixing them up, and then turn around and sell them almost immediately. He wrote a book, How to Build a Real Estate Money Machine, and started giving seminars and publishing a newsletter. He also started a company called American Business Alliance--which had no business other than to provide the "exposure to the components and techniques that every person needs to excel"--and sold shares in it to those who came to his seminars. Then it all ended. The ABA office was closed, and the newsletters were stopped, and the erstwhile shareholders found themselves holding piles of worthless paper. As it happens, their money had gone to a good cause: Cook took much of it to make house and income-tax payments.

He didn't, though, pay many of his bills. Judgments were handed down against him for failure to pay in at least three different states. In Arizona alone he owed close to $175,000 to various companies from whom ABA had leased equipment and space. This was in addition to the $390,000 he got from ABA shareholders. In 1987 he filed for bankruptcy, and in 1989 the Arizona Corporation Commission ordered him to pay back the investors and tacked on a $150,000 fine. The fine remains unpaid, though Cook got criminal-fraud charges dismissed when he recently paid $70,500 in restitution. No matter. The real estate market had just about played itself out, anyway.