This is a chapter I wrote for an upcoming book about Physchic to the Stars, David Guardino. It's for a religious book so I had to keep it clean. My book about my experiences while working for him will be a wee bit more raucous.

A View from the Inside
By Walter Hicks, former employee – Part 1

So whatever you wish that men would do to you, do so to them; for this is the law and the prophets. (Matt. 7:12)


I like to think that 80 percent of all the people in the world are decent and good; that they just want to fall in love, raise a family, live long enough to see their grandchildren, and have enough money to get by on. But the other 20 percent of the world’s population cannot be content with that sort of thing. They want more, and they are willing to do things that the decent 80 percent of people wouldn’t even dream of doing. They are the greedy ones. They are the manipulators, and they are the predators. Rather than following the wise social teaching of Jesus: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” (Golden Rule), the rapacious 20 percent see the world as a tumultuous, fierce, murderous place, and they follow their own motto of “Do unto them before they do it to you.”
In my imagination I see a river that borders the 80 percent of decent and good people from the 20 percent of bad people. The river is a place that cannot be accidentally stumbled into, and it does not have a strong current that automatically takes one to the other side. At some stage in David’s life, for reasons known only to himself and God, he decided to swim over to the bad side of the river. But when he waded ashore, I picture him looking back across the river, and wondering if he had made a mistake; and in my opinion, he pitched a tent and decided to not go any further.
I see the 80 percent of decent people in this world as only 80 percent good and 20 percent bad. Likewise, I see the 20 percent of bad people as only 80 percent bad and 20 percent good. None of us is all good, and none of us is all bad.
When Jesus came across a group of men about to stone a woman to death for adultery, he said: “Let those of you without sin cast the first stone.” One by one, all of the men dropped their stones. I sincerely believe in that lesson, and as such, I have no stones in my hand to throw at David Marius Guardino.
As far as I know, David didn’t kill anyone. He wasn't capable of it. He lacked the total ruthlessness that the other side of the river demanded, and as such every penny he made was taken away from him by far more calculating and far more ruthless people.
When David crossed over the river, he left a land where his intelligence, pugnacity, courage, and mastery of life could have served him, and other people, very well. He was capable of anything. On the decent side of the river he could have been on top of the heap; he could have gone into posterity as a great man. But for some strange reason, he decided to swim to the other side of the river, and on that side of the river he was at the bottom of the heap. He was no match for those on the other side. On the other side of the river, David Guardino was out of his league.
His advertisements said: “David Guardino. Psychic to the Stars. Influence others to do your bidding.” He claimed to have power over minds. Yet, during the years 1998 and ‘99 he made $350,000, but he failed to declare any income. As he awaited his trial, he was also charged with the crime of bursting into a motel room to confront his estranged ninth wife and her lover.
I have often wondered why so many truly intelligent people fell for such an absurd claim. Maybe it came from a desire to control others in order to gain more control over their own lives. However, by achieving control, others would lose their freedom. The fact that another person’s freedom had to be sacrificed so they could gain more freedom didn’t seem to bother David’s clients. Nor did it seem to bother David as he carefully convinced his clients that he was doing their bidding while all the time he was really convincing them to do his bidding.
Naturally, I had my doubts that David was for real. So shortly after starting to work for David I asked him, in a friendly way, if he really believed he was psychic. He replied that he had an innate, strangely mystical, but very benevolent power. He had noticed that whenever he came into a person’s life that the person’s life would change for the better. For instance: people would get better jobs, people would regain lost lovers, and some would suddenly come into money.
In his mind he had no need to cast spells, or to consult a crystal ball, because, just coming into contact with him was enough for a person’s life to change for the better.
I think he actually overcame his own doubts, and he crossed over the river of delusion by believing what he wanted to believe. The temptation of easy money was so great that he actually came to believe that he had psychic powers. He decided to charge what the market would bear for the use of his power. Those with money to burn paid his up-front fee of $10,000. If the prospective client didn’t have that much money he would slowly reduce the fee to what the client could afford to pay.
He was a great admirer of President Ronald Reagan. He even wrote a letter to the White House, and after writing it he gave it to me to sign. The letter was supposed to be from me, and I was saying that my boss – a great guy, the Psychic to the Stars, and even to Elvis Presley, no less – had predicted that Ronald Reagan would be remembered as the greatest president that the United States ever had.
David was hoping that Nancy, a believer in astrology, would hear about the letter, become interested, and invite him to Washington, D.C. to have his photo taken with the President. I smiled at his scheming ways. A photo of David standing next to a beaming President Reagan could very quickly be transformed into $1 million. As I signed the letter I secretly hoped that, as the supposed writer of the letter, I would also be invited to the White House. However, the White House did not reply.
David was a staunch capitalist. He believed the assertion in the Capitalist Manifesto that “The principal of individual rights is capitalism’s essence.” But like a lot of his wealthy clients, he forgot that “Capitalism is a mutually rewarding social compact in which individual rights are subsumed under the founding principles of that compact.”
In other words, one has to play fair, and one must include the interests of other individuals as well as one’s own. It is a social compact in which everyone agrees to procedures for conduct that are established “behind a veil of ignorance.” Adam Smith, the father of capitalism, formed the economic concept of Laissez Faire, from the French, meaning to leave alone or allow to do. Smith based his capitalist theory of economics on self-interest and a free market. It works rather well if one’s own self interest is tempered by respect for the interest of others. Societies seem to work better that way, too. But David and his clients wanted to interfere with someone’s basic freedom of choice.
Life is nothing if it is not competitive, and there’s nothing wrong with wanting to get an edge on the competition. There’s no better way to get an edge than seeing into the future. W. D. Gann, a well-known stock and commodities trader, used astrology to make very accurate forecasts. Billionaire J. P. Morgan also consulted with an astrologer before making important investment moves. Throughout history, people from all levels of society have sought out ways to control the haphazard ways of life. The gypsies knew all about this desire, and if one crossed an old gypsy woman’s palm with silver, she would tell what the future held in store. The gypsies knew a good thing when they saw it, and it made no difference how the actual future turned out because by that time the gypsies would be long-gone. David, however, had t o stay around, which meant he had to be very quick on his feet when things didn’t turn out exactly the way he’d predicted they would.
Why he chose to go into the psychic business is a mystery to me. It’s even more of a mystery why so many intelligent and talented people believe in psychics. Many of David’s clients came from the upper levels of society. Judges, lawyers, and even doctors paid him his flat fee of $10,000. Nevada Governor Richard Bryan even showed up at David’s house in Las Vegas while I was there.
Maybe one of the reasons why very intelligent people paid David $10,000 was that he was smarter than any of them. The man was super-smart. If I had money to burn, I would have hired him simply for his advice. As to whether or not he was actually psychic, I would have to say not.
His advertisements said: “Influence others to do your bidding.”
He obviously knew how to do it. Give it a try. Try and make any intelligent person give you $10,000 on a promise that you will use psychic ability to influence others to do their bidding. You will fail. Yet David succeeded, time and time again.
The belief in the supernatural is not uncommon in very intelligent people. The inventor of Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle, believed in fairies. When it comes to a belief in the supernatural, people in high positions are no different from the cleaning woman who crosses the hand of a gypsy with silver.
David tapped into the desire for power, and for a while he had the power to do it. He was a man who craved power and money, and he fed off people who craved power over other people. Be it a lost lover, or a tricky legal affair, people hired David seeking the power to make at least one person do their bidding.
I eventually had trouble with the ethics of such a matter and told him I was quitting. He pulled a gun on me. He couldn’t control me with his so-called psychic abilities, so he tried to do it with a gun.
But I knew he wouldn’t pull the trigger. He was too scared of what his father and mother would think of him. David was still a Guardino, after all, and his mother and father embraced me as a member of the family, even after my divorce from their daughter. So, I turned my back on David’s bad side, and I walked – albeit rather stiffly – out of his life.
David made millions of dollars on the bad side of the river, but he died a lonely pauper’s death, far from home, in a Texas prison. Just before his death he returned to the Catholic faith. A priest heard his final confession, and all his sins were washed clean by the blood of Christ.
His mother never lost faith in her firstborn. It was her faith that carried him back across the river that, in my opinion, part of him always regretted crossing in the first place. His mother, Harriet Guardino, who was a saint in David’s eyes, lost every battle for her son’s soul. But in the end, she won the war!
The gofer
An immigrant from Great Britain only four short years earlier, I was in a strange land, out of work, newly divorced, lonely and broke when David’s father, Monte, got me the job with David. I had decided to sell my old pickup truck and go back to England, but I couldn’t leave without saying goodbye to my ex-mother- and-father-in-law. They didn’t want me to leave my son, and neither did I, but I could see no other option. So Monte called David. He told me to sell my pickup and fly down to Las Vegas and start to work for him. It meant I could stay in America and still be close enough to my son for visits, so I sold my pickup, bought a ticket, and boarded a plane to Las Vegas.
David was married to his fifth wife at that time. His smiling, 21-year-old bride opened the door and let me in. David was sitting on the couch with a phone to his ear.
She showed me my bedroom.
I unpacked my bag and returned to the living room. David was still on the phone so I sat down in an arm chair and watched CNN Headline News on television. I was about to find that Headline News was on night and day. I woke up listening to Headline News and I went to sleep listening to Headline News.
David finally hung up the phone.
He was all business. He said he would pay my child support of $200 a month to his sister Barbara. He would feed me, give me a place to stay, and give me some spending money. In return I would be their personal chef and gofer.
“What's a gofer?” I asked.
Wife # 5 laughed as she explained that a gofer is someone who goes for this and goes for that.
David was almost constantly on the phone and slept only two or three hours a night. Number 5 kept me entertained with her constant chatter. She had a broad Tennessee accent, and not many words escaped her lips without being interrupted by her laughter. She did all of the shopping. Every morning a black woman would come to clean up and cook a huge breakfast. They dined out almost every evening. So much for my cooking and shopping job!
Every afternoon at one o’clock David’s lawyer would drop by. David would give him a $100 bill. Most often Charlie would sit on a chair for an hour while David talked on the phone. Then when his hour was up David would smile and wave at him as he left. I got to like Charlie Garner, he was a nice old man. His claim to fame was that he had represented the late Howard Hughes, the world’s richest man. David got a kick out the fact that, even though in his sixties, Charlie had wooed and wed a beautiful cigarette girl from one of the casinos. But most of all, David liked Charlie because he was one the very few people he could trust.
David took good care of his car. Part of my job was to take the car to be washed every day. The car would come out of the wash and a group of Mexicans would dry it with soft cloths. I was instructed to always give a $5 tip.
Every evening I would drive David to the Western Union office to pick up money sent by his clients. David lamented that Western Union offices are always in the seediest part of a town. He would pick up a wad of 100 dollar bills, and we would then drive back to the nicer side of town.
A few weeks after I arrived, David announced he was sending me to Tennessee. He said his wife’s nurse was running the direct mail operation in his home in Maryville. Number 5, who was severely diabetic, wanted her in Las Vegas. When they moved to Las Vegas, they left the nurse in charge of the direct mail part of the business. The nurse would now join them in Las Vegas, and I was to fly to Tennessee to take over the direct mail operation.
The flight went well. As I walked into the arrivals lounge, I noticed a small chunky woman holding a cardboard sign with my name on it. I smiled as I approached her. But the smile did no good; she was not happy to see me.
She escorted me to an immaculate Lincoln Town Car and drove for about 15 miles before turning into the long driveway of a spectacularly large house. In the darkening sky a half-moon seemed to float above its main chimney. Stars twinkled and appeared to be giggling with delight from the heavens above.
This is David’s house?” I asked.
“Uh-huh.”
“It’s a mansion!”
The grumpy nurse showed me to the huge basement that was filled with computers and other office equipment. A mattress, a pillow and a few blankets had been thrown on the floor.
“You sleep here,” she directed.
I didn’t like the look of it, so I phoned David to ask if he expected me to sleep on the basement floor. He told me to put the nurse on the phone. She said “uh-huh” a few times, and then put the phone down.
“You get the master bedroom,” she said.
She then took me up the stairs to the second level and knocked on a bedroom door. A very tall woman, at least six foot ten, opened it.
“David said this is Walter’s room. You have to move to the basement,” the nurse ordered.
The tall woman scowled down at me. Then she yelled in a very strong and harsh sounding Tennessee accent, “Clyde pack our stuff. We’re moving to the basement.”
I waited in the opulently furnished main living room while the very tall woman and her man, Clyde, who was a very small man of around five foot three, moved their stuff to the basement. I nodded politely at Clyde. He gave me a gap-toothed smile before nodding back at me. It was the closest thing to a welcome that I got.
“You’d find clean linen and towels in the closet,” the nurse droned out the words.
The master bedroom was huge. The sight of such luxury, and the bubbles in the Jacuzzi, gave me a good feeling about Tennessee.
I put my suitcase down and went down to see if there was any beer in the fridge. I was in luck. I sat at the informal dining area table and took a big gulp straight from the bottle. I looked around at the fine furniture, the plush carpets, and I got a sense of what it was like to be rich. I finished the beer and went back upstairs to find that my suitcase was open and its contents had been rifled through.
The next morning I found that the residents of the house consisted of assorted hillbillies of all shapes and sizes. David had promised them their room, board, and a paycheck in exchange for working on the direct mail operation. But I soon found out that David had lied about paying them, and they had lied about working. David never paid them a dime, and they didn’t do much in the way of work.
The basement was filled with computers which they had a hard time figuring out how to even turn on, never mind operate. As it turned out, the computers were only for show anyway. All that were needed for the process were one form letter, a copying machine, and lots of time to stuff envelopes. When enough envelopes were stuffed with the form letter, name and address labels that came from a list of people known to have shown an interest in psychics, were applied. Then the envelopes were stamped and placed into sacks and transported to Knoxville, where they were directly handed over to the post office.
Amongst other things the form letter said that David was the greatest psychic in the world and he was ready and waiting to influence others to do their bidding. He hoped that the letter would arrive at the time of a divorce, or an arrest, or any other form of emergency that could use a bit of psychic manipulation. The fact that a letter from David coincided with the time of an emergency was good enough evidence to convince some of the recipients that David was for real. They would then call one of David’s phone numbers. We would answer the calls at the mansion in Tennessee, and tell the prospective client that David was presently meditating. We would tell them that David was a very busy man, but we assured them that he would find time for their prob lem and he would phone them back. We would then relay the client’s name and phone number to David in Las Vegas, and he would take it from there. The 60 phones soon began ringing off the hook. Phones were placed all around the house, and it was everyone’s job to answer them.
I later found out that David began to make $10,000 a day. But the hillbillies still never got paid, and neither did the rent.
I listened to the hillbillies’ legitimate complaints about not being paid. I then asked them how they managed to fill the air with smell of marijuana if they had no income. I reminded them that they were being fed and they weren’t paying any rent. I told them they were free to leave anytime they wanted, and I wouldn’t blame them for doing so. However, I said if they decided to stay, I would want 1,000 envelopes per day, Monday through Friday, and they could have the weekends off. The clincher came when I told them I would throw in three cases of beer per day, including the weekends.
At last, the nurse drove back to Las Vegas to take care of # 5, and I was left to handle the direct mail operation. Every weekday morning I would make 1,000 copies of the form letter, and then I would sit at a big desk in the basement, facing smaller desks where the hillbillies would sit stuffing envelopes for all they were worth. They usually finished the work by early afternoon. I would then take the sacks of mail to Knoxville where I would hand them to the clerk at the post office. I would pick up the mail, usually letters with long and detailed explanations on how David could help, along with a few 20 dollar bills and items of jewelry. David requested the jewelry so he could pick up t he vibrations of the person he was trying to manipulate. I was told to send the valuable looking items to one of David’s associates in Las Vegas. The junk was tossed aside or picked up by the hillbillies. David never even saw the letters, never mind read them. On the way back I would stop at a supermarket to buy food and beer. Upon arriving at the mansion I would cook a meal. The meal was eaten by all, and then we would proceed to drink the beer.
Part of my job was to keep the landlord away, and nobody was allowed to answer the doorbell. Among others, I often received a phone call from a printer who claimed David owed him for the huge amount of paper that was sitting in the basement. I told David about his claim, but he told me to ignore the guy.
One day a woman phoned, gave me her name, and told me she was on her over to shoot out the windows. “Stay away from the windows or you'll get a bullet!” she warned.
My Belfast Irish genes were outraged, and on a hunch I went to David’s office and found a gun in the drawer of a big solid oak desk. I found bullets in another draw and I asked Teddy, the biggest and roughest looking hillbilly, if the gun would fire the bullets.
“Thar's one way to find out,” he drawled.
He loaded the bullets into the gun, and then we went to the back yard where he fired the gun into the ground.
“Yup, works jest fine,” he said.
I told Teddy about the phone call from the woman. I then told him that I hadn't fired a gun in my life, and I asked him if he would be willing to return fire.
“Sheet, I live in this here place. Darn right I shoot back!”
So while the rest of the household took cover, Teddy, with gun in hand, plus one of his friends that was “Good People”, and I, hunkered down next to a window waiting for the crazy woman to arrive. After about five minutes of hunkering down I thought it might be a good idea to tell David about the situation. So I phoned David and told him about the woman coming over to shoot out the windows. I added: “We are armed, and we are going to return fire.”
David said he'd call me right back.
Ten minutes later I got a call from David. He was laughing so much he was almost in hysterics. But he managed to say that # 5 wanted to talk to me.
Number 5 got on the phone and screamed: “Don’t shoot my mother!”
The crazy woman turned out to be David’s mother-in-law. And she never did show up to shoot out the windows. But I managed to convince # 5 that we would not shoot her mother if she did.
While in Tennessee I heard many stories about David, but the one that stands out in my mind is the one where an outraged client came to the mansion to kill him. The man arrived with a gun in hand and wanted to know where David was. David was informed, and he met the man with a gun in his hand. The situation was clear, or so the story goes. David was a big man, and it would take a very lucky bullet to kill him outright. He would get a few shots off before he died. As such, the man decided that discretion was the better part of valor, and he left.
For most of us, money is not easy to come by. But for David it was coming easy, and at that time he was making more money in a day than I could make in a year. But he still didn't pay the rent. Two months went by and then the police began knocking on the front door to serve papers. But David told us not to open the door. However, one morning a bleary eyed Teddy opened the door. A policeman handed him the papers. Teddy, upon realizing what he had done, threw the papers on the doorstep and closed the door in the police officer’s face.
Part of my job was to make appointments with lawyers. David would send me the lawyer’s fee in cash. I would keep the appointment with the lawyer, and give him the cash and David’s phone number. The lawyer would call David collect, and once they had made contact I would leave. The lawyers got paid three or four times a week. I also received a phone call from a lawyer wanting to know where David was. I told them he was in Las Vegas. He was very angry when he called again: “I'm not going to waste my time trying to fight his lawyer Charlie Garner in Las Vegas, but tell David I'll be waiting for him if he ever sets foot in Tennessee again.”
Another month went by and I got a call from David telling me that if we were foolish enough to answer the door again we might be evicted. The smell of marijuana drifted down the stairs, and it told me that our time was almost up.
The printing shop owner was still calling, trying to get his paper back, and much to his surprise I told him to come over to the house to pick up what was his. He came straight over. I took him to the basement and showed him the huge stacks of paper.
There was still a lot of paper left, and I wanted to tell him to take it all, but something told me not to say anything.
“Take what is yours, and also take what you think we owe you for all the trouble. Take what you want,” I said, and then I left him alone hoping he would get the hint.
Ten minutes later he had taken his paper out the basement door and loaded it into his van. He then came to the living room, and with a curious look he said “thank you.” Then he left.
I went down to the basement hoping to find all the paper gone. But to my surprise there was still a lot of paper left. He had taken only what was rightfully his. After four months of living in David’s world of ravenous greed and grab-it-if-you-can mentality, it felt extremely heartwarming to come into contact with a temperate and honest man.
The next day a loud knock sounded at the front door. As I expected, one of the hillbillies hurried to open it. The landlord and two policemen strode in. The cops meant business. The looks on their faces told us not to cause any trouble. The landlord marched around the house like he was Napoleon after a great victory. He looked approvingly at the fine furniture and lush carpets. He went upstairs and then went down to the basement. He obviously liked what he’d seen in the basement. He would get what was owed to him from the furniture and the computers, or so he thought. He strutted over to me with his chest stuck out, and he had the look of the triumphant as he said, “You have 15 minutes to get your personal stuff out of here.”
The hillbillies scurried up the stairs, and I followed them. I threw my clothes into my suitcase and headed for the door. But I had to turned and take one last glance. The landlord was sitting in an easy chair looking very smug indeed. He had a self-satisfied expression on his face as he returned my gaze.
“He probably hasn’t paid the rent on that chair either,” I nodded.
The landlord’s jaw dropped, his smile disappeared, and he seemed to shrink in stature.
“But look on the bright side,” I continued, not even attempting to hide my amusement. “At least we didn't trash the place!”
Escape from Knoxville
I moved into an apartment, but after three weeks David and his lawyers decided it might be best for all concerned if I got the hell out of there and returned to Las Vegas.
I decided that Teddy was “Good People” and gave him charge of the car and the apartment. He was given the key to the post office box and told how to pick up the mail and what to do with the jewelry and the cash, etc. He didn’t get the Lincoln; the nurse took the Lincoln Town Car to Vegas. David funded the down payment on a more modest looking Ford for me, which Teddy would drive, and I was told David would take care of the monthly payments.
David sent my airplane ticket, and during a phone conversation he told me that # 5 and the nurse were angry. I didn’t bother to ask why. He then said that all I had to do was smile and humor them. “Women are easy to manipulate,” he assured me.
I was met at the airport by # 5 and the nurse. I smiled at them. And much to my relief they smiled back. They drove me to a nicer neighborhood than the one David was living in when I left, and I arrived at a lovely, huge, detached house with a swimming pool in the backyard. And much to my surprise I was moved into the biggest bedroom.
The next day, Charlie Garner, David's lawyer, came over and he shook my hand. He was grinning from ear to ear, and it was from his grin that I got the sense that I had done something right.
A few weeks later, after receiving no word from Teddy, David asked if I would fly back to Tennessee to see what was going on. I flew back, rented a car and drove to the apartment. I had a copy of the apartment key, and when I opened the door I was astonished at the sight. The place was completely trashed. There was a gaping hole in the living room wall. The floor was littered with porno magazines, and the place smelled like a marijuana plantation. The color copier, along with everything else, was gone.
Foolishly, in a state of shock, I went to the apartment manager and asked if she knew that the apartment was trashed. The glint in her eye warned me to get out of the place, and fast. Teddy had probably been dealing in drugs from the apartment with the money he got from the post office box, and the apartment was in my name. Then I remembered that the car was also in my name, and there was no sign of the car. I drove my rental car to the nearest phone booth and called the police to report the car as stolen, and then I phoned David and told him what I had discovered. He told me to go straight to the airport and he would have a new ticket waiting for me at the United Airlines desk. I drove very fast to the airport, and true to his word – for once – the ticket was waiting, and I was on the next United Airlines flight out of Knoxville. I breathed a sigh of relief as the plane left the ground. The luck of the Irish was with me, for sure, but so was David’s lawyer, and I knew that the Tennessee lawyers knew better than to take on Charlie Garner; especially not on his home turf of Las Vegas, and as for the police, I could only cross my fingers and hope for the best.
As far as I knew I had done nothing wrong, but I was up to my neck in trouble.

Chapter: Living in a fantasy world
By Walter Hicks – Part 2

For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the pride of life, is not of the Father but is of the world. (1 John 2:16)


My life was more orderly in Las Vegas, and David’s big new house allowed room for me to escape from the constant chatter of CNN Headline News that still played night and day.
However, it didn’t allow me to escape from David.
Working for David was more like being an indentured servant than an employee. If I asked for a day off, he would complain that he had to work every day so why shouldn’t I.
David had converted one of the rooms into an office. He worked day and night, often falling asleep while holding the phone to his ear. Everyone in the house would answer the phone and take down the name and number of the caller; David would then phone the prospective clients and reel them in. The small fish, the ones that could only afford to send him a few hundred dollars, never heard from him again. They would call and complain that he no longer spoke to them. We would tell them David was very busy. We assured them that he was working very hard on their behalf and advised them to write him a letter. The big fish, the ones that paid his asking fee of $10,000, received his ongoing attention, mainly because he continued to get more money from them.
A very rich woman who inherited an orange grove in Florida would come to Las Vegas to meet with David at a high-priced restaurant. David would drink the best wine and eat the best food, at her expense, while trying to wheedle more money out of her. She had more money than most people could even dream of, but what she really wanted was a lover. The woman was very plain. Some might even say she was ugly, and she hired David to bring love and romance into her life. During one of her visits, David asked me if I would sleep with her. My look of horror told him the answer, but he then said he would pay me $500 to do so. It was the age of free love, so I had no qualms about the morali ty of sleeping with a strange woman, and the prospect of being paid to do so did not violate my standard of ethics. Wife # 5 took me shopping for new clothes, and then, suitably adorned in my finery, I was told where to meet the client. We had a few drinks – and I needed every one of them – before going to her room at the MGM Grand.
I did my duty, but what she really wanted was to talk. We ordered wine from room service, and I soon found her to be a highly intelligent woman with a charming personality. We sipped fine wine and talked through the night. She told me that she often paid to have sex with movie stars, and one of her favorites was Dan Haggerty who had a short lived fame playing the role of Grizzly Adams on television.
The next morning David met with her for breakfast. Upon returning home, with a huge smile on his face, he gave me $500. I didn’t ask how much he had charged her for my services, but, by the look on his face, I’m sure it was a lot more than he gave me.
David must have thought he was onto a real money maker, because shortly after that he asked me if I would mind sleeping with another of his clients. This time I was taken to meet her at a French Restaurant, and to my amazement she had her husband with her. She’d been a nurse before her husband paid her way through medical school, and now both of them were doctors. I couldn’t believe my luck. She was stunningly beautiful. Her problem was that her husband was sexually impotent, and in a very discreet way, she wanted to satisfy her natural desires. I felt very awkward during the dinner, but her husband noticed my discomfort and put me at ease with a smile. It was one of the strangest experiences of my life. After we had eaten I made polite conversation with the doctors. We si pped expensive wine while David, sporting a big white bib around his neck, seemed to be chugging it back by the bottles. A waiter hovered next to the table awaiting our every whim.
It all looked perfectly normal. All the rules of polite society were followed, but as we spoke and exchanged smiles, I couldn’t forget the fact that when we left the dinner table the husband would give his wife a small kiss, and then, with his full blessing, his beautiful wife and I would be going to a room where we would strip naked and enjoy very wild, and very passionate, sex. To the waiter we probably appeared to be very casual, but each word we spoke, and every glance, had to be measured.
The experience gave me a whole new understanding of the word “sophistication”. I realized that I was amongst a different class of people, and they were a lot different from the British working class into which I had been born and raised. I felt like a veil of ignorance was slipping from my eyes, and I congratulated myself on becoming wise to the ways of the world.
But as I entered into what I assumed to be the real world, David slowly descended into a fantasy world of his own making. He slept for only one or two hours a night, and the lack of sleep was slowly taking its toll on his body and mind. He boasted that he would soon be the richest man in the world, and he was making a lot of money, but he never enjoyed it. His world was a 10-by-15-foot office, and in that world he could be anything he wanted to be. He created a world of lies and deceit, and in his world he really was “The Psychic to the Stars”.
It didn’t help matters when a lot of very respectable people encouraged him along his path to insanity by paying him $10,000 to tell them what they wanted to hear.
I knew things were getting serious when he started to refer to his father, the honest churchgoing Monte Guardino, as “The Godfather”. Somehow, in his deluded and sleep-deprived mind, David concluded that his Sicilian descent, his Italian name, and the fact that he was rich and living in Las Vegas could only mean one thing: he was obviously a member of the Italian mafia. And in David’s grandiose scheme of things, if he was to be in the mafia, then his father must be the boss of bosses. As such, good old God-fearing Monte was then transformed, in David’s mind, into The Godfather.
The Governor comes to visit
My assuredness that I had David all figured out experienced a severe challenge when Richard Bryan, the Governor of Nevada, with his entourage, showed up at David’s door. The Governor was shown into David’s office where he stayed for over an hour. His bodyguards gave me serious looks, daring me to make a wrong move, while his assistants made phone calls and wrote things in leather bound note books. It came as total surprise to me. The Governor was obviously expected, but the visit was shrouded in secrecy. It seemed very odd that the Governor came to David rather than telling David to come to him, and the visit was obviously about something that couldn’t be discussed over the phone.
To this day, I still don’t know what the Governor of Nevada and David Guardino talked about. My guess is that it had something to do with the UFOs around Roswell Air Force Base. After serving as Governor, Richard Bryan went on to serve Nevada in the U.S. Senate, where he single-handedly managed to kill NASA’s SETI project for the scientific search for extraterrestrial civilizations against the opinion of thousands of scientists, including Dr. Carl Sagan and several Nobel Prize winners. “The Great Martian Chase,” he said, “may finally come to and end. As of today millions have been spent and we have yet to bag a single little green fellow. Not a single Martian has said ‘take me to your leader,’ and not a sing le flying saucer has applied for FAA approval.”
Why did Richard Bryan spend so much time and energy stopping the search for extraterrestrial life? And if he was such a skeptic, then why was he talking to David Guardino, a professed psychic, for over an hour? David never said a word about the meeting, before or after it.
Another event that forced me reassess David was when David Letterman decided to call him, live, on his nationwide “Late Night with David Letterman” television show. David had been told to expect the phone call, and he, # 5, and I sat in the living room watching the show as Letterman led up to the phone call. He said that he had noticed David’s advertisement and he was going to call David Guardino to ask him a few questions about his dubious psychic abilities. He told his assistant to make the call. David stared with a stone cold face at the television screen as we listened to the numbers being dialed. The connection was made, we heard the phone ring, but then came the sound of static. Letterman told his assistant to dial it again. The sound of the numbers being dialed was heard yet again, but once again the call failed, and all we could hear on the television was static.
I looked at David, who was as motionless and as cold looking as a marble statue. Letterman, meanwhile, was growing increasingly agitated. He demanded to know why his assistants could not even complete a simple phone call. After one more try he gave up, but he promised his viewers that he would try to call again at another time.
The next time came a week later. David was notified, and was just as stone faced as he was at the time of the previous call. And the results were just the same as they were the previous week. On the television, Letterman was visibly angry at his staff as he gave up on the call. David, without saying a word about it, got up from his chair and went back into his office to resume making money.
Federal Judge Harry Eugene Claiborne was only the fifth person is U.S. History to be removed from public office through impeachment. He was first indicted by a federal grand jury for bribery, fraud, and tax evasion in December of 1983. Shortly after that he called David Guardino.
Former Clark County District Attorney George Dickerson said about him: “Harry Claiborne was without a doubt the greatest criminal defense attorney in the southwest United States.” Many attorneys said his skills in a courtroom were unparalleled in the state’s history, with some saying even that was an understatement. He was appointed to be a federal judge for the U.S. District Court for the District of Nevada by President Jimmy Carter in 1978.
One cannot deny that Harry Claiborne was an extremely intelligent man who was well educated in the ways of the world. Yet, when he got indicted, he decided to call on David Guardino to influence others to do his bidding.
David decided to throw a dinner party in Claiborne’s honor. To make a good impression, he asked me to pretend to be his English Butler. I was fitted out in tails, striped pants and bow tie so as to look the part. On the night of the dinner party I opened the front door to welcome the guests. Then with my best imitation of a posh British accent I would ask them to “please walk this way.” When I opened the door to Harry Claiborne, he mistook me for the host and congratulated me on how fit I looked. With a calm gaze and a stiff upper lip, I replied: “Sir, Mister Guardino is awaiting your arrival in the dining room.”
He followed me to the dining room to find a very overweight “Mister Guardino” clad in a gaudy red and white track suit. As the dinner progressed I stood by the dining room door looking very serious and haughty as the maids brought out the food and refilled the wine glasses. The wine flowed like a river. After they had eaten, Judge Claiborne stood up to give an after dinner talk. He was famous for his masterful story telling abilities that captivated jurors. Senior U.S. District Judge Lloyd George said of him: “He could tell a story better than anyone I’ve known.” And on that night Judge Claiborne lived up to his reputation. He was brilliant. His sense of humor was outrageous, and the dining room was soon filled with laughter. He was better than any stand-up comedian I had ever heard, and I had a hard time keeping a straight face.
He told about a rape trial where he asked the victim if the man had actually penetrated her, and after a short pause while she thought about it, she replied: “It certainly felt like it went right through me.” I could hold it in no longer, and the pent up laughter exploded out of me. Judge Claiborne seemed to look right through me, and then with an amused expression in his eyes, he seemed to say: “So you’re supposed to be an English butler, eh?”
I don’t know whether it was because of David’s psychic influence, but in April 1984 the jury deadlocked and a mistrial was declared. But the judge was tried again in July on only the tax evasion charges and was found guilty the next month, thus becoming the first federal judge ever convicted of crimes while on the bench. He was sentenced to two years in prison. He was impeached by the U.S. House of Representatives on July 22, 1986, and was convicted by the U.S. Senate on October 9, 1986, removing him from office. Claiborne continued to profess his innocence right up to January 2004 when he shot himself to death in Las Vegas.
Escape from death
Working for David didn’t pay much, but it wasn’t hard work, and I had no worries about utility bills or making a rent payment. My child support was being paid each month, and I was never without a bed, a meal, or entertainment. But it all nearly came to a tragic end after I made the mistake of accusing the maid, the one who made my bed, of stealing from my jar of quarters. I kept putting quarters in the jar but the jar kept getting emptier. It had to be because the maid was taking them out faster than I was putting them in. David’s wife and the maid were close friends, so I decided to tell # 5 about the situation in the hope that she would tell the maid to stop. The maid denied it, and she threatened to put a voodoo curse on me if I continued to make the charges. Her threa t didn’t scare me. I ridiculed her belief in voodoo and told her to go ahead with the curse but to stop taking my quarters.
A few days later I awoke with a large discoloration on my right thigh. As the morning progressed, the discoloration turned into a nasty looking lump that kept growing bigger. I began to feel nauseous, my head throbbed with pain, my face was drained of blood, and I began to think I was dying. Then a very alarmed # 5 told me to go into the bedroom. Once there, she told me to pull down my pants. She took one look at the discolored lump on my thigh and said, “Come on, you’re going to the hospital.”
Number 5 was friends with one of the doctors at the hospital. He was often at the house for dinner, and when we got to the emergency room he was waiting for me at the door. He showed me into a room, took one look at the lump, and said, “You’ve been bitten by a Brown Recluse spider.” And he then injected me with the antidote.
As I lay in bed recovering, I couldn’t help but marvel at my luck. The Brown Recluse is the deadliest spider in America, and if not for the prompt actions of # 5, I might have died. But then I began to wonder why she looked so alarmed when she told me to go into the bedroom. Why was the doctor waiting for me at the emergency room door, and why didn’t I go through the usual procedure of giving my name to the admissions office? I didn’t give my name to anyone! And how come the doctor had the antidote so close at hand? Had he tried to tell me something when he asked me if I had been in any small dirty places?
“It’s called the recluse because it likes to hide,” he said. Perhaps there was only one answer – the maid had tried and failed with the voodoo curse, so she decided to place a Brown Recluse spider between my sheets instead. For some reason she must have had a change of heart and decided to confess her actions to # 5 who, before asking me to pull my pants down, must have phoned her doctor friend at the hospital telling him about the Brown Recluse bite, and that’s why he was waiting with the antidote. Perhaps David’s wife wanted to protect the maid and that’s why I bypassed the paperwork at the hospital. It all made perfect sense.
From that day on I was always been nice to David’s chamber maids. I never even checked my quarter jar again. I kept putting the quarters in, but I don’t remember even thinking about taking one out. In the world that David lived in, everyone was on the take, and I learned the hard way that sometimes it’s the wisest course of action to just let them take it.
But David began to take a bit too much when he began to use the credit card numbers of his clients without their permission, and he grew increasingly paranoid after getting word that the FBI was conducting an investigation. The paranoia only made his mental state worse, and he became increasingly hard to be around. One day, the parents of a missing child came to the house. David had said he could help for a fee. I looked at their sad faces. Then I looked at David’s pudgy bloated face, and I knew that my time working for him was coming to an end.
The end came after I invited a beautiful Asian woman over to dinner. I met her at the supermarket. She noticed that I bought the huge roast beef that was on display at the meat department. She followed me to the parking lot and saw me go to the immaculate Lincoln Town Car. She must have thought I was a rich man, so she struck up a conversation with me. I invited her over to help eat the roast beef, and when she arrived at the house David got exceedingly jealous. After dinner the woman and I went to my room. When she left David stormed into my room screaming, “This house is not a brothel!”
The next morning, upon my request, the maid called a taxi for me. When the taxi arrived, I went into David’s office and told him I was quitting. He responded, “Nobody quits on David Guardino,” and then he pulled a gun on me. I doubted that he would pull the trigger; I figured he would be too afraid of what Monte the Godfather would say about it. So I turned my back on David, and whether or not he was scared of what his father might say, the main thing is that he didn’t shoot. So, I said goodbye to the maid and to David’s wife, and then I walked out the front door to the waiting taxi.
Shortly after I quit working for him, the FBI closed in on David. Eventually, he went to prison for credit card theft.
A few years after he got out of jail, I was sitting at home flipping through the channels on the television. I came to a boxing match and decided to watch it. When the bell rang for the end of the round, much to my astonishment, David Guardino clambered up to the corner of one of the fighters. He didn’t say anything, he just stood there in silence. When the bell rang to resume fighting, he sat back down. The same thing happened at the end of every round. Obviously, the fighter had paid David to influence the fight by being there at his corner. And luckily for David, his client won.
While working for David I almost got in trouble with the law in Tennessee, but I didn’t. I almost died from the Brown Recluse bite in Las Vegas, but I didn’t. I almost got entangled in an FBI investigation, but I didn’t, and I almost got shot, but I didn’t. What I got was an education into the ways of the world – and I got to stay in America.
I hope his mother is correct, and that David is now residing in heaven. I’d like to think that Harry Claiborne is there, too, and that Harry is telling David one of his funny stories. Nobody is all bad, and nobody is all good, and when it all comes down to dust: David did not have an easy life. He was often betrayed by those he trusted. He was an addict, and most of his life was spent trying to find his daily fix. He was addicted to money, and in the end he died a pauper’s death. It appears that David finished up a big-time loser, but if it turns out that David Guardino came out of it all as a big-time winner, then that’s alright by me.