Court Records Document Career : Entrepreneur Had Unusual Capital-Raising Technique

Chase Revel, founder of Los Angeles-based Entrepreneur magazine and author of a number of books on how to start small businesses, took an unusually direct approach to raising capital early in his career.

He robbed banks.

The story of those early escapades surfaced last month in a palimony lawsuit filed against Revel in Los Angeles Superior Court. The suit was filed by Kristin Barrett-Whitney, who says she lived with Revel out of wedlock for a little more than a year in 1984 and 1985.

Barrett-Whitney says she left Revel after he became abusive.

While Revel has not yet filed his answer to the suit, he has denied abusing Barrett-Whitney, who he says was his housekeeper.

Her lawsuit contains court documents, probation records and newspaper accounts about his past.

The documents show that Revel was not the type to simply walk into financial institutions and demand money.

True to the entrepreneurial spirit, he hired others.

Twenty years ago, the lawsuit says, Revel’s employees attempted to rob four banks in Houston in one day.

The suit gives this account of his conduct:

Revel’s name was not yet Revel, the lawsuit says. He was then known by his given name, John Leonard Burke. However, for the robbery scheme, which one Houston columnist later called “probably the most fantastic” in the city’s history--Burke said he was Charles Hudson, an electrical contractor with jobs wiring banks.

According to newspaper accounts filed as exhibits to the palimony suit, Burke, as Hudson, went to the Texas Employment Commission, where he said he needed four men with cars. He would pay them $2 an hour.

He told the men that their job was to collect his payrolls, and he sent them--all in the same morning--to specific tellers at specific banks.

He told them to present the tellers with bags for carrying the payrolls. He also gave them sealed envelopes.

Inside each envelope was a note. It was addressed to the individual tellers.

“Keep calm,” one note said. “We have your son Mahlon Jr., whom we picked up at school on the pretext you were hurt in an accident. Don’t warn anyone of this. The safety of your son is at stake. Fill the bag with 100s, 50s, 20s, 10s, 5s and give the bag to the man. Then go to the bathroom and wait 15 minutes before telling anyone. Remember, do you want your son’s life on your conscience? We don’t care.”

Burke had gotten the names of tellers’ children by posing as a telephone survey-taker for a Houston department store, the newspaper accounts said.

His workers were dupes. They really thought they were picking up payrolls.

One of them followed instructions and left a bank empty-handed when the teller whom he was to see was not there.

Another was arrested at a bank.

A third got $11,000 and turned over the “payroll” to Burke.

A fourth was arrested leaving a bank with about $10,000.

Police traced Burke to an apartment the same day.

The newspaper articles filed with the lawsuit also said Burke told police that he was an unemployed gossip columnist. He said he had quit his job at a magazine called Fabulous Las Vegas the month before, changed his name to yet another--Jacques Victor Baron--because of a bad credit rating, gotten married and honeymooned in Hawaii.

Burke didn’t have much time to enjoy the good life before his arrest, but he calmly told news reporters that he had managed to spend several hundred dollars on caviar. “I’m just full of fish eggs,” he told them.

The man one Houston paper described as “droll and dashing” pleaded guilty to one count of bank robbery by intimidation and to two counts of attempted bank robbery by intimidation, according to court records filed with the suit. He also pleaded guilty to robbing a Las Vegas bank of $5,000 two weeks earlier and to the attempted robbery of another Las Vegas bank.

He was sentenced to four years in prison.

When he was released, he settled in Los Angeles, where, under the name Rio Sabor, he started a successful business called Starving Artists Galleries, according to probation records filed with the suit. There, patrons could pick up oil paintings for under $7. Sabor called it the “world’s largest retailer of oil paintings.”

‘Forte Is Creativity’

“My forte,” he wrote his probation officer, “is creativity, and there are a lot of fields where I can apply it successfully with the necessary capital.”

Burke later started another business under one of the names that came up in Houston--Jacques Victor Baron, according to a court record filed with the suit as well as other court records.

He called the business Aetna Express, which he billed as “the West’s most dependable shipping agents.”

He was indicted in 1972, however, for notifying various people in Utah that Aetna Express was holding packages for them.

He wrote them letters saying: “The sender used improper addressing materials--address smeared--return address unreadable,” according to an indictment. “Through our modern tracing facilities,” the letters said, it had been “positively determined that this package was intended for (you).”

Asks for Money

The letters asked for $3.35 in extra shipping and handling charges; otherwise, the package would be opened and sold at auction “to recover our cost.”

The trouble was, the letters from Aetna were total fabrications, the indictment said.

Court records show Baron pleaded guilty to three counts of mail fraud in 1973 and was placed on probation.

That was the same year, a Department of Motor Vehicles official said, in which Chase Revel got his California driver’s license.

Revel’s license bore the same general physical description as the license of John Leonard Burke, who, records show, was also known as Jacques Victor Baron.

The Revel and Burke licenses bore the same birth date, and, according to a DMV official, pictures of the same man.

Difference in Ages

But there was one vain difference. Chase Revel’s license said he was nine years younger than the now-49-year-old Burke.

In filing her lawsuit, which seeks millions of dollars in damages, Barrett-Whitney said that Revel portrayed himself as a self-made millionaire and the founder of Entrepreneur, a monthly with a circulation of 200,000.

“Little did (she) know,” her lawsuit says, “that the man she knew as Chase Revel was actually John Leonard Burke, a convicted felon who had previously committed his crimes in a particularly cruel and heartless manner.”

Barrett-Whitney said that she found that Revel had various pieces of identification in different names as she was leaving what she described as an abusive relationship.

She told a reporter that she then searched through federal and state archives in Illinois, Nevada, Texas, Washington, California and other states and even traveled to Hong Kong, where, she said, he has business interests.

Revel, in a declaration filed in a related court battle over possession of his Pacific Palisades house, has said that her claims about the nature of their relationship are not true. He says he hired her as his housekeeper and he denied abusing her.

Both Revel and his attorney declined to discuss the suit with a reporter.

Revel, who has been a subject of feature articles about starting small businesses in publications such as The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles Times, has told interviewers that he began the forerunner of Entrepreneur magazine, which instructs readers on how to become success stories, in 1973.

Exposed Schemes

Called Insider’s Report, it told of small business opportunities and exposed schemes designed to separate would-be businessmen from their cash.

Revel subsequently wrote books, such as 184 Businesses Anyone Can Start and Make a Lot of Money, published in 1981 followed by 168 More Businesses Anyone Can Start and Make a Lot of Money, published in 1984.

He told interviewers that he had made millions with many businesses. But in 1982 Chase Revel Inc., which published the magazine, filed for reorganization under Chapter 11 of the federal bankruptcy law. The magazine later became the property of a public company.

Today, Revel employees say that their boss’ base of operations is an office at the edge of Beverly Hills, from which he operates a mail-order jewelry company by the name of Van Pler and Tissany.

Remaining a man of mystery, he declined to confirm or deny who he was. “Under the advice of my attorney,” he said, “I have no comment at all on any of the charges in the case.”

Are you John Leonard Burke? he was asked.

“We’re not making any comment in that direction.”