Pez Outlaw Diary - Pez Price Guide : Chapter 5. Life On The Run

Danger, intrigue, espionage and cutthroat deals. Todays reality TV pales in comparison to the life I lived for 11 years. To be honest I have never even watched one episode of any reality TV program. Why, to tame and just plain boring. I lived it, why watch pretend. Besides I've got 11 years of my life on a loop, running 24/7 in my brain. No room left for what passes as real on TV.

Completing each and every deal I did in Europe was Dicey at best. I could have lost everything at many points in each trip. Which is the main reason I mostly hid out at the Raba when not actually doing the deals. I always kept a high awareness of my surrounding in an effort to ward off potential problems. I trusted nobody with what I was really doing. I never confided 100% with anyone, including Joshua. Possibly that is why I jumped at the chance to go legit in 1998 & bought the Holiday Colors.

I could not do what I did in the 1990s today. My nerves could not take it. I believe I used up my luck & my nerve reservoir in the 90s.

The following are surveillance photos taken on the sly by me. For this transaction I paid Gunther Leitner for 50 boxes of 12 carded Silver Glows per box. The driver and I were then told where to meet off site by Gunther.

Photos are of the silver glow buy. The driver was under orders from Gunther Leitner. I paid Gunther, then met the driver for delivery.

That's me on the left. These are Photos I took covertly while buying Pez.

Covert photos I took. That's me on the right. Tell a friend many more to come.

I've already told you about meeting Gunther Leitner at a McDonald's in Linz Austria where I paid him $2,000.00 for Pez dispensers he stole from the main office 15 minute earlier. I've also mentioned that border crossings were tricky. Well the following 10 pages will explain in exact detail what tricky means and why I carried a bottle each of Tums and Advil.

For customs purposes I needed to keep the amount I brought into the country on each trip below $2,000.00 in stated value. Otherwise my pez would have been held at the border by customs and my broker would be needed. More paper work, more fees and more people involved in general. Wanting to keep it simple, the numbers always needed to be massaged, in order to use the customs form you get on every international flight.

So here is the dilemma. Cash carried on international flights must be below $10,000.00 or you must declare it. Not wanting to bring attention to the fact that almost every month for years I was taking just under $10,000.00 to Europe. I usually carried between $9,000.00 and $9,800.00 in order to legally avoid the requirement of declaring the amount of cash I was taking to Europe. Left the USA with just under $10,000.00 returned with just under $2,000.00 stated value of pez dispensers. This was done about 70 times, see the problem.

This is where, we will call him Andy came in. Andy was the middle man, assigned to me by the people who I actually bought all my pez from. Andy was found so that they could maintain distance, today he would be referred to as a cutout. Those who I actually bought from felt I was just to hot to go near or take even a remote chance of being seen with. This always happened after roughly 5 trips anywhere in Europe that I bought Pez dispensers. Hungary was the only country though where the people I bought from got creative enough to use a cutout for handling business after I got to hot.

There also was an unseen hand that moved my activities from Hungary, Slovenia and Austria to eventually just Hungary. After a couple years of buying in Europe my face was known to everybody in or from Pez Austria. I know this because I was told this by people I bought from in Hungary, Slovenia and Austria. Also on one occasion an Austrian I had never seen before came up to me in a factory in Slovenia and said. " I know who you are." That's all he said after which he immediately turned walked away and disappeared. After which I was hustle out and off the property. In the clandestine meeting that followed I heard it for the first time. "Everybody at pez knows what you look like. I can't be seen talking to you ever again."

The unseen hand kept reducing the number of places in Europe where I could buy Pez, until Hungary was all that remained. This was done I believe, so that I could be controlled and a cutout could be used to avoid exposure. Yes I believe it was orchestrated. By doing this the money could be more easily controlled and the number of people who got a cut was reduced. On rare occasions one of the people I was actually buying from would meet with me to iron out a detail but after the first year I never saw Gunther again. Although I could always feel his hand controlling me. On those rare occasions that the other person I was actually buying from would appear. He would show up after I had been at the designated house for a while, then leave before I did. There were usually things Andy and I had to do until a suitable amount of time passed after he left.

Once my contacts had been reduced to just Andy, the price I was required to pay per dispenser went from 25 cents each to a high of $1.10 each. I was always reminded of all the risk that they were taking as to why the price kept going up. In reality there risk was once, when the vehicle drove out the gate with the pez. By the way the guy at the gate was another reason I was told as the price went up. They got there money all at once, cash, large bills please. One day and done. My risk was at every border I crossed and the 3 to 5 years it took to sell every load. At any point in the journey home everything could have gone south and I would have lost over $10,000.00 in a minute. Not only that, they barely had to leave the city most of them lived in. Where I had to travel thousands of miles to make it happen.

Somehow though each time I tried to explain reality to Andy, his English would get bad all of a sudden or he would wince to indicate I was being unreasonable or mean.

My activities now isolated, Andy handled everything. Funny thing is when I met him he was a kid who helped his mother with me because he spoke English. His mother was actually who was assigned to me at first because she had a retail sales license. After a few visits though she disappeared. From then on I dealt with Andy.

I would arrive in Vienna / Wien then the Raba in Gyor where dispensers were individually bagged then put into duffel bags. This is when each duffel bag was configured to place licensed characters or dispensers without country safely in the middle of each duffel bag.

For the last few years of travel though, things changed. I was only allowed to take possession of my pez as I drove out of the country. They got real nervous about people at the Raba helping me move about 9,000 pez up and down from my room every trip. As the Hungarian Headquarters for pez Hungaro Candy was located less than a mile from the Raba and the injection molding facility was a little over a mile away. This eventually made everybody real nervous. So for the last few years I drove to Andy on the way in just to pay him and go over everything. Then pick the pez up on the way out of Hungary at about 3 am.

The first 5 or 6 years trips were 5 or 6 days each. Though in the last few years I shortened them to 4 days. What changed was in the first 5 years I drove around a lot. Slovenia, Austria, Czech, Slovak, etc. buying pez at other factories, warehouses, stores wherever. Buying pez not just in Hungary. As the unseen hand slowly confined my activities to Hungary Though the longer trips just became a waist of time. By reducing the length to 4 days it was the optimal amount of time. More than enough time to get everything done, yet not so short as to appear odd at customs. This was the way it was now, except trips to specific countries like Spain, Sweden, Australia or South Africa.

Once I had been assigned Andy a formula was used to calculate the bill of sale. These bills of sale were also something everybody worried about. Who all looks at them? What do you do with them after each trip. Border officials and US Customs were who saw them. Other than that nobody saw them. What did I do with all those Bills of Sale? I still have every last one of them.

Pez Outlaw sjglew Signature onyour Pez dispenser I Smuggled into USA From Europe

Pez Outlaw sjglew Signature onyour Pez dispenser I Smuggled into the USA...

$4.95

I smuggled approximately 700,000 Pez Dispensers into the USA from Europe. Get yours signed and authenticated as a Pez Outlaw Pez Dispenser.

These are small inspection slips that were in each box of approx 400 Pez Dispensers. $200.00 each for your choice of box inventory slip pictured in chapter 5. Postal money order only. steven j glew 5611 lehman rd dewitt mi 48820. I retain rights to these pictures.

Click picture once to enlarge. Click again for really big. Lower left one is from Slovenia.