As a personal note from Patricia Fripp. I know and really like Stew. He is a great speaker and I am glad he wrote his story.
Stew Leonard tells his life story in new book
By Beth Cooney
Stew Leonard did not want to tell his life story.
"I didn't want to relive the past," he says.
"The way I saw it, I had just gotten out of a prison camp. When you walk away from that, you want to leave it behind you. I did the time. I paid for the crime. My feeling was it's the past. Let it stay there."
So it may surprise readers of his new book, "Stew Leonard, My Story," that he begins his biography from the vantage point of a lecture hall at a federal prison in Bradford, Pa. It was where he served most of his 52-month, 1993 sentence for tax evasion. Rather than sugar-coating his story like the candy sprinkles on one of his famous dairy store's ice cream cones, Leonard decided to document his exhilarating rise, his humiliating fall and his climb back up.
It was Scotty Reiss, a journalist and business consultant from Greenwich, who persuaded Leonard to write a "tell-all"- style book. She is the co-author of the biography, which began selling in Stew's four dairy stores (including Norwalk and Danbury) last week. Leonard has dedicated the book to his grandson, Stew Leonard III, who drowned in an accident during a family vacation in 1988 when he was just 21 months old. All of the book's profits will be donated to the water safety foundation started in the child's name.
Leonard, 79, has rarely spoken publicly about his 1993 conviction for tax evasion for a scam that involved skimming millions in cash from some registers at his original Norwalk store.
In a wide-ranging interview, a robust Leonard says it was time to share "all of my life, good and bad, and hope that someone gets something out of it."
Reiss, who spent years prodding Leonard to write the biography after meeting him through an assignment for the New York Times, believes the former milkman has a story of redemption to tell.
"The theme of his story is the importance of doing the right thing," says Reiss. "For years, Stew did the right thing and he prospered. When he didn't, he paid the price, but I think what gets lost in his story sometimes is he accepted his punishment, took complete responsibility and moved on. I believed there were lessons in his life, positive and negative. It was just a matter of getting him to open up."
For Leonard the time was right to write it all down. His wife, Marianne, had urged him to write a biography, "if only for the sake of the grandkids."
"I began to see that there was something to be said for talking about your adversities. I had been through some tough times. I had done some stupid, stupid things -- I still don't really know why -- but I also came to believe that maybe I could help inspire someone by writing about them." Three years ago, he began collaborating with Reiss, "who never took no for an answer when I told her I didn't want to do a book."
Leonard's story reads with an almost Forest Gump-like quality of an ambitious man who was in the right place at the right time. Except unlike the fictional Gump, whose brushes with great figures and experiences were the result of improbable luck, Leonard had a brilliant knack for seizing opportunities and taking inspired marketing ideas and giving them a unique spin.
He started his original Norwalk dairy store to salvage a third-generation family dairy business that was dying as delivery customers dropped service for the convenience of grocery purchases. The farm-themed store, on the Post Road in Norwalk, quickly became a huge success. Inspired by Walt Disney and his theme parks, Leonard made his store a destination with its animated singing farm characters, live animals, truckload sales and food samples galore.
Along the way he launched the late actor Paul Newman's line of salad dressings, became pals with retailing geniuses such as Frank Perdue and Sam Walton, and was honored by President Ronald Reagan for business excellence.
Leonard, who wrote in his high school yearbook that he wanted to make a million dollars, became rich.
His reputation took an epic fall when federal agents launched a 1991 investigation into his business dealings.
Leonard does not offer elaborate details of the cash diversions in his book, but explains that it began rather innocently when he began paying private security guards he hired to help with crowd control, "straight out of the cash register." Later, he admits to stashing cash to pay contractors who worked on store expansions in exchange for building discounts.
Leonard says when he talked to his tax attorney about the diversions he was assured it was, "what every businessman does." Leonard declined to name the adviser, saying he has since died and "It doesn't matter. I did it. It was my fault. Nothing I say should let you think that I am OK with what I did or that it is anyone's fault but mine."
When IRS agents arrived at the Norwalk store with search warrants, Leonard says he knew he was in serious trouble.
"What I did not know was that I was going to jail. It never occurred to me that could happen. Never. I thought that I would pay a fine. The idea that I could go to jail was the shock of my life."
Leonard was never indicted. His attorneys negotiated a plea deal with prosecutors to spare his immediate family members from prosecution. Two of his brother-in-laws and a company executive also took plea deals. While it has been widely reported that Stew Sr. accepted a plea to protect his son and current company president, Stew Leonard Jr., the father insists that "Stew Jr. was never involved." His plea, he says, was based on threats from prosecutors "to go after my whole family, including my wife, merely for signing our tax returns. I was never going to let that happen."
Leonard was sentenced to 52 months in jail and ordered to pay back taxes, penalties and fines of more than $15 million. He describes his period of confinement as "bleak" but "not as bad as it could have been." He went to prison depleted, after undergoing a hip replacement and heart surgery.
In prison, he says, "There is a time when you look out the window. And all of the sudden it is snowing. And you are inside. And you realize that you are stuck there. You can't leave. And that's the idea. That's what prison is supposed to be and I would never want to go back."
He was also struck by something he saw in common in his fellow inmates, many of them white collar criminals. "You know, everyone who comes to jail shows up saying they didn't do it. It was a mistake. It was almost funny after a while. I was determined not to be that guy. I wanted to talk about why I was there, to own up to what I did."
Still, he says he benefited from spending most of his prison time at the minimum security campus in Bradford where a benevolent warden, Dennis Luther, put Leonard to work helping struggling merchants in the neighboring town. His Bradford Merchants workshops became a "reason to get up in the morning" and Leonard loved doling out anecdotes to inspire them. The workshops grew and soon he was speaking to an auditorium of local business owners on a regular basis. The workshops ended when a new warden took over and had Leonard transferred to another prison. "To this day, I don't see the point of that," says Leonard, who has stayed in touch with merchants he mentored.
He got out of prison after 42 months and returned home, but was afraid to set foot in his stores.
"I was ashamed," he says. "When I finally did it, I was stunned. Customers came up and greeted me. They treated me the same. They patted me on the back and stopped to talk. I am grateful and humbled by it."
Today, Leonard says his role in the company is that of "coach' to the franchise that bears his name. He seems in remarkable health, flying through the Norwalk store at such a pace during a recent tour of a new sushi bar and pasta station, he lost followers half his age more than once.
There is a silver lining in his story, Leonard says, in that his confinement forced him to turn over the reigns of the business to his children. "In family businesses, letting go for the next generation is always a problem. I could have been 80, like I am now, holding on"¦ telling a son with grown children he wasn't ready. My kids had to take over to save the business and look at what they did."
Stew Leonard's has grown to four stores and eight free-standing wine shops. Each of his children and many of his 13 grandchildren have a role in the business. His son Tom has opened his own farm store in Virginia that is not part of the chain, but carries some Stew Leonard's products.
Leonard writes about Tom and the fact that he was sent to a federal halfway house for allegedly skimming cash from a hot dog stand in front of the Danbury store, ending up in Alcoholics Anonymous before striking out on his own in Virginia. "He had some tough times too. Made some mistakes and I am very proud of where he's gone since."
The family has even created a succession plan which requires grandchildren interested in joining the business to work outside the company, after college, for a minimum of two years. "Here at Stew Leonard's we believe a few hard knocks are good for you," he says.
You may have read about my brother Robert Fripp performing in Estonia for the celebration of their independence. I read this on his wife Toyah's blog. Excuse me for being a proud sister-in-law, but is amazing, beautiful, and multifaceted in her talent. She can sing, act, write, be an amazing talk show guest or host. Her stage performances have been delighting audiences for thirty years. She started performing in her teens and has been in movies with Sir Laurence Olivier and Katherine Hepburn.
