ARTIGO NA EDIÇÃO COLLECTORS WEEKLY - PEZ OUTLAW DIARY

Publicação do artigo sobre o "Pez Outlaw", Steve Glew, na edição Collectors Weekly > collectorsweekly/pez-holy-grail. Mais informação em Pez Outlaw Diary > pezoutlaw, com tradução em português (não fiel), aqui > pezoutlawportuguese.

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Quest for the Pez Holy Grail: International Smuggling Meets Father-Son Bonding

By Ben Marks — March 20th, 2015

"How sordid could the Pez-dispenser underworld be? That question was probably running through the mind of movie producer David Klawans when he noticed a curious item on eBay in the summer of 2014. It seems a guy named Steven Glew was offering the book and movie rights to his life story as the world’s most notorious and successful Pez-dispenser smuggler. The price tag for this exclusive peek into the lucrative collectible-Pez-dispenser black market of the 1990s was several hundred thousand dollars.

The existence of such an underworld was news to Klawans, but the Hollywood producer knew a good story when he saw one—he had previously turned a “Wired” magazine article about the escape of six Americans during the 1979 Iran hostage crisis into the Academy Award winning hit “Argo.” So Klawans called a journalist friend named Jeff Maysh and told him about the eBay listing. “David said to me, ‘This would make a great magazine story,’” says Maysh when we spoke recently, “so I did it.” Maysh didn’t buy the book or movie rights to Glew’s life story, but his article on Glew and the $4 million contraband-Pez-dispenser empire he built and lost, titled “The Pez Outlaw,” has just been published in Playboy (an excerpt of that article is reprinted with permission below).

Convincing an eccentric upper-Midwesterner like Glew to trust a suave London-born journalist like Maysh took some doing. “He was one of the most difficult interviewees I’ve ever had to convince,” says Maysh. “By his own admission, Steve suffers from OCD and bipolar disorder, and he’s a recovering alcoholic and drug addict. He’s a very paranoid guy. He doesn’t leave his farm; he’s a recluse. It took two months just to persuade him that my intentions were real, that I wanted to write his story. I believe I’m the first person outside of his family to visit him at his farm in some years.”

Top: Glew freely admits to smuggling thousands of Pez dispensers like these from Hungary into the United States. Above: Glew and his son, Joshua, used to buy contraband Pez dispensers out of the backs of official Pez trucks, like this one, in Hungary and Slovenia. Both photos via Pez Outlaw Diary.

Maysh’s article tells Glew’s tale of white-knuckle, Eastern European border crossings in the dead of winter; secret meetings with code-named sources (Elvis, Geppetto) in authorized Pez factories in Slovenia and Hungary, where he purchased rare Pez prototypes worth hundreds of dollars to Pez collectors back in the United States; and the financially brutal tactics of the U.S. branch of the Pez Corporation (which has its world headquarters in Austria) that crushed the fortunes of the self-described Pez Outlaw.

For Maysh, Glew’s tale had all the earmarks of the work of a classic “unreliable narrator,” which is why the writer spent months interviewing “dozens of people in the toy-and-candy collectible industry and various dealers in the Pez community” to verify Glew’s claims. All but a handful of details checked out, and even Glew’s OCD came to Maysh’s aid. “He kept almost every fax and piece of correspondence,” Maysh says of Glew’s record keeping. “I was able to find shipping documents, and his receipts for various trips to Europe were very helpful.”

Maysh also spoke with Glew’s wife, Kathy, and their son, Joshua, who joined his father on most of their Eastern European adventures when he was still in college. “I didn’t know until I got to Michigan that this was really a father-and-son story,” Maysh says. “They bonded while on their bizarre journeys. They didn’t have much of a relationship before that—Dad was an alcoholic and a drug addict, Joshua was a teetotaling all-star student in high school and college—but they came together in their quest to find the rarest Pez.”

Maysh can sympathize with the mindset that drives such quests. His love is not for Pez dispensers, although he admits he now has a “modest” collection of maybe 40 or so pieces. Rather, Maysh is an avid collector of soccer jerseys. “I’m as passionate about soccer jerseys as Steve is about Pez dispensers,” Maysh says, “so I understand his world, including the passion and paranoia that drives collectors almost to the ends of the earth trying to get that one thing.” Happily for Maysh, he has his Holy Grail: “I own a 1994 jersey worn by Jurgen Klinsmann during his debut for my favorite team, Tottenham Hotspur. It’s widely considered to be the shirt to have.” Lest you doubt Maysh’s word on the importance of this article of used clothing, his Klinsmann jersey is currently housed in the National Football Museum in Manchester, England.

The Black Santa that started Glew’s career as the Pez Outlaw. Photo via Pez Outlaw Diary

If Maysh’s article on Glew generates the sort of Hollywood buzz that followed the “Wired” piece that led to “Argo,” Glew might yet sell the book and movie rights to his story, though he’s had no offers so far. And if that happens, the Pez Outlaw himself has some ideas for casting, at least according to the listing for his life story that’s still posted on eBay. “Gabby Hayes (Roy Rogers movie sidekick) is dead,” Glew writes, “so Bill Murray would be fun.”"

in http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/quest-for-the-pez-holy-grail/