Christopher LaVoie cast a wide net for contestants for his biggest show yet — “4 Days to Save the World.” He made it appear like he had celebrity endorsements from actors, sports stars and the mother of Elon Musk. He sweetened the pot with promises of equity interest in funding from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
LaVoie was born in Florida. After his probation ended, he bounced around his home state, spending most of his time in Hollywood, a city just north of Miami Beach. Tanned, with blond good looks, LaVoie was known by friends as a “mover and shaker,” someone who always had an idea in his pocket and was just looking for “the right business to take off.”
Job recruitment can be very lucrative. If a headhunter pulls a top executive away from one firm on behalf of another, the recruiter typically earns the equivalent of up to 20 per cent of the executive’s first year of salary. The really big money is in the “C-Suite” executives: chief executive officer, chief financial officer, chief operating officer, etc.
Nervous that they would be caught — after all, the low-level employees were selling their company’s information without permission — the workers would meet LaVoie and his business associate in a park, or a coffee shop, and hand over the directory for cash. LaVoie’s business associate would “digitize” the directory and it would be sold to a headhunting firm for up to $5,000.
The first show he set about making was “Top Recruiter,” billed as a reality television show about the headhunting business. The locations, though, are sumptuous. Central to all of LaVoie’s work is a strong backdrop for the filming that does take place. For each one he rented an iconic building, or space in a building, for one or two days of filming. In Miami, it would range from the classic old home where he made his grand entrance to a beautiful seaside hotel to a former bank building that had a giant steel vault in the basement.
The “mover and shaker” moved from the job recruitment or “headhunting” field to reality TV, but didn’t always play by the rules.