Although the resolution quality is poor, the man in the picture looks like Maynard. Zadrowski says the man pictured is Maynard.
Maynard's girlfriend at the time, Valley resident Betsey Griffin, is listed on Maynard's 2005 bankruptcy report as being owed $10,000. Reached by phone, she says she had nothing to do with getting Maynard out of jail and did not pay the $16,000 for him.
Martha Strachan
LifeLock shares office suites at this building near Rural and Guadalupe roads.
Maynard, right, is interviewed during an infomercial aired in the mid-1990s that the U.S. government says was misleading.
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"Because he owed me money, I wasn't going to give him any money to get him out of jail," she says. "So it didn't come from me." (Maynard later paid back the $10,000 with interest, she says.)
Confronted with Zadrowski's side of the story, Todd Davis registers no obvious surprise.
"Is that what you think you have?" he says. "Okay, I hear what you're telling me."
Davis then goes into defense mode, saying that although the story is, indeed, the inspiration for the company, "we don't use that story. That's nowhere on our Web site. That's not part of our messaging. We don't use it in any of our, quote, advertising."
He says that he, Maynard and Prusinski who's also on record telling the tale simply respond to reporters' questions about how the company got started.
As of May, LifeLock still had at least one link on its Web site that introduces Maynard's victim story a WCPO-TV news broadcast from Cincinnati. (The station took the video down, but still has a transcript on one of its sites.)
Call it advertising or public relations, Maynard's tale certainly has made the rounds. Another TV station in Baltimore reported it as fact. Internet sites like www.eweek.com and www.scambusters.com also fell for it.
Newspapers in the Valley were no different.
In a 2005 Business Journal of Phoenix article by Adam Kress, Maynard spiced up his story by adding that police officers assumed he was a murderer they had been seeking. An East Valley Tribune business article by Edward Gately says Maynard claimed to have been victimized in 1998, as does an Arizona Business Gazette article by Maggie Galehouse. A quick call to either the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office or Clark County D.A.'s office would have turned up evidence of the actual arrest date.
The amount Maynard lost dropped from $20,000 to $3,000 in an Arizona Republic article last summer by Luci Scott. That discrepancy could have been caught by looking up previously published articles.
Other stories, which don't include the jail yarn, appeared in various editions of the Republic in August and December 2006, and in May 2007.
Newspapers all over the country have written about LifeLock, and the company has a decent Web presence. Punching the name in Google returns 202,000 results, partly because the company pays bloggers who help sell its services.
Maynard himself writes craftily about his jail stint in articles posted on www.military.com, including one headlined "I was a Jailbird or 'Sitting Duck.'"
Say what you will about LifeLock, all this is evidence that its execs are masterful at getting publicity.
Robert J. Maynard Jr. is one of the smartest people his father has ever known.
Dr. Maynard, one of six members of the state's board of optometry, says his son possesses an extraordinary ability to predict the growth of future markets and to convince people that they should give him money.
Maynard Jr. was born in Phoenix in 1962 and went to Arizona State University for a time after graduating from Brophy College Preparatory. He joined the U.S. Marine Corps and was honorably discharged.
His father says Maynard Jr. eventually graduated from Northern Arizona University, burning with desire for the good life.
"It started when he was in college," Dr. Maynard says. "He didn't want the $20 pair of shoes. He wanted the $300 pair of shoes."
Three years after his first Chapter 7 bankruptcy in 1990, Maynard's dream of getting rich was coming true. His credit-repair company, the National Credit Foundation, was raking in millions. But a few months after it started, state and federal authorities crashed the party.
New laws had been passed to deal with unscrupulous credit-repair firms that, at the time, seemed to be cropping up everywhere. Retired Tucson attorney John Wall, who handled the National Credit Foundation case on behalf of then-state Attorney General Grant Woods, says Maynard's firm was one of several the state targeted.
Court records show the state sued the firm, accusing Maynard and his three partners of fraud and misrepresentation. For one thing, the company falsely claimed it was a "foundation," a label that implied nonprofit status. It stated in advertising it could "help anyone legally obtain good credit," but it couldn't really do that. And it claimed, falsely, that it was operating legally.
State law required companies like Maynard's to pay the state a bond amount of $5,000 to $25,000, to notify customers of their right to cancel services, and to provide customers with written contracts and informational statements. National Credit Foundation failed to do those things, the state said.
At the time, Maynard denied any wrongdoing, saying his business had no customer complaints and was, indeed, legal. He accused Woods of trumping up the charges and trying to destroy all "credit restorative service" firms like his.