The Honolulu Star-Bulletin wrote up a piece on Robert J. Maynard Jr. after recent post about him, covering some of the highlights of his sketchy past and uncovering some new info.
One interesting factoid: Maynard's father, local optometrist Robert J. Maynard Sr., reversed earlier statements about his son's apparent identity theft of an American Express account:
Robert Maynard Sr. dismissed that claim last week when contacted by the Star-Bulletin, saying they had taken the card out together.
Ah, well -- family. It's been two years since our 2007 article that exposed LifeLock's lies -- Maynard Sr. seems to be letting bygones be bygones. And besides, LifeLock hit the business equivalent of a Powerball jackpot and now boasts more than a million customers. Maynard Jr. -- despite his fabrications and bouts with depression -- really did hit the big-time. At least, his company did.
Maynard Jr. told the Honolulu paper that he sold his share of LifeLock. He's spending millions of dollars of his own money" on Kandoo! Oaho, an ocean activities business in Waikiki, according to the article. The initial investment will be about $7 million. (Almost half of that is going into a huge catamaran that will be the outfit's mothership, a June 18 TV news report from Hawaii says).
The Star-Bulletin, for some reason, really misses the point about Maynard Jr.'s casino debt:
In 2003, he landed in jail for a week after running up a $16,080 tab at a Las Vegas casino. He paid the debt two months later and cleared his record, but it came back to haunt him.
The reason it came back to haunt him isn't because he ran up a debt with money he didn't have. Nor is it that he was sent to jail because of the debt. Heck, everyone makes mistakes.
The fact is, he used the incident to mold a lie for marketing purposes. That seems like more than a mistake.
Maynard Jr. admits to the paper that his first company, the National Credit Foundation, tried to "take advantage of the system..."
The other news tidbit we learned from this article was that LifeLock "suffered a setback" in one of its lawsuits recently. A federal judge ruled in May that LifeLock had engaged in an "unfair business practice." Seems like LifeLock, Maynard's brainchild, may also be trying to game the system.
We'd be surprised if it was all smooth sailing on the catamaran.