Michigan Pez smuggler goes from riches to debt to the silver screen

DeWitt — Steve Glew is a dreamer.

When he was trying to get a movie made about his life, acquaintances dismissed it as just another quixotic adventure.

But Glew knew he had a story that Hollywood executives couldn’t resist.

In the 1990s, the Michigan machinist claims he made $4.5 million smuggling Pez candy dispensers from war-torn Eastern Europe and then lost it all with one disastrous move.

It was announced earlier this month that “The Pez Outlaw,” a documentary where he is the central character and actor, will be released in theaters and streaming services on October 21. It was made by Sidestilt Films, whose movies have appeared on HBO and Netflix.

Glew, 71, has waited for and, yes, dreamed about this moment for 20 years. He watched as success turned into failure and failure into success.

“Some of us have to bang around,” he said. “We dig a deep hole, fall in for a few years, go wrong, go wrong, go wrong and then learn from it and accomplish what we were always meant to do.”

Glew, who is nothing if not relentless, isn’t done yet.

He is pushing for a book and feature film. He also wants Pez Candy Inc. to make what he calls amends for its actions in the ‘90s. He wants the company to make a dispenser in Glew’s likeness. It would be called the Pez Outlaw.

Like we said, Steve Glew is a dreamer.

Glew and his alter ego

Glew doesn’t like to talk about himself but can talk about Pez Outlaw all day long. Not "Pez Outlaw," the movie, but Pez Outlaw, his alter ego.

Glew and the Outlaw dress like a homeless person with an oversized T-shirt, dirty jeans and a raggedy bucket hat. Their beard is a foot long. (They measured it.)

They have been described as a fabulist who likes to tweak a good story, a megalomaniac whose delusions keep coming true, an anti-hero who doesn’t care what others think.

The last description comes from their wife.

Kathy Glew, 71, who is as plain-spoken as her husband is fanciful, said he once was a recluse who didn’t like people. He became so fixated on projects that he ignored everyone around him, she said. They’ve been married 51 years.

“He was a good guy, but you had to look for it,” Kathy said about their early years together.

The Pez Outlaw apologizes for none of it.

He knows that people feel his smuggling was dishonest and that he deserved his comeuppance. And he certainly knows people don’t believe he should be rewarded with a movie.

But Glew said he was raised in poverty and lacked the life paths available to most people.

“We’re all dreamers, everybody, especially the blue-collar and poor. We dream of a better life,” he said. “I come from not fancy. You learn some shortcuts and you learn how to navigate. We’re not all round pegs going into round holes. Some of us are square and we don’t fit and we had to find our own way.”

It started with garbage cans

The smuggling story told by Glew is audacious, and most of it is even true. If one has to choose between truth and myth, always go with myth, he said. It makes for a more interesting yarn.

To back up Glew’s accounts, The Detroit News interviewed 14 people and reviewed photos, bills of sale, financial documents and other communications he posted on two blogs that stretched over a dozen years.

Here’s what The News learned:

In the 1990s, Glew was a machine operator who made extra money by selling thousands of toys given out by cereal companies. He obtained the items by scouring the trash containers of a recycling plant for cereal boxes and cutting out the coupons.

His compulsive collecting followed years of drug and alcohol abuse as a teenager.

“You figure something out and then you go at it hard,” he told The News. “You don’t go gently. You go in and you play as hard as you can. You do it as fast as you can. You don’t yield. You don’t hold back. It’s an all-or-nothing type of deal. That’s the only way I know how to do it."

He was selling the cereal items at a toy fair in 1992 when he saw a dealer hawking $1 Pez dispensers for $25. The four-inch cartridges with character heads that eject candy are popular with baby boomers nostalgic about their childhoods.

As with any collectible, the rarer the better. Some designs had been discontinued while others were sold only outside the U.S.

Pez dealers are a ravenous bunch. They called company executives incessantly to learn about new models. They dug through Pez’s trash bins looking for rejects until the firm erected a fence around them.

“You’re always looking for something unique,” said John Devlin, 67, a collector from  St. Louis, Missouri. “Nothing compares to the feeling you get with a great find.”

Devlin has bought 10,000 dispensers over 34 years, including one that cost $2,500.

As usual, Glew thought bigger than everyone else.

The homeless-looking fella with the ZZ Top beard traveled around the world, including South Africa and Australia, looking for Pez.

He had no idea what he was doing at the beginning. In 1994, he flew to Ljubljana, Slovenia, after a collector showed him a rare Pez dispenser that came from a warehouse there.

Driving at night, he couldn’t see the road signs, and even if he could, he didn’t know the language. He got lost and was stopped by gun-toting guards on a dirt road along the western border of Croatia, which was embroiled in a civil war.

When he showed up at the Slovenian warehouse unannounced, he told them he was from America and had money to burn.

“He was some hillbilly from Michigan who basically did this commando landing in Europe,” said David Welch, 60, a longtime Pez dealer from Murphysboro, Illinois. “He had no connections. There was no internet, no cellphones. He was in these not really safe countries. There was a lot of s--- that could have gone wrong.”

He would proceed to travel nearly every month for 11 years, packing $10,000 in $20 bills, paying bribes, negotiating at border crossings, and filling five duffel bags with 10,000 dispensers.

He rarely went sightseeing. He wasn’t interested. He ate at McDonald’s and Pizza Hut.

He said he eventually struck an illicit deal with a high-level Pez executive in Europe to repeatedly receive liquidated dispensers from a warehouse in Gyor, Hungary. The executive even made extras on the side for him.

Glew paid 27 cents for dispensers he sold for $5. A discontinued one would sell for $25. A prototype or factory reject would fetch $1,000.

In all, he said he smuggled 2 million Pez dispensers into the U.S.

“I broke a lot of rules if not actual laws,” he said. “Rules were rearranged if you’ll allow me to put it in a sunny light. You dance the line. It’s a razor’s edge. One slip the wrong way and you’re a jailbird.”

Glew was allowed to bring the Pez merchandise into the U.S. because Pez had failed to register its trademark with customs, according to a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

While it was technically legal to bring the items into the U.S., Pez Inc. is the only entity licensed to sell them in the country, however. The company never sued Glew but would eventually do something just as damaging.

From rags to riches

Glew, who already knew poverty, became acquainted with wealth.

A venture that began with $4,000 turned into millions of dollars. In 1998 alone, he grossed $750,000 selling Pez, he said. He quit his job and hired staff. He paid the six workers bonuses.

He replaced his small farmhouse with a big farmhouse. He bought horses and a barn to put them in. His son, Josh, bought a house. His daughter, Moriah, went to college.

“It was magic,” he said. “The whole time was magic. I won the lottery.”

Pez dealers couldn’t get enough of his wares.

At Pezamania, the largest annual Pez convention, held at a Holiday Inn outside Cleveland, he occupied the same premier corner of a banquet room, spreading his dispensers over five tables, said dealers.

At the event’s traditional bingo night, he wore a gorilla suit while playing Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run.”

He dumped a refrigerator box full of Pez body parts onto the middle of a hotel floor, and kids slid into it, grabbing arms-full of material, said dealers. He held a second giveaway for adults, who were even more frenetic than the youngsters.

“He came with these large moving boxes full of dispensers,” said Linda Gliha, 67, a Pez dealer from Valrico, Florida, who hosted Pezamania for 10 years. “People were dying to get as many as they could.”

Pez gets even

Pez was alarmed by the growing black market of dispensers in the U.S. Among them were prototypes of designs that hadn’t been released yet.

It wasn’t hard to figure out who was behind the barrage.

Glew took out full-page ads in toy periodicals selling his inventory. He was so blatant that he got calls from reporters assuming he worked for Pez.

After Pez in the U.S. complained to the headquarters in Austria about all the bootlegs showing up in America, the European executive who was working with Glew told him it was too dangerous to continue.

So Glew said he hatched a new scheme. In 1998, he designed his own dispensers and used a middleman to have Pez make them.

He remortgaged his home for $125,000 and took out a loan for another $125,000. A toy broker ordered the items for a German candy manufacturer who purportedly planned to sell them in Taiwan. Once they reached Taiwan, however, they were rerouted to Glew in Michigan.

Glew paid $5 for each dispenser and planned to sell them for $25, turning his $250,000 investment into $2.5 million. And, for several months, his sales were brisk.

One morning, he logged onto the Pez website and discovered a new section called Misfit Dispensers. He clicked it and was staring at replicas of his designs. Pez had reproduced all 18 of them and was preparing to flood the market.

Glew said he had been promised exclusivity with his product. The trickster had been tricked.

“What is going on?” he wrote in a fax to the toy broker. “We have been cheated!”

“The right hand knows what the left is doing,” responded the broker.

Glew dropped his price to $15, but Pez lowered its to $5. Glew eventually sold them for $2.

The debacle left him $250,000 in debt, he said. He still owes about half of it.

“I went up so fantastically, elaborately in flames. I mean, you couldn’t destroy yourself more spectacularly than I did,” he said. “I had a haybarn full of product. Now it’s just a haybarn.”

During one of his trips to Europe, Glew once had an argument with a rival dealer who, like Glew, seemed to have ready access to old warehouse models. The dealer, Johann Patek of Vienna, Austria, said Glew was in too much of a hurry.

Making the comeback

After the collapse of his enterprise, Glew retreated to his 20-acre farm.

He stopped going to toy shows and conventions. He stopped taking phone calls. He stopped talking to people, period.

It was just him and Kathy and their 13 dogs, cats and horses living along a dirt road in an isolated rural neighborhood north of Lansing. He was a recluse again.

“It was horrible,” said Tina Gunsauls, 79, a friend and Pez dealer from Red Bluff, California. “They hurt him. He was a broken man.”

Glew needed to make money, but the boxes of newly made Pez that filled every room of his home were worthless. He had to find something new to sell. It took a while but he finally seized upon it. He would sell himself. He would sell his rags-to-riches-to-rags story.

In 2010, he began writing a blog to catch the fancy of a book publisher or movie producer.

Every morning, he sat in the basement typing on his computer. He said he spent a dozen years burnishing the story, trying to make his character more likable, preparing him for public consumption. He gave him a nickname, the Pez Outlaw.

The blog provided advice about how the movie should be made (show the Outlaw being mistreated early in the film to build sympathy) and suggested who should play him (originally Bill Murray, but now he likes Jack Black).

He said the film should end with a backshot of him on the set watching the making of the movie about his life.

“Who doesn’t want to read somebody else’s diary. Especially if it is about Scoundrels and Thieves,” he wrote in the blog in 2017. “Spies, Blackmarket deals, Bribes, life in the underworld of Collecting Pez.”

The blog sometimes lapses into attacks on Pez and the former president of its U.S. operation, Scott McWhinnie. He blames McWhinnie, who referred to himself as the Pezident, for orchestrating his downfall.

Glew told The News he’s no longer angry, but the issue still seems to rankle. McWhinnie retired in 2003 but is frequently mentioned in the blog.

“I hated his guts,” Glew said.

McWhinnie declined to comment.

Landing a film deal

In 2011, Glew listed his blog on eBay, offering the rights to his life story for $75,000, “plus two points on the back end.”

After Playboy magazine wrote a story, Warner Bros. optioned the movie rights in 2015 but dropped the idea after several years. Glew was then contacted by several documentarians before settling on Bryan and Amy Storkel, who were producers of “The Legend of Cocaine Island” on Netflix.

After a 12-year wait, Glew feels vindicated but has little time to savor the feeling. He’s already contemplating the next step. A TV series may be in offing. A book publisher has been contacted.

He also is selling Pez-like figures called the Pez Outlaw. They feature a series of characters in his likeness dressed in different garb, including prison stripes. They’re made by a 3D printing facility in Texas, not by Pez.

When it was announced that the documentary had been bought by a distributor and would be released Oct. 21, Glew raised the prices of the figures to $30.

When he used to fantasize in his blog about a movie being made, he figured its impact would last for three years, which gave him what he said was a small window of opportunity.

He’s still waiting on a payday, and the clock is ticking.

“The Playboy writer got paid, I did not. The documentarian got paid, I did not,” said Glew, who received a nominal fee for the documentary. “But this is just the beginning. In life, you finish one thing and, boom, there’s the next thing and you begin again. I have big dreams for Pez Outlaw.”

fdonnelly@detroitnews.com