Happy at Any Cost by Kirsten Grind & Katherine Sayre

Author:Kirsten Grind & Katherine Sayre
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2022-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

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Anyone in Tony’s entourage who brought in business or a project to help with his vision was paid a commission, ultimately funded by Tony’s fortune, estimated years earlier at about $840 million.I

As she had for much of the last seventeen years, Mimi Pham took care of the details behind the scenes, although she did not move to Park City. In 2020, Tony was paying her a huge sum to be his personal manager: $30,000 per month, or $360,000 a year.

In Park City, Pham was in charge of formalizing new business deals, and she took a 10 percent commission on them, further increasing her income from Tony’s ventures. For example, when Tony retrofitted his luxury buses for $3.68 million, she claimed $368,000.

Suzie Baleson handled some of the contracts through her business, the Wellth Collective, enabling her to collect commissions, and a string of sticky notes posted on one door of the Ranch confirmed that process. A contract would start with the Wellth Collective, move to two other employees for initial approval, and then eventually move to Tony for final approval. Baleson, who called herself Tony’s business manager, moved her brother and sister-in-law to Park City as well, and her sister-in-law was also employed by Tony.

Connie Yeh, a cousin of Tony, was charged with transferring the money for the contracts, while Puoy Premsrirut, a Las Vegas attorney, typically drew up the necessary documents. Premsrirut, a friend of Tony, and Yeh had also worked with Tony on the Downtown Project in Las Vegas.

Weniger, meanwhile, now referred to himself as Tony’s “bodyguard,” ostensibly protecting Tony from others around him. As an organizer of the Life Is Beautiful music festival, he had also been tasked with developing several music projects.

Many of the group’s plans were documented in daily online schedules kept by more than a dozen new employees and assistants hired by Tony, among them Anthony Hebert, Elizabeth Pezzello, and Brett Gorman.

Pezzello, a former competitive swimmer and Miss New York USA contestant, had followed Baleson to Park City as one of Tony’s assistants. Though she had briefly worked as an executive assistant at the cloud storage company Dropbox in San Francisco, her last job had been as a YMCA swim instructor in Florida. Her fiancé, Brett Gorman, an investment manager in New York and graduate of Bowdoin College, tagged along. Gorman has a dog and loves to play golf, according to a series of sticky notes describing him at the Ranch: “Super athletic, healthy, have sense of urgency, hospitality focused” and “Love to make people laugh.”

Pezzello’s Instagram feed shows the courtship of the sun-kissed couple, both in their early thirties, over several years in New York, San Francisco, and Naples, Florida, where Pezzello is from: Pezzello, with long blond hair and flawless makeup, posing on the beach or on the ski slopes; Gorman, with a wide smile and an unshaven face, standing by her side or carrying her on his shoulders. Later the two would start a “vitamin-infused hydration therapy” business in Naples, delivering vitamins intravenously into people’s arms.

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