I was just checking out some of my old internet marketing bookmarks which include people whom I haven’t heard from or about recently. Upon going to all of Gary Shawkey’s old site, I found they were all down. The domains looked like they had expired and were bought by one of those companies that buys up expired domains and then puts these very generic-looking pages up with links.
I’ve been in the internet marketing game for quite a few years now and I’ve seen “gurus” get famous and then disappear, sometimes after increasing numbers of allegations from people that they were scammed by said guru, sometimes disappearing without a whimper. This is not unexpected since some of these people made money on a gimmick that was destined to die out.
And of course some internet marketing super stars pass away, young and older, including some good people that I’ve met in person, such as Corey Rudl and Ken Giddens.
I did a search on Gary Shawkey to see if he was up to anything recently was shocked to find this:
http://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/Self-Help-Author-Arrested-for-Murder.html
Apparently sometime around February 2009 Gary Shawkey was suspected in the disappearance of an older man who had given him investment money in the past. Whoa! Haven’t really seen that in the internet marketing circle before. One of his claims to fame is that he is in the Guiness Book of World Records for fire walking, which was impressive to me at the time I read about it.
This is pretty shocking because he’s not being accused of accidental death after some nasty fight or some heat of the moment crime of passion. He’s being accused of planning and committing a cold-blooded murder just to get some money. Pretty nasty stuff. He stands to go away pretty much for the rest of his life if convicted.
Well, we’ll see what happens in this case, but either way this definitely looks like the end of his guru career.