-It was a Beanie Baby backup on Interstate 285 West.
- Oh, my God, the guy's stopping! - It was no longer a child's toy.
It was the thrill of the hunt for me then.
- You're how old? - 20.
-It kind of got addictive.
-At the height of America's rising prosperity in the '90s,
the frenzy over a new toy mirrors the stock market.
[ Indistinct shouting ]
- They want Beanie Babies. - A Beanie Baby.
-The wolves on this Wall Street may be stuffed...
-Ruff!
- but they bite.
-The homicidal, bloodthirsty...
-Greedy, slimy people.
-I think I'm through because it's getting out of hand.
I am concerned. [ Children cheering ]
-But a kid's toy leading to counterfeiting...
-They only retail for $5,
but some of these are a lot more valuable.
- armed robbery and tax fraud...
-No one is above the law, and everyone,
including the wealthy, has to pay their dues.
- and even murder. [ Gunshot ]
-That's not far from the truth.
♪♪
[ Dial-up modem screeching ]
♪♪
[ Dial-up modem screeching ]
[ Bell clanging ]
-In the early '90s,
as America is starting to dial up the Internet...
[ Indistinct shouting ]
the dot-com bubble
that'll define the decade is just starting to inflate.
-Wall Street believes that the Internet is the future.
-In a Chicago suburb,
an old-fashioned toymaker is quietly stitching a new creation
that will give birth to a real-world frenzy
and help launch the country into cyberspace.
[ Children cheering ]
His name is Ty Warner, and his invention is a pair of small,
slightly understuffed plush animals...
Brownie the Bear and Pinchers the Lobster.
He calls them Beanie Babies.
-A Beanie Baby is a bean bag filled with pellets
that is shaped like an animal.
My name is Lina Trivedi,
and I was the 12th employee to work at Ty.
They were so bold and bright, they just stood out,
with these facial features that will just capture you
and just make you fall in love with it.
-Here is Peanut, the royal blue elephant.
The magenta teddy.
Lots of people came up with clothes.
[ Laughs ]
I don't think you can look at a Beanie Baby and not smile.
My name is Mary Beth Sobolewski, and I am a self-proclaimed
Beanie Baby addict.
And I was also editor in chief
of Mary Beth's Beanie World magazine.
-I never want people to forget
that these were beautiful plush toys.
-My name is Mark Bellomo,
and I'm a toy and pop culture expert.
Let's get this out of the way.
I own about 100,000 action figures
and about 250,000 comics.
And I own every figure, vehicle, weapon, accessory,
creature, playset, mail-away, and promotional
for every action-figure line that's been made
since 1964.
-When Ty Warner officially launches Beanie Babies,
there are nine animals in the collection,
each with a heart-shaped tag bearing his first name.
-The sales strategy, as I understood it,
was, this was something that was special,
and in order for it to be deemed as special,
you wouldn't find it at a big-box retailer.
You would go to those small mom-and-pop shops.
-But many storeowners initially refused to stock Beanie Babies,
and his competitors reportedly dismissed the toys as roadkill.
-They started production in '93.
Nobody cared.
'94, nobody cared.
-But anyone who picked up a Beanie Baby
couldn't seem to put it down.
-It was really difficult to walk past a table
without just picking them up and, you know,
bouncing them around.
It was addicting to just be handling them.
-I'll use a French word. Their puissance,
their purity really made people take notice.
And that's what I've always really appreciated
about Ty Warner as a designer.
♪♪
[ Indistinct shouting ]
-By Christmas of '95, regionally in Chicago,
where their headquarters was, people cared.
-I think they're fun to collect.
-Now, two years into production,
Ty is selling the $5 Beanies
at select gift shops around Chicago.
-That's here.
-The company is also turning out many new characters,
but exactly how many is a company secret.
One that's designed to cultivate demand.
-Well, collectors wanted them all.
Wouldn't you want them all?
-I'm gonna get the... the weenie dog.
-It was so fun to be with our kids,
going store to store, having a little checklist,
and bonding together.
- Smoochy. - This is Legs.
-This is Ally.
-As the little group started collecting, it just caught on.
-I need to take some to Michigan.
They can't seem to find them up there.
- Really? - Yeah. Very short.
-Your friends had the ones that you were missing.
It made you want them.
-Goldie! We don't have Goldie! Yes!
-Why are they selling them so cheap?
- There aren't cheap. - [ Laughs ]
-I was going by a collectible store,
gift shops in the area. They were more prevalent then.
And I looked in the window,
and there were these beautiful butterflies.
So I went, and I purchased three of the Flitter butterflies
and then purchased 10 other Beanies.
And I brought them home, and my daughter
fell in love with them.
I'm Becky Phillips, and my whole life in the 1990s
between 1995 and 2000 was involved with Beanie Babies.
[ Crowd chanting in native language ]
-Toys in the '80s were conflict-based.
The age of the Cold War and Ronald Reagan,
so we had a lot of toy lines
that were good guys versus bad guys.
-You got to get up early to catch Cobra.
-Cobra Commander and G.I. Joe figures...
-Where in the 1990s, the Berlin Wall falls.
You don't have that Communist other anymore.
You have a period of relative prosperity.
[ Crowd cheering ]
So when you're talking about a lot of these animal-based
'90s action figure and toy lines,
it was more based on whimsy than it was the real world.
-The country in the middle of the decade looks different
than it did at the start.
The recession that got Bill Clinton elected is over.
-There is no doubt that the economic strategy
we put in place in 1993 created the conditions
for the extraordinary private-sector growth
we have all witnessed.
-More Americans have jobs and are making more money.
They're also beginning to dip their toes
into the waters of the World Wide Web.
-Tonight, the information superhighway
and one of its main thoroughfares,
an online network called Internet.
-I was going to school full time at DePaul University
and learned about the Internet
through one of my college professors.
So I was, like, kind of running things in my head,
and I was like, "You know, we... We have these Beanie Babies,
but people don't necessarily know what Beanie Babies exist."
So I was like, "What if we just had a way
that people can go to this website?"
My brother was a senior in high school,
so I just asked Ty, I said, "Hey, can I get some help?
I think my brother can come in after school,
and we can get things done quicker."
I had the computer set up, and I just made a mock page.
It had to have been the ugliest thing
that anyone has ever seen on the Internet.
And I called Ty into this little office
that I had this computer set up in
and said, "You know, this is the Internet."
♪ Ahh ♪
[ Laughs ]
[ Dial-up modem screeching ]
And he got it.
He understood it right away. And he said, "You know, yeah.
Why don't you put some time and work on it
and just show me what you come up with?"
[ Dial-up modem screeching ]
-When Warner flips the switch on ty.com in late 1996,
he makes Internet history.
His website, designed far from Silicon Valley
by Lina and her brother in high school,
will accidentally create a reason companies
create websites... To sell things.
-Never at any point was the Ty website
selling Beanie Babies directly to consumers.
The website was designed as a tool
to provide information on the product.
We had a blog, and we had a guest book,
and we had all these ways that people could interact.
It wasn't like we, at the time were like,
"We're gonna build the first business-to-consumer website.
Let's do it." You know? It was just what happened.
-We started to get on the website
because that's all there was on the Internet.
-But Ty's new Beanie Baby website
takes on a life of its own.
[ Dial-up modem screeching ]
[ Mouse clicks ]
-So you were reaching out to different people
through chat rooms.
There were a lot of teenagers.
And instead of talking about Beanies,
all the teenagers were asking each other out online,
there was foul language on the site.
-And then people would sometimes be chatting back and forth.
Sometimes people would start arguing.
-And so Ty Warner was very upset
because nobody was really talking about Beanie Babies.
So after four months, he closed it down.
-This isn't the end of ty.com.
-Hey, yo, deejay, hey, yo, deejay ♪
-Warner will relaunch it with a scheme
that triggers a modern-day gold rush.
-About every four months, they will retire a Beanie,
so then prices will start immediately going up.
-We could be millionaires!
-But as Notorious B.I.G. will rap about in the '90s,
mo' money, mo' problems.
And it won't be long before a shadow falls
over the sunny world of Beanie Babies.
-Ty Warner had to take the Ty heart off of shipping boxes
because they would assault UPS drivers.
[ Siren wailing, police radio chatter ]
-Such staggering amounts of money are being made
by people who are so young. - Get used to it.
-By 1996, there's a fever building in America.
The Internet has arrived,
and the stock of companies with a dot-com in their name
is seen as can't miss by investors.
-This is absolutely real.
This is a revolution.
-Seemingly overnight,
speculators are making bank on dot-com stocks from companies
that have yet to turn a profit. [ Applause ]
With the Internet fast becoming the land of opportunity,
Ty Warner's looking to stake his claim.
So four months after shuttering his website,
he relaunches it, with an announcement
that sets Beanie Baby fans ablaze.
-Ty co-opted that idea, Ty the man, and said,
"We're gonna start retiring some of these."
That made people think, "Oh, my God,
they're never gonna make those again,
so I had better go back and buy the ones that I had missed."
♪♪
-Ty wanted very much to have total control
over not only his product, but the entire market.
-So it was just an incredibly clever strategy
to make people believe
that there was a scarcity to these products.
It was... It was brilliant.
-I would find it very hard to believe
that there was any site on the Internet at that time
that was getting more traffic than the Beanie Babies website.
People would post messages like, "Hey, everybody,
I have a Beanie Baby
that I'm willing to trade for this much,
or I'm willing to sell for this much."
-$200. $300.
-He's worth anywhere from $500 to probably $900.
- Bongo retired. - I know.
Don't touch him, though.
-A lot of the moms during that time
were hunting for the Beanie Babies,
and then after a while, it kind of got addictive for me
to find as many as possible. - Total addiction.
Once you fall in love with them, you're all through.
You'll do anything to get more.
-It was no longer a child's toy.
It was the thrill of the hunt for me then.
-Say "bye"! [ Laughs ]
-America is hooked.
By year's end,
Ty Warner's retirement ploy is working.
Now sold in stores across the country, Ty's Beanie Babies
generate an estimated $28 million in sales,
5 bucks at a time.
-Well, they started lining up at 1:30
in the afternoon yesterday for our 8:00 sale.
-If you don't have a number, you're not gonna be let in
till everybody else who has a number have been rotated out.
-Every time he would retire Beanies,
they started buying not one or two...
They were buying hundreds of them.
-Aah! This is crazy.
[ Indistinct conversations ]
-Having artificially created a full-fledged craze,
Ty Warner is no longer just a toymaker.
He's a bona fide puppet master...
And an elusive one at that.
-He did no commercials, he did no interviews,
so people wanted to know, like, "Who is this person?"
-When you read the harrowing stories of his youth,
you realize and recognize that this guy had it tough.
Ty Warner was a very unhappy kid who got in a little trouble,
and his father sent him off to a military academy,
where he excelled. He had a mother
who was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic.
And he only wanted his mother's love.
And Georgia, his mother, just refused him any time she could.
-Ty's childhood lays the foundation
for what he becomes... A natural-born salesman.
His ability and flamboyant appearance
make him a standout at his first job...
Salesman for the Dakin toy company.
-He would get all dressed up in this huge fur coat
with a top hat and a cane.
And he was driving in this white Rolls-Royce,
and he got the attention of the storekeepers that way...
The gift shops, the collectible stores at the time.
-He was making more in commissions than their CEO.
That's all you need to know about him as a salesman.
-But when his bosses discovered
that he was working on his own toy creations,
first comes the pink slip, then comes Ty Inc.
-He was a lot like Willy Wonka.
You hardly ever saw him.
And he was always dressed in all black
in an era where people didn't do that.
-I don't think he ever received the love that he needed.
So he poured all the unconditional,
positive regard that he had built up into his toys.
[ Crowd cheering ]
3, 2, 1.
[ Cheers and applause ]
-As the '90s turn another year older,
Beanie Babies hit a massive growth spurt.
-Last night we found this site, which is ebay.com.
It's an auction site.
-eBay was created by Pierre Omidyar as a website
called AuctionWeb.
Before the rise of eBay,
I used to have to go to a local dealer and say,
"How much will you give me for this?"
He'd say, "Well, I've only got $100 in the register.
That's all I can offer you."
Enter eBay.
So where you might have an audience of three
to 10 people in a local store for an item,
you would have hundreds, potentially thousands,
when you put it up on eBay.
So that creates and perpetuates
the secondary market value of the object.
-It was the natural economics of supply and demand.
The people who had the supply would put them on auction,
and the people who really wanted them
would bid them up to astronomic prices.
-I would say over $5,000.
- $5,000? - Yeah.
-This is my livelihood, basically,
but I am a hairdresser.
So I do work one day a week,
but I do sleep, eat, and breathe Beanies.
-We were on eBay every day almost the whole day,
looking for the Beanies, checking the prices.
-At one point, 7% to 10%
of all business of all listings on eBay were Beanie Babies.
It was absolutely revolutionary.
And collectors were essential to the rise of eBay.
-If eBay is a boon for some collectors,
it's a digital bonanza for Ty Warner.
In 1996, his company's profits jump tenfold
from just the year before.
Total revenue... $280 million.
-This is the first time in 30 years
that something this big has happened.
I think the last thing probably was the hula hoop.
-The Beanie Baby train is already moving fast,
and then fast food decides to climb on board.
- First I got Pinky. - Then I got Pinky.
-I got Pinky and Patti in the same week.
- What, Vanessa catch something? - Teenie-weenie Baby-itis.
-Now at McDonald's, your kids can get Teenie Beanie Babies
in a Happy Meal.
-Something in Ty Warner's head recognized
the potential of offering a tiny or a smaller Beanie Baby
in a Happy Meal as a way to promote his product globally.
-The campaign is an instant hit.
-I got a zebra. I got a pig.
-So much so that McDonald's
keeps it rolling the following year.
-They're cute. And they're worth a lot of money.
-But it will soon spin out into a free-for-all
that will derail the fun...
-Oh, my God! Look at this.
- and bloody the Beanie craze.
-What started out to be so fun now was getting so ugly.
-They're rolling on this, right?
- What do they give away here? - They have Beanie Babies.
-When McDonald's kicks off its second Teenie Beanie
giveaway in the summer of 1998,
there's a whiff of tension in the air.
-I had to eat a Happy Meal today so I could get one
for my other kids,
and then they can fight over it when we get home.
-Fueled by bidders on eBay,
a full set of the give-away plushies
are now worth 75 bucks on the secondary market.
And that's leading to
some very un-Happy-Meal family experiences.
-What we did is, we gave
each of our older children a $20 bill
to wait in line to get a Happy Meal.
So we had four children and ourselves in line
to get as many Happy Meals as we could.
And we would go there to the next McDonald's.
-I just met a man in line, and we're gonna trade
because I needed a moose, and so I'm gonna trade my fish
for a moose that I got yesterday.
-The bags that you purchased had pictures of Beanie Babies
all over them, so people were like,
"Give me the bag, give me the box,
give me the Beanie, and keep the food."
-When word spreads that some McDonald's around the country
are running out, the mania spirals into mayhem.
-The woman in front of me, they had turned over a card
that they were out of something, and she went nuts.
-It was no longer a restaurant.
It was basically a line to get a Teenie Beanie.
-It was disrupting business.
-I've heard that people kind of take them out of your hand.
-Adults standing in line and punching each other
to get Happy Meals. That happened.
-The worst I've seen as far as for a stuffed animal
or a toy for, you know, a child.
-That McDonald's promotion of Teenie Beanies
is what really became the zenith.
The homicidal, bloodthirsty lines
for Beanie Babies... That was the... the apex.
-It was a Beanie Baby backup on Interstate 285 West.
After a load of McDonald's-bound Teenie Beanie bears
spilled out into the middle of the interstate,
most drivers simply slowed down,
but others saw gold, and they went for it.
-There it is! There it is! [ Laughs ]
Oh, my God! Look at this.
Are they... They're rolling on this, right?
-It became a very different market.
It was no longer the moms and their kids.
It became people's full-time jobs
because they thought it was easy money.
So when that happens,
you start to attract a whole different type of person.
For a long time, my job was handling the articles,
and I would see these newspaper articles of people
running after UPS trucks.
-It's just one of those little fads, like Elmo.
"Come here. Elmo."
They want Beanie Babies.
-Ty Warner had to take the Ty heart off of shipping boxes
because they would assault UPS drivers.
-I'll... I'll come out of a back of a store,
and there'll be five people waiting on me.
-There was a lot of theft.
-A security guard making the rounds
was surprised by two men, who jumped him from behind.
-Many organized crime rings recognized the value of Beanies,
and instead of drugs, instead of prostitution,
instead of guns,
they would actually break into shops to steal Beanie Babies.
[ Glass shattering ]
-I think I'm through because it's getting out of hand.
I am concerned.
It is.
-And when counterfeiting started, really?!
-Very popular and easy to sell. No serial numbers, no markings,
no nothing. No way to trace any of the stolen goods.
-You started to get
the counterfeit Beanies from Beijing.
And they were coming into the country through eBay.
We had collectors who had spent $10,000 on Beanies,
and every one of them were fake.
-What we found was, 456 pieces were seized
for infringement on the popular Beanie Baby copyright.
[ Siren wailing, police radio chatter ]
-When it became an arena of greedy,
slimy people trying to slide into the joy
of this collecting market, I lost my joy.
-Although the counterfeit market
is cutting into Ty Warner's bottom line,
1998 is still a banner year.
His company's profits hit $1 billion,
and he personally takes home more than $700 million.
But the more he makes, the less we see him.
-The newspapers would call and want a quote from the company
as they were writing an article about Beanie Babies
in their newspaper about the craze, about this new product.
-The more they tried, the more he pulled back.
-You think of him as a strange Willy Wonka type.
You think of him as a man in an ivory tower
making decisions and laboring over the toys.
And that's not far from the truth.
He's a man literally in a tower.
He bought the Four Seasons Hotel
and renovated its penthouse suite.
-If Warner's home is a tower, his headquarters
in Westmont, Illinois, is a fortress, and employees
are seemingly under strict gag orders from above.
-They had the Westmont police patrolling that building
at all times.
You could go inside and talk to the front desk,
but you would get no information.
You weren't able to talk to anybody.
-Okay.
♪♪
-We all knew that there was gonna be coming
a Beanie Baby called the Billionaire Beanie Baby.
Ty Warner was gonna be giving those to his employees.
So I load my baby at 6 months old in the car seat,
and the two of us go on over to Ty's parking lot.
The publisher sends me $5,000 in cash
and told me to offer that to employees.
And I start offering them to people.
I tried maybe 10 different employees coming out,
and they all turned me down, and with fear in their eyes.
[ Baby crying ]
So I stopped that, and I just sat in the parking lot.
I took my baby out of the car seat to feed him.
And as I'm feeding this baby, the Westmont police
comes over with his hands on his guns
and says, "You need to get out of this parking lot right now!
This is private property." I'm like, "Well,
can I just finish feeding my baby?"
"Right now!"
And here I'm just a suburban mom with a little baby.
[ Baby crying ]
-Like every company, the maker of Beanie Babies
has trade secrets and business strategies to protect.
And as Ty Warner approaches the fourth year
of his Beanie Baby boom,
he's about to reveal a scheme that will crush collectors
and topple the market.
-Near the end of President Clinton's
second term... - A Beanie Baby.
I love that. [ Laughs ] I love that.
- and on the eve of a new millennium,
much of America is living like the bubble
can only keep expanding.
-Bought it for $10,000. 150,000 3/8.
-$5,000. $5,000.
-From the titans of Wall Street to New York City cabbies,
folks across the economic spectrum
are partying like it's 1999...
-Dot-com! Whoo!
- thanks to massive windfalls
from their dot-com stock trading.
And while the good times continue to roll
on the stock exchanges,
so it goes in the Beanie exchange, as well.
-Do you have any retired ones?
They have sold for $8,800 in different places.
-There were a lot of collectors that quit their jobs,
and they were at the trade shows. So we would meet them.
And there were some of the... The girls that were collecting,
they had the most beautiful jewelry I've ever seen.
They had diamond necklaces, diamond earrings.
And she was making, she said, every month
about $30,000 just in her Beanie profits.
-He is the king of all Beanies.
The prize. Number one.
- So how much is he? - He's $5,200.
-Well, you've got to remember that television programs,
newspapers and magazines,
and Beanie Baby-centric magazines
that sprung up all perpetuated this value myth.
-Isn't that cute? What would you rather have...
A... a new car or Peanut the Elephant?
-There was also a book that came out
that was predicting the prices of the Beanies
and how they would go up,
and he was predicting very high prices.
And so people were reading this as if it was the truth.
-All items can be found in Mary Beth's Beanie World.
-It's an international magazine.
We're now printing over 1 million copies per month.
Like, in this magazine, there are pictures of every single
Beanie Baby every month and their values.
-There was a layer of people that were looking at this
as an investment, like, you know,
"Oh, I have stock in Walmart,
and I also have these Beanie Babies."
-There were a lot of people that watched their friends
get incredibly wealthy off Internet stocks
and really wanted to... to get in on it.
But they didn't have enough money to invest,
so they... they went to Beanie Babies.
This is all fueled by the fact that
the initial investment cost was $5.
-It's a $5 bill
with the potential for thousands of dollars in revenue,
and that's in everyone's mind.
-At one point, I was offered $100,000
for my entire collection.
And guess what. I couldn't sell.
It became like a part of me, like an appendage,
an arm or a leg, this collection.
-Many people have a sentimentality for what they own
and a belief in that if it's a collectible,
we'll always appreciate.
People wanted to keep these for a long time
because they truly believed in their hearts
that this was gonna put their kids through college.
And I think that forced many collectors to hold on
to their collections well past the due date.
-Almond. I don't have Almond, right?
-While prices in the secondary market
are still in the stratosphere,
wholesale orders are beginning to dip.
Having successfully sparked the now four-year-old craze
with his retirement scheme,
Ty Warner comes up with a new plan to juice demand
and prove that he can make lightning strike twice.
-Ty Warner put out a large message to the media.
December 31, 1999,
the entire line of Beanie Babies will be retired.
That is big, big news.
-So, again, you had all these questions on the chat rooms
and people calling each other and saying, "What is he doing?"
♪♪
-They would put out messages on the website
that the end is coming.
-Well, I think it's really bad.
-Kind of sad 'cause I really like Beanie Babies.
-Ty wanted very much to have total control.
And he felt like the great Oz behind the curtain.
-Ty Warner expects his latest scheme
will lead to another payday,
but when a Beanie-related murder occurs
in small-town West Virginia,
it's the wake-up call that Beanie fever is about to break.
-I somewhat hope that the craze will start to die off
so our sanity can return to us again.
-Beanie Babies are dead.
It's over at December 31st.
The millennium, no more Beanie Babies.
-With months to go until the end of the decade,
word of Ty Warner's declaration that all Beanie Babies
will be retired on December 31st
creates fear and uncertainty in the collecting community.
-They will stop making them by the end of the year,
so I better go and get some. - We might pick up a few more.
- Mm. - Yeah, yeah.
-In the beginning, the collecting market started to go,
"Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no, no, no.
Oh, we got to collect all the ones that we don't have yet."
So it created more desire.
-In Elkins, West Virginia,
two night watchmen at a local lumber yard,
Jeffrey White and Harry Simmons,
are hoping to cash in on the rush.
The two purportedly have a plan to start a trading business.
Simmons loans White 150 bucks and several hundred dollars'
worth of Beanies to sell.
But the deal goes sideways when White doesn't pay Simmons.
The two argue.
White storms off.
And then returns with a gun.
[ Gunshot ]
When the smoke clears, Simmons is dead.
[ Siren wailing ]
And Jeff White is sent to prison.
♪♪
The final Beanie to be produced is named The End.
Stamped on the heart-shaped tag
attached to the little black bear is this poem...
"All good things come to an end. It's been fun for everyone.
Peace and hope are never gone.
Love you all, and say 'so long.'"
But as collectors soon discover,
the heartfelt message rings hollow.
-I believe it was always Ty's intention to keep
the Beanie Baby market going.
He thought in his mind, "If all this retirement had worked
so well all these years, can you imagine
if I retire them all and then I bring them out again?
People are gonna go crazy."
Well, the opposite happened.
-A few months later,
Ty restarts production with a Beanie Baby named The Beginning.
-People took that opportunity to quit.
They felt played.
[ Mouse clicks ]
That crashed the market just like a stock market crash.
-At one of the shows in Chicago, there was a collectible person
who was from Carlsbad, California, a huge collector,
and he came in with his Beanies, and he put them down,
threw the Beanies down on the floor, and said, "I'm done."
-The prices crashed.
Ty Warner made an enormous error for himself
and for all the collectors of Beanie Babies.
It was over. It was over.
♪♪
People were very, very disappointed.
They spent so much money,
and it wasn't at all what they had hoped.
Now, all of a sudden, you have a toy box full
with perfect tags of Beanie Babies that
can do no more than be played with at this point.
[ Children laughing ]
-The most famous or infamous story...
There was a soap-opera actor who invested
$100,000 worth of Beanie Babies
for his children's college education,
and then it... it just all falls apart.
-I was selling off a lot of our collection
by the end of 1999.
That connection I had with my children was kind of waning,
and they were going on to other things.
And so that was one of the reasons.
The other reasons really were there
were so many counterfeits on the market.
-They sell for 5 or 6 bucks apiece,
and they used to be tough to get, but not anymore.
The fad is fading.
-When talking about the Beanie Baby bubble,
values are based on speculation about future value.
It's not like oil futures
because you're not talking about a product
that has existed for hundreds of years.
So there are no patterns to look back on.
Eventually, that bubble burst.
-While the Beanie Baby faithful deal with the financial fallout,
Ty Warner is flush with cash.
He's made his billions, and his company
is now one of the wealthiest toy sellers in history.
But Warner's got a secret that will soon come back
to haunt him.
-No one is above the law, and everyone,
including the wealthy, has to pay their dues.
-Once in love with e-commerce,
Wall Street has turned its back on the dot-coms.
With the crash of the Nasdaq, the gravy train
came to a screeching halt for their dot-com industry.
-After the dot-com bubble pops in early 2000,
most used Beanie Babies are worth only pennies
of their original $5 sales price.
Beanie collections now collect nothing but dust.
And in 2004, when the Beanie Baby billionaire claims
losses of more than $39 million,
the IRS believes the toymaker is now playing financial games.
-It is imperative that when an individual brazenly breaks
the law and lies repeatedly year
over year on their income tax returns,
that that person be held accountable.
And that's true if you're rich or you're poor.
-More than a decade after the end of the Beanie Baby boom,
Ty Warner, now ranked 209
in the elite Forbes 400 richest people in America,
is arrested for tax evasion.
-Ty had an account.
And in this offshore account,
Ty nestled about $100 million
and didn't tell anybody about it.
-We know that there were a lot of people
who were not happy with Ty
that were kind of happy that he got caught.
When you burn bridges,
those people will go against you very quickly.
-Ty Warner was sentenced today. He got a two-year probation.
He also has to serve
500 hours of community service.
-Based on federal sentencing guidelines,
Warner could have faced up to 57 months in jail,
but the judge cuts him a break, in part
because of the tens of millions of dollars in charitable
contributions Warner has made through the years.
-He's a very complicated man.
He's a marketing genius.
He's incredibly wealthy.
But I think the best way to describe
Ty Warner is, I heard a story. His executives were asked,
"Would you trade places with Ty Warner?"
And every single one of them said, "Absolutely not."
Because of his profound sadness.
There's just a void that just can't get filled,
I guess.
-Being able to say that I did something
that was never done before
and I did it in association with a product as fun
and playful as Beanie Babies is something
that I will always hold dear to me.
In some kind of way,
the work that I did made an impact
to people. In some kind of way.
-When people ask me about collecting, I say,
"Don't collect things. Collect memories."
My little grandchildren, 1 1/2 and 3 1/2,
play with a lot of the Beanie Babies.
None of the original nine, might I say.
I still keep those tagged in a cabinet.
-A lot of parents now are holding those Beanie Babies,
giving them to their Millennials,
who now are having children.
And I think we're gonna have another generation
who will fall in love with these original Beanie Babies.
-I won't ever say that we'll never see anything
like Beanie Babies again in terms of the mania,
because, yes, there was a confluence of things
happening at just the perfect time
to drive the American people into a frenzy.
[ Children cheering ]
Hasn't happened yet,
but that doesn't mean that it couldn't happen.
♪♪
-I talked to Ty, and I told him, "You know, I think it would be
really cool to do something different in the tags."
And he said, "Sounds good. Can you show me an example?"
This is the first Beanie Baby poem
that I ever wrote.
This is Stripes the Tiger.
"Stripes was neither fierce nor strong.
So with other tigers, she did not get along.
Jungle life was hard getting by,
so she came to live with her friends at Ty."
[ Laughs ]
♪♪