It’s a tantalizing offer to anyone fallen on hard times: Here’s a business that promises to make you $150,000, in your spare time, in just a couple of years. All it costs to get started is $250—and a dream. A salesman from the network marketing company Amway made this pitch to Erik German’s father in the early 1980s and touched off the darkest chapter in his family’s past. Two decades later, armed with a reporter’s notebook, German investigates the grim reality behind the gleaming promises of a company that offers personal deliverance in the service of selling soap.