Happened to be watching the old show Unsolved Mysteries and saw the case of bodybuilder Richard Minns, a married bodybuilder who put a hit out on his girlfriend but the shooting left her paralyzed instead of dead. Minns began a chain of health clubs in the 60s and 70s called First Lady of Fitness(ironically what Betty Weider would come to be known as) and was a multi millionaire.
Celebrities like Farah Fawcett did ads for the health chain at the height of her fame. Minns and Weider were Jewish bodybuilders, about the same age, and both were into sculpture of bodybuilders. This was based on their philosophy of objectivism, made famous by author Ayn Rand who whose well known work
Atlas shrugged was an inspiration to many including Weider, Minns and later Mike Mentzer who was devoted to Ayn Rand and objectivism. It was no coincidence that an Italian immigrant named himself Charles Atlas to become a bodybuilding icon. They were all part of this Atlas society, and Richard Minns was essentially a broke bodybuilder who was made in charge of the clubs with the help of a guy named Bob Delmonteque, who was closely associated with Weider.
Somehow Richard Minns had DEEP connections that let him avoid jail and escape, where he lived in Tel Aviv, and has been honored for his sculpture Atlas Shrugged by the Ayn Rand society of Israel despite his murderous past. I cannot see these connections somehow not coming back to Weider. There were also some fishy things with the clubs including money laundering charges, which may or may not have become Bally's fitness as the paper trail gets murky around the 80s.
The woman Minns had shot now runs wheelchair marathons as she is paralyzed for life, the story was on Unsolved Mysteries yet Minns was honored for his sculpture and never faced any charges, despite being arrested finally in 1994 off an airplane but was magically released. All charges dropped.
BTW, I believe that Mike Mentzer got all of his Ayn Rand objectivism rants from Weider but did not fully understand them. So when he went mad and fell into drugs, he was rambling about these things he got from Weider but he had spun them into madness.
Yet Weider's whole thing about bodybuilding was the philosophy of creating your own reality. Sculpting the human body was in many ways changing what God gave you. This is blasphemous in some circles, especially back in the 40s when Weider started. But it is an objectivist perspective, which Weider adopted. Bodybuilding was a philosophy to him. As well as Richard Minns and a whole underground bodybuilding society. Have not connected all the dots yet so it's just gossip and opinion. Notomorrow.
