Robert Sylvester
http://www.pantagraph.com/news/local/flick-a-millon-dollar-daughter-s-hard-luck-dad/article_216432f2-c92d-11df-847b-001cc4c03286.html
By Bill Flick | flick@pantagraph.com Sep 26, 2010
In an odd, obviously round-about way, you could say Mindy Sylvester is a lot like her dad.
She’s making headlines.
She is inventive, talented, clever, quick-thinking.
Mindy Sylvester?
She is a self-made millionaire, a 39-year-old woman living in Naples, Fla., a 1989 Normal Community High grad and ranked as one of the most successful real estate agents in the U.S. with her own company that sells million-dollar homes to relocating pro athletes and CEOs.
She is on a first-name basis with people like author Stephen King and also is a motivational speaker, sharing the stage with the likes of Colin Powell and Laura Bush at seminars across America and talking about how to succeed in life, even if reared in a dirt-poor, crime-racked home.
Her dad?
That would be Robert Sylvester.
He’s the bank robber with a cigarette dangling from his mouth, whose picture appeared nearly two years ago in newspapers and on websites around the world in a photo captured by this paper’s Pulitzer-nominated David Proeber, just seconds before police gunned him down on Interstate 55 in north Normal.
Yeah, that guy.
“My dad?” asks Mindy. “He was a good guy. He had a huge heart. He’d send me gushy notes all the time. I got one 10 days before he died. He just couldn’t live within the limits of the law.”
Yes, if — as someone else once said — success in life is not becoming like your parents, Mindy is even more successful than her resume.
“I have an amazing life today,” she says.
Yesterday?
Growing up in a trailer in Normal, she recalls coming home from school on days when there was no power and/or heat. She remembers a day back in 1986 when she was 15 and her dad was in the news again: he’d just been sentenced to a quarter-century in prison on a drug conviction.
“It’s tough to see your father, shackled and in handcuffs,” she says. “It’s difficult to know what he’s going through and what you’re going to go through. After that day, some of my best friends didn’t want to talk to me anymore. Their parents wondered what kind of an influence my father and me might have on them.”
It was, no question, the worst day of Mindy Sylvester’s young life.
And also the best.
Attractive with a bubbly demeanor, the product of a father who was popular in his own circle, highly social and very good at sales (even if it was drugs), she eventually realized those were her strong points, too.
At age 19, she landed a job at Armstrong Realty in Bloomington.
“Vic Armstrong (the firm’s owner) took me under his wing,” she says.
“Mindy is,” says Vic, “one of my best success stories. I remember she came in, applying to be a receptionist and she was so poor, she had no wardrobe. I gave her $1,000 to go out and buy some clothes so she’d be presentable at the front desk. But, boy, you could also tell she was gifted.”
At age 22, no longer “wanting to be the drug dealer’s daughter,” she left Bloomington-Normal for Cincinnati.
She became an airline stewardess.
Seven years later, tired of airports and push carts and having moved to Naples, Fla., she went back into real estate, hired by a friend.
On her first day, she sold a home to the owner of 50 car dealerships in southwest Florida.
Ka-ching.
In time, she began selling more homes … expensive ones, very expensive ones.
Through networking, she sold one to an about-to-be-traded Chicago Cub, who quickly needed a home in Texas.
Thus was born an idea for a nationwide company to help pro athletes quickly in moving to other cities.
It was in Naples, too, that on Jan. 5, 2009, while trying to close on another million-dollar home, her cell phone rang. It was her brother, back in Bloomington, telling her their father had just pulled off an apparent armed robbery, but sadly, had been shot dead by police a couple hours later.
“So I had to put on my game face and act as if nothing had happened,” says Mindy, matter-of-factly.
She sold the home.
“Until that day,” she says, “I was sort of in the closet about my dad. But finally I realized I needed to deal with it, openly. I realized I could help others with my own story, to prove that your own willpower can change the world. I started speaking publicly about it.
“The biggest day of my life was the one when I realized we can do nothing to change a situation in our lives but can still make something good out of it.”
And Mindy has. And is.
In an odd way, by his own misdirection and misdeeds, perhaps her father’s biggest contribution to his daughter was teaching her to go the other way and then try twice as hard.
And, my goodness, she has.
