Jack Cranney

After joining Shaklee in 1967, Cranney quickly rose to a top earner in the company. From the 1970s, Cranney was also heavily involved in training new Shaklee distributors. As late as 2010, Cranney was still winning awards at Shaklee. That year he was recognized for generating the largest downline growth both vertically and horizontally. Estimates peg Cranney’s personally recruited Shaklee distributors at over 50,000. By his own admission, Cranney was “likely” among Shaklee’s top twenty company earners. Wind things back to 2001. Despite seemingly making good money in Shaklee, Cranney began soliciting investment for a “retirement plan”. To carry out his scheme, Cranney created shell companies that he named specifically to sound like investment funds. He also set up a sham Employee Stock Ownership Plan to convince victims to transfer their IRA and 401k retirement funds to him. Cranney’s investors are believed to mostly be elderly and fellow Shaklee distributors. A handful of people received payments; others never asked for the interest, simply trusting that Cranney was keeping track of their money. Cranney ran his investment scheme for over a decade. In 2012 it collapsed, prompting an investigation by the Massachusetts Securities Division. In the years leading up to his trial, Cranney revealed Shaklee cut him off on or around April 2012. At the time he claimed he was earning “about $45,000 a month”. Income he stated he needed to “repay his creditors”. When pressed on where the $12 million he collected went, Cranney described moving money among his various accounts and then using it to pay expenses incurred “in the normal course of business,’’ such as travel, food, and Shaklee meetings. Cranney, gray-haired and wearing a dark pin-striped suit, pushed his wife, Nevena, up to the hearing table in a wheelchair. He repeatedly blamed his financial woes on having been consumed with his wife’s care since 2007. It wasn’t until 2018 that Cranney was found guilty at trial. The trial lasted two-weeks and saw Cranney convicted of three counts of wire fraud, 12 counts of mail fraud and three counts of money laundering. The scope of Cranney’s Ponzi scheme was reduced to “over $6 million” stolen from fifteen investors. In August 2018 Cranney was sentenced to five years in prison plus three years of supervised release. He was also ordered to pay back $5.58 million in restitution. Cranney, 79, is currently being held at the Fort Worth Federal Medical Center in Texas. He is due for release in 2023.