Larry’s decision to re-enter the legal arena in a new incarnation as a personal injury lawyer didn’t really surprise his friends in Reno. Unlike some who felt called to the criminal defense bar, it was less the constitutional issues that motivated Larry as much as it was the fame. To many of his closest acquaintances, Larry was a born performer. “He had to have the spotlight on him,” one recalled. “He was at his happiest when people were watching him.”

To some of his friends, it was also as if Larry missed “the action”—that is, the cut and thrust of litigation, the clash of egos that frame every legal contest. Still others thought that Larry had simply become bored with his life as Shantar the carpenter. His attention span was notoriously short, they said, pointing to his serial marriages, or his flirtation with Ramtha. Larry was extremely smart, a quick study; but once he’d taken the measure of something, he often lost interest in it.

Now, by the winter of 1992–1993, Larry had hit upon a new interest: he wanted to make money at the same time he made himself famous. His idea was to turn Larry McNabney into a franchise of sorts. This idea occurred to him while he and several of his lawyer pals were attending a convention of criminal defense lawyers in Las Vegas in either late 1992 or early 1993; and as they sat in a hotel bar watching the stream of briefcase-toting lawyers come and go, Larry saw money. Before long, he had conceived of an ambitious plan. He would set himself up, first in Reno, then later in other parts of the state, and, by dint of heavy advertising, induce personal injury claimants to hire him to do battle with the insurance companies. Rather than try the cases himself, Larry envisioned, he would farm out the lawsuits to other lawyers—at least those cases that didn’t settle almost immediately. In the meantime, he’d get criminal lawyers—like those attending the convention—to ship him their personal injury cases in return for a piece of the action. Those that couldn’t be settled right off the bat would be referred to the heavy hitters among civil litigators, like Durney and Brennan, who would in effect pay Larry a hefty fee for screening the cases. In effect, what Larry was proposing was to become something of a lawsuit broker, a sort of pass-through system in which Larry McNabney and Associates—whoever they were—would get what amounted to a commission for putting the injured together with those who could take the biggest and quickest bite out of the insurance people. After all, it had worked before, hadn’t it, with the Papoose Palace cases?

What Larry envisioned was a volume business—one that brought in injured parties far and wide, by casting as large a net as possible. That meant advertising, which also meant that Larry would have to spend a lot of money to make his name as well known as any other consumer product or service. But that was okay—money Larry had. He had the annuity, and he had some portion of the inheritance from his mother and grandmother. In late 1992 or early 1993, it appears, Larry had sold the annuity by discounting it for cash. Added to the funds that he likely received from his mother’s estate, that meant that Larry had just less than a million dollars to begin his campaign to make Larry McNabney and Associates, Attorneys at Law, a household name in Nevada.

Domestically, things seemed to be going well, too. He and Cheryl and her two daughters found a house in Reno, and it looked like Larry was finally beginning to settle down.

Early in March of 1993, Larry was introduced to Nancy Eklof, an expatriate southern Californian who was an expert in television advertising. Together Eklof and Larry worked out a series of television commercials for his new enterprise, and by that spring, the spots were running frequently on Reno-area stations. In the course of working with Larry, Nancy got to know him rather well, and in fact, he enjoyed entertaining her with some wild stories about his old days as a criminal lawyer.

One story, in fact, involved Larry’s old client, Jack Mazzan.

By the spring of 1993, Mazzan’s case was still bouncing around the Nevada courts, as different lawyers came and went, trying to get the death penalty Mazzan had twice drawn thrown out, or even better, to get an entirely new trial. Mazzan continued to claim innocence. To all intents and purposes, Larry was out of the case entirely by 1993; indeed, the newspaper coverage of the case’s twists and turns rarely mentioned Larry, if at all.

But one day—perhaps Larry had begun drinking again, Nancy later wasn’t too sure—Larry freely admitted to Nancy that Mazzan was guilty of Minor’s murder, as he had also been responsible for the murder of April Barber.

Nancy recalled, “Larry said that Jack Mazzan admitted to him that he had killed Minor and that he’d also killed April Barber. He told Larry that he was driving down the road with April Barber sitting next to him in the truck, just stabbing, stabbing her—” and here Nancy illustrated Larry’s gesture by punching her right hand, backhandedly, as if it were a knife, into the body of someone sitting next to a driver. Larry told her, Nancy said, that Mazzan had told him that he’d taken April Barber’s body outside of town and had disposed of it in the shallow grave where it had been discovered in the fall of 1979.

This was certainly a curious disclosure by Larry back in 1993. For one thing, Mazzan was still appealing his conviction and his sentence, and was still claiming that he had been framed. If Larry was telling the truth, here was Mazzan’s own lawyer telling a comparative stranger—certainly someone who wasn’t bound by any attorney–client privilege—that Mazzan was guilty as sin. That of course is the sort of thing a responsible lawyer should never do.

Was this evidence of some sort of residual guilt on Larry’s part—for his role in trying to defend Mazzan? Nancy, for one, didn’t think so: instead, she thought it was just Larry’s penchant for calling attention to himself by telling an entertaining or riveting story. Maybe Larry thought it wouldn’t make any difference if he told someone that Mazzan had confessed to him—that there wasn’t any way Mazzan would ever get a new trial. But if this was what he thought, Larry would turn out to be very wrong.

Rather surprisingly, for its first year, Larry McNabney and Associates did extremely well. The business, in fact, boomed. If anything, Larry had more clients than he could possibly service. Thinking perhaps that he’d stumbled onto the secret of getting rich without having to do much work, Larry paid $575,000 for a top-of-the-line house on Buckaroo Court in west Reno’s toney Caughlin Ranch area. He and Cheryl and her children moved in that fall. As far as Larry could see, Larry McNabney and Associates couldn’t lose. He began to play a lot of golf, and developed the habit of dropping in at the office from time to time, rather than giving it his close supervision.

The real trick was finding qualified people to process the cases—paralegals and hungry young lawyers, mostly—and to process the cases quickly enough to make them economical. That meant minimizing the expenses and trying to force the insurance companies to settle up. The whole enterprise was time-sensitive—spend too much time on a case and it didn’t pencil out, that is, the profit was too low to make it worthwhile, counting all the overhead: the offices, the help, the advertising. Larry McNabney and Associates’ cut would vary between 25 and 40 percent of the gross of every settlement; the art lay in guessing how much the insurance people would be willing to pay out, how much the pain and suffering was worth. The firm developed a “pain and suffering formula” to speed up the payoffs: eight times the amount of the medical bills of the injured person. Hospitals and casinos were prime targets, along with automobile insurance companies; so were mining companies. And while a substantial amount of revenue came in the first year, Larry knew that if he wanted to keep getting, he had to keep spending, mostly on television advertising. The downside—if there was one—was keeping the help in line. There was an always-present possibility that the hungry young lawyer would walk out, taking clients with him, even though it had been Larry who’d spent all the money to get them in the door in the first place. As a result, the atmosphere in the office was sometimes strained; Larry could be nasty and belligerent if he felt someone was trying to put one over on him.

Nancy Eklof’s commercials were well done: brief and to the point, they featured a casually attired Larry in an outdoor setting. He was handsome, well-dressed; he looked eminently reliable, and his voice—“I’m Larry McNabney. Call me”—was a trustworthy mixture of calmness and confidence.

By the spring of 1994, Larry McNabney and Associates was spending about $50,000 a month on television advertising, according to Nancy Eklof. The idea was, the more the firm spent, the more cases would come in, and the more settlements could be reached. The business had reached a sort of equilibrium, however—meaning that the income was just about equal to the costs. At that point, Larry made a fateful decision—to get more cases, he would begin to advertise in Elko, in eastern Nevada, and eventually in Las Vegas, where, in the early summer of 1995, he would meet a beautiful woman named Elizabeth Redelsperger, and fall head over heels in love with her.