Thirst.

• Author: Wittebort, Suzanne
• Position: Pro-formance sports drink owner Joey Caldwell's conviction for murder of business partner Maceo McEachern - Cover Story - Cover Story

Partners aplenty wanted a taste of Pro-formance, the sports drink that was to make them rich. But murder was the only thing that could slake Joey Caldwell's greed.

Joey Caldwell looked at people and saw dollar signs. "I think everybody is curved with lines through them for Joey," former business associate Eric Hillman says. A bodybuilder who tried to get rich selling vitamins and sports drinks, Caldwell came to care only for money, preferably other people's, and the way it made him feel. "Joey was so after money he would have done anything for it," Hillman explains. "Joey loved money."

Maceo McEachern loved people. Warm and outgoing, the Hamlet mortician was compassionate in his work and generous to his friends and community. "Maceo didn't meet any strangers," says Robert Bristow, a Hamlet police captain and life-long friend. Another friend adds: "Maceo had the gift of gab, but he was a truthful person. He would rather have a friend than money."

Their paths crossed in the ownership and marketing of Pro-formance, a clear, carbohydrate-packed sports drink. But what really brought them together was ambition, that odorless, tasteless, invisible and inexhaustible elixir of the American economy. In McEachern, ambition was benign. He wanted to make his own way outside the family business and one day live on his own horse farm. In Caldwell, it curdled greed into a deadly poison.

In a seemingly innocent business deal signed Feb. 1, 1991, Maceo McEachern acquired from Joey Caldwell the trademark and formula for Pro-formance. In doing so, he signed his death warrant.

On Sept. 1, 1993, Caldwell, 37, was convicted in U.S. Middle District Court in Greensboro of 57 counts of mail fraud, money laundering and transporting a weapon across a state line to commit a felony. The jury believed he used the shotgun to kill McEachern, 44, and his 82-year-old mother on April 12, 1991. The motive: $2 million in insurance. Says Hillman: "I don't think Joey saw it as a life. I think Joey saw it as another means to get money."

The double murder shook Hamlet. "It was like a huge dark black cloud over the entire town. Everyone was just in a state of shock," says Sid Hodges, a pawnshop owner and family friend. The McEacherns were well-known and well-liked. In 1972, he had become Richmond County's first black school-board member and, in 1978, its first black county commissioner. Both mother and son had served on local hospital boards. Mrs. McEachern, a former teacher with a reputation as a canny businesswoman, worked at the family's funeral homes in Hamlet and Rockingham.

Caldwell, who started his first vitamin business in 1986, had enjoyed adulatory articles in the Charlotte press. But behind his facade as an up-and-comer, he was cheating and conning. He became adept at inducing friends and acquaintances to invest in his ventures while leaving creditors dangling. "He didn't want happiness. He wanted material goods," says Jeff Compton, another former associate. "He wanted an airplane, a Porsche, a nice big house, all that. And he'd get that stuff, without being able to afford it."

Caldwell grew up in Gaston County. His parents divorced and remarried; his father makes chain saws at Homelite's plant in Gastonia, and his mother, who lives in Florida, works seven nights a week at a Christian retirement center. He dropped out of North Gaston High School in the 11th grade, according to school records. He married young and went to work for Talon Inc. in Gastonia as a tool-and-die maker.

When co-worker James Brooks left to start Specialty Machine Co. Inc. with a partner in the early 1980s, he hired Joey Caldwell. Skilled and reliable, Caldwell worked 50 hours a week at precision machining and grinding. Brooks describes him as serious, determined and compulsively neat. "He was immaculately clean, a neat freak. He washed his hands constantly." He was a perfectionist. "Anything he went at, he was going to do it right." His personal life was not exactly neat, however: He had a strained relationship with his father, whom he saw infrequently. His first marriage ended in divorce, and he remarried.

"He strived to live well," Brooks says. "He projected a very successful image. It was very important to him, to look the image." He lived in a modest house in a Gastonia subdivision. "He was an Oldsmobile guy. Nothing fancy," Brooks says. "But Joey wouldn't have any junk." Caldwell became absorbed in karate, telling Brooks he had earned a black belt.

By the mid-'80s, Caldwell, though just 5-foot-8, became a serious bodybuilder, competing in local shows. "The gym consumed him," Brooks says, and took its toll on his second marriage. Business slowed, and Brooks was forced to lay him off. Caldwell didn't seem upset, Brooks says, and for a while he sold cars. He had started running with friends he met at King's Gym, one of Charlotte's top weight-lifting spots. "He was a friendly guy, a big-hearted person. If you needed something and called him, he'd have done anything you'd ask," says a friend from those days.

By 1986, Caldwell had, by his own admission, dabbled in steroids. He was also consuming up to $300 a month in vitamins and nutritional supplements. Realizing there was money to be made in buying the legitimate nutrition products directly from manufacturers and selling them to friends, he started Vitamin Locker Inc. In 1988 he hired Hillman, a marketer for Piedmont Airlines in Winston-Salem, and Compton, a Charlotte furniture salesman, who each put up $10,000 for 5% stakes in the business. Another partner, Mark Parker, a bodybuilder from Ohio, paid $20,000 for a 10% share. The company obtained private-label products from manufacturer Vitalabs Inc. in Jonesboro, Ga., and sold them through gyms and health-food stores throughout the Southeast.

Caldwell divorced his third wife and married Barbara Burford Riggins, a divorced fitness enthusiast who became Vitamin Locker's bookkeeper. A UNCC graduate who had taught math in Charlotte public schools, Bobbie was friendly but pliable, former associates say, and firmly under Caldwell's thumb. He often reduced her to tears in the office. She reportedly put some $25,000 into the business.

Caldwell moved his company into a new 12,000-square-foot building in a Mecklenburg County business park and hired about 15 people, far more than needed, Compton says. At its peak in 1989, Vitamin Locker's...