The Attempted Buyout, or: The Time Someone Tried to Buy the Turkey

Let’s begin with the detail that even I found surreal.

Some time after the original post started gaining traction, I received an unsolicited email from a lawyer in Israel. A very polite lawyer. Very formal. Very interested in acquiring my domain name — nittanyturkey.com — for the nice round sum of $10,000.

Now, my site is a charming assortment of Penn State football pessimism, GLP-1 rants, turkey jokes, and occasional tech tirades. It is not, shall we say, a prime target for Middle Eastern private equity.

So I naturally wondered: “Who the hell is behind this?”

No names were offered. No explanation provided. But the context was hard to ignore:

• The Tollman family has deep ties in Israel.
• The Tollman-Hundley saga was suddenly getting unwanted visibility.
• My post, inconveniently accurate and inconveniently discoverable, was still out there.
• And someone was willing to throw five figures at a random blog to make it all go away.

I played along. “Sure,” I said. “$10K for the domain. But the content stays with me.”

And just like that, poof — negotiations over. No counteroffer, no haggling, no “how about $20K?”, nothing. As soon as it became clear the whole post couldn’t be flushed down the digital toilet, the deal evaporated like a fugitive on a private jet.

Everybody has a price, but for this Turkey, ten grand wasn’t it.

The Curious Case of the Disappearing Photo

Years later, I discovered something even stranger: the photo of Monty in the original post had vanished.

Not corrupted. Not mislinked. Just… gone.

I hadn’t removed it. No plugin had eaten it. No server migration had hiccupped.

And yet, the one image someone might want gone — the face attached to a now-inconvenient story — had mysteriously been scrubbed.

I don’t claim this was digital sabotage by well-connected hotel magnates. But let’s just say my WordPress installation on a shared host was hackable enough that someone — human or bot — might have wandered through.

Luckily, I keep backups like a paranoid archivist, and the photo returned to its rightful place. This is my blog, damnit. We restore our own history around here.

Where Monty Ended Up

Monty adjusts the costume on a Bahamian Santa Claus in the mid-1970s.

In 2005, I wrote:

At 68, when he’s released, I hope he still has the drive and desire to come out on top.

Here’s what we know today:

• Monty served his federal sentence (8 years for bank fraud and tax evasion).
• He was housed at FPC Pensacola, as one commenter helpfully posted with full mailing address.
• His projected release was mid-2012.
• After that, he disappeared — quietly, gracefully, intentionally.

No scandals. No comeback tours. No tabloid stories. No book. No Netflix docuseries. Just silence.

People who stumble into my post ask me about him, but I know nothing of his whereabouts or current status.

If he wanted anonymity, he earned it the hard way.

The Comments Section: A Three-Year International Confessional

Now we come to the part that truly deserves documenting, because the comments on that 2005 post evolved into something I can only describe as a Tollman-Hundley Truth and Reconciliation Commission staffed entirely by pseudonyms, ex-employees, ex-family-friends, South African emigres with unresolved rage, and people who knew Monty when he still had hair.

Here’s a sampling of what rolled in over the next several years.

1. The Monty Fans and Loyalists

You’d think I wrote an obituary for Abraham Lincoln judging by some of the reverent tributes.

A cousin wrote that the Monty described in DOJ documents was unrecognizable from the kind man she grew up with.

One Bedford staffer reminisced about Monty calling his son “Grasshopper,” taking peaceful garden walks, and being a devoted father.

Multiple people insisted he was:

• gracious
• humble
• deeply loved
• and ultimately betrayed

One even said:

Monty and Chuck were the fall guys.

Whoever was still rooting for him made themselves heard. (Chuck is Monty’s brother. I met him once or twice.)

2. The Tollman Chronicles: Diet Warlords of South Africa

Holy hell, did the Tollman content snowball.

My blog became the unofficial dumping ground for:

• stories of fleeing Johannesburg “in a hurry,”
• unpaid vendors,
• mansion gossip,
• lavish dinner parties,
• personal betrayals,
• cousin marriages that commenters debated like a backwoods genetics class,
• deep dives into apartheid-era opportunism,
• and philosophical treatises accusing the Tollmans of nouveau-riche colonial decadence.

One ex-employee launched a Molotov cocktail of a comment alleging money laundering, hidden tax shelters, and gold Rolexes, finishing with:

These guys deserve the electric chair.

Subtlety was not a prominent theme.

3. Employees With Battle Scars

Former Days Inn and THH employees showed up with war stories:

• unpaid Social Security taxes
• regional cash flows disappearing into a NY office vortex
• bad internal accounting
• crumbling morale
• over-their-head managers
• conservations like:
  “There’s a difference between can’t pay and won’t pay.”

One GM from the early 2000s even had kind words for Brett Tollman, proving the universe still allows irony.

4. The Soap Opera of SN vs. E.B. McLaughlin

These two practically needed their own corner booth.

• SN wrote cryptically, hinting at secrets, promising revelations, then refusing to spill.
• E.B. accused SN of “obfuscation” and even supplied the dictionary definition.
• SN pushed back.
• E.B. doubled down.
• I sat there, the reluctant kindergarten teacher, reminding the class not to slander anyone.

Had this been in-person, someone would’ve flipped a table.

5. The South African Flame Wars

Enter Walpurgis, who posted an entire Monty Python song beginning with:

I’ve never met a nice South African.

Then we had rebuttals. Counter-rebuttals. Cultural debates. Rage. Poetry. Buddhism. Personal insults.

My Monty Hundley post had somehow become the world’s strangest expat-community bar fight.

6. People Looking for Monty

Dozens of family members and old friends, blindsided by the scandal, arrived searching for him:

• cousins
• high school classmates
• family friends
• people who knew his parents

Some asked for addresses.
Some didn’t know he’d gone to prison.
Some just wanted closure.

The post became a digital missing persons board.

7. The Out-of-Left-Field Voices

These included:

• A builder advertising his Colorado dream home.
• A furious person chanting “Nam-myoho-renge-kyo!” at the Tollmans.
• Generational feuds.
• Class warfare manifestos.
• Genealogy debates.

At one point, I think the thread accidentally summoned a small internet cult.

How My Little Post Became the Nexus

By 2008, I finally admitted the obvious:

I never intended this blog to become the unofficial nexus for Tollman information exchange.”
“This ride has been amazing.”

Amazing is one word for it. A slow-motion train derailment of anecdotes, rage, betrayal, nostalgia, bitterness, affection, and academic treatises on colonialism is another.

But as the curator of this accidental oral history, I’m glad I didn’t delete it.

Stanley Tollman, pictured above, passed away at the age of 91 in 2021.

Final Reflections, 20 Years Later

That 2005 post was about Monty — the talented, complex, flawed man I worked with thirty years beforehand. The man who taught me more about hotel operations and accounting than any classroom ever could. The man I remembered as confident, charismatic, and destined for greatness before life went sideways.

I didn’t expect:

• a domain-buyout attempt,
• a mysterious photo deletion,
• waves of diaspora commentary,
• South African political warfare in my comments,
• ex-employees confessing decades later,
• relatives searching for closure,
• or three years of globe-spanning theater beneath my humble Turkey brand.

But here we are.

I truly hope Monty lived a quiet, peaceful post-release life and I hope his family found closure. I also hope the Tollmans eventually made peace with their choices, fortunes, and consequences.

And I hope the comments section — raw, chaotic, deeply human — stands as a record of the strange, interconnected lives orbiting one man’s rise and fall.

Because in the end?

My little post did something the DOJ never managed:
It captured the human fallout.

Not the legal summary.
Not the headlines.
The human ripples.

Twenty years later, that’s worth preserving.