Amway -- an abbreviation of American Way -- was born in 1959 and relied on a network of individual distributors who sold soap, shaving cream, furniture polish, detergent, cookware and cosmetics, among other goods. Those distributors, in turn, enlisted others to sell products and received a percentage of their recruits' orders...

A lingo developed inside the company, with those known as "Black Hats" making up to $300,000 annually. As interest in the company grew, it was posited that some of the biggest distributors were making profits at the expense of recruits by strong-arming them to buy far more Amway goods than they could sell. Plus, they were pushing the company's own self-improvement publications on the fledglings at a cost of several hundred dollars.

The Federal Trade Commission spent years investigating the company in the 1970s on the grounds that it was a pyramid scheme, but the investigation went nowhere. Other FTC charges stuck, included a ruling that Amway improperly fixed prices...

Books with such titles as "Fake It Till You Make It," written by a former distributor, and "Amway: The Cult of Free Enterprise," became bestsellers and contributed to the company's sales hemorrhages in the 1980s...

Mr. Van Andel, who saw himself as a clean-living, Christian fundamentalist, also gave more than $500,000 to an eponymous creationist scientific institute in the desert of northern Arizona. One scientist there was trying to prove that God created the world in six days.

"For me, the greatest pleasure comes not from the endless acquisition of material things, but from creating wealth and giving it away," he wrote in his autobiography, "An Enterprising Life" (1998). "The task of every person on earth is to use everything he's given to the ultimate glory of God."