Original subtitles

[light dramatic music]

♪ ♪

- It's not really fair to ask the question,

"What was Action Park?"

Basically, so it was a waterslide park.

But in truth, it was so much more than a waterslide park.

- Action Park was the chaos summer park

with very little oversight, too much alcohol,

whistles blowing, people screaming,

motors running.

It was an energy, you know?

You knew you were jumping into the firepit.

- The most dangerous theme park of all time.

- There was a waterslide that held one person

that went in a-- like, in a flip.

- It looked like a bunch of kids built it,

because that's what it was.

- We'll be back with more "Headbangers Ball,"

coming from Action Park in Vernon, New Jersey,

the biggest water park in the world.

- I think the very reason people were attracted

to Action Park was because they could get hurt.

That was the allure of it.

I mean, who wants to sit on a Ferris wheel?

- It was a place where death was tolerated,

where death was put right into the number situation.

- Every member of my family was injured in that park

at some time or another.

They called it Traction Park.

- Class Action Park.

- Class Action Park, the lawyers called it.

- It starts out with people having fun,

and by the end,

crimes have been committed.

Cover-ups have happened.

The story hasn't been told truthfully.

To me, that's probably the worst thing of all.

♪ ♪

male narrator: In order to truly understand

a place like Action Park,

we need to go back to New York in the 1970s.

[light music]

Wall Street. Everything was changing.

Bankers and brokers were transforming

into masters of the universe.

- A ton of money starts to enter the industry.

It is the place to be.

And that is part of what creates the environment

that makes it perfect for someone like Gene Mulvihill.

♪ ♪

- Gene Mulvihill was Wall Street in the 1970s.

He was Gordon Gekko before there was a Gordon Gekko.

- He's this mix of P.T. Barnum, Donald Trump.

It's not just that he's a businessman.

It's the personality that he's bringing to it too.

narrator: Gene ran a brokerage firm

called Mayflower Securities,

and every time he'd make a sale,

he'd blast a bugle through the office

while the champagne bottles crack open.

- This was the era of the penny stock,

of the pump-and-dump scheme.

- Penny stocks? - Yeah.

narrator: Penny stock scams

are when salesmen take worthless stocks

and trick unsuspecting investors into buying them.

- Come on. Who buys this crap?

- Enters Robert Brennan,

fraudster, penny-stock king,

and best friend of Gene.

Brennan gets his start as a salesman

at Mayflower Securities, working for Gene,

and within a few years,

he's the president of the company.

narrator: Under Gene and Brennan's leadership,

it wasn't long before Mayflower

got suspended by the SEC for doing

what "The New York Times" referred to

as "selling worthless securities

in a bankrupt electronics company."

Gene was effectively kicked off of Wall Street.

So he did what anybody in this situation would do:

buy up two ski resorts in Vernon, New Jersey,

Great Gorge and Vernon Valley.

[lively music]

- Located within the magic 45-mile radius

of metropolitan New York City,

Vernon Township occupies

67.9 square miles of prime land,

with a population of better than 20,000 people.

Also located in Vernon is Wawayanda State Park,

and that's just the beginning.

- So many big, larger-than-life people

looked to Vernon in the '70s, and they saw possibility.

It's got all of this amazing outdoor terrain.

You can ski in the winter.

You can hike or bike in the summer.

- You would never think it was in New Jersey.

For a country boy like me,

it was an amazing place to grow up.

Everybody seemed to know each other.

It was like this little idyllic small town.

♪ ♪

narrator: In the early '70s, none other than Hugh Hefner

opened a Playboy Club in the hills of Vernon.

Gambling had just taken over Atlantic City,

and Hef believed it was on its way

up to North Jersey soon.

- And he wanted to build the hopping spot,

the casino that would draw people

from all over to New Jersey.

narrator: Vernon had already been catching the eye

of outside investors,

but the opening of the Playboy Club

took things to a whole new level.

- Every weekend, there was some celebrity coming.

People like Tony Bennett would come to sing,

or Wayne Newton used to come.

- ♪ The love between the two of us was dying ♪

- And Vernon was absolutely

poised to be the next Orlando, even Vegas.

[Wayne Newton's "Daddy, Don't You Walk So Fast"]

♪ ♪

narrator: Since he couldn't negotiate

with New Jersey weather and its short ski season,

Gene became a pioneer in artificial snow.

He went so far as to construct

the world's largest snowmaking machine

out of a jet engine.

[jet engine roaring]

- So the thing with Gene's ski resort is,

there were summer months.

He had downtime. So what do you do?

Well, Gene started building rides.

- So he was looking for something to do with it

in the summer, and he got the idea

of starting an amusement park,

but he wanted to kind of take

the idea of where you get on your skis

and you go down and you control how fast

and where you go to the amusement park.

male announcer: And we reflect on the sounds and sights

of children's joy at Action Park.

Everything here is strictly do-it-yourself.

[light dramatic music]

♪ ♪

narrator: To get his park built,

Gene turned to his old buddy Bob Brennan,

always there to find cash or investors

anytime Gene had a wild new idea.

- They were saying that New Jersey could compete

with Orlando as a theme park destination,

and that's not that crazy.

narrator: Enough people were sold on the vision,

and things started to take off.

♪ ♪

- Action Park was one of the very first

modern water parks in the country--in the world.

Nobody knew what a water park really was.

They had to invent it.

- Build it higher. Make it faster.

Do something that nobody's ever seen before.

That was what my father was all about.

narrator: They were designing it on the fly,

essentially throwing ideas at the wall

and seeing what stuck.

Some worked okay.

Others not so much.

♪ ♪

And in 1978,

Action Park was born.

- ♪ Baby, let me take you where the action's hot ♪

- ♪ Action, Action Park ♪

- ♪ We can ride the excitement ♪

♪ And feel the park rock ♪

- ♪ Action, Action Park ♪

♪ The action never stops at Action Park ♪

[exciting music]

♪ ♪

- When we would all pile into the car

to go to Action Park, it was always a little manic,

everyone just kind of on the edge of their seat,

just all jacked up

about the excitement that was about to ensue.

- Like, older teenagers would take you.

So that right there is already dangerous,

because they're just gonna make you do things that they,

as 17- and 18-year-olds, feel comfortable doing.

- I remember my parents did not want me

to go to Action Park,

but we got lucky because there was this family,

they grew up up the street from us,

and their dad brought them to Action Park.

I think my parents were like,

"Fuck, someone else is offering it for free."

And these kids, classic '80s, children of divorce,

they don't live with their dad, and my parents knew,

"We can't say no. We can't say no."

I remember my parents both, on my way out the door,

being like, "Please be smart.

Like, please be really careful and use your best judgment."

[mellow music]

♪ ♪

narrator: Action Park was divided

into three main sections.

You had Alpine Center, home of the Alpine slide;

Water World, filled with fantastical waterslides;

and Motor World, an area dedicated

to exhaust-spewing engines and go-karts.

And, of course, splitting the park down the middle

was a major highway, Route 94.

- One of the first things you saw

when you walked into Action Park

was the infamous Cannonball Loop,

which for years, it was like a myth

that the thing had ever been open.

- Cannonball Loop was an enclosed tube waterslide,

and you would climb to the top of a series of stairs,

and you would ride down the enclosed tube,

and at the very end, the tube would go into a huge loop.

- I mean, you looked at the thing,

and it looked like it was something out of, like,

a Bugs Bunny or a Road Runner cartoon,

where they just made a loop and said,

"Yeah, there's our ride."

- Some lunatic clearly just was like,

"Build me a slide that's like that."

And then they didn't consult anybody

who had a background in engineering.

- So the story is, they build the loop,

and they throw some test dummies down.

Come out dismembered, missing a head, missing arms.

"Okay, let's tinker with things.

"Change the height. Change the angle.

"Change the water pressure.

"Next step, let's put some humans in this thing.

"Who we got?

How about these teenage employees?"

So Gene's just waving $100 bills in the air.

Any teenager gutsy enough

to go down this thing will get one.

100 bucks, that's real money.

- I'm $100 richer because Uncle Gene--

we always called him Uncle Gene--

gave $100 for an employee

to test the Cannonball Loop.

- And I can remember looking, staring down

into this black tube and looking at the loop

and being like, "There's no way that I would go on this thing."

- So you look down the Cannonball Loop,

and all you see is pitch black.

It's darkness.

- There's the water flow at the top of it

that gets you mo--you know, 'cause you got to have water

to get, you know-- it's a waterslide.

You know, somehow it's a waterslide.

And it's just way too steep.

- So they spray you down with a garden hose,

and you go down, and you're supposed to go down

feetfirst with your arms and legs crossed.

- And then as soon as you, like, kind of scoot forward,

it just takes you.

All of a sudden, you're going really, really fast.

I'm like, "I'm gonna shit my pants."

It was absolutely terrifying.

And then you feel--

all of a sudden, you feel your feet go up.

And then as I go up,

you kind of lose contact with the loop for a second.

It just kind of-- gravity just takes you.

You just...[slaps hands] Kind of flop.

The catch pond, wherever you landed,

was way too short.

You got to the bottom, and I'm like,

"Shit, I did it. I made it."

The loop was fun, and yes, it hurt.

You know, going through the loop

and having your nuts get smashed on a--

you know, a fiberglass tube was not fun.

But then, you know, Uncle Gene's standing there,

and he hands you 100 bucks.

- The first couple people that came in came out,

and their mouths were all bloody,

and that was before they had put sufficient padding

in the top; there was a little bit.

So they sent a couple other people down,

and when those people came down,

they came down with lacerations.

They couldn't figure out why these people

had lacerations from a giant loop.

Then they took the loop apart and they found teeth

stuck in the padding from the first couple people

that went down the slide.

They had gotten their teeth knocked out.

And these other people

were just going up and ripping into it.

narrator: After Action Park test pilots

came out woozy and unable to stand,

Gene brought in a navy physician

to measure the slide's effects.

- Let me put it this way.

There's two places that you can experience

nine Gs as a civilian.

One is the back seat of an F-14,

and the other one is at Action Park.

- You couldn't go down the Cannonball Loop

if you were too small.

You couldn't go down the Cannonball Loop

if you were too big.

Too big, you'd get stuck.

Too small, you wouldn't get up

enough momentum to make the loop.

There was a trapdoor at the top that they--

that's how they would extricate people from the loop

if they got stuck.

- So as you entered the park,

you saw this thing.

It was one of the things that, you know,

you had kind of heard whispers about.

So right away, you walk in, you're like,

"Well, that's real. This shit's real."

[upbeat music]

I did get hurt on a ride

that was called Cannonball Falls.

And it looked like a pretty normal waterslide.

You'd sit down. You'd go down the waterslide.

What is not discernible from the top

is that at some point, you come around a corner,

and there's this big black tunnel.

You feel like, all of a sudden,

you're just going faster as well.

And I'll never forget.

I'm going down this waterslide.

I enter the tunnel, and you just hear people, "Oh, no!"

Ahead of you-- "Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no!"

So you're like, "What-- what's going on here?"

And then you'd see this little piece of light

at the bottom of the tunnel,

and then you'd just get shot out.

And you'd just be there in the middle of, like, the air.

And I'm not kidding when I say

you're, at minimum, ten feet in the air.

It shoots you out the side of a mountain,

and you're just, like, in the sky.

You think you're getting on a waterslide,

and the next thing you know, you're in the fucking sky, man!

- And yes, you were over water,

but there was a few seconds where you'd be like,

"I'm gonna fucking die. What am I doing?"

And you just look around,

and then gravity would take you down into the water.

- And you're in ice-cold water, 17 feet deep,

so people were constantly getting pulled out of there

for, you know, being unable to swim

or just landing wrong and being disoriented.

- There's nothing in the world like Action Park.

[screams and laughter]

- The rides that got built at Action Park

would often come to Gene

through people who just had a wild hair

and wanted to build this crazy idea that they had.

- A certain number of the Action Park rides

were more or less designed in-house

by people without engineering degrees,

and I was certainly one of them.

- The people who were kind of

on the fringes of the ride-design world,

people who Six Flags or Disney wanted nothing to do with,

these guys would literally track Gene down

at amusement industry conventions.

- You could tell these guys went and did bumps of coke,

and were like, "Let's fucking-- let's drill a slide

"right through the fucking middle of a mountain,

and it'll shoot them 20 feet in the fucking air!"

You just couldn't trust anything there.

- Guys would come to us, and no matter

what the idea was, my father would try it.

- And then when each of these rides went into construction,

Gene would change them drastically.

narrator: Action Park's most prolific ride designer

was none other than Gene himself.

After designs came in, he would almost always

tinker with them during construction,

making them bigger, badder, more extreme.

And the Cannonball Loop?

Its design actually came about

when Gene drew a circle on a cocktail napkin

and hired some local welders to put it all together.

- Many of the rides were experimental,

and on paper, the design looked good.

But in reality, once the ride was turned on,

it was not fit for a safe ride

by the average person in public.

- One of those rides was

the Man in the Ball in the Ball.

The Man in the Ball in the Ball

was this giant ball that we had

with ball bearings inside it with another ball,

and you would open up two doors

and get in the ball

to go down the mountain.

And what he did is, the guy built it

with PVC pipe all the way down the mountain.

- Like, it's a great idea; you can see how someone

would think that'd be a lot of fun,

and I think it might work and be relatively safe.

It turned out, you know, there were limitations to it.

- It's a crazy concept.

I mean, it's so big and so heavy and so unwieldy

that there's no way it's gonna stay in any kind of track.

- The day that we were gonna put a live man in it,

it got really hot,

and he didn't realize that PVC expanded.

So when we put the live man in the ball

and tested it to go down the mountain,

the ride just fell apart.

And the guy ended up going down the ski slope,

right over 94, into the swamp down below.

It was unbelievable.

narrator: Another prototype waterslide

was inspired by zero-gravity airplanes.

Gene's vision: riders would actually take flight

as they plummeted downhill.

- We built this, and we tested several versions of it,

and we started sending employees off of it.

And it was working perfect.

narrator: But unfortunately,

after dozens of successful test flights,

one went horribly wrong.

- This one kid went down, and I don't know how he did it,

but he got himself going way faster

than anybody else had.

He went way high in the air

and completely missed the landing.

He had to be backboarded off of the ride.

He's gone on to lead a normal life,

but he was hurt that day,

and that was the end of that ride.

narrator: While some rides never made it

past the testing phase,

dozens of other questionable ideas did.

- Right here, that's called the Speed Slide.

It's over seven stories.

They tell me that you go over 60 miles an hour.

So tell me, any preparations

as we're about to embark on the Speed Slide?

- Yeah, Preparation H.

[soft music]

- There was a canopy around the first 20 feet or so

in case you flew off.

The idea was that it would bounce you back in.

You had a bar you had to hold on to

and lower yourself to vertical...

- And you just drop.

And you've got to be free-falling

for a few seconds,

and then you actually

make contact with the waterslide,

and you go down.

- Tops would come off.

Bottoms would be up around their shoulders.

People would be all disoriented.

Not the most pleasant experience.

- What did you think about the Speed Slide?

- I'm feeling kind of juicy right now.

- It puts more fluids

through your system, that's--

I'm trying to think of a nice way to say it.

What would you say?

- I'd say my fig is puckered.

- I think the Super Speed Slide was the one

that a lot of people would say that it would just sort of,

like, shoot water straight up their assholes,

that it was designed in a way where you just--

you got your first colonic for free

courtesy of Action Park.

- Everybody that got off that ride walked funny.

Yeah, whether you're a guy or a girl, you know,

you were not just getting off and walking away.

You were, you know, picking and prodding

and hopping and poking for quite a while

after you got off that ride.

♪ ♪

narrator: Questionable design decisions

weren't limited to the rides.

The construction and layout of Action Park itself

had its own way of leaving a mark.

- All the park was, like, paved in asphalt.

So everywhere you went, you had to walk around

on, like, dark, you know, highway-grade type asphalt

that was absorbing heat

and reflecting it back on you all day.

- So if you don't bring your own flip-flops

or those water shoes,

you are going to suffer

from the notorious ailment known as chopped-meat feet.

Everybody's, like, limping around from running around

on fucking jagged and poorly paved asphalt.

♪ ♪

- There was a great ride called the Aqua Skoot,

which was essentially warehouse rollers

built on an angle like a ski jump.

You rode a plastic sled, and then you would see

how far you could skim across the water,

like a stone skipping across the water.

- People didn't sit back on the ride

and they'd lean too far forward,

they would face-plant into the water.

narrator: Unbeknownst to most patrons,

the Aqua Skoot was also home to a thriving bee nest.

Guests who lingered too long were likely to be stung.

- I'll tell you something about the Aqua Skoot.

Took one look at that thing, I said,

"No fucking way. No way, man."

That just looked like a thing where you'd get

your fucking toes or your balls

get caught in those-- Aqua Skoot.

I'm gonna Aqua Skoot the fuck away from this thing,

that was my instinct.

[upbeat music]

The culture, the atmosphere at Action Park,

it's most summed up by the Tarzan Swing.

Everybody wanted to go on the Tarzan Swing.

That was, like, number one childhood

test your mettle, prove you got some guts,

go on the Tarzan Swing.

- The idea was that you would, you know, swing and release.

The problem was,

people couldn't hold their body weight.

They would lean out like they were gonna swing

and then just do a total face-plant

from 10, 12 feet up into the water.

- People would think on a 90-degree day

that they were gonna be jumping into pool water.

No, no, no.

That's a spring-fed stream

that held native trout in it.

It's cold, and, I mean, people would go into shock.

People would hit and start to scream because of the cold,

and they would actually forget how to swim.

Man, what a shock to the system.

- The Tarzan Swing was cool

because there was kind of, like, an observation deck,

and that's where everybody was waiting on line.

- So you might have, I don't know,

probably over 75, 100 people

at given times that could all see you as you went.

- Go to do it.

Your weight would hit. You'd flip off.

You'd, like, hit the back of your head

on the water.

No lifeguard would jump in to help you.

The water's ice cold.

You come up for air.

You're all shell-shocked.

You're probably concussed.

And you have, like, 150 people from New Jersey

just being like, "Pussy!

"You fucking bitch!

You fucking wiped out! Pussy!"

And that's, like, when it's at its classiest.

- It was like, "You fucking pussy, just do it!

This is Jersey!"

- "Oh, you fucking suck!

Start swimming, pussy!"

You know, I mean, it was just--

it was actually-- it was a very demeaning place.

- No one yelled at you.

No lifeguard ever blew a whistle

and was like, "Hey, stop chanting the word 'pussy'

at this injured, bleeding person."

Nobody did that.

- They always tell people,

"No inverted jumps, no obscenities,"

and people would go up, do backflips.

People were dropping their pants.

- So you got the people who, like,

swing on the Tarzan Swing and just, like,

throw up the middle finger,

and everybody's fucking flipping--

or people are, like, taking their dick and balls out,

mooning each other.

- Of course, girls in bikinis would go,

they'd hit the water, and, of course,

the bikini top surfaces before the girl does,

and, you know, you get the big round of applause,

and you see the girl get to the top, and...

That happened all the time.

[light music]

♪ ♪

- Action Park felt, in some ways,

like a strange social experiment.

What happens when you take a bunch of riled-up teenagers,

a bunch of alcohol, bunch of dangerous rides,

and you put them into a place where there are no rules?

- Yo, come on. Follow me.

- [laughs]

- Action Park was run by kids.

- Hell yeah! - Oh, my God.

- You know, the second you turn 14,

you got your working papers,

and then you went to work at Action Park.

You know, even the people in the lead supervisor positions,

it's like, "Oh, you've been here for two years.

Here's a radio. You're in charge."

- You had 16-year-old, 17-year-old kids

with no prior management experience whatsoever

literally managing a third of the park.

Hazing became a rite of passage

at Action Park.

[indistinct chatter, laughter]

It wouldn't be uncommon to use a new recruit

as a victim in a drowning.

In the water, we would spin the new employee over

and put him on a backboard,

strap him down real tight while in the water,

and just leave him be.

There are certainly things that happened at Action Park

that are never spoken about.

We lived through it,

we regretted some of the things we did,

but we don't talk about it.

- I was probably a security guard

for maybe three months,

and then they worked me up to a supervisor

and then assistant and then, eventually,

if you stayed there long enough

and you had anything going for you,

they would make you director of security.

So it's not as impressive as it sounded.

- Somehow I ended up in the kitchen.

Like, all the bread products in there--

everything was stale.

Everything was out of date.

So what they would do is,

they would put the big pot of water on

and put, like, a colander over the water

and then put the hot dog buns in the colander

and cover it with a towel, and in five minutes,

you'd have moist hot dog buns again.

Damn, how did we not kill people?

- I know there were people older than them

who owned it, but you never saw them.

Just literally imagine teenagers you know right now

opening an amusement park.

That's what it was. [chuckles]

- Everybody worked at Action Park

because you knew you'd get hired.

They'd give you as many hours as you wanted.

But, you know,

Action Park didn't care about, like, labor laws.

It was like, "Yeah, I just worked 46 hours.

Yeah, I'm 16."

narrator: According to New Jersey law,

employees had to be 16 years old

in order to operate rides.

According to local newspapers, kids as young as 14

were, in fact, working in these roles.

- They were kids. They were teenagers.

So I'm sure their priorities were on, like, hooking up

and getting fucked up.

- There was romance between everybody.

They were teenagers, horny teenagers.

- At the top of the Alpine Slide,

we had a shack, like, where we kept

our employee carts,

where you would put your backpacks,

where you kept your water.

People would go in the shed

to smoke weed and have sex.

That's what they would do in that shed.

Why anybody would want to have sex in there, I can't fathom,

because it was always, like, 95,000 degrees in that thing.

And it always stunk like dirty backpacks,

feet, weed, and just ball sweat.

- There are definitely people who worked at Action Park

who have stories about that's the first time they fingered

and/or got fingered.

Like, clearly, a lot of fingering

going on after hours, I would imagine.

There's a child who was conceived

at Action Park, right?

There's some kid who's, like--

you know, his name's Adam Peter

'cause his initials are AP 'cause he got conceived

down behind the bumper boats on one hot summer eve.

- Now, I was a good girl, so I wasn't really involved

in much of the shenanigans that took place.

But there were parties that I heard about.

I may have attended one.

narrator: The Action Park employee parties

became the stuff of New Jersey legend.

- [shouts]

- We would save all the money we found

in the pools over the course of the summer,

and at the end of the summer,

one huge all-night bash right up in Water World

called the kamanawanalea party.

- Everyone stayed over, so no one was driving,

but that was back in the days

when you could get away with stuff like that.

- You'd find anyplace you could find to sleep--

on the mats, under the umbrellas,

on the picnic tables.

Some days, we'd wake up after the kamanawanalea party,

we'd put our shorts on,

put the whistle round our neck,

and find our way to the lifeguard chair

as soon as we could.

[soft music]

narrator: Of course, leadership comes from the top.

And Action Park's free-for-all atmosphere

was inspired by Gene Mulvihill's disdain

for rules of any kind.

- We called him Uncle Gene

because he actually did have a lot of endearing qualities.

I mean, he was always out and around in the park.

You know, he was a very personable guy to talk to.

- So I go in his office one day for a meeting,

and he has a cattle prod.

And he goes, "Joe, I can't do this anymore."

And he takes the cattle prod.

He puts it to his chest,

and he hits the button, and the thing goes boom!

And I get so freaked out that I'm like, "Oh, my God."

He starts laughing hysterically,

and at that point, he basically goes, like,

"Don't get nervous. It's fake."

And then he pitches me an idea.

"Joe, the people sneak on the lift.

"And they go on the lift without tickets,

"and we want to make sure they all have tickets.

"So what I'm gonna do is, I'm gonna get the cattle prod,

"and I'm gonna stand by the lift.

"We got to get one of those real dirty-looking kids

"that work down in the train park.

"I'll be working the lift,

"and when they come up, I'll go,

"'Hey, where's your ticket?'

"And they'll say, 'I don't have a ticket.'

"I'll take out the cattle prod, I'll hit him,

"he'll pass out like he's dead,

"and then we'll have patrol come drag him away,

"and then everyone will know

not to come here without a ticket."

I laughed like, "Gene, that's some idea."

While I was out of town, I get a phone call

from the person who runs guest services to say,

"We have an issue.

"We have hundreds of parents who are calling

"who are very upset

"because they saw someone who works lift today kill someone

because they didn't have a lift pass."

- I had a friend of mine that had worked there

for couple seasons, and he had told me

that Gene Mulvihill had a MAC-10 machine gun

that he kept in his office drawer.

♪ ♪

- He was far and away

the most unique character I've met in my lifetime.

He was big and loud and full of ideas.

Probably 90% of those ideas were just so crazy

and off the wall that nobody would get near him,

and the other 10% were pretty close to that.

And we actually made a lot of those ideas happen.

narrator: Gene's rule-bending antics

may have been common on Wall Street,

but in this small town,

the locals had no idea how to handle him.

- Well, they obviously didn't know

Gene Mulvihill's personality until they got to know him.

But Vernon is a little bit of a mixed bag.

There were those who embraced

someone like Gene Mulvihill with open arms,

and there were those who hated him

because they see him as having destroyed

our beautiful, bucolic, sleepy little town with his resorts.

- The man could wear a suit in 90-degree heat.

I had no idea how he did that.

He just was a-- he was a cool dude.

- I think he was a piece of shit.

narrator: Action Park's growing reputation

posed an important question:

what insurance company would dare cover

this creatively designed park?

- Gene didn't believe in the concept of insurance.

He thought if you got hurt, you should be responsible.

He shouldn't have to pay an insurance company.

However, he needed insurance to stay in business.

It was part of the terms of his lease.

So he had a work-around.

narrator: He created his own fake insurance company

based in the Cayman Islands.

Its name?

The very real and very legitimate-sounding

London and World Assurance.

- This company's documents were very, very homemade.

They looked like they were ginned up in a basement.

The letterhead was not official.

Might as well have been on napkins.

narrator: Gene was, if nothing else,

efficient with his schemes.

And so his fake insurance company

wasn't just used to avoid paying for insurance.

It also became a vessel for him to launder money.

- I said, "We can't do that."

And he said, "Why can't we do that?"

And I said, "Because the state says we can't do that."

And he goes, "Well, who the hell are they?

They can't shut us down."

And I said, "Well, actually, yes, yes, they can."

narrator: These crimes would attract

the attention of the state and eventually lead

to a large-scale investigation,

three-day hearing, and a 110-count indictment.

- Top officials

from the Vernon Valley Recreation Association

today refused to testify

before the State Commission of Investigation.

Gene Mulvihill did not appear, citing client privilege.

narrator: The outcome?

Gene pled guilty to counts of fraud,

theft, and conspiracy

and was ordered to give up control of Action Park,

which was partially on state land.

But to Gene, that would not do.

So he came up with yet another scheme.

He decided to become the worst tenant he could.

He stopped paying bills and filing paperwork.

He basically did everything he could

to antagonize his landlord state.

- The SCI accusing Vernon Valley

of "arrogantly violating its agreement with the state

to lease land for the ski resort."

Vernon Valley allegedly diverted funds

to avoid paying the state

several hundred thousand dollars in rent.

The SCI probe also disclosed Vernon Valley

created a phony insurance company

to avoid premium payments

and changed the terrain of the ski resort

without obtaining permission.

narrator: And it worked.

New Jersey got so fed up with Gene

that they decided to sell him the land

for just over $800,000

just to get him off their backs.

Gene was free from the pesky state of New Jersey.

And so Action Park continued to expand and grow.

And anytime Gene needed cash for a new ride,

his buddy Bob Brennan was waiting in the wings

to support Gene's wild ideas.

- Excellence always succeeds.

When you have an excellent facility

run by extraordinary people,

you're able to bring out the fans,

and the facility does well.

[rock music]

narrator: But things really started to take off

when Gene started running TV ads

created by his daughter

and starring the park's teenage employees.

- Just go to Action Park. There's no other park like it.

- When it's hot out, this is a great place

to spend the day with your family.

- Race like a pro. It's great.

- These are the most amazing rides in the world.

I love it here.

- ♪ There's nothing in the world ♪

♪ Like Action Park ♪

It's absolutely insane!

[upbeat music]

♪ ♪

narrator: A lot of Gene's ride ideas

took inspiration from natural settings

and environments that he grew up playing in.

His thinking was, if kids couldn't make it

to real nature, he'd create the next best thing.

How else to explain an amusement park

that lets six-year-olds jump off a 20-foot cliff?

♪ ♪

- They also had a slide you could slide off

of the same cliff into that water.

- So the slide version of the Cliff Dive,

I think, was also really good for people

who wanted to treat it like a ride mentally

and didn't want to know the feeling

of committing suicide.

- I remember being on the diving cliff looking down,

being scared out of my life, and to add to that,

there were people right down below,

and they had no idea you were about to jump.

- Conceivably, if you just wanted to chill out

for a minute from all the action of Action Park,

you could just hang out there.

You could be minding your own business,

and somebody could land right on top of you

without any warning.

So it was not actually a chill-out area at all.

- You could do it safely, but people didn't.

You know, people just didn't listen.

They would jump stupidly. They would slip and fall.

- And people would jump, and the lifeguards always told you

to cross your arms over your chest,

but people didn't listen,

and they would land on the water like this,

and their arms would get thrown up,

and they'd dislocate their shoulder.

So you'd see somebody coming out of the water,

and one shoulder's, like,

six inches lower than the other one.

And their arm would just be, like, hanging.

narrator: The floor of the pool below the cliff

was eventually painted white to make it easier

for lifeguards to spot any bodies below.

[exciting music]

And this wasn't the only attraction

that was to feature cliffs.

The original concept for Surf Hill,

which was basically a giant Slip 'N Slide on a mountain,

was to have guests jump off a cliff

before the mat would catch them.

This idea was abandoned due to space limitations.

- Staff members started building up the jump

by sliding the mats underneath,

making it bigger and bigger and bigger,

until eventually one of the guests got seriously injured.

We had been told the person broke his neck.

[cheers and laughter]

[indistinct shouting]

[people cheering and whistling]

narrator: Roaring Springs was an expansive collection

of tube rides designed to mimic the experience

of a mountain swimming hole.

- I remember this guy coming up behind me.

He hit my tube right before the tunnel,

and I went off to the side,

and I slammed my head into the center of this tube

that you were meant to go through.

- Some of the padding had got torn away and exposed a bolt,

and one of the guests came down,

and they basically got impaled on the bolt,

and it tore a nice gash through their midsection,

and they had to be evacuated off the ride.

- Those ride attendants,

they spent their time twisting their whistles

and then just going, "Go, go, go."

And a lot of the time, those tubes would bunch up.

And then what happens when you get to the bottom

when you have to squeeze into a particular area?

People were crashing into each other,

slamming on top of each other.

One person would be in the water.

The next person coming down

would then dunk the next person and go under.

And if you couldn't swim well, yikes.

- [laughs]

CFS stood for "can't fucking swim."

- Security guys, lifeguards, they carried Sharpies.

Action Park gave out daily wristbands,

and they would write "CFS" on the wristband.

If someone had CFS on their wristband,

that means they probably had gotten saved already

at some point in the day,

and it was a warning to other people.

Like, if CFS was on your wristband

and you knew you couldn't swim,

what the hell are you doing jumping off a 20-foot cliff

into a deep pool of water?

But people just--you know, they thought, like,

this was some magical place where all of a sudden,

they would have the ability to swim.

- We should talk about that other ride

that's right near there,

the Colorado River Ride.

Holy shit, dude.

I will say everybody talks about Tarzan Swing.

Cliff Dive, Cannonball Falls, you hear about those.

Colorado River Ride may have been

the most underrated dangerous ride.

- You would load in, and they would just let

the laws of physics take over from there,

which sometimes meant that you would fly really fast

and also sometimes meant that you would get stuck

at certain points of the ride

that they hadn't designed all that well,

and then you would get punted by another tube.

- That thing was just a fucking whiplash machine.

You're going up on the side.

Your raft is getting stuck on the wall.

You have to all team up and push off the wall,

and now you're going backwards.

Like, this is clearly not--

there's no rhyme or reason in this.

narrator: The Colorado River Ride

actually began life as a lazy-river ride.

But during construction, Gene decided

he wanted a realistic simulation of Class IV rapids.

Early test pilots reportedly came out unconscious,

forcing him to turn down the ride's intensity.

- There was one section where tubes tended to go

right up an embankment,

and everyone was looking at it expectantly,

waiting for them to fly over the side.

You would hear people audibly go, "Oh...aw,"

when they didn't actually fall to their doom.

- I mean, we're holding on, getting slammed into stuff,

the thing's getting stuck, we have to kind of

stick our own legs out and push our way off,

and then we go past a lifeguard chair that,

you guessed it, is empty.

Nobody there keeping an eye on anything.

- Gene got involved during the construction process,

and he said...[as Gene] "Look, when you go down

"the Colorado River in a raft,

"there's not some guy in a lifeguard shirt

pushing your raft down the river."

[normally] And I said, "Look, Gene,

"this is not the Colorado River.

It's a water park."

[indistinct shouting]

- A lot of fights on the Colorado River Ride

for the dumbest thing ever--

you know, rafts bumping into each other.

And then people would get out and just start having at it.

Some of the worst fights we had were people standing

in the Colorado River Ride punching each other.

It was just dumb.

You would be like, "Really? Why here?"

- There's morons in the pool with us,

morons in the pool with us.

narrator: Action Park was like the movie "The Purge."

Thousands of kids with pent-up aggression

and a healthy dose of alcohol were given a space

where they could do whatever they wanted.

- You know when you were at pool parties or things

when you were a kid and there was always those idiots

who were like, "Let's jump in the pool off the roof!

"No, let's get higher!

Let's do the second-story roof!"

And you're always--you know, you're kind of on board for it,

but then at one point, you're like,

"Ah, I got to pull out at this point.

This is where it's getting too dangerous."

It was all those kids in one park with no rules.

There were no rules.

And for a lot of kids, that was heaven.

- Action Park was basically the only water park

within the New York City area.

And it was a place that filled a void for people

who weren't spending

their summer vacation at a beach house.

They weren't going to Cape Cod.

They weren't going to Florida.

They were going to Action Park.

And I think because of that, it might've attracted

a more, say, working-class clientele.

[soft music]

narrator: The more news reports warned people

about Action Park's potential danger,

the more adrenaline-fueled teenagers flocked to it.

It became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

In a world filled with people telling you no,

Action Park became known as the land of yes.

- I'd work the front of the lot

to let people know the lot was full.

And what would happen is, people would come

to try to get in the lot after it was full.

And one of the ways they would try to get in is, they'd say,

"Hey, I'm from New York City."

And I don't know what they meant by that,

but I think they didn't realize

that everyone here was from New York City.

So as a 14-year-old, I'd say, "Oh, my God.

"Are there big buildings?

"What is it like there?

You think one day, I can go there?"

- There were a lot of people that came up there,

usually younger guys, that were just coming up there

for the idea of starting trouble.

- It didn't always bring the best.

It did bring sometimes a criminal element.

I once heard a police officer tell me

the majority of their calls during the day

were for Action Park.

- There were a lot of fights at Action Park.

You know, hot, in the sun, lots of places to buy alcohol,

people that don't know any restraint.

- Trying to start fights with each other,

trying to start fights with the ride attendants,

pulling the ride attendants into the rides themselves.

- We used to call it a Code Brown.

That was the code for "somebody shit in the pool."

How angry do you have to be on vacation

to just shit in a pool?

- The average customer at Action Park was just insane.

And they just didn't care half the time,

and, you know, combine that with liquor, and anything goes.

[indistinct chatter and shouting]

- I lived through it, man, I lived through it.

[indistinct chatter]

[lively polka music playing]

- There was a big fest tent.

That's where the beer used to be.

And they would have, like, Summerfest, Oktoberfest.

- My father was crazy for that kind of stuff.

I mean, we had a German brewer.

We had a German baker. We had German bands.

- And I remember them doing a big Polish festival,

Irish festival, German festival.

- Anything you could put the word "fest" on the end of it,

Action Park did it.

And they were kind of free-for-alls.

- Jump, jump, jump, jump! Come on, jump, jump!

narrator: Gene took this stuff seriously.

He went so far as to literally

dismantle an entire brewery from Germany

and have it sent to New Jersey.

And during festivals,

such as Action Park's famed Oktoberfest celebration,

Gene would be front and center,

wearing lederhosen and dancing to polka music.

[upbeat rock music]

♪ ♪

- Now, anyone who worked at Action Park knew

Water World was for the daytime,

and then at some point around 4:00 or 5:00,

the adults would have a little fun in the bar area,

and then they'd make their way over to Motor World.

One side of the highway--

you have 94 that runs through the middle,

and you have Water World on one side

and Motor World on the other side,

with all the racing cars, the racing boats.

And that was usually after they had a few drinks.

[steady rock music]

♪ ♪

- The design was flawed because the Grand Prix cars

were right next to the beer tent.

- So at 5:00, guys would come up.

They'd get a bunch of beers in them.

They'd go down to Motor World to drive the cars.

- Out of all the rides,

my opinion, that's the craziest one

because it's not the ride attendant's fault, you know?

You can't always tell if someone's been drinking,

and if you didn't stink like booze,

they would never know.

- Gene said to me one day...

[as Gene] "You know what we need here?

"When somebody comes in under 55 seconds,

"we got to have these girls in bikinis come running out

"and a huge champagne bottle that pops the top off

and shoots champagne up in the air."

[normally] And I was laughing when he said it.

And I looked at him, and he had a straight face.

He was dead serious about doing that.

- Occasionally with the LOLA cars,

we would get a guest that,

instead of following the course,

would decide he wanted to make his own course,

that he would just start driving around on the course,

drive off the course.

- I watched a guy go off the track

and start chasing one of my employees around in the field

with a LOLA car.

And so this kid was running around

kind of like a bullfighter,

like, trying to make tighter turns

than the car could make so the car couldn't run him over.

- I'd heard the employees figured out

how to override the speed governor

so that the go-karts could go

as fast as 50 or 60 miles an hour.

And I'd heard that they would then take those go-karts

on the highway that ran through the middle of the park.

- Yeah, I took a LOLA car on 94.

It has a top speed of over 60 miles an hour.

It was worth it.

[engines roaring, people screaming]

narrator: Many amusement parks feature bumper boats.

Action Park had full-on "Miami Vice"-grade speedboats,

where riders regularly tempted fate

by treating them like bumper boats,

a common action that would send many a guest

tumbling into a pond murky from leaked gas and oil

and known by employees to be infested with snakes.

- Like, you'd be driving a power boat,

and you'd see something slither out

from, like, in the high grass.

- Oh, yeah, there were big black snakes.

Motor World had lagoons and swamp,

and there must've been four-foot snakes.

Used to scare the hell out of the New Yorkers.

- The things would flip, I mean, on a regular basis.

If I stood there for an hour,

I could almost guarantee I was gonna see one flip.

- Well, if you were a lifeguard in Motor World,

you were being punished for something, for the most part,

or you were somebody who didn't know anybody.

You know, it was not the place you wanted to be.

- I worked at Speedboats,

and everyone would get three times around this pond,

this gas, oily pond...

[chuckles] That was just loaded with dead fish.

I remember that.

One day, we had a group of people.

I think you had about eight boats going at the same time,

and they did their three times around,

and they would throw a red flag.

And this one gentleman is coming toward the dock,

and he comes up, flies forward,

up and over the small dock,

and on top of this other boat.

I thought this gentleman was decapitated.

And I walk over, and I see that he's--

you know, he's stuck forward and his neck is bleeding,

but he's breathing.

I'm shocked, and I'm afraid that this guy

is going to get his hair pulled into the prop.

I remember taking my rod

and slamming on top of the boat

to get the guy to let go of the throttle,

for--you know, for God's sake.

And the gentleman who was on top of the boat

just jumps off the ride and just heads to the monorail

like--as if he hadn't done anything wrong.

[rock music]

- One of the coolest attractions

I've never seen anywhere else, the Battle Tanks,

you know, kind of homebuilt tanks where you drove around

and shot tennis balls at each other.

And if it hit a target on the tank,

it would be disabled and spin in a circle.

- I got a call down there one time,

and one of the guests had gotten hold

of one of the gas cans, and he poured gasoline

on his tennis balls and was putting them

into the air cannon, lighting the balls on fire,

and was shooting them at the tanks.

So he wound up getting ejected from the park.

[serious rock music]

♪ ♪

- At Action Park, the most dangerous ride, probably,

from sheer amount of injuries,

would be the Alpine Slide.

♪ ♪

- People would get on the chairlift,

and this was crazy, but they would actually take

the carts that were on their cart and pull them off

and throw them off the cart and try to hit people

that were coming down underneath them.

- With just a little nudge of your elbow,

it was pretty easy to knock the cart right off the ski lift

down on to the track where people are riding the ride.

- There were some times it happened

a couple times in a day.

It certainly happened a few times a week.

narrator: Once they reached the top of the Alpine Slide,

parkgoers were greeted with signs

bearing bloody photos of the ride's previous victims,

a grim warning that what they were about to endure

was, in fact, truly dangerous.

♪ ♪

- It had a stick, and, ostensibly,

you were supposed to be able to pull up on the stick

as a brake,

push down on it to go faster.

But one thing that I learned was very true:

the sleds were often broken.

- I didn't know it at the time,

but the Alpine Slide was made of fiberglass, concrete,

and mostly asbestos.

- Cement track. It's summertime.

People are in bathing suits, and they're flying down

this path at full speed ahead, and they would just tumble off.

- I wasn't particularly excited to go on the Alpine Slide.

I knew it was unsafe.

- One of the reasons the Alpine Slide was so dangerous

is because it wasn't designed to keep you on.

If you didn't touch your brakes in a couple of key spots,

you were going to fly off.

♪ ♪

- You'd go up into this lip, and if you didn't know

how to distribute your weight when you came out

of that bank turn, the thing would flip on you.

And when the thing flipped on you,

that's when it started to hurt.

- You had kids breaking their collarbones,

their skin ripped off.

And when I was in high school,

you would come back to school in the fall,

and you'd see all these kids bandaged up.

And you'd walk in the hallways, and they were like,

"Yeah, Alpine Slide, huh?" "Yeah."

- Kid shows up back in the neighborhood,

and, like, he's got a big burn on his thigh and his hip.

You assume, "Oh, you fall off the Alpine Slide?

Oh, when did you go to Action Park?"

Like, that-- He'd have to correct you.

He'd have to-- "Oh, no, I had surgery."

[dramatic music]

- The area around the slides was just rock,

so, I mean, everything from broken bones

to concussions.

On an average day, you would have 50 to 100 people injured.

On a weekend, you could double that.

- When I was a kid, I was extremely law-abiding,

so every single time that I saw a sign

that said "slow down," I would slow down.

I hit a bump, and I was sort of airborne,

and I looked to my side,

and I saw that the slide that I had been riding on

was rolling down the hill next to me.

And I was taken to the infirmary,

which was this unsettling-looking

sort of shed.

They took a look at my wound, and they told me

that they needed to spray some sort of stuff on it

so that it would scab over and heal.

And then, unlike a doctor,

the person who was administering this stuff

said to me, "This is gonna hurt."

- First aid had this spray.

It was a little squeeze bottle, like a Windex bottle,

and it had this orange solution in,

which I've been told years later

that it was alcohol and iodine.

I know it was an orange color.

And they would spray the person with this thing,

and from the looks of things,

this was the most incredible pain this person had ever felt.

I can specifically remember one time where we had this guy

come in, and this guy was a bodybuilder.

I mean, this guy was jacked.

And he had friction burns on his arm and his leg,

and this guy was in tears.

We told him, "Okay, now we got to do the leg."

And he was like, "No."

We're like, "Dude, this is gonna get infected

if we don't spray it."

And he's like, "I don't care.

I'd rather have an infection than go through that again."

- They had a circle drawn on the floor

in the first aid room.

And while they were cleaning your slide burns,

if you managed to stay in the circle, you won a prize.

They said over, like, two or three years,

only two people actually stayed in the circle,

and the best they could produce was an Action Park pen.

- You could walk around Action Park

and just see the people with the orange spray.

It was like an Action Park battle scar.

- Action Park was this litmus test that--

it was very clear from the time

I was eight or nine years old, like, you got to go there,

and you got to come back with some scars.

You got to go take your lumps at Action Park

if you really want to be able to kind of grow up

and be a young man in this world.

- After a while, the town couldn't dedicate

its ambulances to Action Park

because, you know, Vernon was a small town,

and we had two volunteer ambulance squads,

and Action Park would keep them busy all day long.

So there was a meeting, and, you know, the town said,

"Look, you got to buy your own ambulance."

And they did. They had either one or two.

I think at their height, they might have had two.

- My wife, she worked-- she was one of the admins.

One of her jobs, it took her an entire week, 40 hours.

She made an Excel spreadsheet of all of the injuries

for one season at the park.

And it was a lot of dislocated shoulders,

broken arms, wrists,

slide abrasions from the Alpine Slide.

It was just a crazy, crazy amount of injuries

at this place.

[solemn music]

narrator: It's impossible to say

exactly how many people were injured at Action Park.

The state only required that they report

"serious injuries."

Of course, that left it to Gene to decide

what he viewed as serious,

meaning that unless you left the park in an ambulance,

it was almost certainly not going to be reported.

- If the government doesn't require you

to report something, there's no way

that someone could determine

how many injuries occurred on a daily basis.

And if Gene wanted to cover that up,

it'd be very easy to do so.

[steady music]

narrator: Amusement parks often embody their creators.

They are the personification of some individual,

some auteur's worldview.

Walt Disney looked at the world

and wanted it to resemble turn-of-the-century America

with a hint of fantasy and the Wild West.

And thus, you have Disneyland.

Gene Mulvihill had a vision of a place

where there were no rules,

something between Ayn Rand and "Lord of the Flies."

- My father wanted to give people the freedom

to control the action, to control their speed.

He loved to have fun, and so the park reflected that.

- The way things were done in the '80s,

it seems to me, created this situation.

You have this sense

of not being bridled

by a federal or state or local government

that's trying to keep you from having fun.

So Mulvihill created

a business that allowed people

to thumb their nose at conventional norms

and thumb their nose at people who worried about danger,

and they put themselves

in the teeth of a dangerous situation.

[soft dramatic music]

narrator: And while regulators may have been tough

on other amusement parks,

Gene had friends in high places,

and Action Park suffered

virtually no fines or citations.

- In the Reagan years, there was this idea

that people should govern themselves,

that red tape got in the way of innovation,

that American capitalism was at its best

when it was unregulated.

And it's in this environment

that Action Park is allowed to flourish.

narrator: It turns out that Gene was friends

with future president Donald Trump.

According to park employees, Trump was actually very close

to investing in Action Park at one point

and even dropped by the park to check things out

and have a look around.

When he saw Gene's vision, he realized it was too wild,

too nuts, even for him.

- Trump found Gene's vision too unhinged.

Fuck yeah, dude. Good for Gene.

narrator: So what would happen if you sued Action Park?

Well, Gene would refuse to settle.

He'd force you to trial almost every single time,

and he'd make that trial as long and painful as possible.

- Gene's philosophy was, "We fight every case.

"We don't settle it.

We bring it all the way to trial."

And we won 93% of them.

narrator: Eventually word got around

that he wouldn't settle, and most lawyers thought it

too much trouble to even try.

Even if you went to trial and won,

Gene would simply refuse to pay

unless you sent the U.S. Marshals

to his door to collect,

something that happened on more than one occasion.

- The U.S. Marshals, the first time they showed up,

they surrounded the ticket booth.

[chuckles] I found my way to them pretty quickly

and asked them to please not shoot me.

After the first time, they would just come

and knock on my office and say, "Yeah, we're here."

Then we'd go to the general manager's office

and take care of it.

[ambient music]

narrator: Action Park was a product of its time.

It was like an '80s movie,

an era of latchkey kids going on adventures,

far from the worried eyes of attentive parents.

♪ ♪

- That was probably the last decade

of unsupervised fun for kids.

- There was no cell phones.

You know, it's like, you wanted

to hang out with your buddy, you called him up,

and you went over to his house and met him.

You know, whosever house you were at at lunchtime,

that's who fed you.

- We were all kids that climbed trees.

We didn't come home until after 8:00.

Our parents weren't even looking for us.

- The '80s were about outdoing each other,

about keeping up.

The '80s were not about, "How are you feeling?

Are you afraid to do this?"

- Like, we would try to die for fun.

We would try to die for fun.

When I was in high sch-- I've been in at least

six different abandoned mental hospitals for fun.

Like, that-- no joke, in high school,

you can show up to school on Monday and turn around

and be like, "Hey, what'd you do this weekend?"

And your buddy could look at you and be like,

"Oh, yeah, we went and broke into

"the abandoned mental hospital,

"and we went in the tunnels underneath.

"Turned out, there were some fucking skinheads down there.

"So they came at us,

so we beat up a Nazi, and we went to a diner."

And they'd be like, "What'd you do?"

And you'd be like, "Oh, yeah,

I went and visited my cousin in Freehold."

And those were, like, both totally standard things to say.

- You know, I can remember being 14, 15 years old,

and we lived about 15 miles from Action Park.

And I can remember a bunch of us,

unbeknownst to our parents,

jumping on our bicycles and riding to Action Park,

spending the day there, and then riding our bicycles back.

Parents never know.

I would beat my kid's ass if I ever found out. [chuckles]

♪ ♪

- Looking back on Action Park with grown-up eyes,

Gene wanted to make sure

everybody was having a good time.

And it probably wasn't the best idea

to have, you know, a place where you controlled the action

and a place where kids were in charge.

It was scary. It was dangerous.

- An amusement park is designed

to look like a kind of place that it isn't.

It's meant to look dangerous, but it isn't.

Its artifice is baked into the story,

and you're told that from when you're very young.

"Go on the thrill ride. It's a thrill."

But it's not really going to fall apart.

It's not really going to kill you.

But Action Park was truly dangerous.

♪ ♪

- A lot of places you go to,

unless the ride catastrophically fails,

no matter how scared you feel, you're not gonna get hurt.

Action Park was not like that.

If you wanted to push the boundaries,

you could get hurt, and, you know, it certainly became

a competition between friends to see who could push it

a little bit more, a little bit more.

And then if you got hurt, you know, if it wasn't serious,

it was almost like a battle scar.

[no audible dialogue]

- The magic and the horror of Action Park

is that you can go there expecting a great time,

expecting fantastic memories,

and you can leave with those exact things,

or you can leave in a body bag.

And you didn't know which it was going to be.

[dramatic music]

- I would say probably the most pleasant named ride

at Action Park, the Kayak Experience.

But I later came to learn that

that is the one where someone was electrocuted to death.

- There were underwater fans that would help push the water

and created rapids, like you were kayaking.

And somebody flipped out of one of their kayaks,

and one of these fans short-circuited,

and they either touched it or were close enough to it,

and they got electrocuted.

- Negligence doesn't begin to even capture

that particular death.

Ungrounded electricity in a water park,

that's the Kayak Experience.

[chuckles] The Kayak Experience.

♪ ♪

- I knew better than to go on any rides at Action Park.

I saw people get hurt on every ride in the park,

and I was like, "I don't want any part of this."

I had a stack of comp passes to give out to people

that was probably six inches thick.

There were hundreds of them.

So if something went wrong, somebody got something stolen,

I would give them complimentary passes.

I never gave one to a friend. People got hurt there.

- When shit got real at Action Park,

the, like, golf cart, Cushman first aid thing

would roll by, and there'd be somebody,

like, completely immobilized on that thing,

you know, with the backboard and the neck brace

and the pads on the sides of their head.

And you'd talk to the first aid guys,

they'd be like, "Oh, yeah, he got medevaced to Morristown.

"He had a fractured vertebrae

in his neck from hitting his head."

I'm like, "Holy shit. Are you kidding?"

And that's when I started to realize, it's like,

this place is dangerous.

[indistinct chatter]

[serious music]

- When I think back to the Wave Pool,

I remember being excited to go in it

and, even as a young kid, walking up and going, like,

"Oh, no fucking way. This is nuts. This is"--

I mean, shoulder-to-shoulder human beings

in a wave pool that was far too violent and powerful.

- If you go to the beach, that water is buoyant.

So when the waves come in, you go up,

and when the waves go down, you go down.

But a freshwater pool doesn't do that.

- We'd often have people that would jump into the water

that didn't know how to swim.

I can't tell you how many times someone

would come up to me and say, "Sir, how deep is that water?"

And I wouldn't even tell them how many feet.

I'd say, "It's over your head."

I'd turn around, and they would jump in.

- When people got to shoulder-height depth,

we called that area "the death zone."

Panic would set in,

and they'd grab everybody and anybody around them.

And I've seen literally families

of 8, 10, or 12 people taking each other down.

- The guards at--we used to call it "the grave pool."

The guards at the grave pool,

they couldn't relax for a second.

- To break a new lifeguard in,

they'd be assigned to the death chair, and that was

the lifeguard stand that overlooked the death zone

on the Wave Pool.

And literally their first 30 minutes to 45 minutes

sitting in the death chair, that new lifeguard would save

three to four to five people.

People thought that drowning at the Action Park Wave Pool

was part of the ride.

They thought it was part of the experience.

They expected to drown at the Action Park Wave Pool.

narrator: Lifeguards at the Wave Pool

had their hands full.

The water was murky enough that bodies often

couldn't be spotted below the surface.

The culprit?

A mixture of muddy runoff from a nearby hill,

human waste, suntan lotion,

and gore from open wounds.

- That was one of the reasons they used to stop the thing

every so many minutes, so they could scan the bottom

and make sure there wasn't any bodies there

that they had missed.

Those guys did a great job, but it's hard to see.

And this guy went down,

and by the time they found him, it was too late.

- When you're a kid,

I think you can separate yourself from it,

because I didn't work in that department.

[laughs] I thought,

"That's somebody else's responsibility."

But it was a common occurrence.

I don't know how many people died at Action Park,

but it wasn't just one person.

- The fact that more than one person

died in your Wave Pool--

who's that second son of a bitch?

That's who your heart really bleeds for.

Nobody should ever be

the second person to die in a wave pool.

You know why? 'Cause after the first person

dies in a wave pool, close the fucking wave pool.

Put up a fucking sign or something, man.

- It was a place where death was tolerated,

where death was put right into the number situation.

"Oh, we've only had this many die."

One is too many.

[ambient music]

♪ ♪

My firstborn was Georgie.

He was actually born on Christmas night

in 1960,

but he was delivered right after midnight,

so he wasn't the Christmas baby.

We were just so thrilled to have him.

Just to look at his little face, it was wonderful.

And then 11 months later,

we had our second child, Brian.

- My brother and I were basically raised as twins.

My dad would actually say that we were twins

so we could play on the same football team.

We did everything together. It didn't matter what we did.

We were like the kids on "The Sandlot."

- Georgie was very, very popular.

He had many, many friends.

- My brother George was a handsome guy.

My brother George felt like he was invincible.

And our whole family thought my brother was invincible

because of how strong we were.

On July 8, 1980, my brother George

was supposed to be working with my dad and I.

- He wanted to go to Action Park,

so I loaned him the money in the afternoon,

and a friend of his went over there to meet him.

And they were just going to have fun that day.

- He goes onto the Alpine Slide,

and he's going down the hillside,

and the cart brake, I don't believe, was working.

And he went off the track

and flipping down the hillside and into some rocks

and hit his head on rocks.

- And I had a phone call.

I'll never forget it. I was sitting at home.

I was looking forward to watching a movie.

They said, "Your son has been injured.

He's in the trauma center."

And they told me that what I had to do

was get a neighbor or somebody to bring me,

because my husband was on a sales call that night.

- My dad got the phone call while we're working

about my brother being hurt.

Stopped working immediately

and went to go see my brother.

- I just didn't think it was any big deal

because he was so athletic.

And I thought scrapes or bumps or something,

maybe a cut,

but I had no idea how awful it was.

When we got to that hospital,

he had been moved to another hospital,

and I saw the bed that he had been in.

There was blood all over the pillowcase,

all over everything.

- When I first saw my brother, I knew he was hurt bad.

I just knew real bad. [cries softly]

They were checking for brain waves

to make--to see if he still had brain waves.

And not only once, obviously two times or three times--

multiple times to make sure,

to see if he's with it or not with it.

- There was no sign that he was going to wake up,

and we just kept talking to him.

Dr. Houser, who was my brother-in-law's brother,

came in from Connecticut just to be with us.

And he checked him out thoroughly too,

and he said, "No."

- On July 16, 1980, he passed away.

- I remember that moment very, very well.

I went out to the waiting room,

and my husband was with me,

and we told our other children that he had died.

My daughter ran down the hallway screaming,

and everybody was crying,

and it was, like, not believable.

So we went to the rectory that night,

and then on the way-- I hate to say this--

but on the way back to the hospital...

we were--walked across the street,

and I deliberately walked out in front of a truck.

And at that point, my husband pulled me back,

and he just screamed at me, "What are you thinking?"

I was thinking I couldn't live with that kind of pain.

It just hurt so much.

And here, 39 years later,

I can still feel that pain.

- My brother George

was supposed to be best man at my wedding.

My wedding was gonna be July 20, 1980.

He died on the 16th.

And I had to have my other brother as best man,

and everything was in a cloud.

- Gene Mulvihill never called us

and never called the hospital.

He had no heart.

He cared about himself and the almighty dollar.

- In the investigation of George Larsson's death,

the spokesperson for the park claims that

the alpine ride didn't kill him,

that the rock his head hit killed him,

and therefore,

the Alpine ride was safe.

The newspapers were told that George Larsson was an employee,

that this happened at night, and that it was raining.

He wasn't an employee, it wasn't at night,

and it wasn't raining.

narrator: The truth was,

while Larsson worked as a lift operator

at the park's sister ski resort

during a prior season,

he never worked at Action Park

and indeed entered the park during normal business hours.

One likely reason for the lie:

the park never reported his death to the state,

dubiously claiming they didn't need to

because he wasn't part of the general public.

- The state of New Jersey

had told them that they could not open

for the Fourth of July.

And they wanted to open for the Fourth of July,

but they never removed the rocks

that they were told to remove.

And when my son went on that ride,

the car flipped him off, and his head hit the rocks.

The newspapers were taking Gene Mulvihill's side.

They believed his story, and they printed it.

Gene lied about my son's death

because he had fake liability insurance

in the Cayman Islands.

Fake. It was fake.

- Anyone that sues the park,

if there's not proper insurance,

is gonna walk away with not a whole lot of money.

That's the bottom line.

- We never even got to go to court

because we were told by our attorney

that a teenager isn't worth much money.

He's a liability to the family,

and you can't expect to settle for very much money.

We eventually settled for $100,000.

[solemn music]

♪ ♪

narrator: George Larsson's death happened in 1980.

He was the first person to lose his life at the park,

but he would not be the last.

In July 1982,

a 15-year-old from Brooklyn drowned in the Wave Pool.

A week later, a 27-year-old man from Long Island

was electrocuted on the kayak simulator.

In 1984, a guest drowned in the Roaring Springs area.

And in 1987, the Wave Pool claimed yet another life.

♪ ♪

- The thing about Action Park is, Action Park becomes

a huge part of the local economy.

And if Action Park creates revenue taxwise,

creates revenue for other stores when people come in,

the city and the folks there

are gonna take a much more friendly look

at that operation if it's making money.

- How many hundreds of people had jobs, you know,

between, like, those lifeguards and the concession stands

and the ticket takers and the janitors

and the support staff?

Like, that's a few hundred jobs for your town.

I would think there might have been a town councilman or two

who was willing to look the other way

to keep the money faucet turned on.

- Some of the town officials

were clearly on Gene's payroll, absolutely.

They worked in his restaurants, in his bars.

They worked in Action Park.

Their children worked for the resort.

There were elected officials that he bought homes for.

That there are local town officials,

chairpersons of our planning boards,

our zoning boards who had free memberships to the spa,

free season passes and that type of thing.

It's not always about being on the payroll.

I think it was always about, "What could I get from Gene?"

And Gene knew that, and he played that.

And that's why Gene Mulvihill got away

with as much as he got away with.

- Gene was so much larger than life than you can imagine,

and there's things about Gene that I will not tell anybody,

and we'll just leave it at that.

- When I went back to work for Gene again,

after years away,

the first thing he said to me when I saw him was...

[as Gene] "It's great to have you back.

I mean, you know where all the bodies are buried."

- I believe that the people in Vernon

turned a blind eye to it.

They didn't want to know anything negative about it.

I think they thought that there would be

repercussions from Gene Mulvihill

or that Gene Mulvihill was telling the truth.

He's a very good liar.

- I think he made that very clear,

especially when he started into a business relationship,

that crossing him was not a good idea.

- Let me put it this way: when I got fired

from the local newspaper as its editor

because of Gene contacting

my boss, my publisher,

he told me point-blank in a phone conversation

that he was threatened by the local officials

that if he didn't go to my boss and get me fired,

they were not going to approve his projects anymore.

- I have heard a lot of stories

that Gene was involved with mob associates.

[somber music]

Around 1993, I filed a lawsuit

for defamation and wrongful discharge.

And I deposed him.

And he came to the deposition,

and every answer to every question was,

"I don't recall. I don't remember."

He didn't answer one single question.

And I was so upset with him

that as we were leaving that deposition,

I'll never forget what I said to him.

I said, "You, Gene, are a lowlife."

I said, "I don't care how much money you have

"in this lifetime.

You are a lowlife for what you did to me here today."

♪ ♪

narrator: By the mid-1990s, things began to change.

As the bad press and lawsuits mounted,

attendance dropped, and Gene found it harder

to move money around and cover the bills.

The park hit another turning point

when Gene's friend Bob Brennan

finally faced a reckoning with the SEC

after years of committing fraud.

Soon after that, Brennan was found guilty

of money laundering and bankruptcy fraud,

landing him in prison for almost ten years,

meaning Gene's never-ending spigot of cash

dried up as well.

Before long, Action Park's parent company

had to declare bankruptcy.

And when the park shut its gates

at the end of the 1996 summer season,

it soon became clear that it would be its last.

- I think it ran its course.

I think, like anything else, people grew wise to it

and people grew weary of it and people moved on from it.

Plus, the whole legal environment did a 180.

And New Jersey was the Wild West

when Action Park opened,

and by the time it closed,

it was not the Wild West anymore.

- The people's mindset changed.

They weren't willing to take the unbridled risks

associated with the way it was in the '80s.

That just wasn't acceptable anymore.

Its time came and went.

[soft dramatic music]

♪ ♪

narrator: In 1998, Action Park was purchased

by resort giant Intrawest,

the multinational corporation behind Whistler Mountain.

The new owners stripped out most of the park's attractions

and renamed it Mountain Creek.

Gone were the looping tubes and fireball-shooting tanks.

Without Gene's vision leading the way,

it became a generic regional water park.

Action Park as we knew it was gone.

♪ ♪

- One day after I came home from work,

I walked into the house,

and my husband, George, said to me,

"Esther, get out the best bottle of red wine you have.

We're gonna celebrate."

And I said, "What are we going to celebrate?"

And he said, "Gene Mulvihill died."

And we did.

He's the only person that we celebrated his death.

He deserved to be gone.

He didn't care about any of the riders,

any of the people.

- I would say in the last four or five years of his life,

we became very close,

and I talked to him all the time.

And I learned about a different Gene,

a very generous, a very benevolent Gene.

I am not glorifying Gene Mulvihill.

I am not telling you

that he was a good, decent, honorable man.

But I did see a side to Gene Mulvihill

that was different from what I had always thought about him.

Was he a villain or a victor?

I think he was both,

depending on the circumstances,

depending on what he could do

and what he could get away with.

[soft upbeat music]

[indistinct chatter]

- It was so easy to romanticize him

because he does what a lot of people wish they could do.

A lot of people wish they could ignore the law.

A lot of people wish they could ignore rules.

Gene actually did that.

- The spirit of Action Park lives on today

in the Fyre Festival, in Theranos,

and all these other schemes.

- The Fyre Festival's bullshit, man.

He gave them a cheese sandwich.

Gene gave you everything he fucking promised you.

He said, "Come to my amusement park.

"Do whatever the fuck you feel like.

"You might get hurt, but you're probably

gonna have a shit ton of fun."

It was what it said it was.

But it was fucked up.

- Even though I was scared to do those rides,

I fucking did them.

There's also a part of me that's like,

"If you can't do them,

then fucking get out of Jersey."

♪ ♪

narrator: In 2010, just two years before his death,

Gene Mulvihill led a group of investors

to take back control of the park

he had founded decades earlier.

In 2014, Gene's son Andy revived the Action Park name

to cash in on a growing sense of nostalgia

for the original park.

The following year, the park announced its intention

to build an updated version of the Cannonball Loop

called the Sky Caliber.

That ride was never built.

In 2018, the resort,

once again called Mountain Creek,

was acquired by Vernon native and onetime teenage

Action Park employee Joe Hession.

♪ ♪

- When you look back at Action Park these days,

I think everybody romanticizes a little bit.

I remember enough about working at Action Park

to remember that everybody that worked there hated it

when they were there, but they always came back,

and we always kept the friends

that we made while we were there.

It's an '80s movie that was real life,

and it's something that'll never happen again.

- I hold it so near and dear to my heart.

I'm so glad that I got to go there.

I wear it as a point of pride.

That being said, I think back to the fact

that I was a child, and I think about the things that I saw

and that I participated in.

And even at the age of 39,

to no small degree, it does scare me

that that was happening,

that that was allowed to happen,

that--that life could be that way.

- I look back as it was a positive thing.

You know, be able to, I don't know,

make your own decisions on how ambitious

or how adventurous you want to be

and living with the consequences.

I think it teaches something.

- Everything's in your face today,

and I think we're more fearful, rightfully so.

I think our parents should've been more afraid, right?

I think everybody in this room would say...

[laughs] "My parents should've known what I was doing

on this day or that day."

- We live in an era when kids

don't really go outside as much.

When they do go outside,

people are scared they're gonna get hurt.

In the '80s, kids were running free.

They were running outdoors. They were scraping their knees.

They were going to Action Park.

We look back at our childhoods.

It's carefree.

We didn't have jobs.

We didn't have to answer to anybody.

We could do what we wanted, right?

We look at Action Park, and we remember

this heightened version of this.

We could do whatever we wanted.

So when you're nostalgic for Action Park,

you're nostalgic for childhood.

You're nostalgic for freedom.

You're not nostalgic for being hurt.

You're nostalgic for everything else.

- When you talk to other people who went there,

there's a certain shared level of...

sort of survivor's respect.

Many of the people you talk to who grew up in New Jersey

laughing about Action Park,

if you ask them on a basic level,

"Do you think the way you grew up

was healthy for a kid?"

they'll say, "No."

We laugh about it, 'cause what else are we gonna do?

But we don't think it was healthy.

And those people understand, like, no, it was really--

You were swimming in pools

where the lifeguards weren't paying attention.

You were going on rides that were poorly designed

that people got hurt on all the time.

And we felt like we were on our own.

We felt like the world was an unsafe place.

But it's what we got, so fuck you.

[David Bowie's "All the Madmen"]

- ♪ Day after day ♪

♪ They send my friends away ♪

- We are extraordinarily happy

that we were able to grow up the way we did

and, simultaneously,

so furious that we had to grow up that way.

♪ ♪

- ♪ Day after day ♪

♪ They tell me I can go ♪

- A lot of kids who grew up in the '80s,

they like to talk shit and tell stories,

and when they got a couple drinks in them,

it's about how fucked up and funny it was.

But when they're with their shrink,

it's just about how fucked up it was.

But a lot of things were.

A lot of things were back then.

- ♪ I can fly, I will scream ♪

♪ I will break my arm ♪

♪ I will do me harm ♪

♪ ♪

♪ Don't set me free ♪

♪ I'm as heavy as can be ♪

♪ Just my Librium and me ♪

♪ And my EST makes three ♪

♪ 'Cause I'd rather stay here ♪

♪ With all the madmen ♪

♪ Than perish with the sad men ♪

♪ Roaming free ♪

♪ And I'd rather play here ♪

♪ With all the madmen ♪

♪ For I'm quite content ♪

♪ They're all as sane as me ♪

♪ ♪