A Pyramid Scheme With the End in Sight

You’ve all met people like Max Bonanni. Big, open face. Easy smile. Sales pitch perfect, you sense he’s always got something working. In short, an idea man.

“With me, I’m always thinking of stuff,” he says. “That’s the way it is with me.”

And, boy, has the 68-year-old Bonanni got something working now.

He wants to build a pyramid. Thirty-five feet tall at the tip and 70 feet by 70 feet at the base. He wants to build somewhere in the desert along Interstate 15 between Orange County and Las Vegas and, in his wildest dreams, fill it with about 40 containers, each storing 7,000 boxes about the size of overnight mail packages. The tomb would be sealed in the year 2000 and not opened again until 2100.

Bonanni wants to build a time capsule.

And for the low, low price of $24.95, you could be part of it.

“From a business standpoint, this could be considered a longshot,” Bonanni says. “From the idea standpoint only, I think it’s one of my fantastic ones. And I’ve had some big beauties. Oh, I’ve had flops too. I could give you both, if you have all day.”

The way Bonanni sees it, lots of us have interesting things to say or leave for posterity. Trusting our own relatives to hand down our legacies leaves it to their discretion and storytelling prowess as to how we’ll be remembered.

But what if, Bonanni says, we each entombed our thoughts, observations, photos or videos for people to see in 100 years? How about newspaper clippings, trinkets, bits of our hair or predictions for the future?

Or, as his sales brochure suggests: “Immortalize Your Existence.”

Convinced that a market driven by baby boomers wanting immortality is out there, Bonanni will send paying customers a shipping package, bumper sticker and numbered “Certificate of Perpetual Remembrance.” Your designee could redeem the certificate in the year 2100 and secure the contents of your box.

Unclaimed boxes would become public domain and likely fodder for news shows in 2100, Bonanni says.

The owner of a Huntington Beach company that distributes sales aids to car dealers, Bonanni needs 10,000 customers to break even on the time-capsule idea. He’s one-fifth of the way there, he says, noting that the full pyramid could hold roughly 300,000 boxes.

Why would anyone send him $24.95, knowing he or she won’t be around in 2100?

“I’m not trying to alibi or hide behind my answer,” he says, “but it’s the same mentality with people who buy the moon. You’ve heard that? If you haven’t, they pay $17 for an acre and a half on the moon. Come on. Then you can buy a star for $45. And they’ve sold a million stars. What drives those people? You’re never going to see a star or touch it.”

By contrast, Bonanni is offering something concrete. Literally.

He envisions the pyramid becoming not only a landmark but a monument, if you will, to ordinary people’s lives.

“I’ll tell you something,” he says, “people in all these shops around here [his industrial park in Huntington Beach], they come up with little ideas and they make their companies run, but they work for the companies and they never get any recognition. I’ve done five or six gigantic things in my life, but no one knows about it. . . .

“If people live long enough to see the pyramid itself, at least they’ll see it and, hopefully, we’ll have a lot of media coverage to show it being closed. I say ‘hopefully’ because I think it’ll be very attracting when it happens. At that point, whoever gave me the $24.95 will see the product itself. The second part of the transaction is when they open it. Of course, they won’t be here for that.”

The idea grew out of his late wife’s fight against cancer. Bonanni saw a woman who had lived a good life, replete with charity work, but out of the public eye. He thinks someone ought to know about things like that, even if it takes them 100 years to find out.

“You want to have a length of time, because there will be drastic changes,” he says. “For instance, from 1903 to 1966, we went from the Wright brothers to the moon.”

Once he buys the site and the materials, he estimates it will take only a few months to build the pyramid. In the ensuing decades, a family corporation will monitor the site, just as someone would maintain a cemetery, he says. Pyramids don’t require much maintenance, he notes.

I tell Bonanni it’s one of the more interesting ideas I’ve heard in a long time. “Thanks, I appreciate hearing that,” he says. “It’s way out, but then again, it’s not.”

If he doesn’t get to the 10,000-customer mark, Bonanni says, he’ll refund people’s money but wouldn’t be able to return the items they stored in the box. Duty-bound to say, “Buyer beware,” I wished Bonanni good luck. Anyone interested in his idea can phone him at (714) 846-8738.

Bonanni says his idea is more than a business proposition. “I’m willing to say if I got to the 10,000-customer level and not a dollar extra, I’ll still build it,” he says.

A pyramid in the desert would be the crowning achievement of most people’s life, but Bonanni has no intention of stopping there. When you’re an idea man, you’re always thinking.

“I got a bigger one than this,” he says with a smile. “But let’s not get into that.”

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821 or by writing to him at the Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or by e-mail to dana.parsons@latimes.com