Cincinnati [cincinnati.com]- Magazine and radio ads for Enzyte made the “male enhancement” pill sound like a sure thing.

The ads featured a glowing customer satisfaction survey, testimonials from happy Enzyte users, a promise of better sex within 30 days and a claim that a Harvard doctor developed the pill’s formula.

But a company executive who helped sell Enzyte says there was a catch:

James Teegarden Jr., the former vice president of operations at Berkeley Premium Nutraceuticals, explained Tuesday in U.S. District Court how he and others at the company made up much of the content that appeared in Enzyte ads.

He said employees of the Forest Park company created fictitious doctors to endorse the pills, fabricated a customer satisfaction survey and made up numbers to back up claims about Enzyte’s effectiveness.

“So all this is a fiction?” Judge S. Arthur Spiegel asked about some of the claims.

“That’s correct, your honor,” Teegarden said.

Teegarden’s testimony is key to the case federal prosecutors are making against Berkeley and its founder, Steve Warshak, [pictured] who is accused of orchestrating a $100 million conspiracy to defraud thousands of customers.

Warshak faces up to 20 years in prison and millions of dollars in penalties if his trial ends with a conviction.

Several other company employees, including Warshak’s mother, Harriet, also are charged with participating in the conspiracy.

Teegarden, who has pleaded guilty and is cooperating with prosecutors, said Warshak oversaw the phony ads and every other aspect of Berkeley’s business.

“He was intimately involved with all of it,” Teegarden said. “He knew what was going on in the departments all the time.”

Teegarden said Warshak told him to create two spreadsheets of data to support claims Berkeley was making in Enzyte ads.

One spreadsheet purportedly showed how the pills increased penis size by an average of 24 percent, when in fact no customers had reported such results. Instead, Teegarden said, he made up the numbers.

Another report he created showed customer satisfaction ratings of 96 percent for Enzyte customers. But prosecutors showed jurors an e-mail from Warshak that they said asked Teegarden to fix the numbers.

“Here’s the spreadsheet you wanted,” Teegarden responded via e-mail. “Let me know if you want me to doctor it up some more.”

Jurors saw several magazine ads for Enzyte and other Berkeley products with titles such as “Maximize the Pleasure” and “Harder Than Chinese Arithmetic,” all promising to enhance the sexual experience.

When customers ordered a product, the company’s goal was to keep charging their credit cards for as long as possible, Teegarden said.

He said first-time customers were automatically enrolled in a “continuity program” that sent Enzyte to their homes every month and charged their credit cards without authorization.

“Without continuity, the company wouldn’t exist,” Teegarden said. “It was the sole profit of the business.”

If customers complained, he said, employees were instructed to “make it as difficult as possible” for them to get their money back. In some cases, Teegarden said, Warshak required customers to produce a notarized statement from a doctor certifying Enzyte did not work.

“He said it was extremely unlikely someone would get anything notarized saying they had a small penis,” Teegarden said.

Warshak’s lawyers will not get a chance to cross examine Teegarden until sometime today and they declined to comment on his accusations. Warshak, however, said he did nothing wrong.

“I’m absolutely sure that no crimes occurred at Berkeley,” he said.

Teegarden, however, said Warshak also tried to manipulate data that banks use to determine whether companies should be allowed to accept payment via credit cards.

He said Warshak artificially inflated total sales to offset the high number of customers who sought refunds from credit card companies, a process known as “charge backs.”

If more than 1 percent of its customers sought charge backs, Berkeley could have lost its ability to do business via credit cards.

To avoid that, Teegarden said, Berkeley began making small, unauthorized charges to thousands of customer credit cards. The charges were later refunded by the company, but they temporarily boosted total sales and reduced the percentage of charge backs.

Teegarden said the continued use of credit cards was so important because Berkeley relied almost entirely on them.

Without them, he said, “we would be out of business.”

Background: The makers of Enzyte have been indicted on 112 counts ranging from mail fraud, bank fraud, money laundering and fraudulent product labeling. And all the charges center around the fraudulent marketing of Enzyte and other glorified supplements.

The indictment contains 12 counts of mail fraud against Steven Warshak and Berkeley stemming from the shipment of products to customers who did not order them and letters sent to customers from “Mr. Johnson,” the fictitious Director of Customer Care.

It also contains four counts of bank fraud and 12 counts of making false statements to banks in connection with Berkeley’s use of merchant bank accounts. The indictment contains 77 counts of money laundering alleging that the defendants moved millions of dollars through multiple accounts to conceal the source of the money acquired through fraud, and also charges Steven Warshak, Paul J. Kellogg and Steven P. Pugh with three counts related to re-labeling one of the company’s 13 core products, a prostate health product called Rovicid, which was re-packaged as a heart-healthy dietary supplement for both men and women.