SW sources: Dave Hester, who claims A&E show is rigged in new lawsuit, has been a pain in the past

New York Daily News ^ | December 13, 2012 | Don Kaplan

[lowbridge]

The most interesting part of the show was when that guy who worked for Jarrod and Brandi stormed off in an anger fit while cursing out everybody including the cameraman. We never saw him again. What was up with that? Why did he have that anger fit and is there a link to video of that incident.

I've seen that episode like a half dozen times so far, and I've seen the episodes before that with him in it.

My best guess, and this is just an educated GUESS, is that it has to do with money and what they werent paying him.

In the first season that guy, Mark, seemed pretty jovial. He seemed pretty happy to be on the show and happy to share Jarrod and Brandi's excitement when they found something really valuable. But as the seasons went on, his reactions seems to become a little more muted.

In one episode in the second season, I recall Jarrod digging through the contents of the unit they just bought, finding the hidden treasure, then ordering Mark to load up the truck and clean out the unit and then he and Brandi toddles off, leaving Mark to do all that work alone. Mark's reaction was that he didnt seem so happy. He sounded sort of defeated.

Despite the fact that Mark seemed to be Jarrod's friend and a very valued employee, I'll bet that Brandi and Jarrod really wasnt paying him much. Just an average hourly salary not much above minimum wage. Throughout the seasons of the show, it must've weighed on him to be loading and carting around all this secondhand junk. He has to have gotten tired of it. On top of that, the millions of dollars of free publicity for Brandi and Jarrod's store the show provided must've resulted in a large increase in customers, which resulted in more product flying off the shelves which in turn could have resulted in increasing Mark's workload as he and Jarrod had to hustle faster and work harder to get more product to fill their inventory.

According to Dave Hester's laswsuit, by the third season, the show was paying him close to a million a year. I imagine that Jarrod and Brandi were each getting paid about the same. Mark must've watched the two of them raking in all that money from the show and the store, and he probably wasnt seeing a dime of it except for his low, regular salary as an employee of the thrift store. What with his increased workload and his appearances on the show, he probably thought he ought to be properly compensated when he knew they could very much afford it. And chances are that Brandi and Jarrod and/or the shows producers were not kicking in anything to him, especially when he deserved it.

So on that episode where he had that breakdown, Jarrod was as usual ordering Mark to start carting junk around (while Jarrod and Brandi stood by and didnt pitch in to help), that probably was the final straw that broke the camels back.