My unfortunate experience with Mike Toricelli came to a head in the 2008 time period. I was interested in working in the intervention field, and in January of I flew from Maui to california to begin working in a training capacity with Mr. Torricelli.
I remained working and staying with Mike for just over 3 weeks. What I found was both eye opening and sad to me. When I came out to stay with Mike, He was working as an interventionist, taking calls the for The Chapman House in Orange, which means he would counsel people on the phone, to ultimately get them to enter their loved one into the Chapman House for drug/Alcohol treatment. Mike also worked for an executive treatment center in Florida during that time period.
Ironically, mike was specializing in interventions on teen agers through a program at the Chapman House. Sadly, his own 17 year old son was hiding out in the garage behind the house. We had to constantly worry about his son breaking into the house to steel when we went out.
I had not realized that Mike himself had been using drugs until I arrived at the front door of his house in January. He had lost quite a bit of weight, and I later found various pill bottles laying around the house while cleaning the place up.
During my Stay with mike, my suspicion that Mike wasn't staying clean was confirmed by mutual friends of ours living at a recovery house in Laguna Beach that Mike had been kicked out of in 2007. Apparently he had been arrested while going off the deep end while living in the house and abusing narcotics.
I had acted foolishly in my business dealings with Mike. I lent him Thousands of dollars in june. It is October and I no that I will never be repaid. He has promised and promised to repay me, and never followed through.
I know that Mike has had sexual relations with a past intervention client of his. I certainly hope for the sake of the integrity of the recovery field, and the intervention business in particular, that professionals such as Mike Torricelli are much more closely monitored in the future. Addiction and recovery are far to important to be tarnished by the greed and exploitation of people within the field.
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