In an attempt to combat sluggish sales and declining growth, PepsiCo, the maker of Gatorade, announced that it will roll out a low-cal version of the drink later this year, aimed at “athletes who are not breaking a sweat.” (Also: people who are sitting on the couch, people who are too lazy to mix one part water with one part Gatorade, and so on and so forth). According to a recent survey of 2,500 adults by Goldman Sachs, 43% of those who dialed down their Gatorade consumption did so because of a calorie-count concern, which seems to suggest that people will go for this Not Water, Not Gatorade but Somewhere in Between hogwash. A lower-calorie version of Coca-Cola’s Powerade, released several years ago and called (The) Powerade Option (to swill sewer water) did not sell well. PepsiCo’s chairman and chief executive, Indra K. Nooyi rebuffed comparisons and said she’s confident that the “Gatorade name” will be enough to do the trick.

Full-fat Powerade, Gator’s main competitor, enjoyed double-digit volume growth in this year’s second quarter, and helped Coca-Cola to beat profit expectations. PepsiCo’s Q2 rose 13% but saw its stock fall due to declines for Gatorade.

PepsiCo closed at $66.26 yesterday, down 33 cents.

For Less-Active Athletes, a Low-Calorie Gatorade [NYT]

Gary Wandschneider likes to think of his career in cinematic terms. Which got us wondering, "Who should play Gary in the movie?" Sounds perfect for a DealBreaker reader poll!

Gary Wandschneider, the married Pepsi executive who went to the feds when a girl he met over Craigslist attempted to extort $125,000 from him, sent the email below to Pepsi employees, according to one of our commenters.

This is without a doubt the most difficult e-mail I've ever written in my 25 years at Pepsi. I learned a long time ago leadership is more than great strategies, financial re-engineering, innovative processes, or new technology. It's really about the personal connections one makes during a career. By any measure, I've been blessed over the past 25 years with a supportive family and company. Although the "movie" of my career is currently focused on one event, an event I deeply regret, and one that has caused great personal grief to my wife and children. It was a mistake that I made at a low point in my life.

[The rest of the email after the jump.]

Pepsi sextortionist Jessica Wolcott is apparently even more of a sociopath than anyone would have guessed, judging from an interview with her ex-husband Kyle Strait in Suburbarazzi.

According to Strait, Wolcott used eight different middle names—Michelle, Monica, Elizabeth, Dakota, Rameda, Rachel, and Tatiana (pat on the back for that Russian mail-order bride reference we made last week). Apparently she also has a whopper of an India name: Ewakailakaipu.

Most impressive of all: “She has upwards of 50 different aliases on the Internet. All of her names and backstories are different groups of friends,” Strait explained. “She’s a high-school dropout, but she’s scary intelligent. She somehow keeps all her stories in order. She’s had years to refine the act.

The former husband* of Jessica Wolcott, the twenty-two year old who recently pleaded guilty to extorting $125,000 from a married Pepsi executive she met on Craigslist, has posted an anguish-filled comment over on the message boards for Prosper.com, a peer-to-peer lending site.

"I wish I would have caught this all sooner. This poor soul, myself, is the ex husband of Jess. Divorced earlier this year. I've always known of her ways b/c when I was stationed overseas, she took my paychecks by threatening to ruin my career in the military only for me to return and find that she had also racked up $15,000 in loans and my name was in collections 5 times for unpaid utilities I had no idea about. Was that a run-on? Anyways, I lost about $30,000 total while I was gone and now my credit is, well, it's bad and I'm still paying for the damage. I'm 25 and WAY behind where I should have been b/c of her. Nearly ruined my life. She needs a psychiatrist and I'm not even sure if that will work. Maybe she needs to be heavily sedated. She's obsessed with using people to become rich. She's never had a legitimate job. This is how she makes her living and I'm so sorry people on here fell for her false hardships and promising hopes. She creates stories according to what she thinks you'll receive as the most heartfelt, and then play on your empathy for her. It's really sick. She'll even turn on the emotions to show her fake convictions, She'll create evidence to back up her claims. She's a professional fake. It took me 1 and a half years to realize it and 4 years to shake her off finally.

"This is like a huge closure for me so it's good to see she finally spun so far out of control that other people got to see it. I'll nev

It's more than a little amazing that so many people who have been, uhm, touched by Wolcott have taken to the internets over the past week to speak out. We're wondering how many days it will be before we hear from Jessica herself.

Oh, and if you haven't yet had enough of this story, Jessica's husband has also said he's going to be interviewed by Inside Edition tonight.

* Note: We haven't confirmed that this man is Jessica's ex-husband, and we've heard rumors that sometimes people pretend to be other people on the internets.

Lender Forum [Prosper.com]

Our good instincts tell us that we should probably leave this story alone. But then again, we cannot remember when the last time we listened to our “good instincts.” So we’re sticking with it.

In the past couple of days our comments section has heard from more people close to now-former-Pepsi executive Gary Wandschneider or Jessica Wolcott, the 22-year-old her tried to extort him out of $125,000. Or, you know, people who claim to be close. Same diff.

First we heard from Gary’s daughter, “Niki Wandschneider” (and that’s the last time we’re using scare quotes for these folks so you’ll have to just keep in mind we haven’t confirmed any of their identities). She left a very earnest comment, telling us that she was “ashamed of what my dad did.”

“But not only did he get this woman in prison but he also proved that even the most respected men can do something wrong. Like I said "its only human to make mistakes." I guess my dad made a big mistake but I still love him and I always will,” she wrote.

Then things took a turn toward the nasty. “That fucking bitch was a perv. And If you want to say shit about my dad go right ahead cause those who have the time to judge others and their mistakes are worthless,” Nikki wrote.

Well, you might not have the nicest things to say about someone who tried to blackmail your father, either.

We even heard from Jessica’s ex-mother-in-law, Valerie. Now you wouldn’t expect anything nice to come from someone’s ex-husbands mother. And nothing nice did. “I am her "ex"-mother-in-law. Thank you God. I don't think you can ever really imagine the evil in this young woman,” Valerie wrote.

Before moving on, we just want to say: more please! This is effin great!

[After the jump, more from the Pop Tart-Pepsi circle.]

We don't want to harp on the story of Gary Wandschneider, the Pepsi Bottling Group executive who went to the Feds when his attempt to get a little on the side made him the target of a twenty-two year old scammer extortionist. He's certainly not the first wealthy, older man to find himself in a compromising situation with a nice-looking younger girl. And he probably never expected the whole thing to end up with his picture splattered across the New York Post and the internets. And now he's out of a job. (But don't feel too bad. He pulled down six million bucks last year, so if he's not an idiot, he'll be okay.)

But the news that Wandshneider was fired/quit/just stopped coming to work had us recalling another executive caught up in a sex-scandal of sorts. We're talking, of course, about William Wayne Pace (pictured above and left), the Time Warner executive who allegedly gave lots of money and gifts to Andrea Schwartz, who police claim was leading a drug and prostitution ring. We made a couple of calls this morning but no one returned them. Nonetheless, it seems that Pace is still toiling away as chief financial officer for Time Warner.

So maybe that was Wandshneider's biggest mistake—he was working for the wrong company. If you want to have an "inappropriate relationship" with a young woman—the kind where lots of money changes hands—you go to work for Time Warner. Pepsi is for prudes.

At some point you start to wonder, "Hey, Pepsi dude, are you sure keeping your $6 million job wasn't worth paying that little hustler $125,000?"

A top Pepsi honcho's job fizzed out yesterday, just days after his soda bosses learned that his penchant for surfing the 'Net for women made him an extortion target.

"As of today, Gary Wandschneider no longer works for Pepsi Bottling Group," said spokeswoman Kelly McAndrew, who refused to say whether he was canned or quit his $6 million post as executive vice president for worldwide operations.

Ex-Exec [New York Post]

In the comments to our post on sextortionist Jessica Wolcott’s victim—some mustachioed dude at Pepsi you’ve never heard of and probably won’t hear of again—we’ve apparently heard from his daughter, Nikki. Now we can’t vouch that this is definitely the victim’s daughter, of course. But the comment is completely earnest, and actually a bit sweet. Seems genuine enough. And we have some reason to believe that a Niki Wandschneider does exist, and may well be the Pepsi dude's daughter. Click through this link and tell us what you think. Do we have the real Nikki?

More importantly, Nikki, if you’re out there, it’s us, DealBreaker. We’d love to hear more from you. Send us an email to tips@dealbreaker.com.

Jessica Wolcott is not just an extortionist. She's also a model/market/entrepreneur—at least according several loan requests she made on the website Prosper, which brings together small lenders with borrowers. From March through April of this year, Wolcott placed six ads on the website seeking between $10,0000 and $20,0000—requests totaling $90,000—giving a variety of reasons why she needed the money and what she planned to do with it.

The young woman who pleaded guilty to extorting a Pepsi executive after meeting him over craiglist wasn't exactly shy about including lots of pictures with her loan requests, including the one you see to you left. Some of the pictures seem designed to show her as as a sweet young thing who volunteers as a Big Sister, while others are clearly attempts to look sexy and provocative.

Gawker last night reported on the Prosper profile and noted that there were even more pictures on Craiglist but, of course, these are long gone. The New York Post this morning reports that Jessica apparently lied about a lot of things in her loan requests.

She claimed in those postings that she had a $60,000 marketing job, modeled for Pantene Pro-V shampoo, had a Johns Hopkins University chemistry degree and that her parents were dead.

But court records reveal Wolcott's mother is alive, and a Johns Hopkins spokeswoman said Wolcott never matriculated there.

Court records also show Wolcott was evicted from an apartment in April for not paying her rent.

This morning the New York Post names the extorted executive as Gary Wandschneider, a divisional vice-president of Pepsi Bottling Co. According to Forbes.com, Gary pulled in nearly $3 million in cash compensation last year and was awarded stock options worth about another $3 million.

Well, that's somewhat less exciting than the idea that it was the CEO of a major company. But the good news is that thanks to help from our readers, we were on the right track! We had narrowed it down to a handful of companies based in Westchester, including the Pepsi Bottling Co. So good work team!

'Pop' Tart Scams Bigwig [New York Post]

Forbes.com Profile: Gary K Wandschneider [Forbes]

Yesterday we noted that the new CEO of Pepsi, Indra Nooyi, came under fire last year for allegedly anti-American remarks she made at the Columbia business school commencement. Pepsi and Indra say critics took her words out of context and misconstrued her meaning. There's only one way to resolve this--a DealBreaker Reader Poll.

Yesterday we wrote some nice things about the new CEO of Pepsi, Indra Nooyi. We said she was smart. We said she looked smart. We said she was from India. We said that people said she played well with others (although at least one commenter objected to this characterization).

You know what? All that sugar made us a bit ill. What’s more, in the back of our minds we kept thinking that there was something else we knew about dear Indra. It was on the tip of our tongues, or at least the tips of our blog-typing fingers, but we just couldn’t get it. Maybe she gave money to charity? No. It wasn't that. Or had a private plane tackily decorated? Nope. That’s not it either. Too many “third” martinis with lunch were giving us afternoon amnesia.

Well, now we’ve sobered up and we remember—Indra gave America the middle finger last year. She was the commencement speaker for Columbia MBAs last march, and her talk included describing each major continent with one of her five fingers. As it turns out, in the mind of the new CEO of Pepsi, America is the middle finger. Many interpreted the content of her speech as sending a “blame America first” message, which Pepsi’s media spinners eventually got around to denying. But then again a lot of the people complaining about the speech were neoconservative types who are a bit quick on the "unpatriotic trigger."

So does Indra Nooyi still think America deserves the middle finger? Was this ever a fair characterization of her remarks? Is Pepsi’s denial plausible? Was this all a neocon plot to promote Coke? Below are some links to the controversy.

The pause that enrages [Powerline]

The Raspberry Statement [Powerline]

'Anything but pro-American'? [Armavirumque]

So Pepsi named Indra Nooyi as it’s next CEO, succeeding former marine tough guy Steve Reinemund. She will be the fifth CEO in the company’s 41 year history. Everyone says she’s very smart, and smart for real—not just because they're profiling her for being born in India and having that "brainy chick" look. She’s also supposedly good with people.

Pepsi’s done well recently by branching out into the wider junk snack food market, decreasing its dependence of sales of sugary-bubbly drinks for profits. Some folks were surprised at the timing of the announcement. Reinemund's only been at the helm since 2000 and at age 57 is only seven years Nooyi's senior. He's generally considered to have had done an excellent job running the company. Word is that Pepsi was worried they'd lose Nooyi to a competitor if she wasn't promoted quickly.

PepsiCo names Nooyi CEO, Reinemund to retire in May [Reuters]