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They gave, and it was not given unto them By MICHAEL FECHTER of The Tampa Tribune TAMPA - Tom Krebs roams the rabbit warren of offices inside Greater Ministries International and points out the important areas.
Computers and shredders pack rooms where people tracked the money in this former bank building off Interstate 275 south of the Tampa Greyhound Track.
Greater Ministries exploded from modest beginnings in the early 1990s into an international financial enterprise when it marketed a money-doubling investment program catering to Christian fundamentalists.
Now, seven people who created and pushed the program await trial in federal court in Tampa on charges of fraud, money laundering and conspiracy. The trial had been scheduled for this month, but was postponed when the group's lawyer bailed out in a conflict, delaying the case well into next year.
In the meantime, thousands of people across the nation wait to see if their money is gone and their faith misplaced in a ministry that preached God and wealth could go hand in hand.
The pitch: Jesus wants his people to prosper, and Greater Ministries founder Gerald Payne discovered a way to double their money through divine intervention.
What really happened to the money is in the hands of Krebs. He took control of Greater Ministries' headquarters following an August court order that evicted the church's officials on behalf of securities regulators from Ohio and Alabama.
It's Krebs' job to work with a court-ordered receiver and bankruptcy trustee to find out where the money went and return as much as possible to investors.
He came to the case through William Smith, an Alabama resident who lost $80,000 after buying Greater Ministries' pitch.
The way Greater Ministries used religious beliefs incenses Krebs, once described by the Wall Street Journal as the nation's toughest securities cop.
``When they say that to separate people from their life savings, encourage people to max out their credit cards and mortgage their homes, then I want them,'' Krebs says.
``This is a nest of thieves I want cleaned out.''
To do that, Krebs and securities regulators from across the country have scoured Greater Ministries' headquarters looking for the money and evidence to bring additional charges.
In addition, the receiver and bankruptcy trustee have urged everyone who lost money in Greater Ministries to file claims. Krebs and his fellow investigators fear most of the money is gone: stashed in overseas accounts, buried or otherwise impossible to trace through the church's shoddy bookkeeping.
So far, the biggest Greater Ministries' asset seized and liquidated for return to investors is the Executive Inn, in Owensboro, Ky., the state's second-largest hotel. Greater Ministries bought it in 1997. The bankruptcy court sold it for $5.5 million.
That's just a tiny fraction of the nearly $500 million Greater Ministries is estimated to have taken in.
The hotel is one of the few examples that the group engaged in any genuine investment.
In August, when Krebs first entered Greater Ministries' headquarters, he expected to see clear evidence of where the money went. He didn't. Where witnesses described stacks of cash and gold inside vaults, Krebs found little of value.
But Krebs found something that convinced him the court's takeover of the headquarters came just in time.
About to flee
Spanish language instructional videos and computer disks were scattered throughout the building.
``These people are getting ready to bolt,'' Krebs thought. He figured they had planned a tropical getaway.
Greater Ministries publicly offered investors a piece of their proposed independent ``ecclesiastical domain'' outside the reach of the law.
They bid on Bahamian islands. They negotiated for an island off Liberia. They explored a Honduran island about a week after the federal indictment was issued in March.
Krebs also found letters from investors pleading for their money back. Some risk losing homes; others lost retirement savings. One man needed help covering his mother's funeral expenses.
Individual losses run from hundreds to tens of thousands of dollars. Some people went deep into debt to invest, accepting Greater Ministries' repeated boasts that money with them was safer than in a bank. The group also encouraged people to borrow money to invest, telling them that 18 percent interest payments on credit cards mean little when Greater Ministries could return 100 percent.
Ohio resident Deborah Thrapp wrote a desperate letter in March asking for the return of $240,000 she and her husband invested with Greater Ministries. The two sold their business and property to get in. They got $34,000 back.
``We can't pay rent any longer and can not afford to buy a place as our sources of income have disappeared,'' she wrote. ``We worked hard for our life savings and I hope you can help us with this problem. My husband just cries for hours and weeps over our situation - and I'm concerned he'll end up in a more terrible condition if you can't help.''
Greater Ministries denies conning anyone. Sign-up sheets clearly say any money sent in is a gift to the ministry with no guarantee of return.
Despite the disclaimer, the church's claim of divine money- making lured the faithful to invest in $250 increments. Just last week, investigators placed the total take at $476 million.
In the beginning
Such numbers make it hard to believe co-founders Gerald Payne and Don Hall struggled to make ends meet just a decade ago.
Hall has been a preacher his entire adult life and styles a big hairdo resembling white cotton candy. Sometimes his work is church rooted. Sometimes tent revivals.
It's not clear how he met Payne, a working man with a past. Payne tells people he used to work for the mob. He served five weeks in jail in 1979 after pleading guilty to lying to a federal grand jury investigating a bankruptcy fraud.
Payne and Hall formed a church named Greater Ministries Outreach about a decade ago. Volunteers cooked meals for poor and homeless families and counseled alcoholics.
At first, money didn't seem to be the focus.
Then, in the early 1990s, Payne introduced what he called the ABC Gold Plan. The plan boasted that a $60 investment became $1,600 in 12 to 18 months. Payne created a company called ``I John 4:4, Greater Inc.,'' described as a financial advising company. His partner, James Maher, was coming off five years' probation in Hillsborough County for running a Ponzi scheme.
As more people got in, the program took to the road. The money grew larger and in less time.
Religion and money
I John later gave way to Greater Ministries. Passages in Luke, II Corinthians and Malachi were offered as evidence that doubling someone's money in 17 months or less was God's plan.
``Give and it shall be given unto you'' from Luke 6:38 became the program's mantra.
It's an interpretation most Christians disagree with. Surrounding passages in Luke put 6:38 in the context of mercy and compassion, not wealth, they say.
Greater Ministries mixed services with money talk. Explanations of the new ``Double Your Money'' program followed gospel singing and charismatic preaching.
People accepted the story, partly because they were believers and partly because the program's early success provided a number of people who could stand up and describe - even show - enve lopes stuffed with cash that showed up like clockwork each month.
Greater Ministries leaders talked of investments in 200 mining operations globally and of international deals that could generate 30 percent and 40 percent returns.
But, investigators say, those early successes weren't real. Greater Ministries simply used money from new investors to pay old investors, a classic grift known as a Ponzi scheme.
Just where the money went is hard to know, because so much business was done in cash and so little was recorded.
What records were found show that millions of dollars went to commissions, dubbed ``gas money'' by insiders, for church officers who brought in more investments.
Investigations begin
Greater Ministries continued to rake in money from investors despite state and federal investigations begun in 1994 when some would-be investors, skeptical of an offer that sounded too good, alerted Florida securities regulators.
Florida investigators brought their findings to the U.S. attorney's office.
None of it slowed Greater Ministries. The church appealed Florida's action, changed the money- doubling program's name to Faith Promises, and added a disclaimer saying that the program is faith- based with no guarantees.
While fighting in court, Greater Ministries toured the country rounding up new investors. Meetings in restaurants and hotel ballrooms drew hundreds of people mesmerized by firsthand accounts of cash tucked into their mailboxes each month.
Greater outgrew banks, Payne told investors. It offered its own Greater International Bank of Nauru Visa debit card program for people to draw their money from.
The problem was, money sent to the Bank of Nauru really went to BestBank, a small state bank in Colorado. A badly managed small state bank.
When state regulators declared the bank insolvent in July 1998, deposits above $100,000 were lost. For Greater Ministries, $18 million disappeared into an FDIC receivership.
Payments to investors lasted a couple of months, then stopped cold.
The group that claimed hundreds of millions of dollars in assets and 200 gold and silver mines collapsed.
Blaming government
Church leaders blamed the failure on a government conspiracy. Regulations and criminal probes didn't work, so the government just took our money, Payne said.
Jack-booted government thuggery repeatedly has been cited by Greater Ministries as the root of its problem.
Greater Ministries blamed the IRS for an unsolved robbery that the church reported four years ago at its Tampa headquarters. The church claimed that anywhere from $500,000 to $3.5 million was taken. Police found little evidence to support the robbery report.
Blaming the government reached new heights when Colorado bank regulators and the FDIC seized BestBank, where the church kept most of its money.
Betty Payne accused Colorado Banking Commissioner Richard Fulkerson of conspiring ``to destroy our Christian church through fraudulently transferring our bank funds'' to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.
``We have suffered major damages to our ministry over the last two weeks.''
The church played it cool with the public and investors.
``I just told them that was our petty cash fund,'' John Krishak told his fellow elders.
But even the elders grew squeamish and wondered whether they should keep their money in the program. Payne chastised them during a September 1998 meeting. He called them Judases and urged them to repent before God and himself.
``You're going to have to leave out of here with the best sales attitude you ever had,'' he ordered.
That's what Payne, Hall and others brought to Pennsylvania in November 1998. Pennsylvania is the state from which investors sent the most money to Greater Ministries.
A meeting with 1,000 followers at the Lebanon County Expo Hall was all sunshine. The group's Liberian mining operation sat 15 feet above Africa's greatest untapped gold reserves, they reported. Billions were there for the asking.
Money continued to come in, despite the legal and financial trouble.
Virginia chiropractor Keith Jassy invested $40,000 after the bank collapse. He told investigators he ``would not have participated if it were not for the church's representation that I would receive double my money back.''
He had it in writing.
``We can double money every 10 to 16 months,'' an accompanying fact sheet said. Greater was ``so big that now we can handle $100 million in the morning and $100 million in the evening.''
He heard about Greater Ministries through a client and spoke to church representatives who bragged about ``huge profits the church's diamond mine was earning,'' Jassy said in a sworn state ment.
Greater did invest in an African mining operation, but it didn't reap any profit.
As much as $11 million went to civil war-plagued Liberia in West Africa. An internal budget shows more than $7 million went to equipment and work associated with the group's mining effort. A letter from the National Bank of Liberia confirms a $4 million payment for permission to open a bank.
Greater Ministries had a building in Liberia's capital, Monrovia, but the bank never opened.
Investments in Liberia may be recoverable, but the receiver and bankruptcy trustee must decide if it's worth trying.
While the search for Greater Ministries' investments continues, victim claim forms trickle in, about 50 to 75 per week.
Some people fear personal repercussions from the IRS if they file claims. Others remain faithful, and hope Greater Ministries prevails in court, resumes operations and makes good on their money.
The group still enjoys support from a large segment of the religious faithful who lost money. Many continue to blame Greater Ministries' troubles on a government and media conspiracy.
But that support falters more easily these days as Krebs and other investigators uncover more evidence of a church scam. Krebs tells them he's found no evidence of the mines or other assets Greater Ministries claimed to own. And he offers proof that elders received huge cash commissions that investors never knew about.
Slowly, ``they come to realize that they have been lied to,'' Krebs says.