You Can't Cheat an Honest Man - James Walsh [99]
year sentence in a federal prison, Rasheed was transferred to a San Francisco halfway house to serve the rest of his sentence. In prison, he had been a model inmate; once out, he reverted to his old ways.
In May 1986, Rasheed fled from the halfway house after depositing $178,500 in stolen checks into a Michigan bank account—and then writing more than $20,000 of checks on the bogus deposits. He was captured in San Francisco a short time later.
Back in federal court, Rasheed claimed that he’d merely left the halfway house as scheduled: “I had no intention of doing anything illegal. I was on the square.”
A few months later, after a trial in which the jury took 26 minutes to find Rasheed guilty of escaping the halfway house, he was sentenced to an additional five years in prison.
A Slightly More Subtle Approach
There’s no doubt that people trust their pastors and people they meet through their churches. Ponzi perps know this—and don’t usually hesitate to exploit this presumption of trust.
Exploiting the presumption of trust doesn’t require religious piety. It simply plays on the social element of church, which is infused with trust and optimism. This relieves the perp of any direct connection to religion—he or she can simply act like a well-meaning church-goer, who happens to trade silver futures or sell pre-paid phone cards.
Of course, the pitch is always strongest when the person making it is the pastor. More than anyone, he or she benefits from the trust and optimism people feel when they socialize with fellow church-goers.
Robert Tilton, a controversial Texas televangelist who bills himself as the “Pastor to America,” exemplifies the issues that arise when the social element of religion meets the mechanics of a Ponzi scheme.
Tilton has a background that suggests a Ponzi perp. A baby-boomer, he acted like James Dean—black leather jacket and minor scrapes with the law—in his Richardson, Texas, high school. Not much of an intellect, he bounced around Texas Tech University and several junior colleges. He talked about studying architecture but ended up working construction.
In the late 1960s, Tilton drifted to Los Angeles. There, he spent most of his free time going to parties and sampling the expanded consciousness of the West Coast drug culture.
On a trip home to Dallas in 1968, he met Martha Ann Phillips. They were married a few months later before a Justice of the Peace. The newlyweds spent their honeymoon dabbling in the just-starting New Age movement in and around Santa Barbara, California. By the summer of 1969, the Tiltons had moved back to Dallas. One night, two evangelical “Jesus freaks” knocked on their door. Tilton said he and his wife were “transformed” when one of the young men said, “Come with me, and I’ll make you a fisher of men.”
In 1974, after Tilton had been able to put away some money from working for a Dallas home builder, the couple decided to become itinerant evangelists. They sold almost everything they owned, bought a used travel trailer and a secondhand gospel tent. They hit the road with their two young children.
The family spent time on the revival-meeting circuit, preaching in small towns from north Florida to east Texas. After two years on the road, the Tiltons settled in Houston. There, Tilton worked with John Osteen, the pastor of a 7,000-member fundamentalist church. He still worked an occasional construction job to make ends meet.
In early 1976, Tilton had a “revelation.” He’d preach a message that combined conservative Christianity, New Age spirituality and entrepreneurial wealth-building. He went back to Dallas to start the Word of Faith Family Church—which was some leased space in a former YMCA building in suburban Farmers Branch. Word spread about “Brother Bob” and his unusual theology of prosperity.
Tilton encouraged his flock to follow his advice for making money in multi-level marketing and other bootstrap operations. This harkened back to early Protestant America, when material success was supposed to reflect God