Saved from the Unthinkable

Springing to his father’s aid, Richard Roberts pleaded to viewers of his own TV program: “Please don’t let this birthday be my father’s last.” At the rate of $160,000 a day, currency once again began filling the mail room and a few days before divine thunder-bolts were scheduled to crease his brow, Oral announced that Jerry Collins, the owner of a dog racing track in Florida, had anted up $1.3 million to save him. At least for the time being, the world could relax, no longer faced with the dreadful possibility of having to do without Oral Roberts. But Oral wasn’t finished. Recognizing a winning hand, he next announced that God was now demanding a similar $8 million a year in addition to the regular tithes from Roberts’s flock, to be collected “every year until Jesus comes”! Furthermore, in spite of all he had actually said and written in reference to the March 31 death threat, the reverend gentleman declared that he had never said he’d die, and that any such notion was merely the invention of a hostile press. The mind boggles at Roberts’s ability to deny his own words. (This whole event was all the more newsworthy because it immediately preceded the tremendous upheaval in the evangelism business that resulted when Jim Bakker and his wife, Tammy Faye, revealed that a mixture of blackmail, sexual shenanigans, and drug addiction was forcing them to hand over their $130-million-a-year PTL operation to Jerry Falwell, admittedly to keep it out of the hands of Jimmy Swaggart, a high school dropout dubbed the “Weeping Pastor” of television.) What happens to those millions that are poured into the Oral Roberts ministry is still a mystery.

Gold Bars and Cut Diamonds

Concerning the fortunes brought in by the Peter Popoff ministry of Upland, California, no such mystery need trouble us. Popoff was never shy about such matters with his close friends, delighting in showing off his wealth at every opportunity. His home in Upland (assessed at just under $800,000), which he put up for sale after I exposed his tricks on the Johnny Carson show in February of 1986, boasted both a walk-in vault and a jewelry display room measuring six by eight feet, with illuminated display shelves. Said former Popoff controller Ira McCorriston:[It] looks like a jeweler’s store when you walk in it, all the lights and the glass cabinets and all the gold bars, the silver and the diamond collections and all that, laid out like you walk into on Fifth Avenue ... That’s one part ... then the other part is this door. It’s like a bank.

Ira says that he never got into that part of the “bank,” the section protected with steel armor-plate and a combination lock, but reports from inside were that Popoff had $2 million in cash stashed away in there against bad times, and had boasted about it. There were three main sources for the Popoff income. As with all these operations, the mail contributions were by far the major source. This money came in from appeals made via the 55 TV stations and 130 radio stations on which Popoff appeared weekly. Then there was the Inner Circle Club money, a method of continuing to extract money from selected individuals who had already sent him large cash gifts, though that system was only put into operation shortly before my TV exposure of Popoff began to take effect. The in-person crusade money was substantial, too, and was far more maneuverable because much of it was in cash. Cameraman Gary Clarke worked on the videotaping of some of the early Popoff crusades by All-American Video, W. V. Grant’s production company. (It was later renamed QC Video when Grant moved to Cincinnati.) Clarke witnessed an event in Atlanta, Georgia, on Christmas Eve that showed him just how enormous the profit was from these shows. It is something that he cannot forget. One of Popoff’s “money men” was backstage heading for the truck to join the others for a count of the take for that meeting, and Clarke watched as the man struggled to get an enormous wad of cash out of one of his pockets. Another employee had to help him. Cash was strewn about the floor, and they were picking it up like so much litter.