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Christian News Today |
Ephesians 5:11 & Mark 4:22
Robert
Tilton and Gene Ewing
American
Con Artist Preachers
The
As head of Church By Mail and Church and Bible Study in the Home
By Mail, the erstwhile
A computer software program identifies and isolates demographic
blocs that respond best to Mr. Ewing's direct-mail appeal. Those contributors,
according to an analysis by The
Gene had {an} intuitive savvy about direct mail that none of
your giant agencies would have," said Mr. Robinson, noting Mr. Ewing's
ability to appeal to specific groups. "That was basically his peers,"
he said. "That would be those who hadn't graduated from high school, old
people, lonely people, people on the outside, those who weren't being reached
by the mainstream churches. And he was extraordinary {at} communicating with
African-Americans."
Well
as life would have it one of these fleecers Robert Tilton rents block of time
from Back Educational Television to communicate his nightly message to the
African Americans.
Robert
Tilton, rules the broadcast vacuum left by fallen televangelists Jimmy Swaggart
and Jim Bakker. Tilton the former the Texas televangelist who has been divorced
twice, now operates out of
Leigh
Valentine a former Miss Tallahassee, and the second divorced wife of Tilton
testified that Tilton would throw her down stairs, slam her against walls, or
hurl cordless telephones at her head;. She talked about how Tilton would drink
himself into blind rages and declare he was the Pope or wake up in the night
screaming that "rats were eating his brain."
The
While skeptics dismissed him as a low-rent
Southern cultural phenomenon, Tilton was hee-hawing all the way to the bank. At
his peak he purchased 5000 hours of airtime per month and appeared in all 235
Tilton learned from the scandals that brought down Swaggart and
Bakker. While claiming to support various orphanages and overseas missions, he
was careful not to link viewers' contributions to any particular project.
(Bakker went to prison because he raised money for a Christian theme park in
South Carolina and then spent the money on other things.) And while Tilton
called himself the prophet of a generation, he did not harp on moral issues. He
thereby avoided setting himself up for charges of hypocrisy. (Swaggart's demise
began when he was videotaped with a prostitute. He had previously preached to
millions on the sins of lust and adultery.) If Swaggart and Bakker seemed like
caricatures, Tilton was a veritable cartoon character, a self-parody of
television evangelism.
Well
you would think that if anybody who had brains and cared about people
especially BET and were aware about the above facts, they would keep Tilton of
their networks. But money and greed talks and the owners of BET love the
revenues more than the damage that Tilton is doing to the African American's
with his trash? So much for typical double standards and hypocrisy even among
Black leaders especially Dr. Henry J. Lyons, President of the National Baptist
Convention and Pastor of Bethel Metropolitan Baptist Church.
Rev.
Henry Lyons is now known for his pastoral peccadilloes and the recent grand
theft and racketeering charges filed by State of Florida against him. A man
called by others as Rev. Hanky-Panky who was a personal friend of Bill Clinton.
A man who sought spiritual solace in the bathtub smoking marijuana after a hard
day of playing patty-cake with Nigerian dictators and the financial stewardship
of the NBC including secret bank accounts, forged signatures, missing files and
hushed-up lobbying work on behalf of those wacky, zany Nigerian scamps. A man
who allegedly made a $200,000 rip-off of an Anti-Defamation League of B'nai
Brith donation, which found its way into his pockets instead of burned out
Baptist churches where it was originally intended.
FOR
MORE TRUTHFUL STORIES AND IN DEPTH REPORTING ABOUT RELIGIOUS ONES FROM THE LAND
OF THE FREE AND THE HOME OF THE BRAVE CHECK OUT THE FOLLOWING PUBLISHED BY
CHRISTIAN NEWS TODAY or the Tampa Tribune or the St. Petersburg Times OR Miami
Newstimes and Pensacola News Journal
01/01/1998
Dogged by grabby ex-wives and financial scandals, a Texas
prophet-for-profit brings his TV act to Miami Beach By Sean Rowe
Sitting in Ross Perot's favorite booth at a fancy Dallas restaurant,
Leigh Valentine eats half her low-fat redfish and then explains her husband's
"disguise kit." The kit contained several fake mustaches and a $1200
custom-made wig. Robert Tilton, the Texas televangelist, carried it everywhere,
and during their first year of marriage he wore disguises "50 percent of
the time," Valentine says.
It's a tale she's told before, under oath in divorce court --
the disguise kit, and the nights aboard a yacht in Fort Lauderdale or in
various mansions where Tilton would throw her down stairs, slam her against
walls, or hurl cordless telephones at her head; how Tilton would drink himself
into blind rages and declare he was the Pope or wake up in the night screaming
that "rats were eating his brain."
Valentine, a former Miss Tallahassee, further explains why
Tilton felt compelled to use disguises in 1995 but probably doesn't any more;
and why, despite having spent $6000 on private detectives in Texas and Florida,
she has no idea where her husband is right now.
"We would go to restaurants here in Dallas and people would
give us the finger," she says. "People would scream at us on the
street. It was incredible. Bob hated Dallas, and the more he hated Dallas the
more he loved Florida. He said Fort Lauderdale was like his cloak of
invisibility. Nobody would ever find him there. No one recognized him. He could
wear shorts and Hawaiian shirts all day and do whatever he wanted."
Apropos of nothing, Valentine announces she's "doing a
book-and-movie deal" (working title: The Dark Side of the Cross). Later
over coffee she says she hopes any story resulting from tonight's interview
will ignore her drunk-driving arrest last month, which occurred after she
broadsided another motorist at a Dallas intersection. It would be nice if she
were described as 39 years of age instead of 41, she suggests. "And call
me Leigh Valentine, not Leigh Valentine Tilton," she adds. "I don't
know how I got myself into this mess. I mean, I'm the daughter of a surgeon! I
wish I'd never heard the name Tilton."
Parting words: "Find Bob. I want photos of him. Him and
whatever girlfriend he's with. He keeps telling the judge he's broke. He keeps
pretending he's changed. Bob Tilton will never change, and he'll definitely
never be broke."
If you saw him on TV during the late Eighties or early Nineties,
you will not have forgotten Robert Tilton. Not the Howdy Doody dimples, nor the
frosted, frizzy hair. Not the bizarre facial contortions, nor the Babylonian
babbling that passed for speaking in tongues. Not the antics: Tilton climbing
aboard his desk to wallow in a pile of viewers' prayer requests; Tilton
explaining why he had gone for plastic surgery (ink from those same prayer
requests had seeped into his bloodstream and created bags under his eyes);
Tilton telling his TV audience that those who messed with him were
"messin' with the apple of God's eye."
Robert Tilton ruled the broadcast vacuum left by fallen
televangelists Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker. And if Swaggart and Bakker seemed
like caricatures, Tilton was a veritable cartoon character, a self-parody of
television evangelism itself.
While skeptics dismissed him as a low-rent Southern cultural
phenomenon, Tilton was hee-hawing all the way to the bank. At his peak he
purchased 5000 hours of airtime per month and appeared in all 235 U.S.
television markets. His daily Success-N-Life show reached virtually every TV
set in North America. Tilton's mass-market ministry pulled in $80 million per
year, and his Dallas church drew as many as 5000 worshipers to Sunday service.
He trotted the globe, wore $2000 tailored Italian suits, and drove, depending
on his mood, a Mercedes-Benz or a Jaguar. He occupied multimillion-dollar
residences near San Diego and Dallas and a waterfront vacation home in Fort
Lauderdale. Of course, the facts of his gaudy lifestyle and the astonishing
size of his business enterprise remained largely hidden until after his eclipse
began.
Tilton learned from the scandals that brought down Swaggart and
Bakker. While claiming to support various orphanages and overseas missions, he
was careful not to link viewers' contributions to any particular project.
(Bakker went to prison because he raised money for a Christian theme park in
South Carolina and then spent the money on other things.) And while Tilton
called himself the prophet of a generation, he did not harp on moral issues. He
thereby avoided setting himself up for charges of hypocrisy. (Swaggart's demise
began when he was videotaped with a prostitute. He had previously preached to
millions on the sins of lust and adultery.)
One issue Tilton did dwell on was worldly wealth. Day after day
he pitched a narrow, well-oiled version of the Pentecostal "prosperity
gospel." In exchange for $1000 "vows" from followers, Tilton
promised to lobby God for miraculous improvements in their health and finances.
"If Jesus Christ were alive today and walking around, he wouldn't want his
people driving Volkswagens and living in apartments," he explained.
Then came November 21, 1991. On that evening, ABC's PrimeTime
Live aired the findings of a six-month investigation into the ministries of
Tilton and two other TV preachers, W.V. Grant and Larry Lea.
The segment on Tilton was by far the most damning. At its heart
was the accusation that Tilton never saw the vast majority of prayer requests
and personal correspondence sent to him by faithful viewers. On the air Tilton
promised to pray over each individual miracle-plea. But ABC said it found
thousands of those requests dumped in garbage bins in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Checks,
money orders, and in some cases cash, food stamps, and even wedding rings sent
by followers had been removed for deposit at a nearby bank.
Tilton and his lawyer claimed the Dumpster documents had been
stolen by enemies of the church and then planted in the trash.
Within weeks the first of a dozen lawsuits had been filed by
outraged followers. One of the plaintiffs, Mary Turk, said she had avoided
seeking medical treatment for colon cancer because she believed doing so would
indicate a breach of faith in God. Meanwhile, reporters from a local TV station
in Oklahoma claimed to have discovered thousands more Tilton prayer requests at
a recycling plant. The requests were promptly impounded by the U.S. Attorney's
Office.
Tilton repeated his claim that the trashed prayer pleas were
part of a plot against the church.
Texas Attorney General Dan Morales launched a fraud
investigation of Tilton's ministry, and the FBI and the U.S. Postal Service
subpoenaed the church's records the day after the ABC broadcast. Tilton called
Morales "a flea." Morales countered that Tilton was "raping the
most vulnerable segments of our society -- the poor, the infirm, the ignorant
... who believe his garbage."
Eighteen months later the screen went dark. By the time Tilton
announced the cancellation of Success-N-Life, the show had lost as much as 85
percent of its audience. Contributions to the ministry had dropped from seven
million dollars per month to two million dollars, according to Tilton's
attorney, J.C. Joyce. "It is a matter of the media," Joyce said,
addressing reporters. "You are responsible for what has happened to this
church." Tilton himself referred to reporters as "devils."
The publisher of The Door, a religious humor magazine, also had some
thoughts on the uses of broadcast media. "If there's a lesson
televangelists have learned in the past decade, it's that those who live by
media manipulation may die by the same," wrote Ole Anthony, whose
Dallas-based Trinity Foundation assisted ABC in its expose. Tilton, Anthony
noted, had simply been brought to the sharp realization that "technology
could be a two-edged sword."
Instead of dying, the story broadened. In recent years it has
included libel suits filed by Tilton against both ABC and the Trinity
Foundation. (He lost the former and dropped the latter.) Meanwhile the Dallas
press corps chronicled Tilton's two rancorous, high-profile divorces and the
accelerating decline of his local congregation.
These days the trip to Tilton's Word of Faith Family Church is
an unsettling one. The structure squats near the confluence of two interstates
in Farmers Branch, a suburb of Dallas long devoid of farmers. High on the
facade, careful observers will note, the prairie wind whistles through a broken
pane of stained glass. Bob Wright, a caretaker pastor put in place by Tilton in
the spring of 1996, parks his white Jaguar a few yards from a disused satellite
dish the size of a sharecropper's shack.
Inside the high-tech tabernacle, thick curtains seal off empty
balconies that once held thousands. Tilton's appointee preaches to a
combination of poor blacks and elderly whites numbering about 130. The service
is a desolate mix of hymns followed by Wright's wandering exhortations and,
finally, a tepid dose of faith-healing during which parishioners move to the
front, receive the laying-on of hands, and slump to the carpet for a few
moments. There's a money plea that winds things up, but no mention of the
absentee landlord. A few months ago, according to one attendee, the
congregation took up a collection for Tilton's lost scuba gear.
"Not even the church staff seems to know when Tilton will
appear," wrote the Reverend George Exoo, a Harvard Divinity School
graduate and magazine columnist who visited the church in September.
"About once a month he touches down in Dallas, the rest of the time
leaving Pastor Bob Wright to rebuild the crowds. It's not working."
"The donations probably did not cover the light bill for
the night, let alone the restoration of the beleaguered church," Exoo
noted. "My guess is that the Big Executive has already canceled the
show."
Nothing, in fact, could be further from the truth. To judge the
health of Tilton's mass-market ministry on the basis of church attendance in
Dallas is a fundamental misapprehension of how his operation actually works. It
also fails to recognize the context of Tilton's troubles. Lost in the chronicle
of his battles with the media, the Texas state attorney general, and various
civil plaintiffs is the fact that Tilton has all but won the war.
Last summer a $900,000 jury award against Tilton was overturned
on appeal. Eleven other lawsuits have been dismissed, dropped, or settled out
of court. Investigations of fraud in Tilton's ministry by state and federal
authorities have ultimately failed to produce any conviction. And Tilton has
rid himself of the second of two wives whose allegations of physical abuse and
drunken debauchery made for colorful headlines but in the end were never proven
in court.
"After all the headlines and all the investigations and all
the audits, they couldn't find one damn thing that this man or this ministry
had done wrong," says attorney J.C. Joyce. "There never was any dirt
on Robert Tilton. In the end it was all a pack of lies. But there hasn't been
any story about that, has there?"
While church members in Dallas may believe that Tilton has
vanished from the face of the Earth or is busy doing God's work in some Third
World backwater, he is in fact alive and well and living in the world's capital
of second chances: South Florida.
As recently as this past summer, Tilton stated that church
revenues totaled an astonishing $750,000 to $800,000 per month, according to
court transcripts from the Tilton/Valentine divorce. This at a time when Tilton
had been off the air for nearly two years. Only a small portion of church
revenues ($20,000 per month) come from leases on church-owned property, Tilton
said at the time.
Anthony, the Trinity Foundation leader and Tilton nemesis,
claims the physical church in Farmers Branch is little more than a money-losing
prop designed to repel IRS scrutiny of Tilton's tax-exempt status, a charge
Tilton's lawyer vehemently denies. At any rate, 130 hardscrabble parishioners
don't generate $750,000 to $850,000 per month. So where does the money come
from?
The answer is Tilton's mailing list, which once contained
880,000 names and addresses. Just as national political campaigns depend on
mailing lists of potential contributors, American televangelists know they are
the crucial, invisible keys.
According to former Word of Faith church members, Tilton once
employed hundreds of minimum-wage "prayer warriors" to answer his
toll-free hotline. When viewers called in, their names and addresses were
entered in computer banks. The master list was then used, as it is today, to
generate mass mailings to the faithful -- and more pleas for money -- over and
over again.
"Do you need more money?" reads an envelope received by
a California resident a few months ago. Two pennies are visible through a
cellophane-covered aperture.
Inside the envelope is a message from Tilton: "Take the
miracle request prayer sheet that I have enclosed with the coins and carefully
write down the areas of your life (especially financial) where you want me to
release my anointing on your behalf... and then WRITE A CHECK FOR THE BEST
POSSIBLE GIFT THAT YOU CAN GIVE!! Make it a widow's step-of-faith and give the
devil a black eye by placing the biggest, largest, most generous gift (that
would defy natural reason) into God's work."
Tilton includes instructions to pray over the coins and send
them back with a check. "Your two token coins will be placed in my New
Testament Treasury Chest for me to bless every day," he writes. "I
will then send you an anointed miracle coin to use as your miracle reminder and
as a point of contact to carry with you wherever you go."
The mailings are accompanied by testimonials from victims of
peptic ulcers, layoffs, cigarette addiction, deadly spider bites, rebellious
children, infertility, insomnia, and AIDS. Their lives turned around after they
sent money to Tilton. Take "Robert," for example, a miracle recipient
identified by first name only: "Everything was crumbling around me,"
Robert explains. "My two best friends had just sued me. My landlord had
served me with an eviction notice. I was jobless and flat broke. I wouldn't
answer the telephone because I knew it would be a bill collector.
"I was cowering in a chair with all my curtains closed.
Heartbreaking love songs gushed from the stereo.... I lit a joint.
"Robert Tilton was praying [on TV]. I can't explain it but
I heard him say, 'You. Right there. You're smoking a joint.' I dropped the
joint and he said, 'You just dropped it.' I started crying. I KNEW IT WAS GOD
TALKING TO ME."
The mailings come with trinkets such as seeds or sand or salt
packets. A Dallas woman received a small strip of red polyester. "Right
now this cloth is plain fabric," Tilton wrote, "but after I send it
back to you it will be a Miracle Cloth saturated with the presence of
God."
As Jim Moore, owner of an Oklahoma printing company that handles
Tilton's outgoing mail, explained to a hidden news camera in 1991: "It's
all about names and addresses."
Mailing lists grow stale when the TV screen stays dark too long.
Now, though, it is bright once more. Tilton's toll-free prayer line is up and
running, and his Tulsa, Oklahoma, P.O. box awaits a hoped-for onslaught from
the faithful.
Every weekday between 11:00 a.m. and noon, a fiber-optic
telephone line the size of a human hair carries the voice and image of the
51-year-old Robert Tilton out of a small TV studio on North Bay Road in Miami
Beach. The signal runs under city streets and across Biscayne Bay until it
reaches the North Miami public television station WPBT-TV (Channel 2). Comtel,
a for-profit affiliate of the station, beams Tilton's brand-new Success-N-Life
show up through the heavens to transponder number one on a satellite owned by
Hughes Communications and known as Galaxy 9.
Unless you own a satellite dish, you can't see Tilton's show in
Miami. You would have to move to Los Angeles, Nashville, Detroit, or Atlanta,
where Success-N-Life began airing on various cable channels in April. Three
months ago Tilton moved into the New York market and now appears there twice
each day.
The new Tilton seems a bit less frisky. Gone are the tantrums
aimed at Satan and his minions. His hair is less flamboyant, almost
grandfatherly in its salt-and-pepperedness. But some of the recent
Success-N-Life segments suggest that Tilton may have broken into a South
Florida wardrobe trailer and discovered a trunk of treasures from Miami Vice
days -- pastel pants, tropical sport coats. ("He's trying to reach out,"
says J.C. Joyce. "Suits and ties don't reach out.")
The old studios in Dallas and San Diego were lugubrious dens
lined with leather-bound books. The new set looks like a Sunday-school vision
of ancient Palestine, complete with Styrofoam "stone" walls and a gurgling
fountain. Tilton sits beside the fountain to read samples of viewer prayer
requests. Beyond the sound-stage walls, Tremont Towing does a brisk trade in
impounded vehicles, while across the street workers are busy building Miami
Beach a brand-new Publix. Inside all is peace and tranquillity.
What hasn't changed is Tilton's repetitious message. He quotes a
bit of Scripture and speaks in tongues, but mostly he pushes emotional buttons:
Cancer. Emphysema. Alcoholism. Credit card addiction. Job layoffs. These
ailments can be cured through faith. But faith requires proof, a
"vow." To make a vow, preferably of $1000, call the 800 number on the
screen. (When a New Times writer called the hotline to seek solace regarding
credit card addiction, a telemarketer took less than a minute recording his
name, phone number, address, date of birth, and type of ailment, promising to
pass the information on to Pastor Bob.)
"When it first came out in April, it was pretty much like a
normal religious show," says a source involved in the program's
production. "Then after five or ten shows it started to change. [Tilton]
pretty much stopped talking about Scriptures. It was just a sales pitch. As a
Christian, I find it a little disturbing."
Intercut with Tilton's sermonizing are "testimonials"
in the form of news reports about people who have received miracles after
giving money to Tilton. One recent testimonial featured "Rex and
Kay," a Dallas couple who lost everything when a Sun Belt construction
boom went bust. Within days of sending their last $1000 to Tilton, Rex got a
new job and the pair made plans to build a snazzy new suburban home.
The testimonial, according to its own tagline, was produced by
Paul Pettite. Pettite was laid off by Tilton in the early Nineties.
Ronald Wishna, who is listed on corporate records as the owner
of the Miami Beach studio, declined to discuss Tilton. But another local
entertainment industry source says Tilton and his associates paid cash up-front
for a two-year lease on the 50-by-50-foot sound stage and invested at least
another $30,000 to transform the building's interior.
"These guys are geared up for real, and they're here to
stay," the source says, adding, "They're a real piss to hang out
with. They're just good ol' Texas boys. They like to smoke cigars and drink
brandy and have a good time on South Beach. Tilton told me once, 'I just want
to come here and be left alone.'"
If Tilton is ready for some R&R in the subtropics, it's
understandable. Though he dropped off the national radar screen in 1993, the
meltdown of his ministry continued:
*In late 1993 Tilton fired, then divorced, his co-pastor and
wife of 25 years, Marte Phillips Tilton. For a time the split seemed amicable.
Now Marte Tilton is suing her ex-husband and his attorney J.C. Joyce for fraud,
breach of contract, and negligent misrepresentation.
In the lawsuit, her summary dumping is described this way:
"Ms. Tilton flew to Fort Lauderdale with two of her children for a short
vacation. The events surrounding this family gathering were strange indeed, and
the 'holiday' ended at 1:00 a.m. July 5, 1993, with Pastor Tilton announcing
that he was leaving Ms. Tilton, and filing for divorce. Pastor Tilton's parting
words were: 'Don't ever return to the office or the church.'"
Marte Tilton goes on to call Joyce "diabolical" and
"the hub of a master scheme, only recently unearthed, designed to preserve
the assets of the ministry to the extent feasible, maintain Joyce's and Pastor
Tilton's lucrative incomes, and spirit away the ... church's assets." (At
the height of the ministry's success, Joyce's annual retainers from the church
ran between $1.3 and $1.7 million, according to court records.) She describes
the months following the ABC expose as a "blur" during which Tilton became
"depressed and only marginally cognitive" engaged in a
"protracted course of infidelity and avarice." She says she also came
to believe that Tilton and Joyce had tapped her phone and shadowed her with
private detectives.
Joyce, whose other evangelical clients include half a dozen of
the nation's wealthiest preachers, including pastors Larry Lea and Don Stewart,
calls Marte Tilton's allegations preposterous -- "the colorful product of
a lawyer's pen" -- and predicts the lawsuit will be thrown out of court or
withdrawn.
*In March 1994, according to news accounts, police responded to
Word of Faith Family Church to quell a disturbance caused by a walkout of
congregation members. At issue was Tilton's relationship with leaders of a
North Carolina charismatic sect that practices "demon blasting," a
form of prayer that involves sect members forming "prayer circles"
around a child believed to be possessed by demons and shouting at the subject
for hours at the top of their lungs. (The group was later the subject of a
child-abuse investigation by North Carolina state authorities; no charges were
ever filed.)
In Sunday sermons Tilton has credited sect leaders Sam and Jane
Whaley with saving his life in 1993 by casting out his own demons. Tilton was
introduced to Whaley by his second wife, Leigh Valentine, whom he secretly
married in the Dominican Republic on February 10, 1994. Sect members
interviewed by an Inside Edition reporter confirmed that Tilton visited the
group's compound on several occasions and was "treated like God."
Responds Joyce: "A lot of ministries may look nutty to a
lot of people. Bob later decided that this stuff was not true doctrine."
*In September 1995 Tilton and Leigh Valentine moved into a new
$1.6 million home in the Dallas suburb of Addison. Two months later Tilton
filed for divorce from Valentine, only to retract the petition. On March 11,
1996, he sued for divorce again.
Describing her husband as an increasingly paranoid and abusive alcohol-fueled
adulterer, Valentine first sought to prove that Tilton and his church were
essentially one and the same and that she was therefore entitled to some
portion of the church's $60 million in real estate and other assets. A panel of
judges ultimately ruled against her; Valentine filed for personal bankruptcy in
October. The Dallas Morning News reports that last month a judge denied Leigh
Valentine's claims of abuse by Tilton and upheld $275,000 in judgments against
her. Valentine said through a spokesman that she plans to appeal the ruling.
*On March 16, 1996, after announcing his call to evangelical
work in Cuba and the Philippines, Tilton named Bob Wright as senior associate
pastor of the Dallas church.
And then he vanished.
When Tilton finally decided to duck and run from Dallas, he did
it right.
Picking up his trail in South Florida is no small task. There is
no telephone listing in his name, either published or nonpublished; no property
records in Miami-Dade, Broward, and Monroe counties; no car registration with
the state Department of Motor Vehicles. Corporate records show that Tilton
registered his nonprofit Word of Faith World Outreach Center Church, Inc. in
Florida more than a decade ago, but the corporation is listed as inactive.
There are a few titillating hints in the court files: a trio of
traffic tickets handed out over the years in Broward (one for doing 93 in a 55
mph zone on Christmas Eve, another for "failure to use due care," and
a third this past April for driving without registration documents). Computer
research reveals twelve addresses used by Tilton in the past decade, three of
them in Fort Lauderdale. But two of those are commercial mail drops, and the
last, a $500,000 waterfront vacation home in the Rio Vista neighborhood, was
sold last year as part of Tilton's divorce settlement with wife number one.
Ditto for his 38-foot fishing boat.
Where's Bob?
"Not here," says a bartender at a fashionable Las Olas
Boulevard bistro. "He used to sit outside and drink single-malt Scotch,
but we haven't seen him in a few months."
Federal records show that Tilton bought a 50-foot Carver motor
yacht last year in Fort Lauderdale for $500,000. In July 1996 he told a judge
in Dallas that he was living aboard and making $4000 monthly payments on the
boat, which he named the Liberty Leigh.
"I haven't seen him or the boat in over a year," says
a resident of Bahia Mar Marina in Fort Lauderdale, where the yacht was berthed
for several months.
"Robert Tilton is an individual who resides in Broward
County, Florida," says the preamble to Marte Tilton's current lawsuit
against her ex-husband. The lawyer who wrote the preamble, James Clutts, says
he doesn't know exactly where in Broward County.
Tilton's trail warms up a few miles south.
The directory in the lobby of an office tower on Michigan Avenue
just north of Lincoln Road in South Beach lists "WOF, Int'l" --
shorthand for Tilton's Word of Faith ministry.
But Tilton doesn't enter or exit the building. And although
there are plenty of Texas license plates outside his TV studio a few blocks to
the north and west, Tilton's blue Chevy Tahoe isn't attached to any of them.
A source who owes his paycheck to Tilton and will speak only on
condition of anonymity finally reveals the secret, with a giggle:
"He's on hiatus."
Cross-examination of Leigh Valentine, September 4, 1996, court
testimony:
A. Bob's mail ministry is a lie and a total deception. He does
not write those letters. He did not even proofread them during our marriage.
He makes it sound like [he's] writing to you right now, this is
what God spoke to me for your life, Jesus will appear to you tonight; if you
sleep with this little red cord under your pillow, you will prosper.
He doesn't even know what's going out to those people, and he
doesn't care, as long as they send their money in.
One time he said in one of the letters that was sent, 'I will be
taking these to the East Coast to pray for you by the ocean where Jesus prayed
for his people.' So we flew to Fort Lauderdale and we checked in to a four- or
five-star hotel on the beach and got a nice penthouse view....
That is stealing from people. Most of those people are on
welfare. They're little Hispanics and blacks. And he even said, 'What I do is I
look at a map and we go after the ghettos, we go after those on welfare, we go
after those that don't read, those that are lower socioeconomic backgrounds.
That's who we send our letters to....'
Q. Have you now given me your full list?
A. No. That's a lot right there. Do you want more?
Q. Well, I wanted the lies that you were referring to in your
prior testimony.
A. Just the lies about the trips, that they're ministry church
trips, when they have nothing to do with God and ministry.
When we went to Israel, he said it was going to be a holy time,
we'd get away with God, and all he did was drink the whole time I was with him
and lay in bed. And one time he got so sick from the drinking, he was just in
bed, we didn't get to see any of the sights.
We never went to Jordan. We never went -- you know, when we did
go to Caesarea, he drank most of the time, and wanted to go to a fashion show,
and so that's what we did on the church's money.
Ole Anthony, whose Dallas-based Trinity Foundation assisted
PrimeTime Live with its 1991 expose, says he's not dismayed by Tilton's return
to television.
"I don't think there's any way he can make it back into the
big time," Anthony says. "He needs to go back on the air periodically
to rejuvenate his mailing list, but I think he'll continue to be a minor
player. He's just on too many databases now. There are too many questions out
there about his practices."
Anthony, a former government spy, millionaire businessman, and
Republican candidate for the Texas legislature, underwent a religious awakening
in 1972. After a stint as a religious talk-show host, he founded a small
community of believers in north Dallas who attempt to live like early Christian
apostles. The group also monitors and investigates televangelists, sometimes
with a vengeance. Most of what is known about Robert Tilton's business
operation and his lifestyle has come from documents and recordings gathered by
Trinity Foundation members during undercover forays and trash sorties.
Are Trinity operatives gearing up for a duel in the sun here in
South Florida? "There's no question we will continue to monitor Mr.
Tilton's activities," Anthony says, "as long as he continues to
invite himself into people's living rooms and mailboxes."
The other two preachers who shared ABC's PrimeTime Live
spotlight with Tilton six years ago have long since left the airwaves, though
W.V. Grant is back in the pulpit in Dallas after serving eighteen months for
income tax fraud. Elsewhere, Jim Bakker was released from parole this past
spring after completing an eight-year prison sentence. The terms of his parole
had reportedly barred him from soliciting the faithful by mail or TV.
As for Tilton, he was observed at the Miami Beach Marina one
recent Friday night. At first the self-described prophet sat alone with his
thoughts and a plate of stone crabs. Then a well-wisher sidled up and engaged
him in conversation. After a few minutes Tilton paid his tab and departed,
generously donating the remains of his stone crabs to his new admirer.
In the cool of the evening Tilton bore west across the MacArthur
Causeway, then ducked into the parking lot of the Fisher Island ferry to avoid
pursuit by a reporter.
According to a representative of Fort Lauderdale yacht brokerage
Chic Marine, his boat was repossessed by the finance company earlier this year.
"He loved that boat," says a secretary who wouldn't
give her name. "But he let the bank take it back so the wife couldn't get
it in the divorce."
"Your source is a damn liar," Joyce retorts. "Bob
just couldn't pay the bills. He spent everything he had on that woman in
eighteen months and now he simply has no money left."
Joyce says Tilton's recent trip to Israel and Europe was an
opportunity to line up locations for future live broadcasts. He promises his
client will be back in Dallas to preach later this year. (So far Tilton has not
put in an appearance in his Dallas pulpit, according to Ole Anthony, whose
spies have continued to monitor all church services.)
Surprisingly, Joyce says even he doesn't know where Tilton hangs
his hat.
"I don't have the foggiest idea," he says. "But
if I did, I wouldn't tell you. We were audited by the IRS. We were investigated
by the FBI. We had twelve lawsuits filed against us. You tell me: How could
anyone stand up under this? The depositions! The interviews! The allegations!
This is an honest minister that has all but been destroyed by the media. But he
survived. He feels comfortable wherever he's at down there in Florida.
