A Friendly LetterA Friendly LetterSince 1981, an independent journal of news and issues of concern to related to the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), and like-minded persons.
Online Issues Seventh Month (July), 2000
"I have dreaded this day and this meeting," Maurice Roberts said. "At the same time, I've looked forward to it."
The day was October 22, 1994. The meeting was a special session of Mid-America Yearly Meeting's Representatives and Executive Council.
"You have by now learned from the trustee report why you have been called together," he continued. "The two issues presented by them were: (1) My concealment of certain agreements and other pertinent information, and (2) my deception in answers related to the above.
"The Trustee report is correct in telling you that I had avoided showing some documents to them, and this has impacted their responsibilities. In this way I have abused my authority when it came to some Trustee matters."
The seven-page statement he was reading is a remarkable document. It took no little courage to stand up and make it, and overall it is quite candid. However, behind its calm language lay some harsh confrontations.
The crucial one came on a day not long before, when Leatha Hein was approached at work by the Clerk of MAYM, Duane Hansen, who asked her to come to an unscheduled meeting with Roberts at the yearly meeting office. Hansen didn't say what it was about.
Once there, Roberts informed her that he had confessed to Hansen his deception about the extent of the yearly meeting's obligations to investors in Productions Plus. "I asked Duane to be with me while I confessed to Leatha Hein," Roberts told the Representatives, "and I asked her forgiveness."
Hein said of that meeting, "As far as Maurice was concerned, he didn't think it had to go any farther than the Trustees. He felt like he'd been honest with us, so he could go ahead serving as Superintendent. We could sell some assets and pay off the debts and go on."
Hein felt otherwise: after their years of struggle to get at the truth, after what they had learned about Deters and her operation, this was not just a committee matter.
She had, for instance, recently learned about the cease and desist orders from California and North Dakota. She confronted Roberts with a clipping of the 1991 news article from the Grand Forks Herald in which Roberts had been interviewed. "I asked him, Don't you think the trustees shoulda known this?'
"I told him that the truth had to be out on the table. The Trustees will have a recommendation, and what the representatives want to do with it is up to them. But I will not cover this up."
Despite this pushing and pulling, there is much to be gained from Roberts' statement. Much of it has an irreducible dignity, a touch of class that is all too rare, especially among Quaker and other church leaders ensnared in this miasma of corruption and folly.
"Today I am confessing to you," Roberts told the Representatives, "knowing I have jeopardized your trust in me. I'm not aware that anything I have ever done in my role as Superintendent was done for personal gain at the expense of the YM or its people....
"I've probably cared too much, taken too much ownership, as though it was my ship to bring safely into the harbor....The financial dilemma that we face is the result of my concern to help others. My motives have been to serve.
"In a retreat setting a few days ago, someone said that the more one leads, the more one is tempted to lead. In this case, my control mechanism backfired because I wasn't accountable in matters related to Trustee affairs.
"The Trustees have recommended that I be terminated and the Executive Committee has recommended my resignation. I had told the Clerk before the Executive Committee meeting, and then I told that Committee, it would be easier for me to resign and run and hide. But I think to have done so would lack integrity on my part. To be unwilling to make a confession to you would have been a further failure.
"Someone said that in the business world, heads roll quickly. How well I know. I have lived in the business world. I've seen it happen more than once.
"The church lives under a different operating manual. I wanted to come here today, not to save my job, but to offer myself to a partnership for recovery, painful as that would be for both of us.
"One counsel to me was to offer my resignation to the Executive Council for them to act upon. The other side of the counsel was that to have done so would create a polarizing of positions. It is not my intent to do so. Therefore, rather than offer my resignation, I have resigned and have placed that letter in the hands of the Executive Council....
"I have felt the Lord's forgiveness and restoration, and have heard him reaffirm his love for me. He will take care of me.
"One of my prayer warriors told me how she asked God to walk with me through this. She said God's reply was, It would be my pleasure.'"
"I've told you how I overstepped my authority. I deeply regret my failure in this way. I wish I could undo it by the wave of a hand....
"I do not want to cause any more hurt to you. And I remind you that Satan would like to profit from this. It would be at my expense and at your expense if he were allowed to win any points at all.
"...If all of this trauma can be used to bring the people called Friends into a closer relationship with the Lord Jesus, I am grateful that my violations are useful to that end."
Admiration for Roberts' composed self-disclosure should not blind us to the import of what he was admitting:
He had been--no lesser phrase is honest--a colossal fool.
Worse, he had been a roper in a scam, actively recruiting new marks for the plucking, many of whom would otherwise have avoided being swindled.
In the process, he had consciously made fools out of his employers, and put the Trustees, their representatives, at serious legal risk.
The fact that he did not put any of the victims' money in his own pocket--if it is indeed true--didn't recoup anybody's losses. Roberts fully deserved to be fired; indeed, he might well have been indicted.
Nevertheless, in the pastoral guild, the tendency to defend and exculpate one's brethren is endemic. When Quaker Life reported on the resignation, in its December, 1994 issue, Editor Johan Maurer rushed to his colleague's defense: "Maurice Roberts was certainly not the only prominent Friend who advocated working with Productions Plus. I hope Friends will look for solutions rather than blame, and will honor Maurice for his years of distinguished leadership among us."
Reading this, one might have thought Roberts was the injured party. But Roberts was not simply one feckless advocate for Priscilla among others; he was second only to Eugene Coffin in spreading her baneful influence among Friends, and in some ways even more energetic about it.
And if there were to be "solutions" for such institutional corruption, speaking plainly about it and holding those responsible clearly accountable would surely be among the most important. The rarity of such plain speaking is evident here; the dearth of accountability would become evident soon enough.
However unedifying the rationalizations of the Quaker Life article may have been, it had its effect, especially at John Wesley College in North Carolina, where the light was otherwise slow to dawn.
The first quarterly interest payment on their 1994 deposit of $100,000 arrived late, but it did get there. Afterward, Deters called President Brian Donley to suggest that she hold the rest of the year's payments until the end of the year, which would allow more interest to accrue.
Donley agreed, but cautioned her that they definitely needed the funds by early January, 1995. He explained that he planned to use the interest for after-Christmas bonuses for his underpaid faculty. "Our faculty members earn so little," he told her, "that after the holidays this bonus is a real blessing."
But just before the holidays, Donley got a call from a local board member, advising him of the imminent appearance of the Quaker Life article. Donley wrote to Deters about this, affirming that, "We were confident, however, that Productions Plus would continue to honor the agreements made with John Wesley College, especially given the track record other organizations have had with you."
Ah, innocence. By January 31, the interest money had still not arrived, and panic was spreading among the college officials. The executive Committee gathered in Donley's office that evening to figure out what to do.
The first thing they thought of was the entirely familiar: their Board member Viola Britt, wife of alumnus Billy Britt, offered to call Eugene Coffin for advice. Coffin too did the expected: "He assured us," Donley wrote to Priscilla, "that you would fulfill your agreements and that we should not be alarmed." Coffin added that the rumored trouble in Kansas was the work of evil forces.
Despite Coffin's assurances, the board was alarmed. It resolved to pray for all concerned, and to send Donley and two others to California to meet Deters and Coffin. Donley had strict instructions to bring back either their matching gift or their original deposit.
Donley went where he was sent, and his delegations spent five days in February negotiating with Priscilla and sister Phyllis in California.
But all they came back with was empty pockets and a "non-disclosure agreement" that the twins insisted they sign, which pledged them not to discuss "proprietary information" with any third party, presumably including investigators.
Well, that was not quite all. They were also given a one-page "report," dated January 3, 1995, listing an inventory of items which, it stated, "represents the fund-raising efforts of Productions Plus on behalf of" the college.
The list is cruelly revealing. It included:
1. 1000 copies of the book, The Painted Word, which included reproductions of the Life of Christ paintings, priced at $35 per copy, with a 65% volume discount.
2. 55 sets of a "Vignettes Collection" of reproductions of Jackson Bailey's work, priced at $1000 per set, again with a volume discount of 65%. And
3. 1000 copies of the book, Founded on the Floods, priced at $10 each, with a volume discount of 50%.
Let us do a bit of math here. The total list price of all these items comes to $100,000, the amount of John Wesley's investment. But if they were sold at the listed discounts, the profit, from which the college's matching grant was to come, would total only $63,500, considerably less than double.
But that is not the worst of it. Founded on the Floods was the only item that was solidly accounted for in Deters' inventory, and it was selling, at best, "sporadically." As for the stock of The Painted Word, she did not own it at all. These books, published in 1980, belonged to and were stored with the Life of Christ paintings. Both were still locked up in Florida, now out of her reach, awaiting a Sheriff's Sale which would take them away from her forever.
And finally, there is no evidence that the sets of Bailey's "vignettes" even existed.
That was what John Wesley's money had bought them.
It was not reported what the college did about their faculty bonuses in 1995. But they never saw their $100,000 again.
Not far away in Greensboro, Billy Britt must have been well aware of what was going on; Viola would have kept him informed. By then, too, it was apparent that the interest on the $100,000 he had sent to Priscilla from North Carolina Yearly Meeting's funds to benefit the Houston Graduate School was in jeopardy as well. None of the first year's quarterly interest payments, a total of $15,000, had appeared. For that matter, there was no sign of the CD Deters had promised to send as security for it.
North Carolina's Representative Body met on march 4, 1995. At that session, Carter Pike reported for the Executive Committee. The final item of his report was the announcement that Billy Britt would leave the Superintendent's position three and a half months early, on March 15, rather than June 30, though his salary would be continued til the later date.
During his last week in the yearly meeting office, Britt made heavy and continuous use of a paper shredder, destroying documents from his files.
Britt failed to return several phone calls seeking his comment on these developments. But I did speak with Viola Britt, who bridled when asked about the paper shredder. "It was strictly routine," she insisted. "Everybody does that when they leave a job. Don't you?"
(For the record, I don't. I toss stuff, and file a lot.)
The Executive Committee appointed a task force to investigate the involvement with Productions Plus. When it was due to report to the June Representative meeting, its clerk asked Billy Britt to do the explaining.
Many among the representatives listened closely, anxiously expecting at last to hear a detailed account of the affair.
Instead, Britt was terse and brief. He explained that Deters had been recommended to him by Eugene Coffin, he had acted in good faith, a CD had been promised, and that the Houston Graduate School had pledged to repay the $100,000 if Productions Plus did not. He may have made an honest error in judgement, but he had done nothing wrong.
There were many probing and angry questions from the floor, but the answers were few and evasive and the matter was soon closed.
Maurice Roberts' statement looks even better viewed from this angle.
Something else happened in March of 1995, which should have sent Priscilla Deters into despair:
On the morning of the 15th, a Sheriff's Sale took place in Orlando, Florida. One item was offered, "to the highest bidder at hand for cash on demand," to wit:
"APPROXIMATELY 50 SEPARATE PAINTINGS, MEASURING 11' X 20' AND MISC. BOOKLETS DESCRIBING PAINTINGS."
Thus Deters lost the war, all of whose individual battles she appeared to have won.
The Florida courts had rejected Robert Graves' challenges, and finally awarded the Life of Christ paintings to the bankrupt Theme Park Ventures, which in turn was forced to sell them to pay off old debts. This was the legal outcome Priscilla had been striving for. Had she had the cash, she could now have bought the paintings, free and clear. But she didn't have the cash.
The painting was bought by an auction company, reportedly for $20,000. The auction company in turn put it up for sale on May 6. This time, a real buyer stepped forward: Herbert Brown, a wealthy businessman who had been chairman of a regional hamburger chain. He offered about $90,000, and took it away to a climate-controlled warehouse in Clearwater, where it remains at this writing.
Brown's son Jared, who handled the purchase, told me his family had no immediate plans for the painting. "We're not in the exhibition business," he said, adding that "if somebody who is wants to display them and do a good job, we'll cooperate."
The painting, he added, was really acquired as a gift for his mother, who was a devout Christian. "We're all active Christians," he said.
How did the Browns hear about the painting? "From Father Robert Graves," Jared blandly explained. "He contacted us several months before they went on sale, and we became interested. We rescued the paintings, really. They might have fallen into somebody's hands who might not do well with them."
When I asked, he said, no, he had never talked to or heard from Priscilla Deters.
This, then, was Robert Graves's moral victory: His family company got nothing; but neither did Deters, and the paintings were safely out of her clutches. He speaks well of the Browns and their new acquisition.
Deters knew about the sale. On March 1, her Florida attorney wrote to Theme Park's John Chambers that, "I received a telephone call from Priscilla Deters this morning. She asked me to advise you that she now has her financing in order and intends to close on the purchase of the painting prior to the Sheriff's Sale date."
But she didn't, and by then no one was surprised.
The fate of the paintings is deeply ironic. Deters had spent over a million dollars trying to clear the title and wrest them away from Robert Graves. Yet in the end, they were sold for a tenth that amount to a stranger, a buyer whom Graves recruited.
There was one more significant item in Brian Donley's account of his discovery of how badly he and John Wesley College had been hoodwinked. Besides hearing about the Quaker Life article--which internal evidence suggests he did not actually read--he also got a call in January from a friend at an evangelical group in Ohio, who told him of receiving a letter from the California Department of Corporations. The letter wanted information about his group's dealings with Deters.
The letter was from George Crawford, the attorney who had handled the original 1991 Desist and Refrain order. He was writing to many of the groups whose names were on the list confiscated in the search of Deters house. And over the next several months, Crawford got numerous responses from people who had sent money in, but not got it back. From the responses, he assembled a stack of affidavits describing losses and outrage at what the victims were learning about their supposed benefactor.
His plan was to seek an injunction against Deters and Productions Plus, for violating the 1991 order. When he went to court, he also asked that the court appoint a receiver to take control of Deters' assets, so they could be distributed among her victims as compensation.
Priscilla hired an aggressive local attorney to fight the injunction. But it was issued anyway, in August of 1995. Another attorney, Richard Clements, was appointed as receiver. Thereafter she was supposed to turn over control of all her personal property and business assets to Clements.
XXXIX
Deters' story since then has been a study in maneuver and evasion. Legal documents show that through 1995 and well into 1996, she was still maneuvering to repurchase the paintings, and gain control of the Florida land where the exhibit hall was to be built.
How did she propose to pay for any of this, when all her assets were supposed to be under the control of a receiver?
That's where evasion comes in. Deters' own statements suggest that assets were hidden from the receiver's scrutiny.
Recall our account of her meeting with in June, 1996 with members of the Nazarene Church, in Lincoln, Nebraska. Susan Skinner, one of those present, later declared under oath that:
"During this meeting, Mrs. Deters was specifically asked if either she or Productions Plus still had the money from our investments. Her response was, Yes, the money is in a safe place where they (presumably the receiver) cannot find it,' and that it (presumably the money) has been moved.' She stated that the money is all there,' and that she cannot get to the money because they (presumably the receiver) would find out'...From her repeated use of the word we,' I developed the impression that at least one of Mrs. Deters' sons knows where the money is, and that the sons were in some way helping her." [Note: all parentheses were in the original.]
Others present at the meeting repeated similar statements. These declarations could, of course, be no more than the bluster which Deters spread liberally among her victims. But the statements are corroborated by other data, specifically my discovery of three private corporations which Deters either controlled or had access to, after the receiver was appointed.
Two of them, Tidings, Inc., and R.A.S., Inc., were Nevada companies; the third, Wonders International Productions, Inc., was located in Denver, Colorado.
Phyllis Beaver was listed as President of Tidings, which was only established on June 30, 1995, shortly before the receivership was set up. Beaver was also listed as the contact for Wonders International, which likewise first appeared in 1995.
R.A.S., Inc. was described as "partially owned and controlled by Priscilla Deters" by an attorney connected with Theme Park Ventures. Its president was one Jerry Morgan; Deters' financial records show she had been making substantial payments to Morgan, for unspecified services, for several years.
In early 1996, R.A.S. made an offer to buy all the stock of Theme Park, as a step toward regaining control of the painting and the Florida property.
Besides corporations, evasion also marked the matter of Channel Q. Communications.
Deters told receiver Clements that Channel Q was a completely independent enterprise, in which she had no ownership interest. Clements took her at her word and did not seize any of its equipment or bank accounts. (ChannelQ was still operating as of mid-February, 1998, and Phyllis Beaver often answered its phone. It has a web page, at: http://www.citivu.com/channelq/)
Yet her declaration to Clements is contradicted by several other facts:
Deters had registered the business as a sole proprietorship herself in San Bernardino County on July 20, 1992. In a 1995 statement she described Channel Q as "a primary developing project of Productions Plus..." Her son Phillip likewise testified that it was "a business activity owned by Priscilla Deters...."
When these items were pointed out to him, Clements agreed that it seemed highly likely that ChannelQ was in fact a Deters asset, which suggests he had been misled.
Another and major form of likely evasion has to do with Deters' financial records. Deters was required by the court injunction of 1995 to submit financial statements covering the period 1989 to 1995. The initial set of records submitted showed that at the end of 1994, she had cash on hand totaling $719,000.
However, the initial records were all stamped "Draft"; and when she finally submitted a "final" version, more than a year later in November, 1996, somehow this $719,000 in cash had completely disappeared, and Productions Plus was reported to have had no cash whatever as of the end of 1994.
What happened to the $719,000?
Good question; Richard Clements would like to know. On the final set of records--a stack of documents nearly six inches high--Deters' accountant makes it plain that the figures therein are something other than exhaustive or entirely reliable:
"We have not audited or reviewed the accompanying financial statements, and accordingly do not express an opinion or any other form of assurance on them....
"Additionally, management [i.e., Deters] has elected to omit substantially all of the disclosures and the statement of cash flows as required by generally accepted accounting principles. If the omitted disclosures and the statements were included in the financial statements, they might influence the user's conclusions about the Company's financial position, results of operations and cash flows."
What kind of omissions are being referred to?
Besides whatever is simply not there, the records contain long lists of entries marked simply,"check written"; there are several other series marked simply "unknown," and still more recorded only as "cash disbursements." Perhaps significantly, on December 31, 1994, $300,000 worth of items are noted, "reclassify projects in process", without further explanation.
Given this kind of financial legerdemain, it is hardly to be wondered at that after more than two years in the post, receiver Clements has collected exactly zero dollars to redistribute to Deters' hapless "beneficiaries."
Why does Clements put up with such high-handed treatment?
There are two responses:
First--and very significantly for readers who are ever victimized--there is not much he can do. He is not a prosecutor, or even a public employee. His resources and authority are strictly limited; in this field, the deck is stacked in favor of the crooks. No wonder that, in her career, Deters has shaken off cease and desist orders like so much dandruff; even the 1995 injunction barely slowed her down. Bottom line: the ability of state efforts to control such activities is severely limited.
But the second answer is, Clements in fact did what he could: He went back to court in August of 1996 and asked the judge to cite Deters for contempt of court for violating the injunction.
Furthermore, he won his case. In January, 1997 Deters was convicted on two counts of civil contempt.
The court fined her $2,000. She paid the fine and kept on moving.
As this record should indicate, there was really only one kind of legal action that might actually stop Deters and the Productions Plus machinery.
To hear Priscilla tell it after 1994, Maurice Roberts was the devil incarnate, the source of all her troubles.
That's dead-wrong. Sure, Roberts told the truth in his resignation speech, when he had no alternative. But Deters' real bete noire in Kansas was Leatha Hein. She freely admits that once the Kansas Securities Commission got into the case, and Gary Fulton had searched Deters' house, she became an assertive advocate--a nag, a pest--lobbying for him to turn to the feds.
One reason she did was because it soon became clear, even to her layperson's eye, that there were limits to what Fulton could do. His jurisdiction was too narrow. He didn't have the authority to search certain kinds of bank records in another state; but the feds did.
"Kansas isn't the whole picture." Hein kept telling him. "The whole United States is the picture. Deters operated in 21 states."
The other reason to turn to the feds was that they could make the investigation a criminal case. Making jail time part of the equation would change the whole nature of the game.
Hein also began worrying about the statute of limitations, which was five years. Mid-America first sent money to Priscilla in 1989; by 1995, the clock was running out on any possible prosecution for their transactions.
"Finally, I got so frustrated I told them I was gonna call Sam Brownback [Kansas' newly-elected U.S. Senator who succeeded Nancy Kassebaum]." Hein felt she had a contact with Brownback, because one of the Trustees' sons had been in law school with him. "But, heck," she declared, "I was ready to go all the way to Janet Reno if I had to."
Maybe this pestering got some response. At any rate, an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Wichita, Bryan Johnson, was assigned to the investigation, and it looked like it might be getting somewhere.
But then in late 1995, Johnson abruptly resigned, to go into private practice. The probe stalled until another prosecutor, Annette Gurney, got up to speed.
While the feds floundered, the twins were not idle.
Will Haworth is pastor of the Nazarene Church in Hays, Kansas. After talking to Chuck Crosby, Deters' "consultant"/salesman, his church had put $37,500 of borrowed money with Productions Plus in 1991. Three years later there was no sign of it, or any matching funds.
When Gary Fulton called, in early 1995, Haworth was ready to talk to him.
But about that same time, Priscilla called.
Now that her mother had died, making her unavailable for further service as a reason for delay, Priscilla announced that her ex-husband, Leonard Deters, had suffered a heart attack and was in critical condition, and she had been required to spend much time with him. But worse yet, Satan was after her, under the guise of people who were saying she had been selling unregistered investments. Had they, she inquired, approached him?
Who might she be thinking of, he wondered.
The California Department of Corporations. George Crawford, that lawyer.
Well, yes, Haworth acknowledged that he had heard from them.
Did you respond? she wanted to know.
Well, yes again.
Oh, you should have contacted me first, she chided. She added that most of the churches contacted did not respond to them.
On another occasion, Phyllis Beaver called Haworth with an anguished plea: Christians don't prosecute other Christians, she whimpered, weeping into the phone. This was all being done to them by someone who was sick, or someone intent on persecuting believers. Beaver asked him to pray with her that Satan would be bound.
That's generally a good idea, Haworth felt, so he joined her in the prayer.
Deters and Beaver also worked the phones to get at Haworth indirectly. Soon he was hearing from other Nazarenes, one a pastor who had invested his retirement money with her. The pastor was shocked by Haworth's cooperation with the authorities:
We've had her in our home, the pastor told him, and she's the finest spiritual lady, never does anything without prayer. How could you?
"This made for a sleepless night for me," Haworth admitted. But then, his church's missing $37,500 didn't help him sleep any better either.
He got more calls, from other investors. One prominent Nazarene told him that if the truth got out about how many of their churches had been swindled, and for how much, that the resulting scandal would take down some "big names" in the Nazarene fold.
Still others took a more pragmatic tack: Look, they said, if you prosecute Deters, none of us will get our money back, and then it will be YOUR fault, not hers.
"This was awful hard to hear," he admitted.
When Annette Gurney called from the U.S. Attorney's office, however, she asked a different kind of question: If you had known that your church's money would be used for Deters and her family, would you have gotten into it?
"Absolutely not," Haworth answered. That much was clear, and it helped firm his resolve.
Unlike Leatha Hein, Haworth was not on a crusade. But he was still resolved to tell the truth about what had happened. He was not going to prosecute Deters, just cooperate with investigators; what they did was their business.
In June he prepared an affidavit for George Crawford. It was brief, less than a thousand words, just the facts about his congregation's hopes of building a larger church with the matching money they never got, and the initial investment they never saw again either.
Haworth called Deters afterward, to tell her what he had done. She begged him to withdraw the affidavit. He didn't.
Some other potential witnesses were close enough that Deters made her pitch in person.
Chuck Hise remembers exactly when he decided that Priscilla Deters was a liar.
It was late in the afternoon of Tuesday, April 16, 1996, and she was sitting in his office.
Hise, remember, is Director of Quaker Gardens, the retirement community for Southwest Yearly Meeting, in Garden Grove, California. They were the ones who got an ironclad bank guarantee on the CD that Priscilla put their $100,000 in, got it back after a year, and walked away.
Hise had not been eager to meet with Deters, but agreed when she pressed him, insisting she wanted to share something she was very excited about.
Priscilla was that sort of person, Hise recalls. Very enthusiastic, bubbly, always talking-a-mile-a-minute. Also persistent. Hise figured she had some new project to promote.
She didn't. Deters arrived with Phyllis Beaver and another couple, Randy and Charlene Littlefield.
From almost the minute they arrived, and for nearly two hours, they talked nonstop to him. At him. And Priscilla, he remembers, kept laughing. Chortling at the hilarious thought, which she repeated over and over, that somehow some people had got the utterly silly idea into their heads that she, of all people, had been promising to double their investment money in a year.
How she chuckled at this. All four of the visitors did. How could people have ever possibly imagined such a ridiculous thing?
It was then Chuck Hise knew Priscilla had lied.
Because that's exactly what she had promised him. Hise didn't join in their laughter.
This crazy idea wasn't all Deters talked about. It turned out, she went on, that there were some people in Kansas, Quakers there, who somehow had adopted this giddy notion about money doubling, who had talked about it to state and federal investigators. Now, can you imagine, she was in danger of being indicted for fraud.
Deters never lost her composure, but she pleaded with Hise to speak with his yearly meeting leadership, to urge them to intervene with the Quaker leadership in Kansas, and get them to head off this big mistake they were making.
"I think they left believing I agreed with them," Hise told me.
"They never asked whether I thought they had promised to double people's money. If they had asked me that, my answer would have been that yes, I had that idea too. And I got it straight from them."
XLIII
At the 1995 sessions of Mid-America Yearly Meeting, the Trustees reported on a year "of intensive activity...." Included was a revised accounting of the commitments outstanding from the Productions Plus debacle, which came to $150,000. Of this total, $84,482 had already been repaid, from funds generated by special appeals, plus the sale of some MAYM properties. The "Trustees have worked diligently throughout the year to settle these accounts as rapidly as possible."
One item, however, remained very much unsettled.
The Trustees report continued:
"Our report one year ago...included a figure of $20,000 for YouthQuake. This included $10,000 of trustees monies released by the former Superintendent for YouthQuake use. Our understanding from Royce Frazier, then Chairman of the YouthQuake Committee, was that MAYM Trustees had no obligation for the $20,000 sent to Productions Plus, and the $10,000 advance would be repaid by YouthQuake. Very recently a letter has been received from [the] current Chairman of the YouthQuake Committee informing us that they indeed hold MAYM liable for the $20,000 they invested with Productions Plus through MAYM. Their correspondence indicated, however, that they are willing to forgive $10,000 of the loss of their funds, but do not intend to repay the $10,000 advance....this has the effect of raising our indebtedness to [MAYM] endowments by an additional $10,000."
Behind the density of this language lies one of the least edifying pieces of fallout from the whole Productions Plus mess, and one that remains shamefully unresolved even now.
As we saw earlier, the YouthQuake Committee had likely been snookered into sending money to Deters in the first place. Then, what they thought--or allowed themselves to think--was a partial return of their investment was not really that at all, but actually came out of MAYM's funds, and was carried in the yearly meeting's books as a balance due.
That was how it stood when Leatha Hein and the Trustees sorted out the accounts. Thus they asked for repayment, only to be given the Quaker equivalent of a Bronx cheer from the YouthQuake Committee.
What was going on here? Can a Quaker body simply welsh on a $20,000 debts, especially to another Quaker body? And how much exactly did YouthQuake put into Productions Plus--$10,000, as previously reported, or $20,000?
Key to the situation is the role of Royce Frazier, who as Maurice Roberts' assistant in 1992 was the initiator of the investment, and then the go-between from the Committee to MAYM. When interviewed, Frazier, now a psychologist in rural Kansas, flatly contradicted the Trustees' account. The $10,000 was not MAYM money, he insisted. "The Trustees had it all wrong."
But how? A friend of Frazier's suggested that Frazier had paid the $10,000 from his own pocket, as a way of repenting for his involvement in the fraud. Frazier made no such admission, and Leatha Hein scoffed.
"Oh, yeah" she retorted when told of this. "Well, then why didn't he correct the report at the time? He was the Acting Superintendent then. He was there. Besides, I've seen the check stubs. It was yearly meeting money."
But how did the YouthQuake Committee get the idea that the $10,000 from MAYM was "theirs"? Who told them that?
Hein added that she had repeatedly asked Frazier at the time to provide her with written minutes and records regarding the YouthQuake transactions, to clarify their exact terms and understandings, but these were never furnished. She says Frazier also assured her that the sponsoring yearly meetings would share any losses, as did those who participated in the Friends Ministers Conference.
This last would have been a straightforward way to handle it. But who was ready to tell these yearly meetings that they faced a second unscheduled "fraud surcharge" in barely more than a year's time? Evidently no one.
Furthermore, there is an equally plausible alternative explanation of what happened: Roberts or Frazier, still figuring that Deters would come through and pay off, simply "borrowed" the money from MAYM and described it to the YouthQuake Committee as if it were an "advance" on the match. By 1994, as the Trustees were soon to learn, such informal and unreported money transfers back and forth were not at all unusual.
(One way to sort out the facts would be to examine the relevant YouthQuake minutes, to see how much they sent, with what approval, and how the returned funds were actually reported to them. But as of press time, the Committee had declined to release them to me for review. And their Treasurer, Sheila Bach of Baltimore Yearly Meeting, who cut the original checks, angrily refused to be interviewed about her role in the matter.)
The amount involved here is minor in the multimillion total of these frauds. But the corrosive institutional effects of the practices it induced are painfully obvious. I regret to say that in this case, my clear impression is that the responses to my inquiry--and to Hein's--go beyond stonewalling to the seeming perpetuation of untruths, and camouflage of possible defalcation. While most of the other messes left in the wake of this scandal have been cleaned up; this one remains to fester.
This item, like the rest of the Trustees' long and unhappy list, was received without comment by the body. The report's final paragraph, however, was striking:
"We have done our best to serve God and MAYM through some very difficult days. The job is obviously not finished. We will assist where we can to provide a smooth a transition as possible to newly appointed Trustees."
A transition? Unstated, but implicitly acknowledged by the last sentence was a striking reality: Once this report was finished, all four members of the Trustees thereupon resigned.
Not to put too fine a point on it, They quit. They had had enough.
The minutes record that Leatha Hein was given a standing ovation in recognition of her "untiring efforts." But she says, "once we walked out of that building, we became nonpersons." She has not been back.
Why?
Herbert Pitts, another of the Trustees, told me that he had received a "very unkind letter," in which a member of MAYM accused him of persecuting Maurice Roberts, and said he ought to get down on his knees to ask God's forgiveness, and then apologize to Roberts.
This despite the fact that Pitts had been among the holdouts on the Trustees. He found it "very difficult" to come to the conclusion that Roberts had misled the group, and did so only "with a great deal of hesitancy and disappointment," because of his high regard for Roberts' wisdom and abilities. Pitts now worships at a Nazarene church, but hastens to say this is due only to living at too great a distance from a Friends church.
Paul Boles, a third Trustee, said simply that they all had become "very unpopular" in the wake of Roberts' termination. "I called a friend in Houston about it," he recalled, "and this person just came unglued. He said it was a lie and there was nothing wrong with Roberts and nothing wrong with Productions Plus."
This reaction against the Trustees, whose labors may very well have saved MAYM from bankruptcy and litigation, is unfortunately a very common one. Shooting the messenger who brings bad news, and ostracizing whistle blowers are familiar enough phenomena that the former is found in the Scriptures, and the other is the stuff of sardonic proverb: No good deed goes unpunished.
Nevertheless, Hein performed one other valedictory service on behalf of the yearly meeting, which was not in the report, but may have been as important as any other: She retrieved all the correspondence between Maurice Roberts and Priscilla Deters, from the beginning.
To get it, she had to insist. Roberts had given these papers to his attorney, who had also represented MAYM in the past. But the Trustees had hired their own counsel, and with his encouragement, Hein demanded that all the correspondence be returned to her, as it was yearly meeting property and she represented the Committee with responsibility for MAYM's property.
Once they were in hand, she spent many hours putting documents in chronological order, then tracing carefully the pattern of the transactions and the statements made back and forth, using highlighter on key sections. When the letters were all arranged and marked, she assembled them in a thick looseleaf notebook.
"If the Trustees had been able to see this stuff, even the first papers," she said, "we could have seen that this operation was not good. Maurice kept telling us he had all the paperwork in order, but he never let us see it."
The notebook's main value, however, was not to the past, but the future. Dick Johnston of the National Center on White Collar crime told me that "White collar crime takes 5000 percent more time to investigate than a street crime." Did the Wichita U.S. Attorney's office and the Kansas Securities Commission have that much time and energy? Probably not.
But they got a break, a big one, when Hein handed her annotated notebook on to Gary Fulton for his investigation. Fulton, in turn, gave it to the feds.
The federal grand jury handed up the indictment on December 18, 1996. Outlining its charge of fourteen counts of wire and mail fraud, the 34-page documents cited a long list of written and faxed communications between Deters and Will Haworth, another Nazarene evangelist named Chuck Millhuff, Barclay College, and Mid-America Yearly Meeting.
How useful was Leatha Hein's notebook to their work? The respective totals of the communications between the victims and Deters cited in the indictment are enlightening:
Haworth, Hays Nazarene Church-------5
Millhuff Ministries-------------------------5
Barclay College-----------------------------6
Mid-America Yearly Meeting---------118
Is it too much to say that without Leatha Hein's painstakingly assembled notebook to work from, the grand jury would not have had enough evidence to make its case? I don't think so.
Imagine where they'd be if Maurice Roberts had borrowed Billy Britt's paper shredder.
But what if despite all the evidence, Priscilla beats the rap? That would be a victory indeed, but her legal troubles would not likely be over.
One brief entry at the end of the introduction to the indictment, which was not made into a felony count, makes this clear:
"That neither defendant PRISCILLA J. DETERS or Production Plus had filed federal income tax returns for the years 1990 through 1994."
To be sure, she was very busy in these years. But at the same time, according to her own financial statements, she was able to pay herself $273,990, not including travel expenses. So this failure to file will at the least require some explanation.
She will have that opportunity. A week before the indictment was made public, the IRS filed a tax lien against Priscilla in the amount of $16,304. This claim is likely to be followed by others.
And behind the IRS in line there is the receiver, Richard Clements. And next to him is George Crawford of the California Department of Corporations. Both have been flouted and mocked by her for years; can their patience be inexhaustible? In all the Golden State, will there be found not even one prosecutor inclined to turn their pleas, and Gary Fulton's evidence, into a criminal case? Or perhaps some law enforcement official in North Dakota will be shamed enough by the looting of Nazarene churches there, in flaunted defiance of their own cease and desist order, to take up the cause as well.
Other states, for that matter, might get in line. Oklahoma, for instance, where church members and widows like Mary Washburn were taken for half a million in Cherokee. Perhaps Texas, where the Houston Graduate School of Theology thought it would have a new campus by now. Even Ohio, where Friends churches in Salem and Deerfield were taken for $150,000, might be interested.
Or--well, a catalog grows tedious when there are 21 states involved. But the future cannot be entirely reassuring for Priscilla Deters, no matter what happens in Wichita.
For Friends, especially evangelicals, the damage done by the entanglement with Productions Plus will not be easy to repair, not least because in too many places it has been so easy to avoid facing. Even worse, it is not the only, or even the largest fraud by which this group has been victimized in the 1990s.
Of that, more presently. In the meantime, what became of Maurice Roberts?
John Chambers has been involved in the Life of Christ painting project since its beginning. Old and sick now, he still comes into his North Atlanta law office, which he shares with his two sons and a daughter, a few days a week. In his personal office there are several boxes of papers related to the painting and its history: Letters, plans, reproductions, news clippings, and legal documents.
Mostly the latter. In one box I found an eight-page summary of the painting's provenance. From its inception in 1967 to 1993, it had changed ownership no less than ten times. All these owners hoped it would be a gold mine, but none of them had ever succeeded in getting it displayed in public, not even once. Bankruptcy and litigation had followed this ownership trail like a cloud of dust behind a hearse.
Chambers nodded at my astonishment at this record, and offered an explanation.
"My father put a curse on that painting," he explained. His voice was weak but firm, and without a trace of incongruity or humor. The curse, he went on, came about this way:
During the three years it took to paint the fifty-five scenes, several people, men and women, helped Jackson Bailey with the actual painting. During this time, some marital misbehavior allegedly occurred among this group. When John Chambers' late father, a man of high moral standards, learned of it, he was enraged. "That's when he put a curse on it," his son explained.
There is a double dose of irony in this story for Priscilla Deters. She may well have spent the most money of any single individual in this quest, and may end up paying the highest personal cost; and she did so without ever becoming the painting's owner. She came close, at least in her own mind, not once but many times. But this was not a game of horseshoes, and if she is ever to fulfill her sense of calling to "raise up the king of kings," it seems destined that this will not be the way she does it.
Perhaps the Brown family, which disclaims any commercial aspirations for its stewardship of the work, will manage to overcome or escape the "curse." We shall see.
Or perhaps we won't. I wonder whether I, or anyone reading this report in 1998, will live to see this work displayed for public viewing.
After a couple of delays, Priscilla was scheduled to be tried in Wichita on October 28, 1997. She appeared on schedule, but at a preliminary hearing to consider her competence, her performance was discursive, rambling and bizarre.
She not merely maintained her innocence, she was quite indignant about the entire proceeding. She rambled in court about being a slave of the state, insisted that her rights were being trampled, and asserted her conviction that since she was a resident of California, a court in Kansas had no jurisdiction over her.
Her days of hiring expensive attorneys were over; Deters was represented by Federal Public Defender, Steve Gradert. Gradert proposed that she be psychiatrically evaluated, to determine if she was indeed competent to stand trial. The judge granted Gradert's request, but denied his motion to have it conducted by a private physician. instead, he ordered that it be conducted by federal authorities, and an even more indignant Deters was thereupon taken into custody.
She was sent to a federal medical facility near Chicago. After several weeks, she was pronounced competent, and released just before Christmas. Her trial was rescheduled for February 24, 1998.
As for Maurice Roberts, he is a survivor. By the spring of 1995, he had found another job, with an old friend and colleague, and was on his way to the Pacific Northwest.
His new employer was a company in Stanwood, Washington. His boss was a Quaker businessman named Philip Harmon.