Scientologists are NOT the only money scammers
correct
[Jehovah's Witness] Church elder ordered to
repay $4.7 million to fleeced flock
Slatkin had him beat by 242 million dollars though.
and DIGL fraud vaporized Billions...
and with scienology there are all those DAID bodies...
hundreds of em,,, with bullet holes, gassed, boiled alive...
www.slatkinfraud.com
www.lermanet.com
A church elder was ordered by a federal judge on Tuesday to
pay more than
$4.7 million in restitution to almost 50 victims of a
Ponzi-like con game -
many of them elderly members of his own congregation.
Financial consultant and ex-missionary Raymond L. Knowles, a
former resident
of Pembroke Pines and Opa-locka and more recently San
Antonio, Texas, was
sentenced to 57 months in federal prison in January by U.S.
District Judge
Donald L. Graham for defrauding elderly and financially
unsophisticated
investors during a multimillion-dollar securities fraud
scheme. He was
convicted last October of 16 counts of mail fraud, four of
wire fraud and
four of securities fraud.
Many victims were fellow members of the same Jehovah's
Witnesses
congregation where he was an elder.
According to a statement by South Florida U.S. Attorney
Marcos Daniel
Jimenez, Knowles used his position as an elder to sell
millions of dollars
worth of risky promissory notes to worshipers, falsely
representing that the
investments would return between 8.5 percent and 20 percent.
He also was
accused of diverting investor funds to lease luxury cars,
pay personal,
business and other expenses including trips to South Africa
and Disney World
near Orlando.
A Ponzi scheme is named after Charles Ponzi, an immigrant
who ran such a
scheme in 1919-1920. It involves an investment scheme in
which returns are
paid to earlier investors, entirely out of money paid into
the scheme by
newer investors.
Copyright 2003, South Florida Sun-Sentinel
Source: South Florida Sun-Sentinel
Another Elders & Fraud story:
Jehovah's Witness elders sentenced to 15 years for $6
million theft Two
Jehovah's Witness elders who fleeced a 100-year-old Deer
Lodge woman out of
her life savings and family ranch were sentenced to 25 years
in prison with
10 suspended. (added 05/13/2003)
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Scams and the Latter-day Saints
Rick Branch
Arlington, TX
For years, Utah, which has a population of over 70 percent
Mormon, has
fought against the stigma of being called the Scam Capital
of America.
In 1984, Ken Thornberg, Director of the Better Business
Bureau office in
Idaho, said he believed that, "...a majority of the nation's
illegal
investment scams originate in Utah.
"`I would say - and I am not exaggerating - that 75 percent
of the country's
major investment schemes are hatched in the Salt Lake
City-Provo area,'"
(Ogden Standard-Examiner, 26 March 1984, p. 10A).
Whether the statistics are completely accurate or not,
Thornberg is not
alone in his assessment that the "majority" of the scams and
fraudulent
organizations are created in Utah.
"As early as 1969 the Wall Street Journal called Salt Lake
City `a locus for
shell operations.'
"Then in 1974 the infamous `stock fraud capital' moniker was
awarded Salt
Lake City in a page one Wall Street Journal article on
February 25, 1974.
The headline: `Dubious Distinction; Salt Lake City Gains
Reputation for
Being a Stock Fraud Center,'" (Utah Holiday, October 1990,
p. 26).
This downward trend continued to be noticed and ten years
later in 1984,
Newsweek magazine wrote, "Utah, the land of the Mormons, has
earned itself
another name: the Stock-Fraud Capital of the Nation," (Ibid,
p. 27).
With such national notoriety, people in Utah must have known
the con artists
were working their area.
Thus, the question begs to be asked, what is the cause of
such a phenomenon?
Perhaps the February 6, 1984 issue of Business Week provides
an insight into
the problem.
"Many (LDS) church members are likely to accept without
question an
investment recommendation made by another Mormon. Hucksters
try to exploit
this tendency by trying to bring church officials into
investor groups or by
portraying themselves as good church-going Mormons," (Utah
Holiday, October
1990, p. 27).
In a United Press International article, this rationale was
again
reiterated.
The UPI said, "Major reasons for the success of scams in
Utah are the highly
organized, tightly knit structure and trust-oriented
doctrines of the Mormon
Church," (Ibid).
Apparently realizing the problem, in 1984 Utah's "Governor
Scott Matheson
appointed a new Securities Task Force, including (Hugh)
Pinnock, in part to
confront what experts were calling a `Mormon connection' to
many of the
schemes," (Ibid).
Hugh Pinnock had been a member of the Mormon Church's
General Authorities
since 1977 when he was appointed to the First Quorum of the
Seventy.
According to the March 11, 1985 Forbes magazine interview
with Pinnock,
"...Utahans were now wiser to swindlers. `They just aren't
as
unsophisticated as they once were," (Ibid).
However, it would be this same Hugh Pinnock that would feel
the sting of a
con artist a few years later, at the hands of the infamous
Mark Hofmann.
Pinnock would help Hofmann secure a $185,000 "...signature
loan at the bank
where Pinnock was a director - a loan to buy documents that
did not even
exist," (Ibid).
In 1986, the San Diego Union provided further information on
the scam game.
No longer was the media simply reporting about Utah being
the Fraud Capital
of America. Now, it was Mormons taking advantage of Mormons.
"In recent years, Utah has been called the fraud capital of
the United
States, and many defendants in fraud cases have been Mormon
officials who
used church connections to victimize other members," (5
October 1986, p.
A-25).
The problem increased to the point where the Ogden, Utah
paper reported:
"The cultural emphasis in the Mormon Church that equates
financial success
with spiritual success, and an unquestioning allegiance to
authority
figures, may partly explain why 10,000 Utah investors have
been swindled out
of more than $200 million during the past decade," (Ogden
Standard-Examiner,
26 August 1989, p. 3C).
Not only did the scam artist attract the favor of the LDS
families, the
elderly, the uneducated and the General Authorities, they
also conned the
fraud wat
