The UCG new HQ property purchased in 1998 under Clyde Kilough (UCG cost: $1,599,784, or $19,610 per acre with an appraised value of $1,710,000) has been listed for sale as follows:
Map of 918 (Milam) FM 3163, Lantana, TX 76226 (Denton County)
Dateline Surrey - The WCG-CGI ministerial pension plan covering Canada, according to a reliable source, is today $1.1 million dollars short of getting a final termination by the church.
| Period | Total Revenue | Total Expenses | |
| Nov. 1, 2005 - Oct. 31, 2006 | $1,622,422 | $1,543,110 | |
| Nov. 1, 2004 - Oct. 31, 2005 | $1,756,737 | $1,386,554 | |
| Nov. 1, 2003 - Oct. 31, 2004 | $1,341,652 | $1,270,075 | |
| Nov. 1, 2002 - Oct. 31, 2003 | $1,217,370 | $1,343,955 | |
| Nov. 1, 2001 - Oct. 31, 2002 | $1,145,929 | $1,212,733 | |
| Nov. 1, 2000 - Oct. 31, 2001 | $1,141,898 | $1,135,236 | |
| Nov. 1, 1999 - Oct. 31, 2000 | $1,122,839 | $1,056,658 | |
Nov. 1, 1998 - Oct. 31, 1999 | $971,457 | $1,021,545 | |
Nov. 1, 1997 - Oct. 31, 1998 | $890,102 | $863,561 |
Bernard L. Madoff confessed that his vaunted investment business was all “one big lie,” a Ponzi scheme colossal in volume and scope that cost investors $65 billion. Madoff became the new poster child for Wall Street gall, greed and corruption. (By comparison, Herbert Armstrong and spinoffs have collected over $2 billion in a shakedown off three expected tithes, offerings, wills, and investments).
“The first flush of reports came out at a time when many people were still reluctant to talk,” says reporter Smith. Frontline gave us the time to burrow deeper, gaining access to some of the key players who gave us an understanding of how Madoff pulled it off.”
In a search for clues on how the fraud began, Frontline traces Madoff’s story back to the early 1960s, when he first opened a small investment advisory business and hired two accountants, Frank Avellino and Michael Bienes, to help him recruit clients. In an exclusive television interview, Bienes describes those fruitful early years. It was “easy, easy-peasy, like a money machine,” Bienes tells Frontline. When asked if he had ever questioned Madoff about his approach, Bienes says: “Never. Why would I ask him? I wouldn’t understand it if he explained it.”
By the early ’90s, Avellino & Bienes had amassed more than 3,000 clients. But the accountants were violating the law, selling unregistered securities. Acting on a tip, the SEC closed down Avellino & Bienes. Madoff was forced to return more than $400 million to investors. It was Madoff’s first brush with the SEC, and as would happen again and again during the course of 30 years, Madoff would remain untouched by regulators.
After the 1992 SEC investigation, Madoff insulated himself from his client base by finding several financiers eager to do business with him and willing to accommodate his unusual demands for secrecy. In an exclusive TV interview, Sandra Manzke, the founder of the hedge fund giant Tremont, admits she agreed not to use Madoff’s name in her fund’s prospectus, and she accepted that Madoff would only use a small, off-the-radar accounting firm to audit his work. “Of course it bothered you,” she tells Smith. “But that was one of the conditions of doing business, that you accepted that. That was his proprietary trading model, the black box that he used, and he wasn’t going to disclose what was in it”—not even to Manzke, who for more than 25 years placed upward of $3 billion of investors’ money with Madoff.
The incentive for fund managers like Manzke to ignore their reservations was enormous. Running a feeder for Madoff was a very lucrative business, and nobody got richer than Walter Noel and his partners at Fairfield Greenwich Group. “It’s fair to say that Fairfield, more than anyone else, took Madoff global,” says attorney Stuart Singer of Boies, Schiller & Flexner, who is now representing former Fairfield Greenwich investors in a class-action suit.
Through interviews with former employees of Madoff Securities and footage Frontline unearthed of Madoff’s operation, the film ultimately takes viewers inside the heart of the fraud. Rich Caputo, who maintained the computers and printers at Madoff Securities, saw the volume of paperwork that went into sustaining the fiction. “We were spitting out statements constantly,” Caputo tells Frontline. “The fact that all of these statements were just sort of made out of thin air is pretty shocking.”
Madoff was repeatedly investigated by the SEC, but it found nothing amiss. Madoff remained a pillar of the financial world until the markets came crashing down in late 2008. “The fact is, he easily could have gone through his life without this being found out,” says Madoff investor Burt Ross. “The only reason that this ended was because, at one given point in time, the economy did so badly that people wanted—needed—to get money out of Madoff’s investments.”
FRONTLINE Presents
THE MADOFF AFFAIR
Tuesday, May 12, 2009, at 9 P.M. ET on PBS
Check your local listings for exact air times. Or view the entire program linked online and bonus material at: FRONTLINE
Feazell pays homage to Tkach Family for nowDISCLAIMER: The information displayed here is current as of APR 03, 2009 and is updated weekly. It is not a complete or certified record of the Corporation.
| Corporation | ||
|---|---|---|
| GRACE COMMUNION INTERNATIONAL | ||
| Number: C0214334 | Date Filed: 2/20/1947 | Status: active |
| Jurisdiction: California | ||
| Address | ||
| PO BOX 5005 | ||
| GLENDORA, CA 91740-0730 | ||
| Agent for Service of Process | ||
| MATHEW H MORGAN | ||
| 2011 E FINANCIAL WAY | ||
| GLENDORA, CA 91741-4602 | ||
Let's start with a $100 dollar bill. As of now, it is the largest U.S. denomination in general circulation. Most everyone has seen this denomination. Slightly fewer have owned them; some have dropped the denomination for holy day offerings.A packet of one hundred $100 bills is less than 1/2" thick and contains $10,000. Petty cash. Fun money. Fits in Armstrong's pocket easily and is more than enough for day or two of shamefully decadent fun in Monaco, lounging around on the yacht, or shopping trips to Harrod's.
Some Of Herb's Petty Cash - $10,000
Believe it or not, this next little pile below is $1 million dollars (100 packets of $10,000). Herbert could stuff that into a Jurgenson's grocery bag; fly to Switzerland, stuff some into his Swiss bank account; and then off to a sex clinic romp in Romania. You don't think he told about all of his private trips on the WCG Gulfstream, courtesy of the WCG dollar, did you? Neither does WCG employee Tkach respect the few remaining members enough to make some basic financial disclosures.
One Million WCG Dollars In $100 Dollar Bills
While a measly $1 million above looked a little unimpressive, $100 million is a little more respectable. More than enough to buy a world-class auditorium. The approximate WCG income for one entire year (in $100 bills) or $100 million, fits neatly on a standard pallet below...
One Hundred Million WCG Dollars In $100 Dollar Bills
But the WCG income for only one year doesn't do justice to the big picture. $1 BILLION dollars pictured below... now we're really getting someplace! Real money!...That's how much Herbert and his WCG garnered from fifty years of mailing out hundreds of his monthly crisis collection letters, taking three tithes, widow's mites, wills, trusts, and sacrificial offerings. Actually, over his lifetime, Armstrong's WCG took members and co-workers for well over a BILLION tax-free US-denominated dollars!
Honey, look at what we've got them believing in this issue!
While the multifacted evidence of HWA's incest with Dorothy is getting weighed and sifted again by those in the blogosphere, AR came across a Tangled Web appeal to the Tenth Circuit you may not have yet seen."Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven. Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works? And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity."In the 59th chapter of Isaiah, that prophet warns of those who conceive mischief, lie, and bring forth iniquity. Their feet run to do evil. The way of peace they know not. They make themselves crooked paths, and they weave spiders' webs. But Isaiah promises in the name of God that those webs shall not be a covering for their sins in the end!
But I still doubted the incest allegations -- that is until Mr. Gary Antion confirmed that they were entirely true when I talked with him after his sermon on the last day of Unleavened Bread, April 12. I'd asked him if he'd read David Robinson's book. He said he had. I told him that I'd read in another publication that Dorothy Mattson told his brother David Antion (a former WCG evangelist) all about the incest. (They were and are in-laws.) He nodded. I asked him if David ever said anything to him about it. "Yes," he said.
"What did he say?" I responded.
"He told me the story was true," he calmly said.
A new video has been posted on the WCG website front page in the WCG Today series, starring WCG box office luminaries Tamara Tkach and Mike Feazell. Tamara deftly and demurely answers Feazell's scripted questions while regally clad in a rich maroon blouse and black pants, hair cascading down to her shoulder line, while adorned in gold jewelry, which suspends a large rock of some import centered beneath her neck. After a brief intro, Feazell begins to interview Tamara with a series of canned questions about her life in the WCG beginning at age 15, when she began listening to the broadcast and getting the PT magazine along with her father. They subsequently qualified themselves and were invited to visit the Denver WCG congregation for the first time, afterward attending their first Feast at the Big Sandy campus. Tamara then voted to attend AC to begin her career.
Viable, long-term career options in the WCG at the time were extremely limited for both men and women. What could Tamara possibly major in at Ambassador? As she laments in the video, AC majors and career options at that time were very limited to AC women - with a choice of home economics, theology, agriculture, or journalism. Tamara takes home ec and theology, graduates from Ambassador class of 1978, and moves to take a supervisory job at Intel in Phoenix.
[Ed.: For background clarification, Tkach Jr. and Mike Feazell, Pasadena Imperial High best buddies, both attended together and graduated from Ambassador in 1973. Tkach Jr. then married AC graduate Jill Hockwald, and began working at the local level as a WCG ministerial trainee for the church between 1973 and 1976, ending at the Phoenix East congregation. He was ordained a local elder in 1976, which due to budget cutting, became an unpaid position as assistant pastor for Phoenix East congregation. He was later removed as the Phoenix assistant pastor in July 1978, two months after getting divorced. At some point in Arizona, newly graduated Tamara meets a temperamental, divorced Joe Tkach Jr., and they wind up getting married two years later in 1980. Tkach Jr. then eked out a living as a social worker for the next four years employed by the government of Arizona, working with the retarded. In 1984, Joe Jr. switches careers to Intel also and takes a job in corporate training services. Things are starting to look up as Tkach Sr. helps put down the 1979 receivership and Armstrong uses Tkach Sr. to replace Roderick Meredith as head of WCG Church Administration. By the end of 1985, a severely weakened, near blind Armstrong, grateful to Tkach Sr. for his undying loyalty, knows he doesn't have much time left. Change was in the air, and the rest is history.
Tamara then glibly mentions how the "inaugurated women's ministry in 1995" began in the WCG. She remarks "when the changes happened the door was opened" to women's ministry. Mentioned are "changes" in doctrine, but exactly how these doctrinal changes came about over the years under the Tkachs is never directly addressed. Joe Junior's chief theological change advisor Feazell and Tammy dance around the issue of when, how, and on whose schedule the "changes" came about. Feazell supportively offers that historically women were the backbone of the church, when men really didn't want to go to church. (Reportedly, Joe Tkach Jr. and Feazell don't bother to attend WCG services locally on a regular basis anywhere anyway.) Feazell remarks about the first 2000 years of a male dominated church hierarchy, who he says depended on women for survival and growth of the church.
In the mid 1990s with the changes, Tamara says the WCG began to realize that women had gifts of value in the church. She remarks that women had always been serving in the WCG, but not in the sense of a designated women's ministry. She recounts the story of a women fully qualified to be a festival choir director, but that opportunity was formerly denied her.
Tamara brings in the influence of women's ministry coordinator Sheila Graham's, whose stint as a writer and PT editor influenced her thinking. A member of the WCG since 1962, Graham wrote PT articles on the role of women, women of the Bible, and the family. She obtained an M.A. from the Azusa Haggard School of Theology in Dec 1997; roughly the same time frame Tkach Sr., and Feazell surreptitiously began to attend Azusa Haggard classes, to complete their mutual Azusa doctoral degree plans.
Feazell next asks Tamara out of the blue about her bowling ministry, when amusingly, they competitively exchange average bowling scores.
Finally, what is the future of the WCG women's ministry, if any? Tamara says that women's ministry is taken care of at a local level. Women's ministry coordinators provide support recommendations which can be implemented on a localized basis as desired.
To conclude the interview, Tamara says she thinks the church may have the wrong ideas about God. She says she wants to better know Jesus, but the church may have put "God in a box", and wants the church to think of God, outside of any limitations.
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Tamara's Lunch with Jesus
Tammy recently had lunch with Jesus. Read about it here.
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Give Tamara A Raise?: Female Solo Pastors Earn More Than Male Solo Pastors
One hypothesis is that women stay in solo pastorates longer, and their longevity leads to higher pay. But that hypothesis doesn't hold up. Research shows that for solo pastors the number of years served makes next to no difference in pay.
The more-likely explanation is regional. We know that solo pastors receive the highest pay in the New England areas and west coast, with the higher cost of living in those regions. And these areas probably have the greatest cultural acceptance of women serving as solo pastors. Thus, women solo pastors tend to find work in regions with a high cost of living, and consequently, get a higher salary.
And before we assume that the church runs counter to the still-prevalent cultural practice of paying women less than men for comparable work, women were paid less than men in every other church position surveyed except church secretary. On average, females earned approximately 80 percent of the compensation of males. Or, in other words, males earned about 25 percent more than females.
Give Tamara a raise? At least Tammy is willing to give out her denominational email address to the worldwide membership, while the Pastor General of her WCG Association isn't. Nor is he willing to open his accounting books and secret funds for the slightest inspection by the congregations sending in more tithes to the WCG's bottomless pit.
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Video update: The video is now up and streaming at the wcg.org webpage.
