Word: bakker
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Behind the accumulated chaos was a helter-skelter organization run by an insecure, often dictatorial man who, in the words of a former PTL executive, "didn't know how to balance his own checkbook." Executive turnover was constant. PTL repeatedly switched legal advisers and accounting firms. Under Bakker, PTL at one point had 47 bank accounts and 17 vice presidents, with financial control split into four separate departments. Thus no one except Bakker and his closest aides had an overall view of the ministry and its money...
...that came atop the Bakkers' salary and compensation, which the current managers of PTL estimate at $1.6 million for 1986. That was up considerably from a decade earlier, when Bakker drew $24,000 in salary and expenses. In subsequent years, that amount ballooned as Bakker used expense accounts to pad his income. By 1982 Bakker was making about $129,000 and Tammy $52,000, yet all the Bakkers' expenses, from tutors for the couple's two children to their personal automobiles, were covered by PTL. The ministry paid for virtually everything, no matter how trivial: Bakker once summoned...
...Bakkers and their close aides drew colossal bonuses with the approval of PTL's complaisant seven-member board. "We directed very little, but we approved a considerable amount," says former Board Member J. Don George, pastor of the 4,500-member Calvary Temple in Irving, Texas. In a series of confidential board minutes for November and December 1986, subsequently obtained by TIME, no numbers are listed for the bonus granted to Jim and Tammy and to Richard Dortch, a top aide who joined PTL in 1984 and was defrocked along with his boss in the wake of the Hahn scandal...
...Among other things, the IRS report called Jim Bakker's compensation for 1981 ($259,770.29), 1982 ($400,765.58) and 1983 ($638,112.27) excessive. The agency raised questions about a host of other Bakker-PTL arrangements. Among them: PTL's purchase of a $390,000 condominium for Bakker in Highland Beach, Fla., in 1982, along with $202,566 that was spent on furniture and fixtures; and an interest-free loan of almost $76,000 to Bakker from the ministry. For its part, the ministry argued that Bakker's salary was reasonable because he was the "guiding light" of the ministry...
...theology of building." Recounts Harry Hargrave, a Dallas businessman recruited by Falwell to run the shattered organization: "Jim would build something here, and then he'd have to build something bigger to finish paying for this as well as the enlarged cash flow." That pyramid philosophy led Bakker from his first Heritage Village television studio in Charlotte to Heritage USA and, finally, to the 500-room Heritage Grand Hotel and its sister, the unfinished Heritage Towers. Bakker's ultimate fantasy was a $100 million replication of London's Crystal Palace. A painting of that now canceled project still stands forlornly...