Word: moons
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...FIFTY-FOUR YEAR OLD Korean immigrant is currently swabbing trays and loading dishes into washers at a federal prison in Danbury, Conn., and millions of people are unhappy about it. The man is the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, founder and leader of the Unification Church, which numbers two to three million followers worldwide, and he's serving an 18-month sentence for tax conspiracy and tax fraud...
...government claims that Moon failed to pay taxes on $162,000 interest on a $1.8 million Chase Manhattan Bank account. Moon says that he was holding the money in trust for his church, an established legal practice known as corporation sole, and that the money should therefore have been tax-exempt. (Curiously, Moon did pay personal taxes on the bulk of the account...
...years ago, the government proved to a jury's satisfaction that Moon used the Chase Manhattan account to purchase stock in iron and paint companies and a Washington bank, to pay for clothing and private schools for his children, and to buy such sundries as gold watches for himself and his friends. IRS agents researched the case for five years and the government spent two years prosecuting it. The estimates for the cost of prosecution and defense range up to $6 million...
...while the government insists that it had a solid and straightforward legal case against Moon, it has been unable to dissuade religious leaders and civil libertarians from their belief that the conviction is symptomatic of a broader governmental attack on religious autonomy...
Scores of national religious leaders have spoken on Moon's behalf, defending less the vagaries of his particular case than the issues of religious freedom the trial has raised. And figures as politically diverse as Joseph Lowrey, president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and Dr. Tim Lahaye, president of the Moral Majority of California, have joined to spearhead a group of ministers who have pledged to spend a week in jail with Reverend Moon. This unusual commitment indicates the depth of their belief that Moon's prosecution was a disguised persecution...