Ministry planned arsenal
Investigators find plans for Greater Ministries leaders' to run away to an island paradise.
The Tampa Tribune, September 4, 1999
By Michael Fechter
TAMPA - The arsenal offers a variety of ways to devastate an enemy.
Start with 1,000 Claymore mines to thwart surreptitious intruders. Twenty pounds of C-4 plastic explosive - enough to destroy bridges and even blow up a multistory building.
Then there are the grenade launchers, machine guns - some equipped with silencers - shotguns, sniper rifles, .357 Magnum handguns, 30 flak vests, two surveillance balloons and two radar systems with a 48-mile radius.
A supply list calls for 1,000 M-79 propelled grenades, 1,000 hand grenades and 5,000 to 10,000 rounds for each type of gun, including 5,000 .50-caliber armor-piercing bullets.
This isn't a rebel insurgency. It's the wish list a Tampa ministry had for its own tropical enclave called Greater Lands.
Solicitations from Greater Ministries International Church offered donors a place in its ecclesiastical domain - a nation within an existing country, akin to the Vatican's position in Italy. The faithful would be free to run their own banking, trade and government - with its own security force.
``It's a cross between being amusing and being frightening,'' said Mark Potok, a researcher and editor who focuses on extremist groups at the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala.
``It's hard to take seriously because it's so ludicrous. But one wonders what this man of God needs .50-caliber armor-piercing bullets for,'' Potok said.
Greater Ministries legal assistant Barbara Ketay said she had never heard of the plans. The Greater Royal plan, with its weapon list, is a fabrication, she said.
``There never has been and never will be guns,'' she said. ``This is not something a church would be involved in.''
Court-appointed receivers found two handguns and a loaded shotgun inside the headquarters when they took control Aug. 6.
Ketay began working with the group and its attorney, Al Cunningham, last October. But she has focused on fighting state regulators and criminal fraud charges pending against the ministry's leaders. She said she did not know specifics about any of the group's plans for self-determination.
Cunningham could not be reached for comment.
Attorney Thomas Krebs found the Greater Royal Island plan in Payne's office. Krebs is part of a legal team, which represents the states of Alabama and Ohio, that took control of Greater Ministries' headquarters building in Sulphur Springs. The team gained access to the building after a federal judge placed the ministry's assets in the hands of a receiver last month.
Royal Island is north of Eleuthera in the Bahamas. The proposal lists a $7 million price tag. After that, the outline called for designs and ordering materials.
Step 6 in the plan: ``Import Filipinos.''
They would be the laborers, filling 30 positions from masons, electricians and carpenters to cooks and landscapers.
It isn't known whether the group moved past the talking stage on the arsenal. Krebs found the undated, anonymously written plan that included the weapon inventory inside Greater Ministries founder Gerald Payne's office last week.
It is more than idle conjecture, though. Records show Greater Ministries representatives at least twice stepped up their pursuit of a homeland within days after court action.
Evelyn Guyton, a Central Florida resident whose name and telephone number are written on top of the cover page, said she does own the island but said no prospective buyers have identified themselves as Greater Ministries representatives.
Investigators going through Greater Ministries' records found plans and correspondence regarding at least three other possible destinations for an exodus of the ministry's faithful, along with Spanish-language instructional videos in the office suites of ministry leaders Payne, Don Hall, David Whitfield and others.
They are among seven people facing an Oct. 4 trial on federal money laundering and fraud charges. At issue is the group's money-doubling financial program. Investigators suspect it is a scam that raked in more than $100 million.
Lawyers and accountants working with the receiver say they've found no evidence inside Greater Ministries' headquarters that the group made legitimate investments to generate income for the ``Faith Promises'' program.
They have found hundreds of letters detailing financial crises created by the program's collapse that ``have led to broken families and divorces, foreclosures on homes, putting pensioners onto public welfare [and] wiping out local church congregation savings,'' attorney J. Michael Rediker wrote in court papers last week.
Other plans found in the building show Greater's leaders pursued their quasi-state on a second island in the Bahamas, off Honduras, and in Africa.
Included in that is a receipt for a $499,000 cash down payment on the Bahamian island of Spanish Cay on July 15, 1998.
That's less than a week after a federal judge found the church in contempt for stonewalling a grand jury subpoena for financial records. Payne told his elders that his arrest was likely, and during a videotaped September 1998 meeting, he encouraged his board of elders to stay silent and loyal.
A Greater Ministries representative took an aerial tour of a Honduran island March 18, less than a week after Payne and the six federal co-defendants were arrested.
The trip, captured on videotape, shows a riverbed mining site on the Honduran mainland. Later, a plane circles a hilly, largely uninhabited island. On landing, the visitors videotaped detailed footage of an incomplete 20-unit condominium and a multibedroom, two-story house with a stunning Gulf view.
Payne outlines his plan for the group's ``proposed Christian state,'' a sovereign ecclesiastical domain, to be located in the Swan Islands in a Jan. 29 letter to Honduran President Carlos Flores.
It isn't known whether the letter was sent.
``They have never come here to the consulate,'' said Honduran Counsel General Luis Castillo in Tampa. He said he had never heard of the group and doubted their plans would attract any interest from his government.
Payne, who signed the letter ``as Ecclesiarch,'' also is listed as prime minister pro tempore on an attached governmental listing. Greater Ministries elder Jack Hudson is named vice prime minister, while Embassy of Heaven leader Richard Allen Shiarla is named attorney general.
The Embassy of Heaven is a tax-protest movement created in Oregon. Shiarla tried to intervene on behalf of former Greater Ministries elder and federal co-defendant Patrick Henry Talbert when Talbert faced state racketeering and securities fraud charges related to bilking 12 elderly investors.
Talbert was convicted April 30 and is serving a 10-year prison sentence. He claimed diplomatic immunity as a Kingdom of Heaven ambassador after his arrest. When that failed, Shiarla's group convened an ``ecclesiastical court,'' which found Talbert guilty of the biblical charge ``coveting thy neighbor's property.''
The Kingdom of Heaven court offered victims of the scam restitution if they agreed not to pursue the state charges.
Payne's letter to Flores proposed the name ``Greaterlands of the Kingdom of Heaven.''
As a New Testament church, Greater Ministries cannot put any authority between itself and Jesus, who is sovereign over the church, their attorney, Cunningham, has said.
The group blames many of its troubles on the government. The financial program collapsed last year shortly after Greater Ministries lost about $20 million in a Colorado bank that was declared insolvent.
Without being specific, Payne has cited other bank accounts closed by the government. He sometimes invokes the name of Branch Davidian leader David Koresh as an example of government intrusion on religious liberty.
After his arrest, Payne addressed a group of church leaders at a meeting last spring. He told them that character assassination went hand in hand with the government's prosecution. ``They did that to David Koresh in order to go ahead and kill 20 babies,'' Payne said on a videotape of the meeting.
Friday, the group's Web page featured an image of Jesus on the cross above a Tampa Tribune photograph of U.S. Marshals taking their building on Aug. 6. Next to that is an aerial image of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco.
