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Posted: June 13, 2002
A federal jury in Portland, Oregon, found six people associated with the Christian Patriot Association (CPA), an Oregon-based extremist group, guilty on June 7 of conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government by running an unlicensed bank that helped 900 people hide $186 million in assets from the Internal Revenue Service. The Christian Patriot Association is run by Richard Flowers, previously most well known for selling anti-Semitic, racist, and anti-government literature at extremist events and survivalist expos, and his wife, Dorothy.
In addition to Richard and Dorothy Flowers, the others convicted included CPA member Jeffrey Weakley and three who hid assets in the bank: Ronald Stacey, Dr. Dan Kirkham and John D. Anderson. Richard Flowers and Weakley were also convicted of failure to file income tax returns in 1995 and 1996, while Kirkham, Anderson, Stacey, and Stacey's wife, Elecia, were found guilty of tax evasion.
Several of the defendants had well-known extremist views ranging from white separatism to sovereign citizen beliefs. Richard Flowers, a longtime friend and associate of "patriot" leader James "Bo" Gritz, made headlines in the 1990s for selling racist and anti-Semitic literature at survivalist trade fairs called "Preparedness Expos." Jeffrey Weakley, who operated the CPA's bookstore and managed its ministry, was an adherent of Christian Identity, a racist and anti-Semitic sect that believes white people are the descendants of the ancient Israelites and that Jews are descended from Satan.
Warehouse banks, as they are called, are attractive to right-wing extremists because they help people hide their assets and financial transactions from the government. The CPA had been under scrutiny from the government since the early 1990s, which actually raided its headquarters in 1996, but the bank continued to operate for four more years. Such schemes have not always been easy to shut down; in the past, attempts by federal officials to deal with extremist-connected warehouse banks in Colorado and Tennessee ended with little success. In Oregon, though, federal authorities successfully prosecuted two other cases against warehouse banks prior to the CPA case.
Court documents showed that some of the defendants were quite creative in how they used the warehouse bank to hide assets. Anderson, for example, paid over $80,000 for a Bell helicopter, registered it in the name of his 10-year-old son, then sold it through the CPA. Kirkham hid almost $80,000 in the bank-which mailed it to him in cash wrapped in tin foil to avoid the notice of postal authorities.
Sentencing is set for August 19.
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