Caught in the Act

Of course the mailing list Popoff purchased from Danny Jenkins contained “marker names” (see Chapter 5) to ensure that only limited use was made of it. Soon after the Popoff court case, those marker names showed up, and Jenkins was alerted to the fact that his list was being used illegally by Popoff. Under the persistent delusion that he could not be touched by the law and was free to flout any court order, Popoff had continued to use the list despite the court injunction not to do so. Warned by his business manager, he said: “They’ll never know, and besides, no one cares.” However, in a feeble attempt to escape detection, he left out all the Ohio addresses when he used it, because Jenkins made his headquarters in that state. Popoff’s purchase of the list from Danny Jenkins was legal, but his continued use of it after the court injunction was illegal. In January 1987, after protracted legal procedures, the court finally ordered Popoff to pay $100,000 to the Jenkins ministry as a penalty.

Back in the Saddle Again

Meanwhile, Jenkins was still trying to rebuild his ministry after his prison stay. He taped shows before as few as 20 or 30 persons because he was unable to attract more. But his ingenuity came through for him. He instructed All-American Video director/editor Rod Sherrill, who had worked with him long before Leroy went to prison, to look back in their archives and come up with some old tapes showing large audiences. Sherrill then edited them into the new Jenkins shows to produce the illusion that he had appeared before packed houses. The result of this electronic manipulation was a series of heavily faked—but very effective—videotapes. (Sherrill seems to have been very inventive on behalf of all his employers. The “enhanced audience” technique was only one example of his creative editing. On another occasion, for example, cameraman Gary Clarke, who first met Sherrill when they both worked for All-American Video, recalls an event at the studio in Columbus, Ohio, when Rod was editing a singularly dull section of videotape made during a W. V. Grant meeting. He came upon a shot of a woman expressing obvious disbelief in something Grant had just said or done. She was seen rolling her eyes upwards—as if to say, according to Clarke, “Come on, nobody would buy that!” Sherrill edited the shot into one in which Grant was tossing a broken cane up onto the stage, and it appeared that the woman’s eyes were following the cane as it sailed through the air. “Rod was real proud of that one,” Clarke reported, “and he showed it to everyone.”) Making good use of his jail experience, on one of the new (post-prison) batch of TV shows Jenkins told his audience that he had recently spent some time among “rapists, murderers, and kidnappers,” according to Clarke. Jenkins didn’t trouble the viewers with the information that he had been among those people as a convicted felon. He boasted that he had taught the miscreants how to make “real leather wallets,” and that they had fashioned 5,000 of them “with scriptures engraved in gold.” But unfortunately, he reported, these wallets had been lost somewhere, and it took a direct revelation from God to Jenkins to find them. Now that they were available again, Jenkins said, he wanted to send these wallets as gifts to the first 5,000 lucky applicants, and he would put a real $1 bill into each wallet “so that you’ll never be without money again.” Forty-five minutes of videotape later, Clarke said, Jenkins threw in the harpoon. One of these lovely handmade wallets was to be “given” to each person who sent in a “love offering” of $100 so that the viewer could share the good fortune of “a woman in Atlanta” who, viewers were told, had gotten fabulously rich by accepting such a wallet from Jenkins. He sold them all. As I did with all the healers I examine in this book, I challenged Leroy Jenkins to produce evidence of one healing he’d produced. On his TV show, and in newspaper advertisements, he had demanded that I attend his services and see his “calling out” performed without any tricks being used. On August 16, 1986, he published in the Columbus Dispatch a display ad featuring a vintage portrait of himself:

Well, as is usual with most of these challengers, Jenkins got it backwards. It’s my challenge to him to prove that he is genuine. I’m not saying, nor have I ever said, that he is “a phony.” I’m only saying that he has not proved that he’s for real. I have nothing to prove. He has. Several letters went out from my office offering to meet Jenkins to establish his validity. There was no reply until October 1986, when he wrote:I am not going to participate in any of your publicity stunts. You are obviously an atheist who is attempting to obtain publicity for your forthcoming book and I have no intention of helping you do so.

Was I surprised at this response? Not at all. One becomes accustomed to “Through the Looking Glass” kind of thinking while involved in these investigations. But when I read this reply to Dennis Jenkins, another of Leroy’s sons, he assured me that his father would actually welcome being tested. I never heard from either of them again. As I write this, Leroy Jenkins is busy defending the two top bananas of the Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker vaudeville show and simultaneously bad-mouthing Jerry Falwell, who took over the PTL ministry when the Bakkers’ scandals hit the limelight. Jenkins likens the charges against the Bakkers to those against him. In a CNN-TV interview he said:[I was charged with] conspiracy to beat up a reporter, conspiracy to burn down a highway patrolman’s house. And that’s what the conspiracy was. Nothing to it whatsoever, and uh ... it was a frame job, just like with the Bakkers. ... The million, two hundred thousand people that I have on my mailing list that follow me believe also the same as I do.

My! How that little mailing list has grown!