Tax Payers Indirectly Subsidized This Behavior

Quote


[fox2now.com]

Former members of polygamist sect led by Warren Jeffs reveal secrets in FBI documents

“There was so much class distinction and shunning of people,” said a former cook for the family of Bishop Lyle Jeffs, the prophet’s brother and right-hand man. She spoke of seeing shopping carts full of meat and turkeys earmarked for the bishop’s family while others made do with rice and beans.

The new social structure came about, as so many things do in the FLDS, when prophet Warren Jeffs had a revelation. This one came on December 12, 2011, about four months after he started serving the life sentence in Texas.

He told followers that God ordered him to create a United Order of members most worthy of heaven. And, before the month was up, his brother Lyle was lining up members at the old elementary school and quizzing them about their lives and faith to determine who was, indeed, worthy. They were instructed to hand over everything they owned and told the church would provide for their earthly needs.

The prophet — and there is little doubt Warren Jeffs is still the FLDS prophet — chooses who will be included in the United Order. His brothers, Lyle and Seth, serve as “bishops” and carry out the prophet’s wishes at FLDS compounds along the Utah-Arizona border and in the Black Hills of South Dakota.

The cook, Allene Jeffs Steed, told the FBI last year that while she prepared feasts of lobster and shrimp for the bishop, her own children “lived off toast.” She used duct tape to hold her kids’ shoes together. And hers wasn’t the only FLDS family to go without.

“We were literally starving,” Sheryl Barlow told the FBI in February. She lived in a house with 40 people and said they subsisted on noodles, brown rice, tomato juice and, when they were lucky, bread or a few containers of yogurt.

Federal prosecutors allege that food for the families of church leaders was ordered separately from stores such as Costco, while other members were left to shop at a warehouse of pooled resources called “the bishop’s storehouse.” Often, there wasn’t enough in the storehouse for everyone, and those at the bottom of the FLDS pecking order had to settle for whatever was left.

“We had little children that were starving, big people that were starving,” Barlow said. “It wasn’t enough to sustain.”

Fear and small numbers have long silenced the “apostates,” as the FLDS calls its turncoats. They’d be cut off from their families, shunned and harassed. Now, there are just too many of them. In some cases, entire families are leaving the fold

Quote

As that trial ended, another case began in Salt Lake City with criminal charges filed accusing 11 FLDS members — including Lyle and Seth Jeffs — of engaging in a food stamp swindle and money-laundering scheme that raked in some $12 million.

“Bleeding the beast,” the FLDS calls it. The “beast,” of course, is the federal government.

While families entitled to the food stamps went hungry, federal prosecutors allege, church leaders funneled food purchased with federal assistance into their own pantries or illegally exchanged food stamps for cash to plow into church projects — including publication of the prophet’s 854-page book of prison revelations, titled “Jesus Christ, Message to All Nations.” One witness who worked in the front office estimated the printing costs at $250,000.

Cash was obtained by ringing up ghost “purchases” at two FLDS-owned stores in Short Creek, according to a federal indictment accusing bishops Lyle and Seth Jeffs and nine other church members in a scheme to fraudulently obtain food stamp cards and launder money. At times, the FLDS stores’ food stamp sales rivaled those at Costco or Walmart, federal authorities alleged. They say the laundered cash was used on big-ticket items such as a Ford F-350 truck ($30,236), a John Deere tractor ($13,561) and $16,978 in paper products, to list a few.