God’s Little Acura
I’m going to let you in on a little secret. It’s up to you whether to act on it, but you should know ahead of time that an opportunity like this might not arise again in your life. So hear me out.
All right. What if I told you that your days of listening to that rusty old muffler are over? That you won’t have to spend another dreary morning outside waiting for the bus, inhaling diesel fumes and freezing your butt off?
Or perhaps you don’t have any car problems. In which case I suggest that it might be time to upgrade. Because for everything you’re currently getting out of the sedan, there’s really no need to borrow your brother-in-law’s pickup when there’s hauling to be done. For that matter, where in the rules does it say you have to go without an SUV when you can have one for as little as $1,000? This is, after all, America.
Now, you tell me to mind my own business, shut my pie hole, move on down the road. You’ve heard this line before, and it ends with fourteen unwanted magazine subscriptions in your name. To which I say: Relax. Take a deep breath.
Because — and I want you to really think about it, now — this sort of thing happens all the time. It’s just that it usually doesn’t happen to you or me. No, it tends to happen to people whose mufflers don’t misbehave. In 1956, for example, an unknown investor named Warren Buffett recruited seven people to take part in a stock-market venture. They pitched in and gave him $105,000. In five years, he turned it into $7.2 million.
Like I said, this sort of thing happens to other people all the time.
Now it’s your turn.
Are you with me now? OK, here’s the deal: You can have a late-model Honda Accord, fully loaded, for $1,000. Or you can have a Cadillac Escalade for $2,000. You can have a Toyota, Lexus, Porsche, BMW, Ford, even your very own Freightliner, all for prices so low it’ll put you in church on Sunday.
I know what you’re thinking now. You’re thinking: Do I look that stupid? And you know what? You’re good and right to think that way, because who the hell am I? But then you ask a relative, a friend, a coworker, a neighbor. Or you ask your pastor. And they’ve already had your exact same doubts, asked your exact same questions — and concluded that this might just be the best opportunity of their lives.
Now you feel a little better. And because you don’t want to miss out on this chance of a lifetime, you hand over a check. And in return you get a receipt and a phone number to call if you have any questions or if you change your mind and want to back out. Which, I might add, is perfectly fine, because this deal comes complete with a 100 percent money-back guarantee.
Still, you get a little nervous, a touch of anxiety and remorse. And you find yourself dialing the number on the receipt, fully expecting a recording from the phone company or maybe a French girl talking dirty. But sure enough, a receptionist answers, “Auto Emporium,” very businesslike, and she assures you that the car — your car — is on its way, though maybe you shouldn’t expect it until March or April because there are so many cars and so many people, OK?
You hang up feeling a lot better. For a while everything’s great. But then spring comes and goes, and still no car. So you call the number on the receipt again. This time it’s voicemail, and you leave a message, but no one calls back. So you call one more time, and now the line is disconnected. And that’s when you hear from your relative/friend/coworker/pastor — or maybe even from me — that there are no cars.
There never were.
Now your stomach sinks, and it stays like that for days as you start reading about all this in the paper: how attorneys for the federal government say this was all part of an elaborate scam that crisscrossed the country. You feel gullible and ashamed, even though you now know that you’re in a class that numbers into the thousands. How many, exactly? Well, even the federal prosecutors aren’t sure, but they believe they’ve nabbed the four main culprits.
The first three, two men and a woman, are accused of masterminding the scam. The fourth … well, the fourth is different. The fourth is a woman named Corinne Conway. She’s 62 years old and lives about 50 miles east of Kansas City in Higginsville, a quiet little town noteworthy mainly for a stunning park dedicated to Confederate soldiers and a Fourth of July fireworks display that blows away the efforts of a lot of big cities. Of course, that was before all of this came up. Now Higginsville is known as the home of Corinne Conway, who stands accused of recruiting folks from churches across the nation to buy cars that did not exist, and who, prosecutors say, profited to the tune of about a million ill-gotten dollars. She’s what they’re calling a “finder.” And for that she might now spend the rest of her life in prison.
A towering blue-and-yellow likeness of school mascot Husker Harold, painted on the dull siding of the junior high, greets visitors who venture off Interstate 70 into Higginsville. To judge by his overalls, Harold is a farmer, possessed of massive shoulders, enormous biceps and no face. Instead, he wears a sombrero with eyeholes. He leans gingerly on a wooden club, which, incongruously, appears to have a sharp spike driven through it.
About 4,700 people live in Higginsville. The town, like any self-respecting burg these days, has its own Web site, www.higginsville.org, which proudly displays its motto (“Country Living At Its Best”) and boasts of its “strategically located” position in relation to Kansas City. It is, in the words of one longtime resident, a “nice, clean German town.” It is also home to five bones and a lock of hair that once belonged to Captain William Quantrill, perhaps the nastiest man in Missouri history, who in 1863 led a raid on Lawrence, Kansas, that left nearly 200 people dead. In 1992 the Kansas State Historical Society freed Quantrill’s remains. His skull headed east to Ohio, where he was born and where it now resides in a child-sized coffin. The five bones and the hair landed in Higginsville’s Confederate Memorial Cemetery, where they were bestowed full Confederate honors.
Just east of Higginsville’s Main Street lies the headquarters of Virtuous Women International Ministries. According to a federal indictment, this unassuming white building was pivotal to a nationwide conspiracy that netted more than $19 million in less than four years. It was from this base, prosecutors allege, that Higginsville’s most notorious living resident helped sell cars that didn’t exist to thousands of suckers.
Barring any delays, Corinne Conway will go to trial in downtown Kansas City in May, along with her three alleged cohorts: James R. Nichols and Robert Gomez, both 27 years old, both from California; and 52-year-old Gwendolyn Baker, of Tennessee.
The government’s case paints Nichols and Gomez as the creators of a fictional character named John Bowers. They gave him a New York estate worth hundreds of millions of dollars, a backstory as a retired executive for a Texas-based food processor and a soft spot for devout Christians in search of automobiles.
When Bowers died, the story went, his adopted son and heir (Gomez) announced the old man’s plan to reward the righteous by selling off cars at bargain prices, with the sales being used as write-offs against the estate tax on his fortune. The executor of Bowers’ estate (Nichols) then carried out his wish with the help of a Tennessee woman (Baker), who helped locate eligible Christians to benefit from the sanctified sale. Using contacts throughout the nation, they distributed lists of the available “miracle cars” to religious organizations from coast to coast.
The sales started with churches, but prosecutors believe the scam expanded as buyers recruited family and friends to get a piece of their good fortune. “I think that it was just a matter of connecting through personal relationships,” says Don Ledford, spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s office in Missouri. “One person that’s part of the conspiracy knows somebody else, and they make that contact, and that person knows somebody else, and they make another contact. And it had to do more with personal relationships than any organizational relationships.”
Many people who heard about the offer were skeptical. To gain their confidence, prosecutors say, Nichols and Baker provided documents from two Southern California businesses, a car dealership and a towing facility, which were purportedly storing some of the cars. When asked for more information about Bowers, Nichols and Baker allegedly explained that the probate judge overseeing his estate had placed a gag order on them, thus restricting what they could make public. This “gag order” was also blamed for the delays in getting cars to purchasers.
Within the scheme, Nichols and Gomez are said to have been primarily responsible for the money. Baker, prosecutors say, would deposit miracle-car payments into Nichols’ California bank account. In March 2000, for example, she deposited checks for $19,000, $45,000 and $51,000. The following month she transferred $42,500. In May 2000, checks for $30,000, $1,000, $4,000, $5,000, $9,000, $20,000 and $12,000 went into the account. Nichols in turn wrote checks for identical amounts, making them out to area casinos, where Gomez held player accounts and gambled aggressively at VIP poker tables.
According to the federal indictment against all four defendants, “Baker was primarily responsible for obtaining individuals in various states to help her make contacts in churches and other organizations to solicit purchasers of automobiles and other motor vehicles.” Those contacts were called “finders.”
It was the finders, prosecutors say, who did the actual selling. Some of them collected commissions for each sale. Their job, though vitally important, was not exceptionally difficult. They were, after all, preaching to receptive audiences. In fact, some of them were actually preaching. Though it’s unclear how many finders sold miracle cars, some of the known finders were leaders in church organizations. If the miracle message was dubious, the messengers, in many cases, were above suspicion.
In St. Petersburg, Florida, the Reverend Glenn Miller spoke about John Bowers from the pulpit of his Breakthrough Christian Center, where he was senior pastor. Like several fellow churchgoers, Karin Alozade bought into the story for a $1,000 1998 Honda Civic. Alozade’s daughter paid another $1,000 for a 1998 Honda Accord. According to Alozade and a subsequent story in The St. Petersburg Times, several other parishioners, persuaded by the words of their minister, bought miracle cars, too. (Miller did not respond to calls requesting comment for this story. This past summer he told The St. Petersburg Times that he considers himself a victim of the scam.)
“I thought it was true. People do strange things,” the elder Alozade says in retrospect. “And with God, anything is possible. That’s the premise I went on and would still go on: Anything’s possible with God.”
On a military base in Opelika, Alabama, Jocelyn McRae says she heard the pitch from the son of a Florida minister. “He showed me a paper that had a listing with all these cars on it,” McRae recalls. “It sounded too good to be true, so I didn’t really follow up on it. Then I started talking to more people in the unit. Some of them were buying it, some of them were skeptical about it, too.”
McRae wound up signing on for a Toyota Camry and a Ford Expedition, for a total of $1,800. “He was doing so much business,” she says of her finder. “He had contracts with doctors and lawyers. I figured if he’s doing all this business, maybe they did their homework. I think what got them was that he was saying if people wanted their money back, they could get it back in three or four days. It was convincing because you could get your money back.”
According to various press reports in various cities: In Duluth, Georgia, Wayne Herman paid $2,000 for a 1999 Cadillac Seville. In Colorado Springs, Colorado, Don Ross dished out $3,200 for five cars and two semi-trucks. Outside Seattle, a man named Walter Schmidt reportedly organized a miracle-car buying circle that doled out $250,000 for more than fifty vehicles, from sports cars to tractor-trailers.
“It’s hard to estimate,” Ledford says of the total number of victims. “You could safely say thousands. And I only say that because the number of vehicles alleged in the indictment is 7,000.”
That would be the indictment that accuses Corinne Conway of acting as the scam’s top finder, “promoting” Gwen Baker to her religious contacts, receiving funds from other finders throughout the United States and using her own organization as a front to sell nonexistent automobiles.
In July 2000, Conway traveled to Portland, Oregon, where a group called Renewed Hope Ministries and its pastor, Bob Hill, hosted her for “An Evening with Virtuous Women International.” Information advertising the event listed two speakers: Conway and a “Dr. Gwen Baker.”
Hill says Baker never made the trip. Instead, he recalls, Conway appeared solo, first on Hill’s religious radio show, then later at one of his church services. “During the radio broadcast, she presented herself very professionally and never mentioned the cars,” Hill says. “But she did mention them in our church during the Sunday morning service, and some of our people lost money in this scam.”
Prosecutors say Conway is responsible for $6 million in miracle-car sales, from which she pocketed nearly $1 million in commissions.
According to public records, Conway founded Virtuous Women International in 1993, registering it that year as a nonprofit organization in the state of California. Twenty years earlier, she’d attended San Diego State University, where, according to university archives, she’d served as president of the Black Student Council and director of the school’s African-American Community Center.
In 1995 Conway began filing her organization’s papers with the Missouri Secretary of State’s office, after she and her husband, Wilbur, a minister, moved to Higginsville. The group’s goal, as understood by the state, is to “help women to rediscover their purpose according to the Bible so that they reach other women, men and children for the Kingdom of God.” More specifically, it’s to “enhance the growth of women in the knowledge of Jesus Christ through seminars, retreats and workshops.”
It was at one such workshop in 1989, before Virtuous Women had officially organized, that Joan Miller-Thomas says her life changed. Miller-Thomas arrived at the conference in San Diego that day distraught and struggling to come to grips over a family crisis. She says Conway sought her out from the beginning, as if tuned in to her pain: “She was so right on about my situation. She kind of helped me and nurtured me through the situation.”
After that, Miller-Thomas began attending the group’s monthly meetings, and then later took a leadership role, speaking at conferences and traveling with Conway around the country. “She helps a woman to know her place as far as not feeling inferior,” Miller-Thomas says. “Helping her know her strengths, know her weaknesses, know how to be in the workplace, in the home, know how to be a daughter, a mother, a wife. If she had a problem, how to deal with that problem. How to trust in God. How to be strong. How to tap into your spiritual self. Knowing how to handle the word.”
And knowing how to find a good deal. Miller-Thomas says Conway would often tout goods and services she’d heard about on her travels. “She was into herbs,” Miller-Thomas explains. “She would always tell someone about a good herb, and she would just talk it up. If she knew of a good seamstress, she would talk them up. If she knew something that could help you, she would spread the word.”
Similarly, Miller-Thomas believes that if her friend sold miracle cars, it was because she believed in them. “No way could I ever think of her doing that intentionally,” she says of the fraud charges. “She was always good with word of mouth, so they probably used her for that. She’s a mighty woman of God. She’s done so much. I think this is just a trick to tear her down.”
For nearly a decade now, Miller-Thomas has lived in Pennsylvania. This past year, she has worked as youth minister for a church in the small town of Upland, near Philadelphia. She’d lost track of Conway for years, until last spring, when they spoke by phone. The conversation never touched on miracle cars, she says; she didn’t even hear of Conway’s arrest until recently. Instead, she recalls, they talked tragedy — about how the Conways had to rebuild after a fire a few years back burned their Higginsville home to the ground.
That fire had been big news in the small Missouri town. “They lost about everything they had,” another family friend says.
The Conways’ new home lies on a corner property in a working-class part of town. One story tall, it’s perfectly rectangular in shape. The sole visible sign of affluence is a satellite dish that sits on one corner of the roof like a tiara on a truck driver. The headquarters for Virtuous Women International, though a larger structure, is no more ostentatious. If Conway socked away $1 million for herself, she has done well not to make a show of it in Higginsville.
Conway’s defense lawyer, Robin Fowler, declines to go into detail about the case but says his client has nothing to hide because she never knowingly did anything wrong. Until just five months ago, Fowler worked in Kansas City, Kansas, as an assistant U.S. attorney. Seven years ago, he prosecuted a fraud case against a man accused of acting as a foot soldier in a phone scam that targeted thousands of cellular users nationwide. Conway, he maintains, does not belong in such company. “I fully expect there will be a trial in this case, and we think that trial will show that Ms. Conway never intended to defraud anybody in the course of this,” Fowler asserts.
Court documents point to five instances in which checks made payable to Conway were transferred to Baker, then transferred to Nichols, then transferred to a casino where Gomez spent an evening impiously flipping chips. Prosecutors promise much more when the case goes to trial.
Then again, Conway was not the only finder who sold miracle cars and earned commissions; she’s just the only one who faces a life sentence for fraud, the only one who will go to trial alongside alleged masterminds Nichols, Gomez and Baker.
A finder named Bishop James Swinson, for example, name appeared on the receipt for the miracle cars sold to Karin Alozade and her daughter. He has not been charged. Swinson’s son, Michael, sold a car to at least one fellow soldier at an army reserve unit in Alabama: Jocelyn McRae, the woman who bought a Camry and an Expedition for $1,800. (“We were all in the military,” McRae says. “I guess there was a bit of trust.”) McRae says she and several fellow purchasers found out the truth on their own, either from the media or by word of mouth. The younger Swinson has not been charged in the case. He declined to comment about his involvement with miracle cars. James Swinson did not return calls requesting an interview for this story.
And then there are the ministers who put their imprimatur on the offer. In Florida, Glenn Miller told his congregation that a well-known black minister and author in Georgia, Creflo Dollar, had invested heavily in the miracle-cars program. Many congregants at St. Petersburg’s Breakthrough Christian Center, satisfied by Miller’s endorsement, fell for the con, though Dollar has told The St. Petersburg Times he made no such investment. (Like Miller, Dollar did not return phone calls from the Pitch requesting comment.)
Where does gullibility end and culpability begin? The government says the distinction is knowledge — and money. The difference between Corinne Conway and the other finders is that she allegedly knew the story was untrue and still walked away with $1 million. That, they say, makes her a culprit, not a victim.
Conway is the only finder facing federal charges. Last fall Georgia prosecutors charged that a minister named John Alexander had swindled $7 million out of Atlanta-area residents in the miracle-car scam. Alexander’s attorney told an Atlanta television station that his client was a victim himself. Conway’s lawyer says the same is true of his client.
“It’s our position that she’s a victim herself,” Fowler says. “Her reputation in her community has taken a huge hit, particularly in the church community, and we hope she will be vindicated at trial and she can start working on her reputation again.”
Despite Fowler’s assertion, religious leaders in Higginsville say they’re not familiar with the work done by Conway’s organization. Some compare Virtuous Women to the Promise Keepers, the Christian organization that aims to teach men how to live good lives as husbands and fathers. Others say that doesn’t seem quite right but fail to offer a clearer definition. As a matter of fact, in Higginsville, where a stranger can’t drive down Main Street without attracting attention, there’s a relative lack of awareness regarding Virtuous Women International. Then again, the majority of Conway’s work takes place outside Higginsville, in the churches around the nation that host her events.
Over the past half-dozen years, fifteen women have been listed as officers or board members of Virtuous Women, from the states of Missouri, Florida, Oregon, Washington, California, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Tennessee. Some served multiple years, others just one. One woman, listed by Conway as a board member in 2000, says she participated in one Virtuous Women conference and then declined Conway’s offer to serve as an officer. “Does it still exist?” she asks of the group.
Of the six current officers and board members named in the organization’s state filings, only one could be located at her listed address. Karen Lowery, a Virtuous Women officer since 1999, declined to comment for this story, refusing even to supply information about the organization itself. “We can’t make any comments at this time,” Lowery told the Pitch.
Though prosecutors say the miracle-cars scam was more about personal relationships than organizational connections, it undeniably gained momentum through a nebulous network of ministries. For example, Precious Daughters Ministries, which is based in Portland, Oregon, and which hosted Conway more than once in recent years, is among those groups with members who sold miracle cars. A representative for the group says they do not believe Conway purposely deceived them.
Based in part on Conway’s involvement with Precious Daughters, Renewed Hope Ministries, headquartered in the state of Washington, held its own Virtuous Women event in July 2000, after which several members purchased miracle cars. Literature advertising that event says Conway trained under the leadership of a Dr. Myles Munroe, whose “international, non-denominational, charismatic ministry in Nassau, Bahamas” reaches more than seventy nations. (Munroe could not be reached to comment for this story.)
Despite the fate that has befallen Virtuous Women’s founder, another organization, the Atlanta-based World Changers Church International, will host a Virtuous Women International conference next month. Conway herself is not scheduled to appear. But the connection between Virtuous Women and World Changers is one some Florida churchgoers have already heard about. When congregants of the Breakthrough Christian Center in St. Petersburg wrote checks for their miracle cars, they did so believing that World Changers and its founder, Creflo Dollar, had already done the same.
In all, the miracle-car defendants face 21 counts of fraud and money laundering and could each be sentenced to more than 100 years in prison. Nichols and Baker could get sentences totaling a maximum of 275 years for their roles; Gomez could get 235 years. Conway, who is named in 14 of the 21 fraud counts, faces the smallest maximum amount of prison time, 135 years. Her attorney has requested that Conway be tried separately; U.S. Magistrate Judge Sarah Hays will likely rule on that motion in February.
The indictment identifies $11.7 million in properties to be seized from the defendants. Among them: seven bank accounts belonging to Nichols or Baker, player accounts and safe-deposit boxes for Nichols or Gomez at six Los Angeles casinos, five BMWs and three other automobiles purchased by Nichols, and $818,000 in gaming chips that Gomez was carrying when he was arrested last June.
None of the items listed in the indictment belonged to Conway. Still, prosecutors say, all the defendants attempted to hide their miracle-car earnings. “It was a further part of the conspiracy and scheme to defraud,” the indictment alleges, “that defendants Baker, Nichols, Gomez and Conway concealed and attempted to conceal their receipt and use of funds from purchasers of automobiles and other motor vehicles by failing to report funds which they received and used to the Internal Revenue Service.”
Lawyers for Baker and Gomez declined to comment on the federal charges, other than to note that their clients have pleaded not guilty. “We deny each allegation,” says Gomez’s attorney, Lance Sandage. A lawyer for Nichols could not be reached for comment.
Invariably, victims who agree to talk about their miracle-car experience begin asking questions about the status of the case and whether they’re going to get their money back. Information, they say, comes slowly if at all, and usually by the same word of mouth that got them in trouble in the first place.
Initially, the U.S. Department of Justice opened a telephone hotline for those who believed they’d been conned. After thousands of calls came in, the government set up a special Web site (http:// www.usdoj.gov/usao/mow/nichols/nichols.html). Victims can now read updates on the case — they know, for instance, that on November 26 Nichols and Gomez posted $100,000 bonds in California, where they will stay until their trial begins in Kansas City in May.
Conway, meanwhile, awaits trial at her home in Higginsville. She says she’d like to tell her side of the story, but she has been advised by her attorney to stay quiet. “The media has been one view,” she says. “But I’m not allowed to talk.”
The miracle-car scam has attracted plenty of media attention, bringing Conway’s name to everything from National Public Radio and The St. Petersburg Times to smaller outlets such as The Columbus Ledger-Enquirer in Georgia and the twice-weekly Higginsville Advance (July 24, 2002 headline: “Local convict is out on $20,000 signature bond”).
Bob Sherman is a Conway defender, a retired truck driver who has lived in Higginsville for nearly thirty years. Sherman points to the Advance‘s pretrial treatment of Conway and notes that in the context of a small town, the paper’s erroneous labeling of the defendant as a “convict” might be more destructive than it seems. “I don’t think it helps anyone’s reputation, whether [the government is] right or wrong,” Sherman says. “Just like a man being accused of child molesting and he never did it, it will follow him around. The damage is already done.”
Sherman says he might well have been among the scammed. It was only a sense of self-restraint, he’ll tell you, that kept him from that. Awhile back, when the miracle-car offer made the rounds in Higginsville, Sherman heard that a rich man in New York had died, his last wish being to sell his fleet of cars at a fraction of its worth. He had good reason to believe the story, Sherman says, because he considers Corinne and Wilbur Conway good people. Still, he decided not to partake.
“I said, ‘I really don’t need a vehicle. I’ve got a pickup. I’ll let that go to someone who needs it,'” Sherman recalls.
Here is a man, a churchgoing man, who had faith that John Bowers’ miracle cars were real but passed on the deal anyway.
Because you’ve gotten caught up in all of this, you might ask Bob Sherman about Conway. Corinne, he’ll tell you, is the biggest victim of them all. She might not have lost any money, but now she stands to wind up a jailhouse geriatric. “They’re nice people,” Sherman says of the Conways. “They’re not somebody you’d think of as being jerks or cons. I think she got suckered in. Bless her heart, she’s going to pay for it.”
He theorizes that maybe Corinne Conway stepped on someone’s toes — perhaps someone who’s “kin to the state prosecutor.” He speaks glowingly of Wilbur Conway, whom he considers a tremendous minister and a great asset to the town. In fact, he knows much more about Wilbur than Corinne, and you begin to get the impression that he’s automatically assigning the husband’s qualities to the wife. But then, he has seen her preach. He once attended a small Higginsville church and saw her speak there. He says he liked what he heard.
But the church closed because of low attendance; it simply couldn’t support itself any longer. And that made him kind of sick. Because too many people, Sherman says, “aren’t interested in Jesus until they get in between a rock and a hard place.” That room, he believes, should have been filled with people wanting to hear the word of God, people thirsting for leaders such as Corinne Conway to speak it. Because places like that are where miracles happen. They’re where lives change.
And all it takes is receptiveness, a willingness to believe that the unexplainable does happen. To have faith, in the words of miracle-car buyer Karin Alozade, that “anything’s possible with God.”
