The Trash Detail

At the 1986 Fort Lauderdale meeting, I watched W. V. Grant at work with his expensively coiffed and costumed wife, Shirley, various assistants busily scurrying about, and ushers trotting baskets of cash and checks backstage. I got the impression of a somewhat rushed and desperate gang of cattle rustlers at work, wearing the wrong costumes. They threw fixed smiles in every direction, handling each person with assembly-line precision and galloping toward the final moment of mass testimony that would terminate the magical ceremony. I wanted to get hold of those crib sheets that Grant carried for the “calling out” stunt. I’d stood close to the edge of the stage as he worked at memorizing one, the writing on it plainly visible through the paper as it rested on a transparent lucite podium in front of him. At that moment, as I saw this careless procedure, it seemed to me that Grant might not be quite as smart as I’d thought. It occurred to me that there might be another weak spot we should investigate. When the meeting broke up, I approached my colleague Chuck Saje and suggested that we monitor the trash thrown out by the Grant group each night. It was just possible that Grant might fail to destroy some evidence. Chuck felt that we would find nothing. After all, he opined, a counterfeiter would be insane to throw his rejects in the trash, instead of burning them. I was grasping at straws to hope that Reverend Grant would be that careless. But we went ahead with the plan. The first night yielded nothing. Two large dumpsters beside the Grant truck remained empty but for a few food wrappers. The second and third nights were the same, and even the food wrappers were gone by Saturday, when the Grant caravan had departed. I felt as if I should abandon the surveillance, but made one more forage on Sunday. Eureka! Two plastic trash bags had appeared atop some tree cuttings, and, to the amusement of several early-morning joggers, I made off with them. It was a bonanza. Chuck and I picked among the coffee grounds, cigarette butts, and fried potatoes, and the first thing we came up with was a note from Shirley Grant to her husband. What made this note even more interesting was the form on the other side. It shows how careful Grant is—at least with money. We knew that we’d really arrived “behind the scenes” at the Grant show when we found a trash bag with letters, envelopes, bank money wrappers, and deposit slips. Grant had shown his audience a bundle of bright red envelopes. He’d explained that there were 120 of them, numbered consecutively from 1 to 120, and that anyone who agreed to take an envelope “at random” was expected to place within it a check made out in the amount represented by the number on that envelope. If the numbering had been as represented, and there were only 120 envelopes, Grant stood to collect $7,260 from that offering alone.

Shirley Grant’s note to her husband at Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

  But my colleagues and I managed to get 11 of those envelopes as they were given out, and more from sifting through Grant’s garbage. The numbers they bore were mostly in the upper half of the scale, from 70 to 120, and several large numbers were duplicated. Mathematically, the chances of our happening upon such a selection at random are slightly more than 1 in 5,000. (Actually, probably less, because some recipients might have failed to return envelopes with large numbers on them, and those with smaller numbers might be more likely to show up.) In other words, it is highly likely that those 120 (or more!) envelopes had been numbered so that many more high numbers were available than low ones. This would bring Grant considerably more than $7,260. It seems that W. V. Grant’s operation has little that is not in some way slanted to provide an altered version of reality and increase his income.