Peter Popoff and His Wonderful Machine

Enter Peter Popoff, Anointed Minister of God, possessing the Nine Gifts of the Spirit, smuggler of Bibles behind the European Iron Curtain and into Cuba, TV star across the United States and Canada. According to his autobiography, the Reverend Popoff is no stranger to miraculous events. Peter says that as a child he saw his father change water into wine for one of his communion services in war-torn Berlin, and tells of his mother slicing up a small heel of bread into two full plates of bread to feed ten people. Traveling for his own ministry many years later in the United States, he says that he and his wife, “Liz,” drove their car to a service more than 50 miles away on a nickel’s worth of gasoline because God revealed to them how to do it. Squeaky-voiced Popoff directed his religious empire from Upland, California, sending out more than 100,000 computer-generated begging letters from coast to coast every two weeks. In 1986, he admitted to an operating cost of $550,000 a month; his actual gross income can only be guessed at. Since most of that income entered the collection plates—which are four-gallon plastic wastebaskets—in the form of cash, we suspected that the official figure might be somewhat smaller than Popoff’s declaration. Because Popoff—like all the evangelists—is not required by any government agency to account to anyone for any of the money that is taken in, except whatever he decides to pay himself as personal income, it is difficult to know just how much is collected.

A Rellglous Entrepreneur

Popoff always depended upon his valuable mailing list for most of his income. The crusades were really only methods of obtaining new names for that list, and his television and radio shows added to that number, of course. After the first few years of his electronic preaching, Popoff expanded his mailing list by contacting “Reverend” Gene Ewing, the owner of Twentieth Century Advertising, in California, who had many such valuable names for sale. Ewing had already been working for Popoff, writing emotional and highly effective promotional pieces for him and inventing clever sales stunts for the mailings. The mentality of Popoff’s contributors was demonstrated when Ewing had “business reply” (prepaid postage) envelopes printed up for Popoff to include in his mailings as a convenience for donors. The gesture backfired. The faithful wrote in complaining that it looked too businesslike, and from then on they had to pay their own postage. Former Popoff aide Mike Delaney described Ewing’s productHe sold letters and mail-order gimmicks to Popoff. Guaranteed, copyrighted money-making letters.

Though he paid full price for those letters, they may not have been as exclusive and original as Popoff thought. Lawyer Henry Eckhart—who has looked into Popoff’s. business methods—claims that in some cases Ewing merely copied old letters designed for other clients, such as Leroy Jenkins, and resold them to Popoff. Popoff purchased from several sources a group of 80,000 names, bringing his total list to 130,000 potentially generous persons, though Popoff’s former controller, Ira McCorriston, says that only about 30,000 to 40,000 of the new list were really “big money” (“Code Seven”) names. McCorriston told me, “The trash [Ewing] put out was just unbelievable.” One such piece was a “Holy Shower Cap.” This was a cheap plastic affair that was to be worn by the recipient and then wrapped around some cash or a check and mailed back to Popoff. As such things go, it was a relative failure; it brought in only $100,000 from a single mailing. Some other gimmicks were: holy gloves (throw-away vinyl work gloves), golden prosperity envelopes, special red faith strings, mustard seeds, gold and silver lamé patches, holy ribbons, blessed shoe liners, sanctified hand-prints, Russian rubles, and red felt hearts. There were also sacred handkerchiefs imbued with the preacher’s sweat. Popoff bought 36,000 of these from Synanon, another religious organization, at 25 apiece. He tore each into three pieces and represented to the faithful that he had mopped his brow with each scrap he mailed out. I have a large collection of such gimcrackery. Since Reverend Ewing needed time to compose each letter and it had to describe some dire crisis for which money was required “immediately,” and since Popoff’s staff needed time to actually print the 100,000 begging letters and mail them out, Popoff had to invent his monthly crises many months in advance and get the information to the advertising agency. It’s obvious that a lot of hard labor, thought, and planning goes into this kind of work. Ewing first began working for Popoff on a percentage basis, about 20 to 25 percent of the “take.” But when Popoff had to write him a check for $96,000, immediately followed by another for $100,000 each as his share of one month’s results, the arrangement was changed to a flat $20,000 per letter, produced six at a time. Ewing managed to survive on that. Former Popoff assistant Mike Delaney remembers that he hand-delivered several $120,000 checks to Ewing, who is still active in that trade, writing the same valuable junk and inventing crisis situations for evangelists like Oral Roberts and Rex Humbard, under the trade name Twentieth Century Advertising.