The Plot Thickens

There was much more to the project than Popoff’s patrons ever knew. My colleague David Alexander is the one who uncovered the entire plot, by interviewing many of the minor characters involved and gathering the physical evidence to establish the facts. What he discovered constitutes, in our opinion, a strong case. Popoff needed two things: He wanted to bring in a great deal of money, and he had to explain the fact that his promise to deliver the Russian Bibles had not been fulfilled. Ideally, he could provide the explanation and at the same time attract the money. To accomplish this, he decided to fake a break-in at his headquarters along with the destruction of the Bibles he had told his followers he had ready to ship. The results would be videotaped and shown to the nationwide television audience. He would earn sympathy and funds at the same time. In May 1985, Delaney had entered the plan. He was approached by Rod Sherrill, who offered him and a friend of his $25 each for an easy evening’s extra work. Popoff and Sherrill set up a stack of “Russian Bibles” in the print shop and instructed the two to return later and wet them down with a hose and strew them around the shop.

The Vandals Strike

That night, at nine o’clock, Mike Delaney let himself and his friend into the print shop with a key that Rod Sherrill had given him for that purpose. They turned a hose on the “Bibles” and left. Early the next morning, just before the videotaping began, Mike returned to generally ransack the shop. The plan was to break a window as if that were the means of entry by unknown vandals, said Delaney. He left the printing equipment intact, but made enough of a mess for the resulting display on TV to be effective. It is incredible how inept the operation actually was. Although Sherrill—with the full knowledge and enthusiastic approval of Popoff—had come up with this clever scam, he bungled the actual performance. For one thing, Sherrill told Delaney to put in an order for new glass for the front door of the office three days before the glass was broken! Delaney still has the original, dated receipt from the A-1 Glass Company in Upland. When Volmer Thrane tried to break the window, he heaved a brick at it three times, but only cracked it. Rod Sherrill had to take over. When he successfully threw the brick through the window, he did so from inside the office, so that not only did all the shattered glass end up outside, but the flexible plastic laminate in the glass made the door bulge from the inside out, and this fact showed up clearly in the tape they prepared and eventually broadcast. The Three Stooges couldn’t have improved on this performance. To top it all off, Mike Delaney says he discovered that he had soaked only about 10,000 books, not the 100,000 claimed, and that they were not Russian Bibles at all, as Popoff represented them to his TV audience. They were simple 48-page religious tracts written in Russian! When David Alexander and I interviewed Rod Sherrill in the company of his brother, Reeford, and his sister-in-law, Pam, Rod told us that he had not been aware of the Russian Bible vandalism scam until Volmer Thrane, a former Popoff employee, told him about it. Though it had been Peter Popoff’s idea, Rod was in on the implementation of the scheme, and helped carry it out—badly.