The Christian Sentinel


- Aug. 7, 2007 Update - 

Victory!  CRI/Hank Hanegraaff loses merit less defamation law suit against Bill Alnor!  CRI to pay up to a quarter million dollars to Alnor's legal team. 

As was expected, the Hank Hanegraaff and The Christian Research Institute vs. William Alnor Case was thrown out of court.  Moreover, a California appeals court ruled that CRI/Hanegraaff violated California anti-SLAPP legislation by filing frivolous law suit against Alnor.  Thee three judge panel ordered CRI/Hanegraaff to pay Alnor's legal expenses that could be in the quarter million dollar range, although legal wrangling continues over how much CRI will have to pay.    

For more information follow these links: http://www.religionnewsblog.com/17614/hank-hanegraaff-bill-alnor

http://lightingthewayworldwide.org/answer_man_03.htm

http://www.moriel.org/articles/discernment/church_issues/final_dissolution_cri_alnor.htm

 

Below is the original story Alnor filed on the matter, followed by Alnor's statements/comments concerning litigation from CRI/Hanegraaff:

CRI - Hanegraaff under federal mail fraud investigation? 
Did the Bible Answer Man’s unusual fundraising appeal go too far?
(Posted 11:30 p.m., Wednesday, Jan. 19, 2005)


Hanegraaff

ã 2005 Christian Sentinel

By William M. Alnor, Ph.D.
Christian Sentinel Publisher

Christian Research Institute (CRI) President Hank Hanegraaff has become the focus of a federal criminal mail fraud investigation sparked last week by an unusual “urgent memo” fundraising appeal letter he released on Friday on CRI’s website. 

            Hanegraaff’s appeal letter blames “novice employees” at the local Rancho Santa Margarita Post Office in Southern California for a “bizarre error” that may have cost CRI “perhaps in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.”   Hanegraaff claimed that CRI’s mail was diverted to the wrong post office box run by another company, and “the business to whom the envelopes were sent threw many of the envelopes into the trash!”  He then begged for contributors to send CRI a “sacrificial” gift to help get through the crisis. 

            However, the officer in charge at the post office where CRI receives its mail by maintaining PO Box 7000, disputes Hanegraaff’s allegation.  The officer in charge, who identified himself as “Gus,” claims it never happened, and referred the incident to the United States Postal Service’s Inspector General’s Office, which has begun looking into the case. Three other Rancho Santa Margarita postal employees contacted over the next several days also said it never happened.

            A mail fraud report was filed in connection with the case.  

            “We have no record of any misdelivery complaints involving The Christian Research Institute and PO Box 7000 or of any missing mail and incidents of that nature,” said “Gus” who also identified himself as the acting postmaster at the facility. 

            In the letter Hanegraaff, who is a popular author and broadcaster of "The Bible Answer Man Broadcast" heard internationally, also claimed to have set up a special 1-800 hotline at CRI to help deal with the problem.  However, the phone number Hanegraaff provided in the letter was not a hotline at all, The Christian Sentinel has learned.  More later.

            Further, the Post Office said CRI never complained to them about the alleged diversion of letters to another box and they had nothing in their file about the supposed incidents.  Officials at the San Juan Capistrano Post Office where CRI used to maintain a PO Box prior to the ministry’s move the Rancho Santa Margarita, also said no CRI mail was misdelivered from their end as well. 

            Yet, Hanegraaff’s letter, which used the alleged incidents as an emergency fundraising appeal, claims that the Rancho Santa Margarita post office “has accepted full responsibility for this error and has fixed the problem.”

            In releasing the E-letter, which starts at CRI’s homepage at http://www.equip.org and continues at http://www.equip.org/abouthank/letter.asp, Hanegraaff prefaced it by saying “I never imagined having to send an urgent memo like this to you.”  (In case CRI takes down the letter from its website as news of the investigation was spreading on Tuesday, a copy of it can be accessed by clicking here.)  [Jan. 21 update:  As anticipated, about 1:30 p.m. PST on Jan. 20 CRI did take down the letter when they came under fire due to this article.  A different letter was inserted by following the links above.  However, the letter in question is still available on CRI's web site at http://www.equip.org/abouthank/letter1.asp)]

            “You can be assured that all mail is now being handled correctly!”  Hanegraff continued.  “We bear them no ill will and believe this was an honest mistake by novice postal employees.  But much has been lost.”   Earlier in the letter, Hanegraaff declares: “We don’t know how much we lost, but we know it was substantial – perhaps in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

            Calls to CRI to discuss the matter were not returned.  

            But “Gus” claimed no apology was ever made to CRI and that no systematic misdeliveries ever took place during the past three months as Hanegraaff alleged.  The acting Rancho Santa Margarita postmaster was interviewed about the case on Friday and again on Wednesday.  In addition, the postal staff at the facility at 29862 Avenida De Las Bandera began an internal investigation of the alleged incident, which included visiting a location where some of the diverted mail was supposed to have gone, and they claim the incident never happened; that CRI must have fabricated or grossly exaggerated it.  

            “This looks like mail fraud to me,” said an investigator familiar with nonprofit prosecutions.  “Hank could go to jail for this.”

            At press time the case was also being referred to other government agencies for analysis and possible prosecution, including the Federal Trade Commission, the FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section (CCIPS).  

            The United States Department of Justice said penalties for mail fraud are up to five years in prison and up to a $250,000 fine.  At press time it was uncertain whether other government agencies had yet launched investigations.  Federal penalties for wire fraud are identical.  CRI transmitted the same letter from Hanegraaff to its worldwide "CRI Update" weekly E-mail list on Jan. 17, The Christian Sentinel has learned.     

A postal clerk working the window at the facility on Tuesday said that if there were some misdeliveries, it may have been “four or five letters” over a day or two and that it may have involved a machine that automatically reads and addresses envelopes.  Such errors occasionally happen with many businesses, but it certainly did not go on for months as Hanegraaff claimed, she noted. 

“On occasion a machine may address some envelopes incorrectly, not just to CRI but other companies as well, and that’s why the Post Office tries to visually verify envelopes,” the unnamed Rancho postal clerk noted.  There may have been some inadvertent mistakes, she insisted, but “not into the hundreds of thousands of dollars as [Hanegraaff’s] the letter claimed unless one envelope became lost that contained a check for several hundred thousand dollars,” she said, laughing. 

She confirmed that the postal employees at the facility were annoyed with Hanegraaff’s charges.  “They (CRI) never complained to us at all,” she said.

On Wednesday late afternoon, hours before The Christian Sentinel was set to run this story, the acting postmaster again affirmed that “no apologies to CRI” were ever made by the post office, since the incident appears to have been fabricated.  “It never happened.  There were no diversions of mail,” he said.  

            But Hanegraaff’s letter tells a different story.  “Only by God’s grace did we discover this error before more damage was done,” Hanegraaff wrote.  “Praise God for his intervention!”  He then used the alleged event to pitch for more funds to “help us catch up!”  He then claimed that due to the problem CRI set up a “special hotline at our ministry, 800-228-1563,” to see if your gift or product order ever arrived.”

           Hanegraaff also claimed that the alleged loss of CRI’s mail came at a very crucial time – “at a time when we could least afford it,” during the time period in question CRI receives “17 percent of its yearly income from supporters.”

In light of the crisis, “please help us catch up!” Hanegraaff pleads at the end of the letter.  “If at all possible, please send a sacrificial gift to help CRI and the Bible Answer Man broadcast keep ministering at the high-impact level to which we are committed.  Gifts of $50, $100, or $200 are especially needed, but any amount will help.”

However, The Christian Sentinel on Friday learned that it was not a hotline at all.  No one was manning it.  It was simply a toll-free number to CRI that walks listeners through a menu, while a commercial advertising Hanegraaff’s recent book “The Covering” played in the background.  The menu had a number of options, including how to make a contribution to CRI, and how to order products through the bookstore.

           When an inquirer on Friday punched the correct letter for customer service on Friday and asked about the hotline and misdirected mail, a dumfounded CRI employee didn’t know what he was talking about.  When he gave her details of Hanegraaff’s letter released earlier that day, and asked where CRI’s mail was diverted to – to which company -- and how much money CRI may have lost she said, “I don’t know how much or if we can get into who did what.”

            The case was also referred to the Inspector General’s office in Chicago for further analysis, The Christian Sentinel has learned.  A mail fraud report was filed in connection with the incident.  However, at press time it was uncertain whether the letter was ever sent through the U.S. mails, although Hanegraaff has typically sent his fundraising letters by surface mail just after releasing them on the Internet.  [Jan. 21 update: The letter was also sent out through the U.S. mails as The Christian Sentinel also received reports yesterday that some people were receiving it at their homes.]

            Almost as soon as Hanegraaff took over CRI in the late 1980s following the death of founder Walter Martin, its finances came under intense scrutiny and criticism from a variety of fronts.  In the mid 1990s the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability (ECFA) of which CRI is a member, ordered CRI to retract intense fundraising appeals that promised to put CRI’s entire research library onto the Internet, which was never done.  Prior to that, Hanegraaff launched an intense campaign to purchase the former headquarters of the Full Gospel Businessmen’s Association, which was never purchased. 

           Various researchers have also disclosed that Hanegraaff has engaged in instances of extensive repeat plagiarism with some of his published works. 

           In 2003, in a scandal reported by such prominent publications as The Los Angeles Times and Christianity Today ECFA ruled that CRI was not in compliance with some of its ethical standards and ordered CRI, which had a yearly revenue of over $9 million, to pay back some monies diverted to Hanegraaff.  Among items diverted to Hanegraaff was a $60,000 Lexus, a golf club membership dues and other purchases. 

           Meanwhile criticism of his escalating salary intensified in recent years, particularly after it was revealed that Hanegraaff’s wife, Kathy, was making a large salary as “director of planning” at the same time many CRI employees did not know she worked at the ministry as her office was used for storage. Click here for the Christianity Today article. 

           In August 2004 The Christian Sentinel disclosed that the Hanegraaffs income including fringe benefits and expense account items had soared above $410,000 annually. Earlier in the year, the nonprofit Christian ministry, “Wallwatchers” issued a “donor alert,” advising contributors to “prayerfully consider” not giving CRI money.  Many of these instances can be accessed through The Christian Sentinel’s statement on CRI that can be accessed by clicking here.     

 

April 1, 2005 editorial/statement from Bill Alnor: Since the above story ran on January 19, 2005 a lot has happened and since we are only a periodic online publication we have been too busy to keep up with it on a daily basis.  According to various published reports in such outlets as Christianity Today and the North Carolina Watchdog group, Wallwatchers, CRI has retained legal representation in what appears to be an attempt to refute criticism that may have resulted from publicity generated by the Christian Sentinel, the Los Angeles Times and other media outlets which have publicized news reports of January's emergency fundraising appeal that claimed that "up to $200,000" of its money may have been lost due to a "bizarre" postal error by "novice employees."  CRI has stood by its story, though a Christianity Today article and the above Wallwatchers report seems to have concluded that CRI engaged in exaggeration in its unusual fundraising appeal.  Without submitting direct proof to inquiring journalists, CRI has claimed that there was a systematic three-month diversion of mail from the Rancho Santa Margarita Post Office in Southern California to another company, which CRI claims was throwing the mail away.  Both the company in question, On  Target, and the U.S. Postal Service have denied the allegations.  (Hanegraaff's fundraising appeal is no longer at CRI's web site, but it can be accessed by clicking the link to it in the below story.) 

When the Christian Sentinel first broke the story, postal officials in Rancho Santa Margarita were annoyed with being blamed for allegedly losing CRI's mail, and they urged Bill Alnor to inform the postal inspector's office in Pasadena about Hanegraaff's letter discussed below.  Alnor did just that and he was told by Rancho Santa Margarita postal workers and the USPS Pasadena office that they were putting it under an immediate criminal mail fraud investigation.  Additionally Alnor filed a mail fraud complaint with the U.S. Postal Inspection Service and with the Rancho Santa Margarita Post Office.  Alnor then received a January 19, 2005 letter from Patricia S. Sweeney, manager of the Criminal Investigations Service Center of the United States Postal Inspection Service, that assigned it a number C/MJC/006/S1137458/C1289672 that states in part, "the information you provided will be reviewed to determine if this matter constitutes any violation of the Mail Fraud or False Representation Statutes.  If additional information is needed, you will be contacted directly.  Again, thank you for assisting us in identifying suspected incidents of mail fraud." 

Last week, however, Yvonne Guerrero from the public affairs office of the postal inspector said the CRI mail fraud case is now "under review" by the postal inspector's office but it was deemed not significant enough "at this time" to forward it to field investigators. 

"It has not yet reached a threshold to forward it to the field," Guerrero said.  "It would depend on how many people lost money to this particular appeal. This could change."

However, if more people contact the post office with mail fraud complaints about CRI that might do the trick, Guerrero said. She was also aware that Hanegraaff's unusual appeal was also delivered through the mail.  "When the case was brought before the U.S. Attorney's office they thought the dollar amount lost by customers was not evident enough in this case at this time to throw it into the field unless more people come forward" who sent money to CRI, Guerrero said.  "We have hundreds of cases similar to this, and we don't have the resources to investigate them all," she said.   

"It gets tricky when one deals with religious organizations or churches," Guerrero said.  "People often don't want to complain about them to the government."  If one wants to file a mail fraud complaint against an organization, a secure form is online with full instructions, she said.  To access it go to:

https://www.usps.com/postalinspectors/fraud/MailFraudComplaint.htm

Meanwhile, CRI is hopping mad at Alnor, and allegedly on April 1 CRI filed a lawsuit against Alnor alleging defamation because of the old claim published below in the Jan. 19 Christian Sentinel that the USPS was investigating them when clearly the USPS was looking into the situation -- and still has it under review.  Alnor has not seen the suit, but after being read a portion of it by a reporter on Friday, he noted that it appears to be an obvious attempt to punish a whistleblower -- that CRI has a long history of doing, instead of dealing with its internal problems.  This tendency has already been alluded to by a watchdog organization, the Wallwatchers. This ignores the problems with Hanegraaff's fundraising appeal that claimed that the "post office helped lose our mail" that Hanegraaff was using it as an "emergency...urgent" fundraising appeal.  Many have noticed over the years that CRI seems to constantly be involved with new fundraising appeals.  As Alnor pointed out before, CRI had previously been involved in fundraising irregularities, and at one point in the mid 1990s the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability (ECFA) ordered CRI to take corrective action.  And in 2003 ECFA ruled that CRI had breached some of its standards.  This event, however, created extreme controversy, with some questioning the role of ECFA.  Others have criticized CRI for using mass marketing telephone solicitors to extract money from people, and the Wallwatchers watchdog organization criticized CRI for spending about 20 percent of its income on "development," which is often another term for fundraising.  It also ignores other problematic aspects of Hanegraaff's appeal claiming that the Post Office "took full responsibility" for the error, when postal officials told various reporters that not only was that not true, but CRI never talked with the Post Office about it at all until after the negative publicity began, and even then when they did there were conflicting stories.  Also getting lost in the shuffle was Hanegraaff's declaration that they had set up a phone "hot line" to deal with the problem.  However, in multiple calls from researchers around the time of the unusual appeal no one answered the hot line.  Instead an advertisement to sell one of Hanegraaff's books played in the background, along with automated instructions to hit certain numbers to reach various CRI departments, including its bookstore.

It is also true that no one at CRI bothered to contact Bill Alnor to correct any part of the story they thought was wrong, despite a public appeal to do so.  CRI never returned phone calls to Alnor inquiring about the case.  It is also interesting to note that the so called "Bible Answer Man" apparently ignored clear Scripture (1 Corinthians 6:1-8) that prohibits Christians from suing other Christians in court.  This is a fine way to treat the former news editor of the Christian Research Journal who personally helped Hanegraaff with some of his research in the early 1990s and who was a guest on Hanegraaff's show at various times.  Alnor is also the author of UFOs in the New Age, which was designated a "CRI Book" in the ministry's marketing, and by 1994 Hanegraaff approached Bill Alnor, a former newspaper reporter and author, attempting to enter into an agreement with him to "ghostwrite" for him.  (Ghostwriting is the practice of paying a writer to pen a work without byline credit, and instead inserting the payees name as the author.)   But things apparently changed when Alnor wrote him a letter in 1995 questioning the direction he was taking the ministry on moral and financial grounds.  At that point he was executive director of Evangelical Ministries to New Religions (EMNR) and he aggressively brought up the subject of alleged improprieties at CRI (including plagiarism, finances and marital problems -- alleged wife abandonment -- of Hanegraaff's right hand man, Paul Young) before the EMNR board in the mid 1990s.  Alnor believed -- and still believes-- that CRI has adversely affected the unity and impact of the countercult movement.  CRI eventually removed itself from EMNR after its board insisted that all board members, including CRI's own representative, sign an ethical standards manual that includes sections that deal with transparency, honesty, misrepresentation, plagiarism and other issues.  If anyone would like a copy of Alnor's letter to Hanegraaff, please write him privately by clicking here. 

CRI is also apparently attempting to throw public smoke screens around the case, partly to impugn Alnor.  For example in the Wallwatcher's report, the attorney for CRI claimed that the Federal Trade Commission, the FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section (CCIPS) is also not investigating CRI.  However, our story below never claimed they were.  It just stated that the case was being "referred" to these agencies for possible prosecution.

In conclusion, the USPS has placed the CRI mail mystery under "review" and it is not an active investigation at this time.  But that could change. The "breaking" Christian Sentinel story published on Jan. 19, 2005 that follows below was based on verbal statements coming from two postal offices declaring they were beginning an investigation, which was halted at a later point when it came to the attention of the U.S. Attorney's office, Guerrero said.   

The Christian Sentinel is not the least bit intimidated by a lawsuit or a threat of a lawsuit from CRI.  It is an obvious attempt to silence legitimate criticism coming from these pages and to attempt to obfuscate problems within CRI that have resulted in much negative publicity since Hanegraaff took over CRI after founder Walter Martin's 1989 death.  We repeat our call for Hanegraaff to resign as president of CRI.  We are joined by many others in the field of apologetics, including the family of the ministry's founder Walter Martin.  And we continue to believe Hanegraaff and others at CRI have turned the ministry into a money-making machine that they are using to enrich themselves.  We have had the courage to document Hanegraaff's steady salary increases that have placed him and his wife to well over $400,000 annually when one throws benefits paid to the couple, (which is an amount almost unheard of among ministries of its size), according to the latest 990 form filed with the IRS.  Bill Alnor also documented the fact that there is overwhelming evidence that Hanegraaff committed extensive plagiarism with some of his work, and his doctoral dissertation from the Mass Media and Communications program of Temple University (successfully defended in June 2004) Alnor produced a section that includes graphs and charts documenting it.  For more information, click here.  

Meanwhile Alnor reported on the fact that Hanegraaff moved into a gated community at a multi-million dollar golf course in the Charlotte, N.C. area.  This attack on Alnor is also reminiscent of some of the goings on in the Brad Sparks lawsuit against CRI in the early 1990s during which, records reveal, CRI spent more than $500,000 on lawyers and private detectives in fighting it, not including a cash settlement they paid to Sparks.  We will continue to track problems within CRI as we have been tracking problems within other religious organizations since beginning the Christian Sentinel in the early 1990s.  CRI has not conducted itself in a transparent manner, as the Wallwatchers have alleged.

On another note, Alnor has noticed that CRI has been attempting to rewrite history by impugning Alnor's reputation and work with the ministry, which is actionable.  In recent times CRI has systematically removed Alnor's by-line from all articles in CRI's web site, leaving only the text, while making some of them official CRI statements.  In other cases they have refused to make available on line some key articles he has written for the Christian Research Journal as first its news editor, and later a contributing editor.  Some within CRI have even alleged publicly that "Alnor was fired" as the Journal's news editor, when the fact is that he resigned as an independent contractor (and he never was a CRI employee), partly citing problems with the way CRI was treating its employees.  However, the fact is Alnor stayed on for awhile as a contributing editor, even producing at least one in depth piece following his leaving as news editor.  This continued right up to the time Alnor wrote Hanegraaff the previously mentioned letter, which was designed to help Hanegraaff in the wake of researcher Brad Sparks' lawsuit that Alnor and many others thought was avoidable.  Alnor's letter at the time was lauded at the time by  Chuck Smith, founder of the Calvary Chapel movement in Costa Mesa, California who then had an association with Hanegraaff.  If anyone would also like a copy of Bill Alnor's resignation letter as the CRI Journal News Editor, write him personally.  He is also willing to provide hard copies of articles he wrote for the Journal, which according to a survey at the time was its most popular department.  It is also true that Elliot Miller, the Journal's editor, wrote a gracious editor's note noting Alnor's leaving the Journal -- not "firing."  A copy of this is also available upon request.  But impugning reputations and attempting to silence critics is the same as has been done with other CRI critics, including Robert Bowman, a respected apologist.     

Last, if anyone has further information on alleged improprieties within CRI (and other ministries) please continue to forward them to us and we will continue to report on it -- because it's important and so many people today lack spines.  

In His Grip, 

BILL ALNOR  

 

 

 

           

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