The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • 75

1 2 Part Aug. io, 1980 Cofi Angeles Stones The Life and Times of Gene Scott corporate confusion. When the FCC demanded months' worth of "Festival of Faith" tapes, Scott produced a letter from Wescott owner of the copyright to Faith Center refusing to relinquish them. Though Scott controls both entities, the FCC had no authority over Wescott. Scott gloated.

The attorney general finally sued for peace and Deukmejian and Scott agreed last year that Scott would stop suing the state (which he had done four times) if the investigation would be held up. But the information-gathering has continued. Two more ex-employees have given investigators sworn statements accusing Scott of diverting for his own use furs, money, jewelry, stock and other assets donated to the church. There are persistent stories in the sworn statements and elsewhere about Swiss bank accounts and assets concealed in three different states. Scott's lawyers countered with a contradictory deposition of their own by Susanna Decin Footitt, one of the Please Turn to Page 13, Col.

1 own substantial real estate holdings scattered all over California. A second tax dispute arose in Hartford, where Scott paid local authorities but not before attacking them on TV. The National Labor Relations Board got into the act when Scott summarily fired the Hartford station's staff. The Federal Communications Commission and the California attorney general started investigating after three ex-members and employees charged Scott with misappropriating funds. The complaints included counts centering on purchase of a $186,000 personage in Pasadena to Scott's use of a $65-a-day suite at the Pasadena Hilton.

A Refusal to Cooperate Scott refused to cooperate with investigators, citing constitutional church-state separation. Some documents were turned over, but investigators demanded more. At stake with the FCC by this time was renewal of KHOF's broadcasting license. To counter the FCC, Scott marshaled a campaign of The investigators' curiosity arose well before the mass suicide at Jonestown but escalated quickly afterward. Scott often has charged he is as much a victim of "the Jimmy Jones Syndrome" as anything else.

The investigations, in brief, are these: The Los Angeles County assessor contended Faith Center was $140,000 in arrears for property taxes on church facilities not religiously exempt. When authorities tried to seize a Faith Center bank account, Scott transferred $400,000 from the account in Glendale to Wescott's in Oroville. The assessor essentially has given up on the case. Some assets of Dolores Press and Sunset Mausoleum were infused with Faith Center's. The Wescott entities CAROI'S ri WAllpApER ancJ dRAPERy SHOWN IN YOUR HOME OFFICE 20 REDUCTION ON THE DESIGNER WALLCOVERINGS AND FABRICS OP VAN LUT, CHARLES BARONE, OREEFP, LLOYD LAURA ASHLEY, HARRISON HOUSE, SCHUMACHER AND WAVERLY FINAL WEEKI Painting Wallpaper Installation VisaMasterCharge MAKMM FAMK ROMAN SHAMS CUSTOM BEDSPREADS SOFAS CHAM WOVEN WOODS SUNOS CUSTOM CARPETS CsN Direct Of CoMoct Orange County-All Cities.

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Enjoy the pampering of our men's and women's luxury spas, the challenge of 27 Stately Elegance championship noies ot goit Continued from 11th Page Oroville, he developed a skilled ability to shelter funds through the church." Speaking was Bob Stevens, an Oroville manufacturing executive who had a falling-out with Scott 10 years ago, leaving Scott's fold at about the time Wescott was turning from a small-town church into a complex of interlocking corporations. Scott organized a travel agency to book tours to the Holy Land and provide discount passes for church executives. He put together a property-management company to handle church real estate. Finally, in the late 1960s, Wescott bought a for-profit printing company in San Francisco, Dolores Press, and in 1970 acquired control over the Sunset Mausoleum in the Berkeley Hills. The operations turned Wescott into a quasi -conglomerate.

Scott branched out theologically as well. He preached at Calvary Community Church in San Jose and played a key role in organizing Melodyland Christian Center in Anaheim. The mausoleum, valued at between $6 million and $18 million, became the fiscal bedrock for the Wescott empire. Scott's organization acquired it after the California Cemetery Board and other investigators found its management had looted it of $200,000. One of the previous owners, an Oakland attorney, served time in state prison for the theft.

After Wescott acquired Sunset, however, the former owner tried to regain control. Scott fought back. The two sides have been suing one another periodically for 10 years. The latest round of litigation was filed last May. Economic Base Scott developed a Sunday school curriculum system and wrote religious pamphlets all of the material printed at Dolores Press.

Gradually, the market for the materials broadened and provided much of the economic base for the larger corporate complex he had in mind. Scott moved his base of operations to San Francisco, returning to preach at Wescott in Oroville every weekend. He started using a long, black Cadillac limousine that belonged to the newly acquired mausoleum. "Gene's enterprises were conceived as a tool to propagate the word," recalled Earl Herrick, who ran many of Scott's different operations for more than 10 years before a falling-out with Scott led Herrick to resign abruptly three years ago. "If you have a vision that grand, you know you can't do anything without money." Herrick, who is now an Oroville automobile salesman, declined to explain the end of his relationship with Scott.

"We had a parting of ways," he said, "but there was no question of his integrity." When Scott moved to San Francisco, his wife stayed in Oroville. Never as much of a confidante to her husband as his mother, according to long-time family friends, Betty Ann Scott found herself increasingly removed from her husband's life and life style. "Gene and his mother were thick as thieves," a family friend said. "Betty was left alone." In 1972, after 23 years the marriage fell apart. She left Oroville and moved to Sacramento.

No, she told The Times, she didn't want to talk about it. "I just don't want to be associated with him," she said. In 1975, Gene Scott took the step that eventually made him at once virtually a counterculture figure in Los Angeles television and a target for investigations. Scott accepted a job as "financial consultant" to Faith Center, a church that, through a combination of naivete, inexperience and mismanagement, found itself $3.5 million in debt from a plan to sell what amounted to bonds in the church to its own parishioners. The bond scheme had backfired.

The company that sold Faith Center on the idea had disappeared from town and the church had $19,000 cash in the bank, a television and radio network on the verge of bankruptcy and a church building in danger of foreclosure. Two older ministers mutally acquainted with Scott and the late Raymond Schoch, Faith Center's pastor at the time, called Scott in the fall of 1975. They asked him to turn the financial skills that had created the Wescott empire to the task of saving Faith Center. Unlimited Expenses Scott made demands of Faith Center that made it appear to his father that he didn't want to pastor the church. To Scott's surprise, however, the church board agreed to resign en masse, force Schoch out and pay Scott $1 a year with an unlimited expense account.

No detailed accounting of the expense account ever has been released, and the perquisite has drawn the attention of critics. Scott drives around in a silver Cadillac limousine "because I like it and I can work in it." Though he eats well and stays in sumptuous hotels, he contends only half the hotel bill is his because his secretary shares his suite "in a connecting room." Scott says he has no bank account or real property in his own name. Scott estimates the total of his expenses at less than $70,000 a year. "My attorneys keep saying that if I took a $100,000 salary, it would be less suspicious," he said, "but I don't want a salary and I don't care how it looks." The expense account and Scott's sometimes grating personality made Faith Center and its new pastor a lightening rod for attention by government agencies. The World's Greatest Vacation One of our most impressive pieces.

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