Deadly Vows Read online

  It all becomes a self-feeding machine, a vicious cycle that has to be nourished. And the cadre of companies that have sprung up around the industry suck on the teat of that vicious cycle, helping preachers “reach the next level” of big-time ministry.

  Sean and I quickly became cogs in that all-consuming machine and, before we knew it, we were integral members, swallowed whole and deeply involved in churning out the vile brew that constantly emanates from such ministries to feed the machine. Our primary gig was always working with Morris Cerullo, who pioneered many of the techniques used by big-name ministries today.

  Cerullo has been able to keep his reputation much less known than it should be—at least in the United States. He is huge overseas, but in the United States, he prefers to keep his name out of the media altogether.

  Cerullo has managed to avoid any major scandals, unlike many of his contemporaries. His 12,000-square-foot home is estimated by critics to be worth more than $12 million. He also owns a Gulfstream jet worth more than $50 million, employing two full-time pilots. His defenders have said that Cerullo’s great wealth—estimated at more than $100 million—did not come from defrauding donors, but from wise investments in real estate and other holdings.

  My own experience in his ministry was mixed and Sean and I discussed it at great length in the beginning. We both had a distaste for Cerullo’s fund-raising techniques, but unlike some other televangelists, we could get on board with the actual ministry that Cerullo performed around the world almost constantly. We could see where much of the money Cerullo raised through his television shows and various ministry publications went, and we believed that the bulk of the money was truly being used to minister to people all over the world.

  That belief led us to something that both of us had condemned before we moved to California: an end-justifies-the-means belief that, although we were uncomfortable with how the money was being raised, we were very comfortable with why it was being raised. And it was that dissonance that played out as Sean and I both found ourselves stretching the truth, glossing over moral compunctions and side-stepping our former reluctance to communicate what amounted to untruths.

  “We would write about events and report their results before the events even happened,” recalled a man who used to run Cerullo’s communication department. “We would base our reporting of the results on what had happened at events in the past, and then we would justify it by saying we had to meet printing deadlines, so lying was OK, because we believed that in the end the lies would be made true by what was going to happen.”

  Ultimately the means began overshadowing the ends so much that we found ourselves helping to plan new ways to raise money regardless of the reason. The raising of the money became the goal, and we ceased being concerned with why. Sean was clearly impressed with Cerullo’s personal ability to raise money at his week-long conferences, during which it was not uncommon for him to raise $100,000 in a single offering simply by demanding that the ten thousand people who were in attendance reach deep and give according to the blessings God had bestowed on them through the ministry.

  “He’s a heavyweight,” Sean said one day when we were standing in the front row of such a meeting—the front row being a place of honor reserved only for the highest donors and most-respected ministers. “All these other guys are amateurs. I have seen MC ask everyone to hold up the offering envelopes to pray, but what he’s really doing is letting the light shine through the envelopes so he can see inside them to be sure there’s money in there. I saw him call out Tim Storey one day for having an empty envelope.”

  Tim Storey, who has been called the “pastor to the stars,” runs a ministry in Los Angeles attended by many major celebrities. But Cerullo was never one to be starstruck. As far as he was concerned, no matter where he was, he was the luminary in the room. Other ministers, no matter how big their ministries were, played second-fiddle to Morris Cerullo. Even Oral Roberts found himself doing what Cerullo told him to do one day when Cerullo assigned me to secure a book endorsement from Roberts. He gave me Roberts’ home phone number and told me what Roberts was to be told to say in endorsing a book he hadn’t even read—since I hadn’t written it yet.

  And Roberts did exactly as I told him to, offering the endorsement exactly as it was presented to him.

  Almost immediately after arriving at Cerullo’s ministry, Sean was called upon to author Cerullo’s Bible study magazine, Victory Miracle Living, which had formerly been penned by the woman who had hired Sean. Each month, Sean would spend most of his time carefully researching and writing lengthy Bible studies. Cerullo’s ministry then distributed them to tens of thousands of donors who were led to believe Cerullo himself had authored the studies.

  “Almost immediately, it was clear how talented and gifted Sean was, and I had to have him,” the head of Cerullo’s communications department said. “I took him right away and brought him into communications.”

  VML, as Victory Miracle Living was called, was the cornerstone of Cerullo’s mailings each month—other than the ministry letters, which were the chief raisers of funds. Those were most often authored by a man named Dave Rostell, who had started at Cerullo’s ministry but had gone on to be a partner in a large company that wrote letters for dozens of ministries. In San Diego, Sean’s goals changed course from just being a world-traveling evangelist to being something more akin to Rostell. He envisioned a time when he would have a company that did the same types of things Rostell’s company did. Though he never gave up the idea of being a world-famous evangelist, he actively pursued the second goal of becoming a wealthy consultant to big-time ministers at the same time.

  He bided his time writing VML and authoring the monthly book that was the “hook” at the end of VML designed to get its recipients to send in donations. If their donations reached a certain threshold (usually twenty or thirty dollars), the ministry would send them the book Sean had authored as a gift to thank them for their donation. The book, of course, always carried Cerullo’s name as the author. Sean, the woman who hired him and I ghost wrote Cerullo’s books at that time, with the woman who hired Sean focusing on prayer, Sean focusing on theology and me focusing mostly on prophecy.

  Any “partner” who was paying attention could have easily realized Cerullo could not possibly be authoring all the materials credited to him—it wasn’t humanly possible, especially for a guy who was spending two hundred days out of every year either ministering somewhere or traveling to minister somewhere. And we weren’t the only writers; we were simply the top three. Sean thrived in the role of Bible study author. It played directly into his strength, which was reaching deep into the sometimes confusing scriptures and pulling out lessons that appealed to common people on a powerful, emotional level. For a guy who disdained the idea of being governed by emotions, he was a master at using emotions to control people and to get them to acquiesce to his desires, whether they were for prayer, donating or obeying his husbandly commands.

  Deadlines at Cerullo’s ministry were regimented, militaristic and unassailable. The ministry had honed mailing down to a science. It knew how long it took a piece of first-class mail to reach Louisiana or Kentucky. It knew how much four pieces of paper would cost to mail as opposed to five pieces. Cerullo himself could easily calculate whether a particular letter or newsletter would be successful in generating donations, and he could look at the proposal for a letter, newsletter or magazine and know what it would cost to produce as opposed to how much money it would raise. We had to have those numbers and estimates ready when we approached him with those ideas but they weren’t really necessary, because he was such an astute businessman that he could accurately estimate the numbers off the cuff.

  And the VML that Sean authored was consistently a good moneymaker for the ministry, as well as drawing rave reviews from the people who actually read the messages and applied them to their lives. Sean’s view of those partners, however, quickly became jaded.

  “People don’t read the books we
write,” he said one day, smiling humorlessly. “They just want to have them on their bookshelves. We could write anything we wanted in there. MC doesn’t read them either. He’s just lucky we aren’t unscrupulous.”

  They did, however, read VML—and so did Cerullo—and they loved it. Sean’s ability to put new spins on words and phrases that were thousands of years old was unmatched, and ultimately the lessons he taught through VML breathed new life into that publication, making it relevant, fun to read and useful.

  Cerullo loved Sean’s work.

  “Sean was a very good employee,” Cerullo told me in 2012. “How can someone go from a deep, spiritual experience to one losing control of his life?”

  The rhetorical question went unanswered, but it was clear, even after everything that later came to light about Sean, that Cerullo still respected him deeply.

  Sean, however, didn’t respect Cerullo after a year or so at the ministry—except maybe as a businessman. As members of the inner circle, we were privy to all the workings of the ministry and we were counted on to not be starstruck by Cerullo or the other ministers he would draw to himself. We also were supposed to understand that the man behind the curtain was neither a wizard nor God. The ministry was ultimately a business, and while lower-level workers were expected to believe everything it did was ordained by God, the very few of us who were behind the curtain were expected to understand the inner workings. Many employees at the ministry were there because they were true believers in Cerullo, people who would be loyal to him and work for less-than-standard wages because they believed in what they were doing. But you get what you pay for and those people weren’t counted on to generate ideas; they did what they were told and that was enough for the kind of money they were making. But Cerullo paid us what then was considered good money and he expected us to earn that money by seeing beyond the veneer he had created around himself. We were supposed to understand the business side of the ministry—but never mention it.

  And we were expected to accompany Morris Cerullo to his domestic meetings and crusades and do whatever it took to make sure the events ran smoothly, which might be standing on stage with him and dutifully “Amen-ing” one day or grabbing unruly congregants by the collars and escorting them out the next.

  Initially, Sean was put off by the morality—or lack of it—that he saw in the household-name preachers we were meeting and working for.

  “Let me tell you something,” he preached in 1995, after he had been at the ministry for a year and a half. “If you have enough money, you can draw hundreds of thousands of people in foreign countries and thousands in the U.S. In fact, I could take anyone in this building and I could spend enough money and you could preach to ten thousand people in two months. If you have enough money, you can do it, and the momentum would grow and in six months, your name would be a household word. You’d be doing crusades with Kenneth Hagin or Rodney Howard Brown and whoever you wanted to, if you had enough money in the beginning. These men have grown and built multi-million dollar ministries and millions come in every year, sometimes hundreds of thousands in a day—but they’re bankrupt spiritually.”

  Already, he knew the ministries of big-time preachers had become those self-feeding machines, and he understood that the machines themselves could trap the ministers who built them.

  “What happens if you backslide while you’re out on the road on your Christian tour?” he asked in the same sermon. “What do you do? Do you come out the next day and say, ‘Sorry guys, I backslid; I’m not going to do this anymore. I’m going to go down to the [convenience store] and start selling gas.’ What about a man who has built a multimillion-dollar-a-year ministry? What happens if he backslides? Does he quit? No. He tries harder and he does everything he can to keep the momentum going.”

  For Sean, it was an eerily prophetic statement. When he found himself in a situation that later turned out to be as far from what he would have earlier considered God’s will as possible, Sean didn’t just quit and say, “Oops, I’ve made a mistake.” Much like the ministers he was chiding in that 1995 sermon, Sean instead just kept pushing forward, kept trying harder.

  Sean saw the big-time ministries he was working for as a springboard to his own ministry. He focused on learning from them, learning how to transition from mid-level ministry into becoming a marquee name. He analyzed every aspect of big ministry and, as was his gift, he distilled ways to make it better, to do it more efficiently, to bend it to his own will. He could, he understood, apply the principles of what he was learning to bring something to a mass audience that had never been there before: holiness. Instead of fake miracles, Sean confided, he would broadcast real ones. Instead of preaching about prosperity and ways to achieve your goals in life, he would preach an uncompromising Gospel of repentance and fidelity to God. He would bring the kind of church he had grown up in—his uncle Jake’s, the Four Corners church, the Antioch Ministry—to a mass audience.

  But those days had already slipped beyond his grasp, even though he didn’t realize it.

  “When you’re in deception, you never know it,” Sean’s boss at the ministry said. “It’s only later that you can look back and go, ‘Wow, I can’t believe what I was doing.’”

  Sean, whose preaching had taken a downward turn along with his morality, still used his connections in the Christian world to get speaking gigs, to hone his own marketing skills and position himself to create momentum for his true dream: to make a living as a minister, both preaching and through the written word. He was still a good preacher and those who hadn’t seen him preach before would have thought he was probably the best preacher they had ever heard. But Sean’s preaching wasn’t what it had been when he was younger. It was following the same downward trajectory as the rest of his Christianity.

  During our time with Cerullo, Sean’s young sister-in-law had moved to San Diego as well and she was living with them again. It was through her that I met Joy Risker, the always joking, always laughing, always smiling girl who seemed to always be around from that point forward.

  Joy, who attended the youth group where Sean was assisting as a leader, was gregarious, funny and just wild enough to be unpredictable. Sean had encouraged us to visit the church he attended, which was pastored by former televangelist Larry Lea. We attended for a short while, but it wasn’t for me and we ended up finding a small, predominantly black church—I was generally the only white person in whatever church I attended—to go to because it felt more like home.

  Sean, however, thrived at Lea’s church, working with the children’s pastor, a wickedly funny man who loved to poke fun at everyone, including Lea. He told us about a dinner he had attended with Lea and his wife, who was in the habit of standing up at church and singing the “Hallelujah Chorus” in a serious and over-the-top operatic voice. When the waiter asked the children’s pastor what he wanted on his salad, he had stood up, raised one hand and in an operatic voice, sang “Jalapeño!” Lea apparently had snickered. Lea’s wife had not.

  Sean loved to hang out with the children’s pastor, who also was finding his way out of the moral strictures of fundamentalism. He told one story of being cornered by a group of people who thought everyone could stand to have a demon or two cast out of them. They had surrounded him in a chair, and after an hour, it became clear to him that they weren’t going to let him leave unless they were satisfied they had cast a demon out, so he began to chant “fuck you, fuck you, fuckyoufuckyoufuckyou.”

  “They went wild,” he told me, laughing. “They cast the demon out of me and I got to go home.”

  I was both amused and shocked. I had never heard a Pentecostal cuss like that, but I respected the children’s pastor implicitly, so I wanted to know more. It was that incident more than any other that started me on the path away from fundamentalism. But for Sean, the influence was something more. He could not say enough how attractive he found the children’s pastor’s wife to be and although I have no reason to believe he was ever inappropriate, it was shocking
to hear him so openly admiring a woman to whom he was not married. Little did I know it was just the beginning.

  Maybe the reason Joy Risker always seemed to be around had nothing at all to do with Sean’s young sister-in-law.

  Chapter 8

  “LIKE WATCHING THE SUN”

  If there was one thing you could say about Joy Risker, it’s that she wasn’t a follower.

  Most teenagers are intensely concerned with what everyone else thinks about them every second of every day, but Joy wasn’t that way, according to a high school friend.

  Joy attended Grossmont High School, which was on the border of La Mesa and El Cajon in east San Diego, an area that used to be known as “the boondocks” because it was isolated from the rest of the city. El Cajon and La Mesa are considerably less affluent than the rest of the area and, being inland, they get the desert heat more than San Diego’s trademark ocean breezes. With an average annual rainfall of less than twelve inches, the locale isn’t considered as desirable to live in as the wetter, more scenic coastal areas, so it attracts residents who can afford the less expensive housing in the area—“less expensive” being a relative term, since the average price for a two-bedroom house in the area is still a third of a million dollars.

  Several of Grossmont’s alumni went on to storied careers, from Indian chief Anna Prieto Sandoval, of the Sycuan Band of the Kumeyaay Nation, to broadway actress Karyn Overstreet, CNN producer Jack Hamann, Naval admiral Gregory R. Bryant and even the 1980s’ most notorious TV spokesman, Joe Isuzu (actor David Leisure), who graduated in 1968.

  “Our high school was almost completely segregated,” said Rino Ortega, who now does IT work for a Navy contractor. “All the white people would hang out in one section, blacks in another section, Mexicans in another. It was real separated like that, but our group had a good mix of white people, black people and other minorities. [Joy] kind of gravitated to our group and right from the beginning she was always just around.”