BlogWood: MT Archives

Random acts of kindless

After the storm, selfless little acts of Christian love popped up like a spreading mold all over the state...

A pastor, his wife and three others were under arrest Wednesday on charges they sold donations for hurricane victims from their church.

Polk County sheriff's deputies raided Mercy House Ministries, where supplies intended for Hurricane Charley and Frances victims were displayed as if in a grocery store, investigators said.

Undercover detectives bought some of the items, originally obtained by church members from a hurricane aid distribution center, before making the arrests.

Pastor Billy Dan Benton, 48, and his wife Pamela, 44, of Lakeland face charges of grand theft and fraud.

They were jailed Tuesday night on $25,000 bail each.

Kristina Pelfrey, 36, and her husband, Thomas Dale Pelfrey, 40, of Winter Haven and Michael James Johnson, 37, of Auburndale, also were arrested on grand theft and fraud charges and were in jail with bail set at $25,000.

The church has been providing food in the rural, largely impoverished community for at least a year.

Mercy House on at least five occasions received large donations of food, baby supplies and other items worth at least $300 from a hurricane distribution center in Bartow, a sheriff's report said.

Undercover deputies noted they bought a can of baby formula marked "sample, not for sale" priced at $1.50.

The church also purchased milk and eggs from a local grocery store and marked up the prices, the Sheriff's Office said.

"It's not a church in any shape or fashion; it looks like a grocery store when you go in there," said Sheriff's Office spokeswoman Carrie Rodgers.

Rodgers said the food on the church's shelves would be photographed and inventoried and returned to the hurricane distribution center where it would be given to needy storm victims.

So, what happens during the rest of the year when these guys are busy scamming impoverished locals who lack the transportation options to travel to a store where they can actually pay retail price without an additional 100 percent markup? I’m pretty sure that this operation didn’t just open after the hurricanes - people like this make their living by taking advantage of a class of people whose choices are nearly nonexistent.

Financially powerless, homeless or right on the edge, lacking education, perhaps mentally ill, but unmedicated, the poor make a very easy target for “service providers” like Rent-To-Own ripoff centers and usurious Payday Loan joints. But at least these businesses are loosely regulated, and they have contracts to sign, and are actually pretty up front about the reaming they are about to give someone. This is not to say that the victim has any choice, or that the victim necessarily understands the complexities and costs involved in these agreements, but the huge interest rates or the exorbitant costs for cheesy furniture are clearly laid out.

Churches and mobile preachers are a whole different story. They open up shop in depressed areas where unemployment rages to the point that many residents lack the means to travel more than a few blocks for groceries and other daily needs. Many residents have no ability to pay for groceries, even if they could get to a store.

The scam artists suck the hopeless in with promises of salvation and hot food, maybe even a bed. Then they wring every last cent they can out of them - a few dollars a day - by running a “company store” type scam with “credit” extended to buy shoddy, overpriced merchandise, some of which was donated by well meaning people who think they are helping someone.

Trouble repaying? No problem - you can work off your debt by fixing up the “Church” property. You’ll get credit for $3 or $4 an hour if your benefactor is feeling generous. Or maybe the “Preacher Man” will farm you out, day labor style, taking $10 per hour or so for your work and trading you a bed and some bad food in return.

After a natural disaster, it’s pretty easy to shift gears slightly by soliciting donations, picking up free emergency relief supplies, or whatever. People all over the country are lining up to help victims of Charley and Frances, and the scum who were already in place and operating their squeeze-the-poor scams are in ideal positions to take advantage of both the generous and the needy.

It’s too bad that it took 2 hurricanes and the accompanying spotlight on post-storm ripoffs to get law enforcement types interested enough to pay attention to this problem, but at least this one operation has been shut down. Unfortunately, there are perhaps thousands of other very similar scams running throughout the state right now.

We as a society must decide to allocate an adequate amount of our very ample resources to help those who are most in need. Otherwise, we are providing the ideal environment in which to perpetuate a cycle of false hope, scams, and rip-offs.