CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- A federal grand jury indicted fallen evangelist Jim Bakker Monday on charges he bilked millions of dollars from followers of his PTL television ministry to finance his high lifestyle and pay hush money to Jessica Hahn.
The 24-count indictment also accused Bakker and former PTL president Richard Dortch of scheming 'to defraud and to obtain money by means of false and fraudulent pretenses' from people who invested $158 million in a PTL vacation resort.
While Bakker and Dortch knew the ministry 'was in poor financial condition,' they took bonuses totaling more than $4 million between 1984 and 1987, the grand jury said.
A separate, 11-count indictment, returned simultaneously in U.S. District Court in Charlotte, charged Bakker's former aide, David Taggart, and his brother James Taggart, with tax evasion stemming from their alleged diversion of more than $1.1 million in ministry money to pay personal bills.
Bakker and Dortch each were accused of a single conspiracy count, eight counts of mail fraud and 15 counts of wire fraud. If convicted of all the charges, Bakker and Dortch each face up to 120 years in prison and fines of up to $6 million. The defendants will be arraigned in 10 days, prosecutors said.
Bakker could not be reached for comment. A spokeswoman said he left his office as soon as he heard the news.
But Bakker told his new congregation Sunday during services at a roller skating rink that he felt his indictment was imminent and he felt powerless in fighting the legal system.
'What can I do?' he asked. 'You've got the IRS against you, the FBI, the KGB -- no, the CIA -- all these government agencies.'
Weeping on occasion, he said, 'If I thought it would help Christianity, I would get a gun and blow my head off. Then I'd be gone and you'd have no one to blame your problems on.'
At a news conference in Phoenix after the indictments were handed up, Hahn retorted that she had been hurt deeply by the revelations, including being cut off from her family, and concluded that if Bakker 'wants to blow his head off, let him.'
The 23-member federal grand jury was empaneled in August 1987, four months after Bakker resigned as head of the nation's largest television ministry upon learning the Charlotte Observer was on the verge of exposing his 1980 tryst with former church secretary Hahn.
The indictment charged Bakker, 48, and Dortch, 57, with mail fraud, wire fraud and conspiracy to defraud the public through the sale of lifetime partnerships that promised yearly vacations at Heritage Village USA, a PTL resort development in Fort Mill, S.C.
It also charged Dortch with negotiating the use of $265,000 of the money to buy Hahn's silence.
In late 1983, Bakker announced expansion of the Christian theme park at Heritage USA, where the 500-room Heritage Grand Hotel already stood. To finance construction of an additional hotel, he sold 152,000 partnerships in the venture at $1,000 apiece, promising purchasers a four-day stay every year for life.
The indictment alleges that using an elaborate scheme to sell 11 different partnership programs from 1984 through 1987, Bakker and Dortch made false statements to raise at least $158 million.
It said the partner funds were not used as promised to build an additional hotel, as well as the Heritage Tower Hotel, the Country Farm Inn, the Heritage Grand Mansion, the 1100 Club Campground and several bunkhouses. The second hotel, known as the Towers Hotel, was begun but was only partially completed and only one bunkhouse was constructed, it said.
After publicly announcing on several occasions that all partnerships in the Towers and other structures had been sold and the programs were closed forever, the indictment said, Bakker and Dortch continued to sell partnerships.
They did so even after being informed that all the partners could not be accommodated in the Grand's 250 available rooms in a year's time.
The indictment alleges Bakker and Dortch diverted PTL funds for their own benefit. It said Bakker and his wife obtained bonuses exceeding $3.46 million and Dortch received bonuses totaling $550,000, while at the same time concealing the true financial condition of the ministry from its board of directors.
In the second indictment, David Taggart, a personal aide to Bakker, and James Taggart, an interior designer who did work for the PTL, were accused of evading a total of nearly $500,000 in federal income taxes during the years 1983 to 1987 -- David Taggart about $319,805, and James Taggart about $174,636.
During his sermon Sunday, Bakker said the decision to prosecute him already had been made in Washington and said the grand jury merely 'rubber stamps that decision -- stamp, stamp, stamp.'
'Jesus died with the federal government putting him on the cross,' Bakker said. 'Religion delivered him to the government. It's true. One of the members of his own evangelistic team betrayed him.'
The 16-month investigation jelled when the Rev. Jerry Falwell, the Moral Majority founder to whom Bakker handed the reins of his ministry, provided federal officials with access to PTL records.
Hahn was one of the first witnesses to testify before the grand jury, appearing for two days in September 1987 to recount her 15-minute, 1980 fling with Bakker was revealed to the world in Playboy Magazine.
After Falwell confronted him about having sex with Hahn, Bakker weptcopiously and thanked the Baptist preacher for showing enough brotherly love to approach him with his sin. Then Falwell went with Bakker to tell his wife Tammy Faye about his transgression and imminent resignation.
Within a month, it became apparent that Falwell had no intention of allowing Bakker to return. Falwell accused the Pentecostal preacher of being 'morally unfit' and of practicing 'a lifetime of homosexuality.'
Three principals in the PTL scandal were not indicted -- Hahn, Tammy Faye Bakker and Roe Messner, the ministry builder that served as a conduit to get the first $265,000 to Hahn. Hahn, who admitted demanding and receiving hush money, had been granted immunity in exchange for her testimony.
Detail after lurid detail has unfolded in the PTL scandal, the latest Sunday when Penthouse Magazine hit the streets with former PTL guest John Wesley Fletcher, who says he told the grand jury Bakker that 'had sex with me ... three times' and that he procured young men for Bakker.
'I was Jim Bakker's male prostitute,' said Fletcher, publicly detailing for the first time the alleged homosexual liaisons.