Guilty Father

Moon did not pay his taxes

Soon after Sun Myung Moon opened an account at Chase Manhattan Bank in 1973, the Korean evangelist came by to make a deposit accompanied by two women carrying large purses stuffed with an assortment of bills. It took clerks an hour to count the currency, which totaled $100,000. A Chase banker recalled the women's saying that the money came from street sales of flowers by members of Moon's Unification Church. The Moonies, who refer to their leader as "Father," and who regard him as a manifestation of God, were zealous collectors of funds, and deposits to his Chase accounts were frequent--perhaps too frequent. In a New York City federal court last week, a jury of ten women and two men decided, after four days of deliberation, that Moon was guilty of conspiring to avoid taxes on $162,000 in personal income for the years 1973 through 1975. He faces up to 14 years in prison, $25,000 in fines and a possible deportation hearing by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service.

Moon, 62, was convicted of failing to report as personal income $112,000 of interest on $1.6 million in his Chase accounts, as well as $50,000 worth of stock in Tong II Enterprises, a profit-making import company that Moon controlled. Convicted with him was his top financial aide, Takeru Kamiyama, 40, who was charged with helping the evangelist prepare false tax returns to conceal the income, attempting to block the subsequent Government investigation by submitting phony backdated documents, and lying to a grand jury.

Throughout the trial, which lasted more than six weeks, the evangelist's attorney, Charles Stillman, insisted that the cash and stocks, although held by Moon, actually belonged to his Unification Church and were therefore not subject to taxation. One key witness for the prosecution was Michael Warder, 35, a former church executive who now works for the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. He testified that on several occasions Kamiyama had turned down his requests to use funds from the Chase accounts for church purposes with the explanation that the bank deposits were "Father's money . . . not accessible."

Moon accepted the verdict impassively, but officials of his church denounced the judgment as "unjustified persecution." The evangelist's attorneys plan to appeal the conviction.

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