I asked Buck if he would be open to talking on the phone. It may be faster, save you some time.
Email me so I can work it into my daily schedule, he said. He added, Thnx.
I knew this would be the last I heard from him. I’d e-mail him and he’d never respond — he was ghosting me; it had happened to me dozens of times. He was hiding something.
So I said, God bless.
Buck had given his life to Christ while he was in prison, serving thirty months for insider trading. He’d been raised Methodist, and had planned to be a minister. Then in college, he had answered an ad seeking PC salesmen, and soon after got into selling fax machines, then got into investment banking. He spent eleven years running from God.
“Lying on my prison cot, I thought about my wife, Mi-Seon,” he told Bay News 9. I was making my way through the videos posted on his YouTube channel. It had been twenty-four hours since I’d stepped outside the Gateway and every flat surface in my room was now populated with beer bottles stuffed with cigarette butts. Bags had appeared beneath my eyes, but it didn’t matter since no one was looking at me, and I also wasn’t looking at myself.
“We’d been married seven years and I hadn’t been a good husband,” Buck said. “She had every reason to leave me, and yet, that morning, she had vowed to stand by me. If my wife of flesh and blood could love another person to that degree, how much more must God love me?”
I had e-mailed my editor that morning with an update. My hypothesis is that Buck’s recent troubles stem from an illness brought on by his daily consumption of wrath, I said. I think I can have this story to you by the end of November. There are questions I still need to answer.
Send when you can, he responded.
I knew he didn’t care. I was not a priority — the paper was buried under postelection news. No doubt he’d forgotten about this quirky editorial. I couldn’t even imagine which section he would put it in. Metro?
I was a shitty journalist, and this couldn’t be argued. The drinking didn’t help. I hoped there was a story in Buck, but I hadn’t yet found it, and I couldn’t be trusted with anything breaking.
After leaving prison, he’d earned his ministerial degree and had hit the road as an itinerant preacher, then accepted an invitation to produce Christian television in Florida. Neither was satisfying. Everyone he ministered to was already saved, and as an evangelist, he needed to reach souls in jeopardy.
In 1999, he launched LiveCrusade.com, the first place where people could go seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day for prayer. He answered prayer requests live on the air, broadcasting from midnight until two a.m. Within a year, seven hundred volunteer pastors around the country were responding to forty thousand LiveCrusade.com prayer-request e-mails daily. Within three years, Buck had secured a time slot on secular television. Though Live Crusade with Buck Hill reached national and international audiences for limited periods, his greatest impact was in regional networks throughout Florida.
He appeared on air in a suit and tie. His hair was cut and styled, bleached blond. He was charismatic, seated before a serious-looking bookcase, preaching on everything from divorce to gluttony.
Even back then, his sermons skewed political. He took particular aim at “baby killing” and “the radical homosexual agenda.” After five years, networks pulled Hill’s show under pressure from the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Among other things, he had called Islam a “1,400-year-old lie from the pits of Hell,” and called the Prophet Mohammed a “murdering pedophile.” The Koran was a “book of fables and a book of lies.”
Americans United for the Separation of Church and State petitioned to have Live Crusade’s tax-exempt status revoked. “I have every right to educate people on spiritual matters and deal with the pressing spiritual issues of our day, even those that transcend into the political arena,” Hill told the New York Times, which broke the story. “Unlike many Christian leaders, I have never and never will endorse any candidate for public office. I have never told people who to vote for or who not to vote for.”
The IRS launched an investigation into the Live Crusade ministry that lasted for nine years. This past March, Buck and his lawyer finally reached a settlement. I spent a day at the courthouse, wading through the filings. He owed $10 million in unpaid taxes. He owed $100,000 to American Express.
“He was very theatrical,” said Shelly Zeno, his former publicist. I had found her on Facebook, living in Sarasota. To my amazement, she posted her phone number on her profile. It sounded like she answered the phone in her car. She invited me to come down to the lot where she was now selling Aston Martins. We borrowed a Vanquish Volante and followed the bay. She rolled the top down. Chrome clouds gathered over the water. She was a fast talker, peroxide blond, with oversized lips and enormous knockers. She had represented some of the biggest names in Christian media, including Buck’s archnemesis, “prosperity pimp” Joel Osteen. I hoped she would give me some dirt on Buck’s spending habits.
“I worked pro bono for him,” she told me. “He never had the money to pay me. He wrote his own copy, and I just sent it to editors. I didn’t always agree with what he had to say, but he was good at attracting attention. I liked his spirit. There was a time when he felt everything he was saying and doing was coming from a very deep conviction.”
“You believe that?”
“Absolutely.”
We pulled up to a streetlight and she smiled at the car next to us. Two men leered back. I could tell my plastic Walgreens sunglasses next to her Ferragamo’s didn’t make sense to them, much like her story about Buck’s finances didn’t make sense. Did she think I hadn’t done my research? That I didn’t know about his Naples mansion or his trouble with the IRS?
“If he didn’t have the money to pay you, what happened to his donations?” I said.
“What donations?” she laughed.
“You’re saying he never got any?”
“Not that I know of.”
I’d read somewhere that he refused to sell trinkets on the air. “The Bible says the Gospel should be free,” he’d said. But then, he also ran a “Souls of Gold” mail-in jewelry campaign offering only receipts and prayers in return for your family heirlooms. And the Ezekiel Project: a paid membership that offered prayers in return for the membership fee. Members of the Ezekiel Project were expected to sign up other members who were “committed to the Truth,” like a holy pyramid scheme. Where did that money go?
“I looked him up about a year ago,” Shelly said. “It made me sad. I could tell he wasn’t doing well, that something had happened to him.”
“What do you think happened?”
“I couldn’t tell you. His website was rolling out old information. His appearance concerned me. It looked like he was in a dark, tattered room with the drapes pulled. It was just so not Buck.”
“Did you talk to him?”
“I considered it, but I was afraid he would ask me for help.” She wasn’t doing Christian PR anymore — she refused. “You can’t pay me to walk into a church now. By the time I left PR, I didn’t feel like I was doing anything except making rich Christians richer.”
I was driving on the Tamiami Trail when Buck called me back. I had been persistent in trying to get him on the phone since leaving St. Petersburg, wanting to make a plan to meet him in person. In my voice mails, I had expressed my concern for the future of Live Crusade given his recent troubles with the IRS. I was careful not to give him further reason to avoid me. I pulled out my recorder and steered with my elbows, praying that my car wouldn’t veer off the road, since I didn’t have the money to get it serviced, and hadn’t in over a year.