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Some of the Bakkers' excesses have been well documented. Among them: six luxurious homes, complete with gold-plated bathroom fixtures and, famously, Tammy's air-conditioned doghouse. But behind those well-publicized items, a broader pattern of plundering PTL's treasury has emerged. According to the Falwell loyalists who are currently in charge at PTL, in the Bakkers' last 16 months in power, more than $2.4 million was paid out of a single confidential executive checking account handled by the Charlotte office of Laventhol & Horwath, PTL's auditors. Almost $1.4 million in compensation went to the Bakkers and top executives from the account during the first four months of 1987. Aide David Taggart received 1987 cash advances of $111,000 and bonuses of $225,000. Payments totaling $128,000 were made last year to James Taggart, brother of David, who ran an interior-decorating firm.
All of that came atop the Bakkers' salary and compensation, which the current managers of PTL estimate at $1.6 million for 1986. That was up considerably from a decade earlier, when Bakker drew $24,000 in salary and expenses. In subsequent years, that amount ballooned as Bakker used expense accounts to pad his income. By 1982 Bakker was making about $129,000 and Tammy $52,000, yet all the Bakkers' expenses, from tutors for the couple's two children to their personal automobiles, were covered by PTL. The ministry paid for virtually everything, no matter how trivial: Bakker once summoned a PTL plumber to attach a lawn hose to a spigot at his home.
The Bakkers and their close aides drew colossal bonuses with the approval of PTL's complaisant seven-member board. "We directed very little, but we approved a considerable amount," says former Board Member J. Don George, pastor of the 4,500-member Calvary Temple in Irving, Texas. In a series of confidential board minutes for November and December 1986, subsequently obtained by TIME, no numbers are listed for the bonus granted to Jim and Tammy and to Richard Dortch, a top aide who joined PTL in 1984 and was defrocked along with his boss in the wake of the Hahn scandal. Instead, on an attached piece of Jim Bakker's stationery are listed bonuses totaling $800,000 for the preacher, $175,000 for his wife and $175,000 for Dortch.
Were the board members bought off? All deny it. Even so, some board members received substantial gifts from PTL for their own churches. Board Member George, for one, received a $100,000 gift for landscaping his church in Texas shortly after he joined the board in late 1985.
The Bakkers' high living had caught the eye of the IRS long before the PTL scandal finally broke. In 1981 the agency launched a two-year inquiry into the ministry. Then, in a confidential 1985 report, the taxmen recommended revocation of PTL's tax-exempt status, retroactively to 1980. Reason: the IRS believed the organization did not operate exclusively for tax-exempt purposes and that part of its income personally benefited the Bakkers and others.