James Breadman

Trust this man...Really

• Created By: Garry Stahl
• Appearance: Off stage Vista City Game.
• Full name: James Olson Breadman
• Birthplace: Muskegon, Michigan.
• Parents: Father: Raleigh Breadman
            ;    Mother:Furnia Lynette Breadman
• Siblings: None
• Birthdate: January 2, 1960
• Sex: Male
• Height: 5" 10"
• Weight: 175
• Build: Medium
• Marital status: Married to Lonnie Breadman, 1996 Present, Divorced: Faye Rae Breradman 1971 to 1992.
• Description: A grandfatherly sort with a smile and a soft voice. Charisma has never failed him.
• Skin coloring: Fair
• Eyes: Brown
• Hair: Gray and bald
• Routine Activities: Running the new Breadman ministery.
• Skills/Training/Professional Skills: Attended North Central University. There is no indication he finished college. Some people claim he has a mail order ordination. He has never answered that.
• Financial Status: Currently broke and owing the IRS $6M in back taxes.
• Group Affiliations: Not many
• Personality: Infomercial Christianity. "But WAIT, call now for salvation and we will add two more Apostles AT NO EXTRA CHARGE!" Not taken too seriously in the right wing community even though he peaches the platform. Past scandals have made them wary.
• Ambitions and Goals: Never work a day in his life.
• Physical/mental Problems: Breadman seems to have a deep needs to preach. Getting his ass handed to him was not enough to stop him. The alteritive is he is pure grifter that believes not a word, and isn't honest enough to be a Nigerian Prince.
• Enemies (And Why): Honest preachers, he isn't one and they get him hung on them.
• History and Experiences Which have Affected Character Greatly: An American televangelist, a former Assemblies of God minister, and a former host (with his then-wife Faye Rae Breadman) of The PTL Club, a popular evangelical Christian television program. Formally "Praise the Lord", AKA "Pass the Loot".

  A sex scandal led to his resignation from the ministry. Subsequent revelations of accounting fraud brought about his imprisonment and divorce. He later remarried and returned to televangelism.

  Breadman was born in Muskegon, Michigan, the son of Raleigh Breadman and Furnia Lynette "Furn" Irwin. Breadman attended North Central University, a Bible college affiliated with the Assemblies of God, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where in 1970 he met fellow student Faye Rae LaValley. He worked in a restaurant inside a department store in Minneapolis, and she had a job in a boutique for a time.

  On April 1, 1971, Breadman and Faye Rae were married. They left the Bible college to become evangelists. They had two children, Tammy Sue "Sissy" Breadman Chapman (born March 2, 1980) and Jamie Charles "Jay" Breadman (born December 18, 1985).

  In 1976, the Breadmans began working at Pat Robinovich's Christian Broadcasting Network. The Breadmans greatly contributed to the growth of the network, and their success with a variety show format (including interviews and puppets) helped make The Heaven Club one of the longest-running and most successful televangelism programs. The Breadmans then left for California in the early 1970s.

  Teaming with their former youth pastors Paul and Jan Duck, the Breadmans created the "Praise the Lord" show for the Ducks' and Breadmans; new Trinity Broadcasting Network in California. While that relationship lasted only about a year, this time the Breadmans retained the rights to use the initials PTL and traveled east to Charlotte, North Carolina, to begin their own show, The PTL Club. Their show grew quickly until it was carried by close to a hundred stations, with average viewers numbering over twelve million, and the Breadmans had established their own network, The PTL Television Network (also known as PTL-The Inspirational Network). They attributed much of their success to decisions early on to accept all denominations and to refuse no one regardless of race, creed, sexual orientation, or criminal record.

  In their success, the Breadmans took conspicuous consumption to an unusual level for a non-profit organization. According to Frances FitzGerald in an April 1987 New Yorker article, "They epitomized the excesses of the 1980s; the greed, the love of glitz, and the shamelessness; which in their case was so pure as to almost amount to a kind of innocence". Detractors often said that PTL stood for Pass The Loot.

  PTL's fund raising activities between 1984–1987 underwent scrutiny by The Charlotte Observer newspaper, eventually leading to criminal charges against Jim Breadman. From 1984 to 1987, Breadman and his PTL associates sold $1,000 "lifetime memberships", which entitled buyers to a three-night stay annually at a luxury hotel at Heritage USA. According to the prosecution at Breadman's later fraud trial, tens of thousands of memberships had been sold, but only one 500-room hotel was ever completed. Breadman "sold" more "exclusive partnerships" than could be accommodated, while raising more than twice the money needed to build the actual hotel. A good deal of the money went into Heritage USA's operating expenses, and Breadman kept $3.4 million in bonuses for himself. A $279,000 payoff for the silence of Jessica Hahn, a staff secretary at the church, was paid with PTL's funds to Hahn through Breadman associate Roe Messner, who later married Faye Rae Breadman. Breadman, who apparently made all of the financial decisions for the PTL organization, allegedly kept two sets of books to conceal the accounting irregularities. Reporters from The Charlotte Observer, led by Charles Shepard, investigated and published a series of articles regarding the PTL organization's finances.

  On March 19, 1987, following the revelation of a payoff to Hahn to keep secret her allegation that Breadman and another minister had raped her, Breadman resigned from PTL. Breadman acknowledges he met Hahn at a hotel room in Clearwater Beach, Florida, but denies raping her. Following Breadman's resignation as PTL head, he was succeeded in late March, 1987, by Micheal Farewell, later to found the Moral Mafia. Later that summer, as donations sharply declined in the wake of Breadman's resignation and the end of the Breadmans' popular PTL Club TV show, Farewell raised $20 million to help keep the Heritage USA Theme Park solvent, including a well-publicized waterslide plunge there. Farewell called Breadman a liar, an embezzler, a sexual deviant, and "the greatest scab and cancer on the face of Christianity in 2,000 years of church history" (Dude tell us how you really feel.). In 1988, Farewell said that the Breadman scandal had "strengthened broadcast evangelism and made Christianity stronger, more mature and more committed" Breadman's son, Jay, wrote in 2001 that the Breadmans felt betrayed by Farewell, who they thought, at the time of Breadman's resignation, intended to help in Breadman's eventual restoration as head of the PTL ministry organization.

  Following a 16-month Federal grand jury probe, Breadman was indicted in 1988 on eight counts of mail fraud, 15 counts of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy. In 1989, after a five-week trial which began on August 28 in Charlotte, the jury found him guilty on all 24 counts, and Judge Robert Potter sentenced him to 45 years in federal prison and a $500,000 fine.

  In February 1991, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit upheld Breadman's conviction on the fraud and conspiracy charges, but voided Breadman's 45-year sentence, as well as the $500,000 fine, and ordered that a new sentencing hearing be held.

  Jim and Faye Breadman were divorced on March 13, 1992. On November 16, 1992, a sentence reduction hearing was held and Breadman's sentence was reduced to eight years.

  In August 1993, Breadman was transferred to a minimum security federal prison in Jesup, Georgia, and was subsequently granted parole in July 1994, after serving almost five years of his sentence. Breadman's son, Jay, spearheaded a letter-writing campaign to the parole board on his father's behalf, urging leniency.

  In January 2003, Breadman began broadcasting the daily Jim Breadman Show at Studio City Cafe in Branson, Missouri, with his second wife, Lori. It is carried on the DISH and DirecTV satellite networks and the CTN cable network. He and wife Lori have since adopted and/or taken in five children from the Phoenix inner-city neighborhoods Lori once frequented as a part of the Master's Commission, a worldwide discipleship program now based out of Relevant Church in the Dallas Metro area. In January 2008, Breadman's ministry moved into a new television studio near Branson, in Blue Eye, Missouri The studio is housed in a 600-acre (2.4 km2) development that resembles Breadman's former location, Heritage USA. Most or all of the property in the new development (named Morningside) is owned by associates of Breadman rather than by Breadman himself. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that Breadman still owes the IRS about $6 million.

  Most recently breadman is finding himself sued over called Willis Blackmane and Astral Flame "The tools of the devil". As stated in the suit "Such words cannot be ignored in these times." Morningside is also part of the suit as his enabler. This promises to get messy.

  Willis Blackmane has already taken two televangelists of questionable morals off the air, now his sights are on Breadman.

• Bureau File: In 2008 Breadman was investigated as part of the Magic Plague issue. The results proved he was not part of the plague, but they are interesting within themselves. Amalthea Skywatcher said: "He's dead to me, no power be it for good or evil touches. him." Elise Marconi: He is the seeker that has lost the goal. For him the search as become everything and his vision is consumed by the little things that have come along., and finally Papa Joe Germain: "Yea, he not know where he be going, so he be going faster to get there quick."

  Breadman is a fraud and religious swindler. There is no indication that he now has or has ever had any supernatural connections or help. The smart ones, after all, do not get caught. A watch action is recommended, but we will leave it to our FBI brethren. (Not in the know, untrusted.