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Drexler claims that the next year, 1965, he scrawled across his 1040 form, “I object — Fifth Amendment.”

Sparks of light fly from the cluster of diamonds on Bill Drexler’s right hand whenever he jabs the air with his index finger. He does this frequently. “Taxation is theft" — jab! “You have a right" — jab! — “to lower your taxes and to avoid them,” Drexler declares from his podium at the Town and Country Convention Center, where he’s been introduced as the King of the Tax Fighters.

Susan Jeannette called several weeks ago to tell me about this group of San Diego “tax rebels.”

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A man of medium height, he wears a dark blue business suit, a white shirt, a rep tie, and more diamonds on his left hand. The suit and lectern hide a heavy belly; he looks substantial, like a former linebacker turned banker. In fact, William E. Drexler is a high priest, and he’s here to evangelize. But he doesn’t want his listeners to join a church; he exhorts them to become ministers in their own religious organizations.

Marv Susemihi decided current trends spelled the coming decline of the stock market.

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This will drastically lower their taxes and it’s perfectly legal, he assures them. Less than three weeks away from April 15, Drexler indeed preaches the Good News: salvation from the Internal Revenue Service! Deliverance to tax-free living!

Andy: “There are very few legal things that you have to do."

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It’s news Drexler’s audience devours; about 150 people sit in the chrome and red plastic chairs in this meeting room, concentrating on his rich baritone voice as if it were floating down from Mt. Sinai. No doubt — this is an audience of taxpayers: weary middle-aged men wearing polyester pants and windbreakers; young women decked out in high heels, tailored clothes, and coordinated jewelry. A show of hands reveals that most of them heard Drexler announce this seminar earlier in the week on Rod Page’s KOGO talk show and later in a KSDO interview.

Bill Drexler: "You’ve just done me the biggest favor in my life. You’ve threatened me."

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The rest were invited here tonight by friends. The audience also includes a few of Drexler’s enthusiastic converts, a population Drexler says is booming. He says thousands of San Diego residents have formed churches as he advises. And he says that’s a reflection of a much larger national phenomenon; Drexler claims that 25.000,000 Americans have stopped paying income taxes entirely.

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This evening one of Drexler’s converts. Reverend Jeri, listens intently from the front row. She wears a fluffy white fur coat streaked with coppery highlights which match her hair. At age thirty-two, she’s a well-established realtor who lives in El Cajon and sells homes throughout the county.

A friend first told her about Drexler two and a half years ago. Up to that point Jeri hadn’t paid too much in income taxes but her real estate business was on the verge of booming. She recalls that when she first heard Drexler’s pitch at the office of a Clairemont businessman, “I knew it was for me.” She wrote out a check for a thousand dollars to charter the Church of Prosperity and received her certificate of ordination. Then she took a vow of poverty and donated all her worldly goods to her church. The following April Jeri simply didn't file a tax return, nor has she filed one since then, nor will she file one next Tuesday. She has calculated how much she’s saved since switching to Drexler’s brand of religion — between $45,000 and $46,000 over the last three years.

So now she watches the king with glowing eyes and nods at his words; Drexler has delivered them so often that they’re as hard and polished and shiny as his diamonds. The poor don’t pay taxes; the wealthy and powerful don’t pay taxes; so it’s you, the poor hard-working slobs, who shoulder all the burden, he tells them. And look what the government spends the money on! Look at Wilbur Mills and Elizabeth Ray and all the foreign aid that goes to our enemies, and look at all the stupid research projects, and what in the name of God gives them the right to ask how many toilets you have? There’s only one way to stop it, he intones solemnly. Cut if off right at the pocketbook.

This has been Bill Drexler’s central theme ever since he moved to San Diego six years ago. At least I think he moved to San Diego six years ago. Drexler’s a little vague about that, along with many of the details of his life. Throughout the years, he’s voiced several variations on the sub-theme of how people should avoid paying taxes — by establishing trusts, taking the Fifth Amendment, and above all. by forming churches. Despite Drexler’s insistence that his current church plan is flawless, I learned that a number of other authorities entertain serious doubts about its trustworthiness as a tax dodge. But controversy as well as confusion enshrouds Drexler. He has a legion of enemies nationwide who insist he’s a shyster, but he also commands impassioned allegiance from an army of supporters. I first heard of Bill Drexler from one of the latter. Susan Jeannette, who called several weeks ago to tell me about this group of San Diego “tax rebels.” She said that although Drexler had lived in San Diego for years, he had not sought publicity; he’d been gone much of the time, traveling. But in January he had opened a local office of the Freedom Foundation on University Avenue, she said, and it now was actively seeking recruits. Drexler was their leader.

So I arranged to meet him at Jeannette’s home, one of those gracious, completely anonymous Tierrasanta residences. That day Drexler wore brown pants, a darker brown sportshirt, tan cowboy boots, and his diamond rings. He reminded me more than ever of a former football player whose once-beefy frame has yielded to the marbling of fat. He has bright blue eyes which contrast starkly with piercing charcoal pupils. Without much prompting, he launched into the story of his life as a tax fighter.

He was born and raised in St. Paul, Minnesota, the son of a one-time state legislator. He went to Catholic schools, got a law degree, and started practicing in 1961. Then in 1964 he was called in for a tax audit. The way Drexler tells it, he happily documented his tax return, and watched the auditor reduce the IRS’s demands from $800 to $600 to $400 to $200 “Finally, he said to me, ‘Drexler, we know you’re guilty and I just can’t prove it this time. But I want you to know that we’re going to audit you next year and we’re going to get you!’ ” Drexler recalls that he told the IRS agent, “You don’t know it but you’ve just done me the biggest favor in my life. You’ve threatened me. From here on in all you’re going to get from me is my name, rank, and serial number, and the Fifth Amendment.”

He claims that the next year, 1965, he scrawled across his 1040 form, “I object — Fifth Amendment.” He says he did the same thing each ensuing year and heard nothing from the Internal Revenue Service — until 1973, when they indicted him on criminal charges of willful failure to file in 1968, 1969, and 1970. The case went to trial in St. Paul. Drexler says the government brought in 155 witness to testify that the lawyer had been generating income; he says he testified in his defense that the audit had imbued him with a substantial fear. He says when the jury finally deliberated, it took only fifteen minutes to find him innocent. Recalling the victory, Drexler told me that no account of it had appeared in the St. Paul newspapers, something which he attributed to the scope of IRS power and intimidation.

However, I later obtained copies of clippings from those papers, which not only reported the verdict, but cast Drexlcr’s success in a slightly different light. Drexler clearly promotes the impression that his defense relied on his correct application of the Fifth Amendment. However, the story which ran in the St. Paul Pioneer Press October 2, 1973, quoted the local U.S. Attorney as giving a different explanation for Drexler’s victory. “There was no question that he (Drexler)didn’t file returns,” the prosecutor stated in that story, “but if his attorney gave him such advice and if a jury accepts that, then that’s a legal defense.” The story says Drexler had argued that he was acting on advice from Jerome Daly, another attorney from the St. Paul area and a noted tax resistance advocate. It was ironic, the paper noted, that Daly the previous year had been convicted of tax evasion after he had used the same device of pleading the Fifth Amendment on his tax forms.

The news clippings mention several other things which Drexler tends to recall differently or gloss over completely. The Pioneer Press twice reported that the government claimed Drexler earned a total of about $56,000 in the years 1968 through 1970. Today Drexler remembers the government saying he owed $244,000. “I’ve always made good money,” he told me complacently. Drexler’s file also contains another event which he tends to delete from autobiographical sketches: the Minnesota state supreme court disbarred him in 1971. Drexler has facile explanations for all the specific infractions cited in the court’s disbarment decision — jury tampering, misrepresentation, forgery; and he offers a more general explanation for the court’s action. “I was a maverick on the tax thing,” he says. “So every time I didn't dot an ‘i’ they were out to get me." Whatever the motivation, the court’s opinion docs paint a damning portrait. “Since his admission to the practice of law,” it concluded. “Drexler has pursued a course of professional conduct wholly inconsistent with the oath he took when he became an officer of the court. . . . (He) docs not possess the moral qualifications to continue in the practice of law."

If disbarment put an end to his legal practice, Drexler says the 1973 victory in his tax case brought him another form of business — appeals for help from other people interested in avoiding taxes. Furthermore, Drexler says by then he had learned about a tax dodge which was even more attractive to him than the use of the Fifth Amendment; he’d learned about the tax benefits associated with religious organizations. Once again, Drexler’s memory falters when he tries to recall details of his introduction to the Life Science Church. He says in 1969 he was in Chicago on business when he met a cleric by the name of Archbishop Cruikshank. Drexler says Cruikshank (whose first name Drexler forgets) was from either Illinois or Indiana and had started the Life Science Church in 1967. Cruikshank had broken off from an orthodox affiliation (maybe Presbyterianism, but Drexler isn’t sure). Drexler says when he did some legal work for Cruikshank, the grateful archbishop offered to ordain Drexler as a Life Science Church minister so that Drexler could reap some of the advantages of the religious life, such as reduced fares on airlines. Drexler accepted the offer and says he began researching the tax status of clergymen. By 1973 he was so impressed with the latter that he bought the whole church from the then-ailing Cruikshank, relocated it in Minnesota, and set himself up as a bishop (or was it as an archbishop?) and one of the church’s trustees.

He was soon to relocate it again. Drexler says after his 1973 tax victory, he foresaw signs of impending trouble with the Minnesota state tax collectors, so he moved to San Mateo, California, to do tax work fora big corporation there. After one winter, the Bay Area’s rainy weather and stormy politics (“all that SLA stuff was going on about then”) further persuaded him to move his family down to San Diego.

They moved into a rented house on Ducommon Avenue in University City and apparently Drexler began supporting himself by dispensing tax advice. But he wasn’t primarily promoting the church affiliation in those days.. The advice he did give also didn’t always lead to taxpayer victories, according to Don and Grace Blackburn.

Don Blackburn is a carpenter. He was out working the other day when I drove out to visit his home in Dehesa, east of El Cajon. But his wife readily recalled for me their experience with Drexler. She remembers first hearing about him toward the end of 1974 through some local tax protest group. “He [Drexler] was supposed to be a real super-duper tax fighter, so we went to hear him one night at the Howard Johnson’s near Highway 8 and Waring Road.” Grace and her husband had already tangled with the IRS and lost badly. In 1970 the agency had charged Don with evading the taxes on some cash income earned in 1968 and 1969 (income he failed to report out of naivete, Grace maintains) and on an attorney’s advice, Don had pled guilty. As a result, he had served ninety days in jail in the fall of 1973. “If they had put him in for just a week, it would have scared the devil out of him,” his wife says today. “But after three months, he was completely bitter. There was nothing else they could do to him.” When the Blackburns heard Bill Drexler speak that night in Mission Valley, the IRS was pressing to collect the penalties and back taxes which they claimed the couple still owed. So Don and Grace greeted Drexlcr’s fiery words like those of a savior. “We were desperate,” Grace says.

Drexler’s message of taxpayer oppression and coming revolt electrified them. The couple met privately with Drexler for specific advice, and Grace states that Drexler told them to ignore a registered letter from the IRS, which was waiting at the post office and which the Blackburns had been warned related to the back taxes. “He said if we didn’t pick it up, they couldn’t expect us to act on it.” Drexler advised the couple to plead the Fifth Amendment on their 1975 tax return, advice which they followed gleefully. Grace recalls she and her husband felt smug for only a short time; soon thereafter a tax collector knocked at their front door with the news that the IRS was putting the house up for sale.

The couple only then turned to another tax counselor, who was horrified at the news of their Fifth Amendment invocation and who hastily fired off an amended 1975 return. The couple learned that by following Drexler’s advice (ignoring the letter and failing to petition the tax court) they had forfeited a substantial part of their rights. “It has been a battle ever since we met Drexler,” Grace says today. “Had we answered that ninety-day letter we would have been able to go to tax court and fight it.” Instead, the Blackburns’ dispute with the IRS over the back taxes still rages; the agency has liens on all the couple’s property.

Back in 1975 the Blackburns didn’t realize all the implications of the advice they claim Drexler gave them, and Grace said it was an incident involving another tax protester which finally disillusioned her with Drexler. That affair involved a Chula Vista resident named Bob Green. One of the Blackburns’ tax protest friends told them that Green was facing a court date with the IRS and that Drexler would be at Green’s side advising him. “So we decided to organize a group to go down and kind of cheer them on,” Grace recalls. ”1 remember how excited we all were. We were really going to see Drexler, the big tax fighter, dish it out to the IRS!” She even remembers phoning Drexler on the morning of the trial and getting his reassurance that he’d see everyone in court. But when the tax court convened, Drexler was nowhere to be found. “We all felt just sick,” Grace says, “and Mr. Green was crushed.”

Drexler says he remembers the Blackburns, but he remembers the details of his dealings with them somewhat differently. He says when they told him about the ninety-day letter, he offered to sell them a “tax court petition advice packet” for twenty-five dollars or to prepare such a petition for them for seventy-five dollars. In any case, he says he warned them that they needed to file the petition, but Drexler claims the couple said they wanted to think about it, and they never got back to him.

(Grace laughs at that. “We were so gullible at that point that we would have bought something from him for $500, ” she says.)

Asked about the Green anecdote, Drexler gave me Green’s phone number and encouraged me to call him. When I did. Green remembered that day in court when the cheerleaders showed up and Drexler didn’t. “Sure, I was kind of disappointed, because I expected him to be there,” he says. "And going in there by youself, you get a little worried.” But Green says he subsequently talked to Drexler and followed his advice on how to appeal a contempt citation. (A San Diego federal court judge had cited Green for contempt when he took the Fifth Amendment in response to an order to answer questions during a 1974 income tax audit.) Green finally won his appeal only last month and today he extols Drexler’s merits. ”I think he’s the greatest guy in the world. Everything that Bill has done for me I can’t do anything but praise. ” Green says he did have trouble reaching Drexler at various times, but he excuses that readily. “Bill does a lot of traveling.”

Grace Blackburn says she also had trouble finding Drexler early in 1976, when she tried to reclaim from him some personal records. She says one time when she called the University City house, she got Drexler’s landlord, who told her that Drexler had abruptly and unexpectedly left town. She says she finally tracked down a Minnesota telephone number at which she talked to Drexler’s wife. Soon thereafter, the Blackburns received their papers back.

If Drexler did leave town, however, he returned to rent a palatial home at the top of Via Capri on Mt. Soledad. Susan Jeannette, the woman who introduced me to Drexler, says that by early 1979 Drexler was living there and venturing forth nationwide to lecture about taxes; he was only helping local people to form Life Science Church chapters on an individual basis. Jeannette says Drexler never attempted a large-scale promotion of the church in San Diego (even though he lived here) because he lacked the time to do so. But I found that Drexler’s claims about his relationship to the church seem to vary with his audience.

When the Internal Revenue Service and the Minnesota Department of Revenue wrote Drexler at his San Diego post office box number in March of last year, informing him of their desire to examine the religious activities of the Life Science Church, Drexler answered by sending them a copy of a notice (written the day before on Life Science Church stationery) informing “all Life Science Church members of Minnesota, California, and Arizona” that he was disassociating himself from the organization and that two other San Diego residents were henceforth the leaders of the church. These two had all the church’s hooks, records, and files, he declared in writing. And when I questioned Drexler March 27 about this, he answered that some San Diego church members had broken off from him but had continued using the Life Science name, so he had wanted to disaffiliate himself from their activities. Drexler told me, “In this particular area (San Diego and the State of California), we are setting people up under another church. We’re not using the name the Life Science Church.”

Yet in an interview three weeks earlier, he had told me that his main activity these days is promoting the Life Science Church. Furthermore, in his San Diego radio interviews March 27 and 28, Drexler also liberally used the Life Science Church name. And when I asked him that first day at Susan Jeannette’s house how San Diego residents could establish Life Science Church chapters, he urged them to contact the Freedom Foundation, the office which opened at 5241 University Avenue this January. Drexler told me (at that first meeting) that he had no formal connection with the Freedom Foundation office. It was just one of thousands of tax resistance organizations around the country, he said, one which happened to sponsor his appearances in San Diego. He urged me to visit it, however, and talk to successful Life Science Church members there.

When I did so, Susan Jeannette unwittingly contradicted Drexler by telling me that last December Drexler had asked her and a man named Andy (who asked that his last name not be used in this story) to open the Freedom Foundation office as a means of promoting the notion of tax avoidance through churches. Jeannette is a trim, blond, former housewife whose personality is almost the antithesis of Drexler’s. She’s spunky, unguarded, and direct. She says when she first met him two and a half years ago, she was working as a salesperson for a printing and graphics firm; Drexler was a client. She learned about the Life Science Church through that contact but says she never seriously considered the idea of forming her own church until December, when Drexler asked her to open the office. She was ready for something different, so she accepted the offer, but she admits that “at first it was just a job.” Before very long, however, her feelings had changed.

Today Jeannette can launch into an antitaxation sermon that would shame Ronald Reagan. Teaching people how to avoid taxes is “spreading the good news,” she declares; her blue eyes blaze with conviction. “The middle-class American people are just being gouged. We want to enroll enough people so that the government really feels it. It’s a moral issue! We feel if there was a five percent income tax levied on every single citizen [instead of the current complex system], it would be more than enough to handle the responsibilities and eliminate the oil depletion allowance and all that b.s.”

This is one of Drexler’s central premises. He and his followers argue that tax avoidance is far more than a matter of mere personal enrichment; it’s a weapon, a key strategy in the growing American tax revolt. Tax avoidance is patriotic. They declare it may be the only way to save the country — by eventually forcing the Congress to restructure today’s oppressive tax system. If the citizenry simply refused to pay income taxes as a matter of principle, the boycott might serve the very same purpose — except that a simple refusal to pay will land one in jail, and that flavor of patriotism isn’t likely to be to the taste of the masses. In contrast, Drexler and his associates assert that church formation achieves the same end — except, they claim, you can get away with it.

As Jeannette and her coworkers at the Freedom Foundation sell the notion, this is how the church ploy works. First Joe Taxpayer walks into the office and fills out an “Application to Qualify as a Minister,” a one-page form which asks for one’s vital statistics (name, address, marital status), then poses six questions that your average tax dissident isn’t very likely to stumble over: “Do you believe in and adhere to the principles set forth in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution? Do you believe in the Free Enterprise Capitalistic System as opposed to the Collectivist systems of Socialism and Communism? Will you perform the duties of a Minister? Keep in touch with the head office of the church? Furnish the head office with a report at least once a year?" Jeannette says even the sixth question ("Do you believe in a Supreme Being?”) hasn’t ever disqualified anyone. "Most people do believe in some supreme being, whether they define it as themselves or God or even their husband."

Along with the application, the would-be minister submits his thousand-dollar "donation." an amount split evenly between the local office of the Freedom Foundation and Drexler, according to Jeannette. She says the money pays for all the materials supplied to the new ministers, and it supports the larger church organization. Indeed, the price would seem to be a bargain; Drexler says associates in New York are asking a $3500 donation per person and getting it at the rate of up to thirty a day. He adds that the San Diego figure is likely to increase after April 15; since the office just opened, "they wanted to offer the lower price to let some people get in on the ground floor."

What do you get for your donation? For starters, the Freedom Foundation bestows on you a piece of paper declaring that you’ve been ordained a minister. You get a second certificate stating that your church has been "chartered.” In both cases, the Freedom Foundation offers one a choice, according to Jeannette. One can choose to affiliate either with the Life Science Church or with the Church of Christ, she says. The difference is solely one of personal taste, she says; non-Christians tend to opt for the Life Science Church designation. Both the Freedom Foundation staffers and Drexler. however, explain the exact nature of the relationship between Drexler’s Life Science Church and the “chapter” (individual) churches somewhat less than clearly.

Jeannette states that all the individual offspring are chartered churches of the two “mother churches,"’ which are well-established entities recognized as tax exempt. But Drexler stresses that the chartered entities are each separate, independent churches; they’re not branches of the main church in the sense that the Catholic Church has branches. The Freedom Foundation staff members help new ministers to select unique names for their newborn organizations (the Life Science Church of Lower Clairemont Drive, for example).

The Freedom Foundation also provides one other major service: detailed practical advice on the establishment of one’s church. Jeannette says. She says new ministers follow one of two main patterns. One is to donate fifty percent of their adjusted gross income to the church (the maximum deduction the law allows one to take for a contribution to a charitable organization). Under this kind of setup, the church in turn “provides” the minister with food, shelter, and other necessities. Under the second arrangement, the minister sets up a religious order, joins it, takes a (notarized) vow of poverty, and turns over to it all his or her possessions and earnings. Ministers usually end up paying minimal taxes under the former arrangement, according to Jeannette, and no taxes at all under the latter.

What else do you have to do to operate a “church,” besides declaring that you are doing so? “There are very few legal things that you have to do," contends Andy, a former foosball tournament director who became the Freedom Foundation’s controller in January. Drexler recommends that each individual church appoint three “trustees” (who can include the minister and the minister’s spouse), hold regular “services” (of a nature and frequency to be determined by the minister), and report once a year to the “main” church office. Drexler says the First Amendment of the United States Constitution prohibits Congress (or the IRS) from regulating religions much more than that. " ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ ” he quotes from the Bill of Rights. “And no law is no law!”

That phrase comes up repeatedly when Drexler and his followers try to explain the logic of using churches as tax dodges. At base, the logic relies on the fact that United States tax law allows special benefits to churches, religious organizations, and the individuals who contribute to them. The law does require that organizations claiming these benefits actually be operated for religious purposes. But there’s the catch. Drexler argues that the First Amendment effectively stops the IRS from saying that one group is a church and another is not. “Any claim to church status cannot be subjected to evaluative criteria or government standards, as such action would tend to prescribe the form and content of religious beliefs and practices,” declares the introductory pamphlet which Drexler and his associates distribute to the curious. “Whatever rights, privileges, and exemptions or immunities are granted to, any church and/or religion . . . must ... be granted to all churches and religions,” it argues.

That same pamphlet is stuffed with other legal references, citations which purport to further substantiate Drexler’s arguments. But the strongest argument Drexler makes is the pragmatic one: it works, Drexler and his followers insist. Study the legal history, they urge prospective ministers; check with the IRS. But if in the end it all sounds very confusing — well, just look at us. Look at Bill Drexler, who hasn’t paid a dime in state or federal income taxes since 1965! Look at the people who’ve had the sense to follow his advice, like Reverend Jeri.

I talked to Jeri the day I visited the Freedom Foundation office, a modest storefront jammed in between a stereo shop and an Italian restaurant in the 5200 block of University Avenue. The office, furnished sparsely, has the look of a one-room schoolhouse. About thirty folding chairs arranged in rows accommodate those who show up here on Monday nights, when the “Bill Drexler movie” (a cinematic version of Drexler’s standard harangue) is shown.

Jeri, a strikingly attractive redhead, told me she wishes she could spare more time from her real estate business so that she might help enlighten the American public about taxation. She cuts an inspiring figure. That day she wore a silk blouse, tight-fitting black pants, high heels, and an abundance of gold jewelry — finely wrought chains around her neck and her slender wrists, as well as several rings. She’s soft-spoken, self-possessed, very likable. She has no doubts about the effectiveness of the church ploy and says she hasn’t heard one word from the IRS since she set up her own religious organization.

Jeri does wonder if the tax collectors would have squawked if her situation had been different when she chartered her church. (She wasn’t paying much in taxes when she dropped out.) And she also confesses to occasional guilt pangs over not paying income taxes. “But of course I do pay sales tax and gas tax and different use taxes like that.’’ She laughs. “And I do spend all the extra money I have as a result of not paying taxes.” (She just bought a new Mercedes, for example.) “So it all goes right back into the system.”

Jeri further testifies to a spiritual change which came over her after she started her church. Initially, it was just a practical move, she says, but almost immediately she started feeling, “I want this to be real in my life. I didn’t want it to be just a dodge.” She says at first she didn’t know what form her ministry could take, but she finally started performing weddings. Now she says she’s done about six, “and I absolutely love it!” She officiated at the service when her own mother remarried; she performed a ceremony for the bank employee who helped her open her church account. “I try to tailor the wedding to the individuals. . . . My husband and I record the wedding for the people and we play the music for them and we do all that. It’s really neat,” she says.

However, the Freedom Foundation staff members steadfastly maintain that it’s perfectly acceptable for ministers to start their churches for solely pragmatic purposes. “That’s my approach totally,” declares Marv Susemihl, who’s now the Freedom Foundation’s training director.

Just three months ago Susemihl was a stockbroker, a profession he had pursued for eleven years and which had supported him bountifully. But Susemihl says that in recent years he began to look hard at economic trends — spiraling inflation, runaway federal spending and bureaucracy — and finally he decided they spelled the coming decline of the stock market. He began researching financial alternatives and in February he gave up the brokerage business. A few weeks later he began working at the University Avenue office of the Freedom Foundation, hustling others into Drexler’s amorphous fold. Soon after that he formed his own Life Science Church.

Like Jeri, Susemihl looks like a walking advertisement for the good life. He’s tall, broad-shouldered, narrow-hipped, square-jawed, smooth-talking. He frankly confesses that the church idea frightened him at first. “I’d been audited once in my life and it absolutely scared the devil out of me!” But the more he studied the church plan, the more he decided it was a way “to directly confront the issue of the IRS and how you hold it in your life.” Now Susemihl’s confidence in the rectitude of tax rebellion is strengthening daily. Next Tuesday he’ll file a standard income tax return, but next year he’ll list his occupation as “minister,” and will deduct fifty percent of his 1980 income as a contribution to his church.

Susemihl was the third full-time staff member to join the Freedom Foundation office. Jeannette says by May that number will grow to five. All of them work on a commission basis (getting paid in proportion to the number of new churches they charter), and Jeannette points to that arrangement as an indicator of the idea’s popularity. (She declined to tell me how many San Diego churches have been chartered, but Drexler says there are “thousands.”) She says the most enthusiastic response so far county-wide has developed at the San Onofre nuclear facility, where a thirty-three-year-old carpenter who works for Bechtel has been helping to advance the cause.

I phoned him at his Carlsbad home, and he asked me to refer to him simply as Richard D. “I don't mind telling anyone what I’m doing,” he said, “but I don’t know if it’s such a good idea to publicize my name.” A year and a half ago he first heard about Drexler’s church program when he viewed the Drexler movie at a friend’s home. Shortly thereafter, he and his wife Pauline drove up to San Clemente to hear Drexler present a seminar on taxation. On February 22, 1969. Richard was ordained. He named his church the Church of Revelation, “because it was a revelation to us.”

Immediately he arranged to have his payroll deductions reflect his new status, a move that added $150 a week to his paycheck. “Right away it was like having a second job,” Pauline says. Richard decided not to take a vow of poverty because he believes he has a duty to support his country. Under the arrangement he did choose (in which he donates fifty percent of his income to the church — which in turn pays for his car, utilities, food, clothing, and children’s schooling), he wound up paying 1.5 percent of his income last year to the IRS. I1 believe in an equitable tax system.” Richard explains. “I'm more than willing to pay my share. I would be a hypocrite if I said this and didn’t live by it.”

Like Jeri, Richard and Pauline say their feelings changed after they started the church. At first, the move was merely a financial one; soon it evolved into a cause. Now the couple holds weekly “seminars” comparable to the ones scheduled on Mondays at the Freedom Foundation office. “When you start looking into this thing, the bottom line comes when you have to make a commitment. You have to make a stand somewhere.” Richard says. “We’re saying it’s time for the government to go back to the people. It’s time for us to start running our own lives, and this is our way of making our statement. This gives us the opportunity to teach my children; to give my friends some insight they might not have had before.”

Before that conviction hardened, Richard says he did do some checking — even with the IRS. “The best way to take care of some big guy is to walk up to him and smack ’em in the face,” he declares emphatically. He says when he asked the IRS about church formation, “They said, ‘We don’t like it. It’s legal, but one of these days we ’re going to find a way to get you.’ ” The agency further told him that the Life Science Church isn’t listed in the IRS book of exempt organizations, a statement which Richard dismisses as “ludicrous.” If one church is exempt, he declares, all churches have to be exempt. “Otherwise, you have clear-cut discrimination.” He and Pauline received what they regard as the final proof of both their practical and moral righteousness three weeks ago when they got back their tax return. Richard had purposefully filed it early because “we were expecting a lot of kicking and screaming and crying .... But everything worked perfectly.”

When I talked to Carl Corsi, one of the specialists in the IRS exempt-organizations division, he reiterated that the “Life Science Church” isn’t listed among the organizations which have applied for and been granted recognition of tax-exempt status by the IRS. However, he hastened to confirm one of Drexler’s frequent assertions: religious organizations don’t have to apply for tax exempt status. In a sense, if something is a church, it’s automatically exempt. The problem, Corsi admitted, comes in distinguishing between legitimate and bogus churches. “It’s very, very difficult,” Corsi said. “The IRS has no more sensitive area because of the First Amendment considerations.”

Corsi refused to comment on whether the number of people filing as ministers of churches is increasing. However, one sign of IRS concern over the phenomenon is a “fact sheet” the agency recently prepared and is now distributing. “The fact that an organization purports to be a church or other religious organization does not guarantee that a charitable contribution deduction will be allowed,” it says. “Similarly, the fact that the organization received a church charter from an existing organization does not guarantee deductibility .’’The fact sheet says the test is “whether the organization to which the contribution is made is itself organized and operated exclusively in furtherance of its avowed church purposes.” It must also have “actual operations furthering religious purposes. Moreover, the organization cannot be operated to further the private interests of its founder or other individuals. ”

Corsi added something else, a point Drexler tends to downplay. As vague as those guidelines might be. the IRS does have the authority to investigate any church whose sincerity it questions. One Life Science Church member who found that out the hard way is a chiropractor and naturopath named Frank Stoneman. Today Stoneman lives in a small town named Post Falls, Idaho, but he says in 1976 he was living near Modesto, California, and it was there that he first heard of Bill Drexler. Stoneman drove down to San Diego specifically to meet with Drexler, and he says shortly after that he sent money to Drexler and subsequently received papers in the mail chartering him as a Life Science Church. “I really thought that he was an honorable man,” Stoneman says sourly. “The story he told was quite plausible.”

Stoneman says he later filed a 1977 income tax return which detailed a variety of deductions to Stoneman’s new church, deductions supposedly allowable because of the church’s tax-exempt status. Stoneman claims Drexler had told him the IRS recognized the Life Science Church to be exempt, an exempt status which he further assumed applied to his individual church. So it was a jolt when he heard from the tax agency months later and found himself facing the task of proving that his church was exempt. But at first he wasn’t too worried, he says, since Drexler had vowed to rise to the defense of any troubled Life Science Church members.

Stoneman says Drexler asked for $2500 as a retainer, and it was hard to come up with all that money because the IRS had frozen his bank account. But Stoneman says he sent Drexler $2380 in checks (paid to Stoneman by various clients) and Drexler promised that he’d stand by Stoneman’s side in court. Stoneman says that up to the night before his court appearance he still was waiting for Drexler: the next morning it became obvious he never would show. Stoneman later received the $2380 back from Drexler. but he's still fighting the IRS today, ' he chiropractor says if he had filed a normal tax return that first year, he probably would have paid the government $7900. Now, given the penalties which mount daily, Stoneman says the IRS is seeking “well over $100,000.”

When I asked Drexler about that incident, he denied that he had chartered Stoneman as church. He said he did promise to help defend Stoneman (who was in trouble because of other tax considerations, Drexler says), but he says Stoneman never paid him his full $2500 retainer. That’s why he failed to show up in court that day. Drexler maintains.

Furthermore, Drexler claims that the IRS has never gotten any member of the Life Science Church, even though the church hasn’t been recognized as a tax-exempt organization by the IRS. Corsi at the agency said he couldn’t comment on that claim. He said he couldn’t make any statements about any individual church or person; IRS regulations prohibit him from saying anything specific about Drexler. Corsi did point out that if an IRS auditor should have a question about the legitimacy of a particular church, his first reaction would likely be to see if the church had been officially recognized as tax exempt. If it hadn’t (as the Life Science Church has not), then Corsi said the next step would likely be an investigation — yet Drexler says that hasn't happened to any of his members.

Drexler says people have formed Life Science Churches and then gone off on their own and gotten themselves into trouble. However, he insists that no obedient Life Science Church member has ever gotten into trouble. How can that be? I asked him. How can you account for that? “We’ve done it and we’ve done it in another way, but that’sour secret, just like Coca Cola,” he finally confessed. “We are in good shape and we have no problems along those lines .... Our people who are the bishops in the Life Science Church know what we got and how we got it. But basically, that’s our secret.”

Drexler says he gets calls every day from other churches begging him to share that secret. “AH our competition would like to know this. They call me all the time. But we’re not going to just throw that out and neither will Coca Cola throw their secret out and say, ‘You take so many parts of this and so many parts of that.’ ”

I was still skeptical. Drexler fixed me with those dark, cold pupils and said, “All you have to do is ask yourself why hasn’t the IRS from 1973 up to the present time said, ‘Bill Drexler, your church is no good. You got airplanes. You got automobiles. You got big checking accounts, bank accounts in Switzerland. You got all these things swinging for you. We’re going to say no to you. ’ If they are on any good ground at all, why haven’t they come after me?"

Good question. “They know I’m right,” he answers himself. “Hey, we’re in fat city.”