Justin said he called the church’s maintenance supervisor and had to stay at the church for almost seven hours" the news outlet reported.
I wonder if the $600k will cover his bill; I mean 7 hours, at union rates, has got to add up.
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Odds are most of those checks were written by older Americans, which is even more infuriating. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve had to feign ignorance when an elderly relative was asking how to “email money to Pat Robertson to help with Haiti, because the gays made the earthquake.”
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But think of all the work it took to hide it. Plumbing, (maybe) drywall, painting…“Find another bathroom! This is gonna take a while!”
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My guess is someone grabbed a big bag of donations and didn’t bother sorting out the cash from the checks.
If it was an inside job maybe they were planning to make regular “withdrawls”? A bathroom sounds like a good place to hide it because you are mostly guaranteed privacy while you are accessing your stash, but even if discovered won’t necessarily point back to you. Or maybe they planned to stash it there and then wait for the investigation to end before picking up the loot but died or had to leave before they could retrieve it? Maybe the crook was just stupid or incompetent, which if they were a regular parishioner at a prosperity gospel church would be unsurprising. Maybe someone wasn’t so much looking for a huge payout like the pastors at these churches get but they needed to fuel a “sin” habit such as drugs or prostitution and were worried their family would notice regular bank withdrawls for no apparent reason?
All speculation of course, but I’m sure it made sense to the person who did it at the time.
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God invests in mysterious ways.
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Hiding it from his wife? He’s a rich weasel into hoarding wealth, even when people in his neighborhood are left homeless from flood.
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Plumber finds $600k… of course that was after he carried bags of “trash” out to his truck to haul to the “dump.”
(I may be inserting my own views of what I would do if I found any of Osteen’s loot)
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When was the robbery? Was the Bathroom wall open then? When was the wall last sealed?
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“We throw the money in the air, whatever God catches He gets to keep.” - Old joke.
“We hid the money in the wall, whatever God finds He gets to keep.” - New reality.
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While this is very likely to have been an inside job, they were also stealing from Joel Osteen. $500K is chump change for Osteen; he’s supposed to be personally worth on the order of $50M, and his church takes in roughly $43M year. Per the Indy Star, anyway, but I don’t think those numbers are unreasonable.
Really, it’s a pity they didn’t get away with more.
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Plus if you get caught you can always claim you put 100% of the money into the church!
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Occam’s Tazer would say that this was most likely done by Osteen himself or under his direction. Who else would have access to the church for long enough to open up the wall, dump the bags, then close it up and paint it over?
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And don’t forget this episode -
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Thieves stealing from thieves…
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Praise be to Anoia! May this church’s drawers rattle eternally.
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Damn! With so much power, you’d think there’d be situations like “I’m being fired for being openly gay? I think not, or your business will be destroyed by an earthquake!” or “Don’t bully me, or I’ll summon hellfire and brimstone!”.
Amazing restraint on the part of “the gays” (apparently only most of the time) if you ask me.
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‘apparently stole’… heh…
This ‘church’ was once called The Summit, & was the home of the Rockets… I saw many a rock concert there. Too bad it slid downhill from there…
Why not just ‘Houston’?
Damned if I’m all that proud of being associated with the loons running the State right now…
I can Guess That Tune(r) in one note!
I wonder just how all that moola could have accidentally ended up there…
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Oooh screenwriting idea:
Prosperity Gospel Church is really a mafia/cartel money laundering operation.
This story can go all Charley Varrick.
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