That way Moon was allowed to continue pouring an estimated $100 million a year into his newspaper and other pro-Republican media outlets. Additional millions went to fund right-wing political conferences; to pay speaking fees to world leaders, including George H.W. Bush; and to bail other Republican political allies out of financial troubles.
When I was investigating Moon's activities in the mid-1990s, I interviewed former church insiders who explained how Moon's U.S. business operations, such as restaurants and real estate deals, served to launder overseas money that his followers would first sneak past U.S. Customs, a practice confirmed by Moon's ex-daughter-in-law.
In her 1998 memoir, In the Shadow of the Moons, Nansook Hong alleged that Moon's organization had engaged in a long-running conspiracy to smuggle cash into the United States and to deceive U.S. Customs agents.
"The Unification Church was a cash operation," Nansook Hong wrote. "I watched Japanese church leaders arrive at regular intervals at East Garden [the Moon compound north of New York City] with paper bags full of money, which the Reverend Moon would either pocket or distribute to the heads of various church-owned business enterprises at his breakfast table.
"The Japanese had no trouble bringing the cash into the United States; they would tell customs agents that they were in America to gamble at Atlantic City. In addition, many businesses run by the church were cash operations, including several Japanese restaurants in New York City. I saw deliveries of cash from church headquarters that went directly into the wall safe in Mrs. Moon's closet."
Personal Confession
Mrs. Moon even pressed her daughter-in-law into one cash-smuggling incident after a trip to Japan in 1992, Nansook Hong wrote.
Mrs. Moon had received "stacks of money" and divvied it up among her entourage for the return trip through Seattle, Nansook Hong wrote.
"I was given $20,000 in two packs of crisp new bills," she recalled. "I hid them beneath the tray in my makeup case. ... I knew that smuggling was illegal, but I believed the followers of Sun Myung Moon answered to higher laws."
U.S. currency laws require that cash amounts above $10,000 be declared at Customs when the money enters or leaves the country. It is also illegal to conspire with couriers to bring in lesser amounts when the total exceeds the $10,000 figure.
Moon "demonstrated contempt for U.S. law every time he accepted a paper bag full of untraceable, undeclared cash collected from true believers" who smuggled the money in from overseas, Nansook Hong wrote.
Despite Nansook Hong's revelations, which corroborated longstanding claims by other Moon insiders, no known criminal investigation ensued.
There is also the question of where the mysterious money originated. Some Moon watchers believe much of the cash came from scams of superstitious Japanese widows who were sold miniature pagodas and other ornaments dedicated to their dead husbands.
Yet, while the Japanese scams might explain part of Moon's fortune, others who have looked into Moon's operation suspect that a major source of money derived from Moon's close relationships with underworld figures in Asia and South America.
Those ties date back several decades to negotiations conducted by one of Moon's early South Korean supporters, Kim Jong-Pil, who founded the Korean CIA and headed up sensitive negotiations on improving bilateral relations between Tokyo and Seoul.
The negotiations put Kim Jong-Pil in touch with two important figures in the Far East, Japanese rightists Yoshio Kodama and Ryoichi Sasakawa, who had been jailed as fascist war criminals at the end of World War II. A few years later, however, both Kodama and Sasakawa were freed by U.S. military intelligence officials.
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