The head of a purported multimillion-dollar religious communications business was indicted on federal fraud charges for allegedly swindling equipment leasing companies out of more than $11 million, federal authorities said Thursday.
Rodney Dixon, chief executive of Lacrad International Corp., was also charged with falsely inflating Lacrad's net worth and income to obtain a $2.25 million bank loan in order to buy a corporate jet.
Dixon was also hit with a money laundering charge for allegedly using $47,500 of the profits from the fraud to buy a Jaguar automobile in 2000.
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Lacrad International, which sold religious sermons on compact discs, had offices in [Chicago suburbs] Elmhurst and later in Oakbrook Terrace.
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According to a civil lawsuit filed by the companies, Dixon had claimed that Lacrad's annual revenue exceeded $100 million in the late 1990s.
But the indictment contends that Lacrad's annual sales never topped $100,000.
Dixon also claimed Lacrad had offices around the world, but that, too, proved to be false, the charges allege.
The indictment also says Dixon lied about Lacrad's financial condition to obtain the $2.25 million loan from Regions Bank in Tyler, Texas, in 2000 in order to buy the jet.
Why would a Chicago company go to Texas for a loan? Texas banks — now an offshoot of the Republican Christian theocracy — apparently never heard of due diligence or even healthy skepticism. "Christian business? That's all we need to hear. Loan approved!"
...at one company handling duplication orders from an assortment of churches, "demand grew from a minimum average order of 50 to 250 CD-R copies several years ago, to orders ranging from 250, 500, and 1,000 to 25,000 copies per customer per week." Move over, Thriller.
That company, Lacrad International, probably the busiest (and hippest) company I've seen in a long time, has been catering in a variety of capacities to churches, synagogues, temples, and plain old secular businesses since 1984. Today, it offers everything a digital ministry might require, including—and this is only scratching the surface—Internet broadcast (it's home to four Christian Internet stations—picture west Texas or eastern North Carolina in cyberspace), Web hosting for both content delivery and CD sales, and technical consulting. As far as duplication goes, Lacrad offers several different trademarked "media services," such as CD Visitor (for people unable to attend services), CD Outreach, and CD Sermons. All the company's efforts to date have been audio-only; plans for the future include IP broadcast movies and television, as well as conversion to DVD-R on the duplication side, within the year. Lacrad has its own plant in Ohio, all set for the upgrade.
Lacrad's facility in Ohio began with four Rimage Protégé units; later, four Rimage ProStar units were added; today, there are a grand total of eight ProStar units churning out discs. These ProStar systems aren't exactly small change: that's eight drives a piece, officially supporting up to 12X recording, with a 500-disc capacity, which is to say, if one of them fought me, it would win. Cooler than these items, though, is the fact they're run remotely from Lacrad Corporate headquarters in Oakbrook Terrace, Illinois: data becomes an image, which, in turn, becomes a disc, all over a WAN. Bill Blank, executive vice president of operations, says of the rig, "It's working beautifully. The primary benefit is the ability to load it up and walk away. Return, and the job is done; the automation is fabulous."
Isn't it interesting that a Christian front for a run-of-the-mill fraud operation feels the need to express itself in the language of high technology and Michael Jackson?
