Sunday, June 16, 2013

If There is a Hell...

There's a special place there for folks like this:
While Cancer Fund provides care packages that contain shampoo and toothbrushes, the people in charge have personally made millions of dollars and used donations as venture capital to build a charity empire. Less than 2 cents of every dollar raised has gone to direct cash aid for patients or families, records show.
For years, Cancer Fund founder James T. Reynolds Sr. and his family have obscured that fact with accounting tricks, deceptive marketing campaigns and lies, the Tampa Bay Times and The Center for Investigative Reporting have found.
Stories about ripping people off in the name of a cause are as old as the concept of charity itself.
But the Reynolds family is something different.
After spending nearly 20 years building Cancer Fund, the family began spinning off new cancer charities, each with a similar mission and a relative or close associate in control.
The family has founded five cancer charities that pay executive salaries to nearly a dozen relatives.
During a yearlong investigation, the Times and CIR identified America's 50 worst charities based on the money they divert from the needy by paying professional solicitation companies.
At least a dozen of these operators have built networks of multiple charities, some with interlocking boards or family connections.
They include multimillion dollar operations in Florida, Louisiana and Pennsylvania.
None are more brazen and incestuous than the Reynolds network.
To track the family connections, the Times and CIR reviewed thousands of pages of financial records and investigative documents from regulators in eight states, interviewed vendors and recipients and traced donations from the phone banks to their ultimate destination.
In the past three years alone, Cancer Fund and its associated charities raised $110 million. The charities paid more than $75 million of that to solicitors. Cancer Fund ranks second on the Times/CIR list of America's worst charities. (Florida's Kids Wish Network placed first.)
Salaries in 2011 topped $8 million — 13 times more than patients received in cash. Nearly $1 million went to Reynolds family members.
The network's programs are overstated at best. Some have been fabricated.
"Urgent pain medication" supposedly provided to critically ill cancer patients amounted to nothing more than over-the-counter ibuprofen, regulators determined. A program to drive patients to chemotherapy, touted by the charity in mailings, didn't even exist.
The Tampa Bay Times did a superb series on America's worst charities, and most, like the Cancer Fund used names similar to legitimate charities to help them rip people off.  These are the folks who take advantage of elderly folks and the not-super-bright, and it really wouldn't bother me to see many of them go to jail for a while.

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