Study Finds Some 9/11 Charities Did Little Charity Work
Scammers wasted no time in trying to profit from the 9/11 attacks.
Some charities established in the wake of the 9/11 attacks should be considered scams as well. The AP has found some that spent more on their own salaries than money that went towards their stated purposes/goals. These scammers used the goodwill of Americans trying to help those affected by the attacks and instead benefited monetarily. For example, there’s the money raised to make a 9/11 quilt, but no quilt has been produced, and only a few boxes worth of segments have been gathered:
THE QUILT THAT ISN’T
Kevin Held was earning a living as a self-employed handyman in Peoria, Ariz., when he formed Stage 1 Productions in 2003 to promote the American Quilt Memorial honoring the lives lost on Sept. 11. He said thousands of individual pieces would be crafted together on white, king-sized sheets that, when sewn together, would stretch 1½ miles across an eight-lane highway.
That never happened.
The $713,000 that Held raised from students, school fundraising campaigns, T-shirt sales and other donations is gone. More than $270,000 of that went to Held and family members, records show.
In a July interview, Held said he hoped to finish the quilt in a few months. But he changed his mind a few weeks after the AP began asking questions, abruptly shutting the project because of “tough economic times.”
Held has done an impressive job raising money, persuading students to hold “penny drives” and police officers to buy T-shirts promoting the quilt for $20 or more. But he’s spent a lot in doing so.
Since 2004, Held paid himself $175,000 in salary, health insurance, other benefits and a weekly car allowance he received for most of that time. He’s owed another $63,820 in deferred salary, according to the charity’s most recent tax filing. Held argues that he’s actually owed closer to $420,000, because he was supposed to receive $60,000 annually since 2003, and has received far less.
He told the AP in July that more than $50,000 paid in 2005 to satisfy a loan never reported by the charity went to his mother to repay “an accumulation of a bunch of small loans.” But when pressed last week — after the AP pointed out that his mother died that year — Held said he paid himself more than $45,000 to repay the loan. He said he couldn’t explain the other $5,000 without researching it.
So, he’s taken a salary in excess of the money raised - that’s a red flag right there - and that’s the kind of thing that Charity Navigator would give that a failing grade.