36. And the Hits Just Keep Comin'

Upon my life, by some device or other
The villain is o'er-raught of all my money.
——The Comedy of Errors, I.ii

In March 2006 there was a flurry of activity on Q.'s various Web sites.

He put up a poster and some online clips from his film project — but if you read carefully, the clips are identified as deleted scenes, and primary shooting isn't even finished yet. More about that in a minute.

He began selling "exclusive preview" versions of upcoming CDs from B. and Six Steps to Heaven. Excuse me — he wasn't selling them, he was offering them as gifts for a $25 tax-deductible donation (later reduced to $10) to raise funds. How much was he trying to raise? $70,000. What was it for? Several more international missions projects in 2006, all connected in some way to the film project.

All this was described in a seven-page prospectus, downloadable from one of the Web sites. Since this prospectus comes from Q., naturally it's vague, but it sounds as though parts of these mission projects will be captured on camera, for footage to be used in the film project. So completion of the film depended on the missions projects, and the missions projects depended on your donation, for which you were supposed to get an "exclusive preview" of a CD that might not even be finished yet, according to its description on another of the sites.

Elsewhere Q. claimed to be "finishing up production" on the film. That usually means that all original footage is already in the can, but to Q. it clearly means something else.

What intrigued me, though, was all this talk of tax-deductible donations. Q. hadn't openly solicited donations on his site in a while, but he was definitely back at it. So I did a little more gumshoe work, and learned that Q. was breaking the law. As long as he (a) remained unregistered with the IRS; (b) solicited donations; and (c) claimed that they were tax deductible, he was in clear violation of Chapter 100, Item 7(a) of Washington's Charitable Solicitations Act (Revised Code of Washington, section 19.09). Here's the text of said law; here's a handy brochure from the state Attorney General's office explaining it. Whether this law requires Q. to register with the Washington Secretary of State as well as the IRS is a murkier question: it evidently depends on how much he collects from in-state sources.

I kept reading RCW 19.09 and determined that Q. could be subject to a $1,000 fine from the Secretary of State's office for each donation he's collected in violation of the law, and could earn himself a cease-and-desist order from the state Attorney General. Furthermore, anyone who'd given him money (including, presumably, Stinky Cheeseman and Picante Chilipepa, who allegedly bankrolled the Greece trip), could sue him and recover up to three times the amount of the donation.

I began to salivate. My nemesis was illegally soliciting funds, and I could prove it. First I needed a receipt. I used a credit card to donate $25 online, in my own name, to Q.'s organization for a copy of B.'s "exclusive preview" CD. Then I printed out the electronic receipt. As I expected, it lacked what's called an Employer ID Number (EIN) — the unique number assigned by the IRS to every registered nonprofit, which is supposed to appear on receipts for tax-deductible donations. I didn't really expect Q. to send me a CD, but no matter — that receipt was easily worth $25 to me. I printed it out, along with the relevant pages from Q.'s Web sites, and sent an e-mail to the Charities Division of the Washington Secretary of State's office. I'd done my homework, and I had the goods. Surely the Charities Division, armed with my information, would aggressively pursue the transgressor.

Wouldn't they?