
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, May 17, 1990                   TAG: 9005160307
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: E-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: MEGAN ROSENFELD THE WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

HEY, WANT TO BUY A THEME PARK?

FOR SALE: 2,000-acre theme park with Christian accoutrements, incl. church, replica of room where Last Supper held, Billy Graham's childhood home, props and lighting for Christmas display and Victorian home built for crippled children now avail. as bed and breakfast. Amenities include own sewer system, broadcast studio, satellite network and 60,000 copies of souvenir book about PTL. Special extra for highest bidder: 2,000 hours of unaired Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker television show tapes, featuring Roy Rogers, Mr. T, various former presidents and other celebrities.

Asking price: You name it.

"I'd say $200 million is about right," said Martin W. Taplin, the Florida real estate "workout and turnaround specialist" who is trying to sell Heritage USA, the Christian resort built on the outskirts of Fort Mill, S.C., near Charlotte, N.C., by evangelist Jim Bakker. Taplin was hired by the court-appointed trustees for the park, which filed for bankruptcy court protection nearly three years ago after Bakker fell from grace. Found guilty of bilking his faithful, spending their money on operating the park and his own lavish lifestyle instead of building time-share lodgings as he had promised, Bakker is now serving a 45-year sentence in a federal medical center in Minnesota.

Earlier this month, as part of a five-month effort that he said has produced 65 prospective buyers (fewer than 20 of them really serious), Taplin ran a full-page advertisement in the New York Times at a cost of around $18,000.

"It never hurts to advertise," said Taplin, sounding a note that is music to newspaper publishers' ears. "The trustees wanted to make sure as many people as possible knew it was for sale."

He might have added: still for sale. A Canadian businessman backed out of a $65 million sale last September, saying that a lawsuit by the Catawba Indians that claims that most of South Carolina belongs to them was preventing him from getting title insurance. Others speculated the real reason was that he couldn't get the money together. In any case, the deal was off and the trustees once again faced the prospect of either breaking the park into smaller parcels or selling it as a package deal, which is what Taplin proposes to do.

Last week, Oral Roberts University agreed to pay $6 million for just the satellite network, but PTL trustee Dennis Shedd said he reserved the right to cancel the deal if a buyer could be found for the entire complex.

Part of Taplin's ad trumpets the park's location as being "1-hour by air to over 50 percent of U.S. population," which he touts as being superior to Disney World's demographics. In case you're wondering, Disney has not been among the callers nor, so far, have the owners of Opryland USA, which Taplin sees as the closest type of enterprise to what he envisions as the perfect owner of Heritage USA.

Who else would want a 10-acre water park with seven slides and a wading pool? Six restaurants? A discount store? A six-car train and a 900-seat dinner theater and a farmlet with 22 horse barns? Not to mention the Olympic-size swimming pool, the miniature golf course, the softball field, the tennis club, the Total Learning Center and the rights to the July Fourth celebration, including an all-night program of Gospel TV shows?

"Whatever else you can say about him, Jim Bakker was a helluva real estate developer," Taplin said.

Taplin had one disappointment, though. Those gold water faucets in the Bakkers' hotel suite that everyone wrote about? Gold plate. And it's starting to tarnish.

by CNB