From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 2000--

Would you buy an appeal from fundraiser Bruce Eberle?

McLean, Virginia--Fundraiser Bruce W. Eberle may be the most asked-about person over the past few years in calls to ANIMAL PEOPLE by anxious animal protection donors and sanctuary directors--but most of those asking would not recognize his name.

Neither do they recognize the names of most of the sanctuaries that Eberle is asking them to give money to or rent their mailing lists to, except perhaps from previous appeals and list requests received from the same outfits: Tiger Haven, Tiger Creek, Tiger Tracks, and Lifesavers Wild Horse Rescue Ranch, among those bringing the most inquiries.

ANIMAL PEOPLE didn't recognize Eberle's name or the names of most of the sanctuaries Eberle represents either, until we began investigating the unknown sanctuaries one by one and found Eberle is their common denominator. Then we investigated him.

We found that Eberle's activities had been investigated often before, including by U.S. Senate committes looking into the Paula Jones affair and the fate of Americans missing in action during the Vietnam War.

Questioning some of the people whose mailing lists Eberle solicited, we learned he was apparently anxious about what we were discovering, sharing, and asking about. We figured it wouldn't be long before he tried to head off an expose, and sure enough: 48 hours after we mentioned to several sources still dealing with him that we were working on an expose, he made contact.

Eberle volunteered quite a lot. But he didn't answer the basic question on the mind of each prospective donor: is money sent to the groups he represents helping animals?

Eberle also didn't answer the basic question among those whose lists he wants to borrow: will it help or hurt them?

High-volume mailing

Ultimately, these are judgement calls. Charities must raise funds, which requires mailing lists. Doing high-volume direct mail to donors to similar facilities is the easiest way to build a list. But keeping donors requires their assurance that most of the money they contribute is spent to serve the charitable purpose, not to enrich direct mail merchants.

Exchanging lists is the major means by which charities of all types expand their donor base. But again, there is only so much money to be divided among charities, and when donors get too many appeals from similar organizations, some charities suffer--especially when the fundraising firms take more from the receipts than goes to do actual charitable work, reducing the total pool available to the groups actually fulfilling the mission.

Correspondence with inquiring donors to exotic cat sanctuaries indicates that Tiger Haven, Tiger Creek, and Tiger Tracks are all making quite a haul lately.

But Jill Carnagie of the Valley of the Kings Sanctuary and Retreat, in Sharon, Wisconsin, formerly known as JES Exotics, has run a similar sanctuary for exotic cats for at least as long or longer, without doing costly high-volume mailings to cold prospects.

"Donations have really been at an all-time low," Carnagie reported in her May 2000 newsletter.

Does she need to hire a more effective fundraiser--or do donors need to learn to toss more appeals from unfamiliar groups into the trash, thereby making direct mail fundraising even costlier and more difficult for organizations which are just getting started?

Either way, Eberle can profit.

Who is Eberle?

"The Eberle Communications Group began with the formation of Bruce W. Eberle & Associates in 1974," Eberle told ANIMAL PEOPLE by e-mail. "We have worked with nearly 200 national organizations," he said.

Eberle clients have reportedly included former U.S. president Ronald Reagan; Oliver North, who was a central figure in the Iran/Contra scandal of the latter Reagan years in the White House; and former Los Angeles police officers Stacey Koon and Laurence Powell, who were sentenced to serve 30 months apiece in jail for allegedly committing the videotaped beating of motorist Rodney King in 1992. Their appeals said they were "political scapegoats of black radicals and self-serving liberal politicians."

Eberle & Associates "works primarily with conservative groups," Eberle explained, while Fund Raising Strategies, formed later, "has worked with a wide variety of charitable organizations in wildlife welfare, historic preservation, veterans support, and poverty relief.

"Both organizations," according to Eberle, "endeavor to operate under values" which include the claim that, "There is no substitute for integrity."

"A few years back," Eberle admited, "we raised funds for a POW group. After a number of years we began to doubt their ability to fulfill their commitment to their donors. We terminated our relationship. That was several years before this same client engaged in activities that eventually came before a special committee of Congress. The truth," Eberle insists, "is that we were victimized by the political establishment," although Eberle also claims that Eberle & Associates helped to elect key members of the Republican majorities prevailing since 1990 in the U.S. Senate and since 1994 in the House of Representatives.

"We accurately reported to the donors precisely what was related to us by the client," Eberle maintains. "Unfounded charges of fraud were made against us by self-serving politicians, but when the dust cleared and the matter had been reviewed by the Federal Trade Commission, we could hold our heads high. Some still quote out-of-context from that hearing, but the fact is that we did nothing wrong."

Or at least nothing prosecutable: under court rulings which hold that the right of free speech prevails over accountability, nonprofit fundraisers enjoy much more leeway in what they can tell prospective donors than for-profit advertisers.

"Using third party sources," Eberle insisted, "we endeavor to check our clients out and establish that they are indeed doing what they claim to do or have made concrete plans that will turn into reality with the availability of funds.

"Our company donates a minimum of 20% of our profits to more than 50 charities," Eberly added. "Personally, my wife and I give to a wide number of charitable groups," he went on.

Eberle and his companies belong to the usual trade associations. They have received a normal quotient of awards from charities that employ them and from professional peers. Eberle is even a sometime Sunday school teacher and sings in a church choir, he told ANIMAL PEOPLE.

"I have been in the direct mail fund raising business for more than 29 years, 26 of that with my own company," Eberle continued. "I believe you will find that in the Washington D.C. area, my company has a reputation for unsurpassed integrity."

Paula Jones

Here is what Washington D.C. sources and observers actually report, as discovered through a series of online searches:

* On February 27, 1998, picking up on information originally disclosed by the ABC-TV subsidiary Salon News, Chicago Tribune reporters William Gaines and David Jackson revealed that Paula Jones, who had accused U.S. President Bill Clinton of sexual harassment, had "received about $100,000 from a fund-raising campaign that was supposed to be on behalf of her attorneys."

John W. Whitehead, president of the Virignia-based Rutherford Institute, which was actually paying Jones' legal bills, said, "We're not getting any of the money."

Detailed Gaines and Jackson, "A mass mailing of Jones' eight-page request" for money "she said was 'all going to help my legal case' raised questions among Jones' attorneys, because part of the donations" were "used to pay for the fund-raising effort and the rest" went "to an account controlled by Jones."

Jones was paid a $100,000 'advance' against the returns, which were expected to be "at least an additional $200,000, for a total guaranteed minimum of $300,000. Jones signed the contract that guarantees her the minimum net income of $300,000 with Bruce W. Eberle & Associates Inc.," Gaines and Jackson stipulated.

"The contract has a space for the signature of an officer of the Paula Jones Legal Fund," Gaines and Jackson said, "but the words 'legal fund' were scratched out [when] Jones signed it, a copy of the contract obtained by the Tribune shows."

Added Gaines and Jackson, "Under the contract, Eberle's company is paid about eight cents for every solicitation package processed. In addition, his company receives a commission from the rental or purchase of donor lists, and a company Eberle controls, Omega List Co., serves as an agent in the deals. Postal expenses are to be borrowed at 24% annual interest from another company that is headquartered in Eberle's office and run by one of Eberle's business partners."

ABC, the Washington D.C. bureau of the Dallas Morning News, and Reuters all confirmed the details.

* On July 22, 1998, St. Louis Post-Dispatch Washington D.C. bureau chief Jon Sawyer reported that, "Half of every dollar Senator John Ashcroft [R-Missouri] has raised this year for his political action committee has been plowed back into direct-mail advertising. A tiny portion, just $1,000 so far, has gone to conservative Republican candidates--the people Ashcroft pegged as prime beneficiaries when he announced last year that he was setting up a PAC. The biggest share by far, $529,903 as of June 30, has gone to direct mail companies--most of them controlled by or associated with Bruce Eberle."

* Deirdre Shesgreen of the Post-Dispatch Washington D.C. bureau followed up on December 12, 1999. "Last month, Ashcroft fired his direct-mail consultant, Bruce Eberle," Shesgreen wrote, "after the Associated Press inquired about accusations that Eberle used phony prisoner-of-war sightings to solicit money from veterans for another client. Eberle's solicitations came to light in 1992 during hearings held by the Senate Select Committee on POW-MIA Affairs.

Operation Rescue

"In one letter sent out by Eberle's firm," Shesgreen continued, "Air Force Colonel Jack Bailey appealed for money to help carry out a rescue mission he said would save Americans still being held prisoner from the Vietnam War. 'Please excuse the handwriting. But I'm writing at a makeshift desk on the deck of the Akuna II,' the letter read. 'The China Sea is tossing and rolling.' The committee reported that Eberle--not Bailey-- wrote the letter, and that Bailey's boat had been docked for more than two years."

Then-ABC News reporter Jamie Walker in 1991 memorably exposed Bailey and his MIA charity, called Operation Rescue, with an assist from International Primate Protection League founder Shirley McGreal.

"The background," McGreal told ANIMAL PEOPLE, "is that the desperate family of MIA Captain Donald Carr received a letter from a Bailey henchman, enclosing a grainy photo of a person identified as their son, sitting in a cage in a purported prison camp in a remote area. Money was needed to send an adventurer to rescue him. Somehow Walker got suspicious that a Thai animal dealer had to be involved."

Walker consulted McGreal, who identified the premises in the photo as those of "the disgusting Thai dealer Khampheng," doing business as Bangkok Wildlife. Khampheng had a German courier named Gunter Dittrich.

"Walker got a film crew in," McGreal continued to ANIMAL PEOPLE. "The giggly Thais said that Jack Bailey had come to Khampheng's and asked to take a photo of a man sitting in a cage," who turned out to be Gunter Dittrich.

Dittrich reportedly confirmed to Carr's widow that he was the man in the cage--but according to some accounts the grieving Carr family had apparently already given Operation Rescue a substantial sum.

"Though Eberle raised funds for Bailey," McGreal said, "there is no way to know if Eberle knew of this heartless scam."

Eberle does not appear to have been moved to ask hard questions of Bailey for quite some time, while amplifying Bailey's fundraising success to his own advantage.

According to the final report of the Senate Select Committee, "In approximately three years [1983-1986] Eberle prepared more than 40 solicitations on behalf of Operation Rescue and mailed them to hundreds of thousands of potential donors. They brought in contributions of approximately $2 million."

An Eberle employee, Linda Canada, "designed most of Operation Rescue's solicitations from 1984 to 1986," the Senate Select Committee report continued. "She told investigators that she could not provide the Committee with any facts to back up her statement in a 1985 solicitation that 'men are in terrible shape. Their time is running out.'"

That statement, the Senate Select Committee found, appeared in a mailing sent soon after "A memorandum dated April 2, 1985 from Eberle to Canada laid it out: 'I have an idea for three more packages on behalf of Operation Rescue: 1) Some sort of an international cable gram sent from Thailand to the donor describing the 'evidence' that Americans are still being held captive and the urgent need for tax-deductible contributions in support of the rescue efforts. 2) A handwritten or hand-printed letter on lined note paper written by firelight during an intelligence-gathering mission either inside of Cambodia or Vietnam, or at least on the banks of the river which divides Thailand and Cambodia. Same message. 3) A letter originated in Thailand, either on hotel stationery or on Akuna II staionery, stating that the Akuna is in port and can't leave again unless a certain amount of money is received. Letter could even be drafted on the desk of the Akuna."

All of these ideas were used.

"The Post Gram and the handwritten letter are clear examples of misleading solicitations," the Senate Select Committee found.

The Senate Select Committee further found that of the $2,283,472 that Operation Rescue raised with the Eberle mailings, the Eberle fundraising campaign consumed 89%.

Lifesavers

Eberle appears to have become aggressively involved in fundraising for animal causes in 1997 or 1998. Known Eberle clients include, or have included, besides Lifesavers, Tiger Haven, Tiger Creek, and Tiger Tracks (incorporated as the Cedarhill Animal Sanctuary), the Exotic Feline Rescue Foundation; Riddle's Elephant and Wildlife Sanctuary; the Wilderness Conservancy; and Wildlife Waystation, whose list seems to have been the magnet that lured many of the rest.

ANIMAL PEOPLE discussed the Eberle arrangements with six of the eight, and with representatives of three other organizations whose executives said they had declined to do business with Eberle after discussion.

Most told ANIMAL PEOPLE that Eberle or staff began their association with an unsolicited telephone call. Most said they were satisfied with the results of the Eberle campaigns; Exotic Feline Rescue Foundation founder Joe Taft said he was not, and accordingly ended their relationship.

Of them all, however, only Wildlife Waystation had significant previous fundraising experience. The others were relatively young organizations, relatively small, and appear to have been easily persuaded to commit huge sums to "cold mailings" using rented donor names, in hopes of building large mailing lists from scratch.

Lifesavers, for instance, spent $43,846 (59%) of its $74,734 budget in 1998-1999 on list-building via Eberle--and the first Lifesavers mailing by Eberle didn't even go out until April 1999, founder Jill Starr told ANIMAL PEOPLE. The Lifesavers fiscal year ended just 90 days later, well before Eberle sent out a December 1999 mailing on Lifesavers' behalf to 400,000 addresses.

Starr told ANIMAL PEOPLE that Lifesavers rescued "about 20 horses in 1999 and 10 in 1998." Her "rescues" were accomplished, she admitted, mainly by purchasing horses at auction, a practice much criticized by other rescuers including Enzo Giobbe and Stacy Wilson of the International Generic Horse Association/Horse Aid, because it has the net effect of supporting the floor prices, thereby keeping the auction system profitable for high-volume sellers.

The Lifesavers mailings purport to be saving horses from slaughter. But Lifesavers is located in Lancaster, California. Since the passage of the California Horse Slaughter Initiative in November 1998, selling horses to slaughter for human consumption has been illegal in California. However, since the mailings do not say which auctions Lifesavers attends, or where, horses might be bought at dogmeat auctions or in another state.

Tiger Creek

Like many and perhaps most humane organizations, whose purpose and modus operandi are not always well understood by media and the public, and--like any other enterprise that eventually accumulates rosters of disgruntled ex-patrons and staff, --Wildlife Waystation has weathered several rounds of controversy since opening in 1977.

The founders of several other sanctuaries that Eberle represents became controversial for tangential reasons.

Brian Werner of Tiger Creek, now located near Fort Worth, was suspected of losing a tiger in 1997 when predators killed two cattle near his former home in East Union Township, Ohio. But Werner's two adult tigers turned out to have been delivered to the not-well-regarded Turpentine Creek Wildlife Park in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, which Werner now denounces, and the third of his tigers was still a cub.

Werner meanwhile formed the Tigers Missing Link Foundation, a tiger registry viewed with much skepticism by many other sanctuarians, private tiger enthusiasts, and the American Zoo Association.

In early 2000 Werner brought himself to the notice of ANIMAL PEOPLE by sending above his own signature a list of National Rifle Association allegations against various animal rights groups, and by forwarding a purported USA Today news item about another sanctuary that turned out to be a forgery. Werner said he got the forgery from a private tiger owner who denied having had anything to do with it.

Riddle

The ANIMAL PEOPLE file on Scott Riddle of Riddle's Elephant and Wildlife Sanctuary in Greenbriar, Arkansas, began with a 1986 report by Jane Neufeld of the Daily Telegram in Garden City, Kansas, that Lee Richardson Zoo director Dan Raffa had requested a USDA probe into the death of a 23-year-old elephant named Twinkles.

Riddle, a former Los Angeles Zoo elephant keeper, and Gary Jacobson, a former L.A. Zoo elephant ride concessionaire, had allegedly used an electroshockdevice to try to get Twinkles aboard a truck, after buying her for a zoo that Jacobson ran in Florida.

Neufeld said she had been contacted "by four persons from the Los Angeles area." Among them were Carol Buckley, who founded The Elephant Sanctuary at Hohenwald, Tennessee, in 1994, but was then identified as "a Los Angeles area elephant owner," and Pat Wyatt, "a former Los Angeles Zoo employee who worked with elephants when Riddle was at the zoo." That was from the 1960s into the early 1970s, and again from about 1980 until the early 1990s, according to then-L.A. Zoo curator Ed Alonzo.

Both Buckley and Wyatt "expressed concern about the proper and improper use of electricity on elephants. Both referred to deaths of [two] elephants at the L.A. Zoo while Riddle worked there," wrote Neufeld. Each elephant died from injuries apparently resulting from conflict with other elephants.

Alonzo said he believed electric shocking devices had been used on elephants during Riddle's time at the L.A. Zoo, but--as Neufeld put it--"said that the zoo did not consider the deaths to be attributed to Riddle."

Riddle was apparently never charged with any offense. But rumors that he handles elephants roughly resurfaced from totally different sources in 1994, after Riddle opened a "comprensive school in elephant training, handling, and safety procedures" at the Arkansas site, which Riddle then billed as a "breeding farm and wildlife sanctuary."

Riddle's star guest instructor was Robert "Smoky" Jones--a trainer long unpopular with animal rights activists.

ANIMAL PEOPLE sought the perspective of two of Jones' colleagues: Arlen Seidon, a performing elephant trainer for 40 years before founding the Animal Education, Protection, & Information Foundation sanctuary in Fordland, Missouri, and Doug Cook, who trained both elephants and dolphins.

Seidon said he had once employed Jones, but dismissed him because he was "just too damned rough."

Cook called Jones "one of the top four" elephant trainers in the world, but confirmed that his technique for "adjusting" the behavior of difficult elephants could be considered "pretty rough."

Riddle was linked again to electroshocking elephants in December 1999, when David Harrison of the London Sunday Telegraph revealed that, "Electric goads, prohibited under European Association of Zoos guidelines, are being used on four Asian elephants at the Blackpool Zoo. Keepers routinely carry the implements when working in close proximity to the four elephants. The elephants are trained by Scott Riddle, an American elephant consultant."

Tiger Haven

The most notorious Eberle client in animal protection, however, may be Joseph Donovan Parker, 53, who founded Tiger Haven in 1993 with his wife Mary Lynn Parker. Accused of skimming $50,000 in proceeds during 1986 and 1997 from charity bingo games, Joe Parker drew a reduced sentence on lesser charges after turning prosecution witness in a joint federal/state probe of alleged corruption in bingo gambling that apparently led to the December 1989 suicide of Tennessee secretary of state Gentry Crowell. Parker served three months in a halfway house for conspiracy and tax evasion.

Parker opened a Knoxville bingo hall to benefit Tiger Haven in May 1994, but reportedly closed it in 1996 after Knoxville News-Sentinel staff writer Wesley Loy questioned his methods in August 1995.

ANIMAL PEOPLE learned in 1999 that Parker had not filed IRS Form 990, the federal accountability document required of charities doing at least $25,000 worth of business, since fiscal 1996.

--Merritt Clifton