Ted Samply is a former SF sgt. who no self respecting soldier, airman or Mairine would walk across a street to spit on. He has and will continue to use the POW/MIA issue to line his own pockets.
“Ted Samply is a former SF sgt. who no self respecting soldier, airman or Mairine would walk across a street to spit on. He has and will continue to use the POW/MIA issue to line his own pockets.”
“Documents filed with the court revealed the extent to which Sampley had made use of the statue and, indeed, of the entire POW issue.
The material showed that he had created a self-contained financial network that revolved around POWs and MIAs. One of Sampley’s companies, Red Hawk, manufactured the POW T-shirts and sold them to his nonprofit Homecoming II, which in turn sold them at the vigil booth. Although Sampley could say he was destitute, with only one personal bank account containing $ 1 00, the organizations were quite healthy. His reported earnings from the cash-only T-shirt concession amounted to nearly $2 million over three years.
The cash flow was 7 abundant. In August 1991 alone, Homecoming II wrote ten checks to Red Hawk, totaling more than $18,000. Some of the checks were written on the same day or only a few days apart.
Despite the constant influx of money, Sampley did not pay the people who worked at the vigil booth. They were considered volunteers. Sampley also used them to compile data for his POW/ MIA biography project and to fold copies of U.S. Veteran News and Report.
In return for their work, which continued in shifts around the clock, the volunteers got a place to sleep at the Homecoming II House in Annandale, Virginia.
I visited the house shortly before Christmas of 1992 and found a stark arrangement that worked entirely to Sampley’s benefit. Residents explained that they had to buy their own food and personal goods, even though they worked full time for no pay.
Among the volunteers was Cheyenne Borton, an eighteen-year-old girl who was the only female in a houseful of middle-aged men. Cheyenne explained how Sampley had arranged the volunteers’ sleeping quarters: “When the house is full, you just pick a place on the floor.”
Despite its similarities to a nineteenth-century workhouse, the Homecoming II facility did not come under scrutiny in the course of the Hart/Scruggs lawsuit. The judge did not look into the financial dealings of the house, nor did he examine its relationship to Sampley’s Red Hawk corporation. He merely looked at the concession stand sales figures and ordered Sampley to pay royalties in the amount Of $359,442.92.
It was only a symbolic victory for Hart and Scruggs. Sampley said he wasn’t going to pay and successfully resisted all attempts to collect on the judgment.
I asked Sampley how he had managed to avoid doing what the court had ordered. “I immediately put Red Hawk out of business,” he said. “I sold everything they owned, and paid bills. I closed down Homecoming II. I heard that Scruggs was planning to levy the vigil site, so I gave it away. I put everything into another nonprofit group.”
When sheriffs arrived to foreclose on Sampley, there was nothing to seize. 8
Sampley, who says he has spent more than a half-million dollars defending himself on the T-shirt charge, emerged energized by the conflict. When it seemed as if the fight with Scruggs had progressed as far as it would go, Sampley turned to new attention-grabbing projects and reverted to one of his stock-in- trade publicity stunts, the bamboo cage. In the fall of 1993 he erected a cage outside the Camp Lejeune Marine Corps base and arranged for three MIA wives to starve themselves inside. While in the cage, the women ingested varying combinations of water, juice, and vitamins, but none took any food. The fast was a protest against President Clinton’s plan to lift the trade embargo against Vietnam.”
Thank you for telling me about Ted. I wasn’t aware of his agenda, but I do know a little about Pipeline “News”, which has been around for years in one incarnation or another—and it has never been anything close to a “news” org.