Bakker’s Heritage USA Is Born Again : Development: Televangelist Morris Cerullo heads a group that has bought the Christian resort. Plans are to reopen it this summer.

An appeals court says his 45-year prison sentence may have been a bit stiff, so Jim Bakker’s back on Page One.

You remember Jim Bakker--the televangelist who paid himself $1.6 million in salary and bonuses in 1986 while claiming his PTL ministry was on the brink of bankruptcy.

It was Bakker’s zeal to create and expand Heritage USA, his 2,200-acre Christian resort and amusement park in Ft. Mill, S.C., that finally collapsed his empire. He promised that for those who donated at least $1,000, there would always be a room at the inn. But it turned out there were more promises than rooms.

After Bakker was convicted on charges of mail fraud and sent to prison in 1989, Heritage USA was closed, boarded up and sent into bankruptcy. Since then, the park has been overgrown by weeds, plundered by thieves and battered by Hurricane Hugo.

This week, a federal appeals court ordered Bakker resentenced by a different judge, declaring that the first was personally biased. And Heritage USA is getting a second chance as well in the person of William Lund, an economic analyst with headquarters in Irvine, who is described by an executive who employed him as knowing “more about resort properties than anyone.”

Lund’s resume includes major economic studies for Disney World, Disneyland, Universal Studios, Knott’s Berry Farm and a string of large development companies. The executive adds: “He (Lund) hasn’t been a headline guy or a principal, but he’s been behind the scenes a lot.”

Now Lund is behind the scenes again, hired by San Diego faith healer and televangelist Morris Cerullo to lead the revival of Heritage USA. Cerullo assembled a corps of corporate backers last December and bought the Bakker resort and TV network for $52 million.

Unlike Bakker, Cerullo does not plan to build a theme park. But Lund says Cerullo will follow Bakker’s general direction.

About $30 million is budgeted to rehabilitate the park, get it open in July, then expand it over the next two years.

A second hotel, about 70% completed when the park was closed, will be finished, Lund said. More hotels will be built so that they, together with a convention center, can host up to 90% of Christian conferences held internationally.

“There’s a lot of them held every year. Dr. Cerullo just held his world conference in Anaheim--he holds it there every year--and more than 6,000 people came from all over the world,” Lund said.

One, perhaps two golf courses will be constructed. More condos and houses will be built, intended primarily for retiring Christians.

Bakker’s ideas and plans for Heritage “were very wise,” Lund said. “I think Jimmy Bakker had a great idea, and I think if he’d run this as a business, as will now be done, it never would have had the problems that it did. And he certainly wouldn’t have had his problems.”

At Heritage USA, you left the secular world behind. Every employee, from the room clerk to the trash man, was a smiling, “born-again” Christian. So was the family in the next and every other room. No one drank; no one smoked. You were with your people.

At its peak, Heritage USA was drawing visitors to a first-class, 500-room hotel, and another was under construction. Campgrounds and RV parks were available for those who didn’t want to pay the hotel rates. Houses and condominiums were being sold to permanent residents, mostly retirees; about 400 still live there.

Attractions included a 10-acre water park with seven water slides, swimming pools, a miniature golf course, a tennis club, softball fields, a roller rink, a dinner theater, a 3,000-seat amphitheater, six restaurants, a miniature train, a studio for taping the Bakkers’ TV show, an Old Jerusalem-themed shopping area and a replica of the Last Supper.

Bakker proved the idea worked, “but we couldn’t go by that anymore, because of many reasons,” Cerullo said in an interview this week. One of the main reasons, he said, is “the bad publicity. How can you overcome the incredible bad publicity it has received on a worldwide basis?”

The successful reopening of the park is “not a fait accompli, let’s be honest. It’s going to be a step-by-step process,” Cerullo said. “We can’t expect people to just take us at face value. We’re going to have to prove ourselves.”

Cerullo, whose ministry is oriented overseas, was an unknown nationally when he emerged late last year as a prospective buyer of Bakker’s assets.

Bakker claimed Heritage USA drew nearly 6 million visitors in one year, but Lund says 2 million is probably more realistic. That’s far less than last year’s estimated 28.5 million visitors at Disney World or the 12.9 million at Disneyland, but enough to put Heritage USA in the top 10 of amusement parks in its time.

“That by itself was a remarkable feat,” Lund said.

Most resorts aim at a certain economic slice of the population--for instance, people earning at least $40,000 a year. But Bakker targeted a religious slice and made his resort affordable to all economic levels within that group.

Several potential buyers initially approached bankruptcy officials, but “everybody got cold feet,” said Jeffrey K. Hadden, a professor of sociology at the University of Virginia who has published two books on televangelists. He acted as consultant to one prospective buyer.

The Catawba Indian tribe had filed suit claiming it is true owner of the land. The “partners” who had donated to Bakker in exchange for visiting rights at Heritage USA were threatening to sue as well. Buying the park “looked good on paper, but when you looked at the imponderables, everybody took flight,” Hadden said.

Bankruptcy officials were becoming desperate when Cerullo appeared, Hadden said. “You have to at least give him credit for his timing being right. If he’d shown up earlier, he’d have gotten no attention at all. But he walked in when every other option for the property had fallen through.”

Hadden said he thought Cerullo might be in over his head.

“Cerullo, as best I can tell, has attracted a kind of rag-taggle of nondenominational folks over the years, but not an identifiable group in terms of demographics or institutional affiliation. He just doesn’t have the charisma. He’s raising his money from a constituency that is much narrower than what Jim Bakker once had. I don’t think there’s a prayer” of his raising the necessary funds on his own, he said.

But Hadden conceded that with backers, Cerullo “might be able to pull it off.”

Cerullo put down $7 million and promised to pay $45 million more by Dec. 15 to close the deal. He launched an appeal over his own TV network but raised only about $5 million, he said. So he turned to corporate backers.

To the rescue came Tan Shri Khoo Kay Peng, chairman and father-figure of Malayan United Industries (MUI), a banking, manufacturing, trading and hotel conglomerate that ranks as Malaysia’s 21st-largest company. Khoo is well known for his Christian zeal and is said to preach to his mainly Christian management team during weekly meetings.

Khoo signed up MUI of Malaysia and Hong Kong as partners with Morris Cerullo Worldwide Evangelism. A Christian hotel firm, Seraphim Corp. of Vancouver, B.C., joined in, and the firms formed a for-profit corporation that now owns New Heritage USA.

Cerullo is chairman of the board. The division of ownership is confidential information, he said.

Cerullo’s ministry has bought real estate before--most notably the El Cortez hotel in San Diego and 200 acres in nearby Mira Mesa--but he sold them at a profit before realizing his development plans.

He objects to press reports that his development plans have consistently fizzled. He insisted his plans for New Heritage USA will succeed and he will “take back what Satan tried to steal.”

Cerullo concedes that “a great portion” of Heritage USA’s attendance was attributable to Bakker’s charisma. But he said New Heritage USA will succeed in spite of that.

“We’re going to build it on, first of all, a good, solid, businesslike basis, and No. 2, all of the religious aspects and the business aspects are going to be at arm’s length and totally separated so there’s no commingling. That’s very critical.”

He said he’ll try “to reestablish relationships” with those who donated to Bakker expecting park benefits in return. “We’ll let them know, ‘Hey, look, the past is the past. You gave to help build this, so come back and enjoy it.’ ”

But there will be no refunds or benefits offered them, Cerullo said: “There’s nothing we can do except just love them and try to nurture them and let them know that they’re welcome.”