Angel Food charity defends salaries, loans

Monroe — The fortunes of Angel Food Ministries and the Wingo family who runs it have risen dramatically in 14 years.

Joe Wingo started the nonprofit by selling 34 boxes of cut-rate groceries to laid-off mill workers off his back porch. In 2007, it sold $111 million in food in 35 states.

Wingo and his wife began the organization without salaries. But between 2005 and 2007, IRS documents show, the nonprofit paid them and two sons a total of $2.8 million.

Angel Food also made $1.4 million in personal loans to the Wingos during that time.

In addition, it loaned $83,000 to a church the Wingos started.

Plus, it loaned more than $1.4 million to three for-profit companies and one nonprofit the family owns.

The amounts have created a buzz in the nonprofit community and some of the 5,000 churches that provide volunteer labor to Angel Food Ministries, which sells and distributes food to the needy.

Interest grew after the FBI and IRS raided the company’s offices Feb. 11.

Documents related to the search have been sealed, and officials refused to talk about it.

An e-mail the firm sent to churches said they believe the target is an individual or individuals connected to the organization, not the ministry itself.

“Whooo!” was Bill Buzenburg’s response to news of the salaries.

He is the executive director of a watchdog group in Washington, the Center for Public Integrity.

The salaries and loans on their face are not illegal, but are potential conflicts of interest, he said.

“There is a smell test. And the fact that these four people are in senior positions and on the board and taking large salaries and giving themselves loans, none of this passes the smell test,” he said.

A 2008 survey by the Nonprofit Times, an industry publication, shows the average CEO salary of $50 million-plus nonprofits was about $218,000 a year.

Joe Wingo’s salary was $69,598 in 2005, when the organization sold $36 million in food and had an $8 million profit.

His salary jumped to $588,529 in 2006, when it sold $96 million in food with a $20.9 million profit. Wife Linda and sons Wesley and Andrew averaged more than $500,000 each that year.

“Five hundred and eighty-eight thousand dollars, that is just astronomical,” said Janelle Kerlin, an assistant professor in the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies at Georgia State University.

Kerlin compared that to CARE, the international development agency based in Atlanta.

“It brings in over $600 million a year. It’s a huge organization, far outsizing this one, and its top executive makes $400,000 a year,” she said.

Half-million-dollar salaries are a long way from where the Wingos started. A member of the Gwinnett Hospital Authority, Joe was convicted in 1989 of extorting $17,500 from a doctor.

He served a year in prison, was released and scraped by on menial jobs before starting Angel Food Ministries and Emmanuel Praise Church.

“When I was reduced to nothing, I decided to sell out to God completely,” Wingo said in an earlier interview, explaining his turn to full-time ministry.

Now the Wingos fly to meetings in the private jet Angel Food leases. They hold property valued at more than $930,000, and last year Joe spoke at the White House’s Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives.

A public relations agent hired by Angel Food declined to make the Wingos available for interviews.

Joe Wingo defended their salaries in an earlier, unpublished interview. His 2006 salary was low compared with that of executives at a $100 million for-profit company, he said.

“I could probably make about $2 million a year in salary,” and not be out of line, he said.

He saw no difference between running a for-profit business and a nonprofit, Christian ministry like Angel Food.

“Should Christians running an organization have a different ethos of compensation? I don’t think so, because business is business. I don’t care if it’s God’s business, your business or whose business it is,” he said.

The family’s independent evangelical church in Monroe pays them together several hundred more thousand dollars a year, Wingo said.

The family’s salaries in 2007 — when Angel Food’s profits rose 27 percent to a record $26.7 million on $111 million in sales — dropped significantly, to $402,098.

However, they took out personal loans of $453,332 in 2007, bringing the total of personal loans from the nonprofit to $1.4 million over three years.

Loans from Angel Food to businesses registered to family members include $1.1 million to the for-profit Good Hope Transportation, a trucking firm formed to help them deliver food, according to Joe Wingo; $246,146 to Linjoe, a company that has purchased $274,000 worth of property; $25,123 to Good Hope Food Co., and $3,814 to the nonprofit Good Hope Construction.

Wingo said last year he was trying to be above-board about the money.

“We just want to keep the ministry very pure. We try very hard just to make it work. Will we make mistakes? … You bet I will. But you know what? I bet all the folks that work for me will stick up for me and say I just want to do the right thing.”

About a dozen people at the Wingos’ church Sunday stood by their pastor, telling stories about Joe Wingo personally paying for funerals for their family members or helping them or others with gifts of money.

William Gray, who said he served 37 years in prison on a murder charge, said Joe Wingo visited his prison in 1995.

After Gray was released in 2007, the Wingos hired him and helped him find housing in Monroe.

“Without them, I wouldn’t have made it,” he said. “I think they deserve more [money] than that for all they do for people.”