Fallen Angel

Brock argues that while Piazza had the authority to fire her, the grounds on which he did so were unfair. "She was not my subordinate. Everybody on the planet found out, even MCC. It was quite an ordeal, but I'm grateful. It changed me. The person who was hurt in this was my partner."

Within a year of driving Piazza to the sex club, Neil quit his job at the church because of the stress and long hours. Part of the stress he chalked up to Piazza's controlling nature and double standards.

But leaving came at a high price. At first Piazza ignored Neil's notice and refused to fill the pending vacancy. Two weeks stretched to two months. Finally Neil packed his files and said he was leaving by week's end. The pastor was livid. Neil says Piazza retaliated by giving him a negative performance evaluation and sending copies to the board.

A 10-year friendship was destroyed. Neil says he hasn't spoken to Piazza since.

Seeds of Undoing

In the sterile conference room at the Nokia headquarters in Plano, Terri Frey asks to see my press pass before she'll answer questions, despite several e-mails and phone conversations. The days of trusting people at their word are over, she explains. After all, she thought she knew her friends, her pastor and her church. Now she errs on the side of caution.

"I was in the cult of Michael Piazza," she says, her eyes burning. "I adored him. He was God in many ways to me."

It was Frey who saw the church's finances going sideways and sent up red flags. She developed a financial tracking system, organized accounting information, compiled attendance and giving reports and kept meticulous files brimming with correspondence. Those files she would later turn over to the denomination's investigators, an act for which she was vilified and cast as a modern-day Judas.

Frey moved to Dallas from Florida and started attending the cathedral in the spring of 1993. The new Cathedral of Hope was nothing short of magnificent, and services were breathtaking. "I felt God's presence in that building," she says. "That's the only way I can describe it."

Church had always been a cornerstone in her life, but she needed it now more than ever. A child of alcoholic parents who sexually abused her, she sought to make sense of her burden through the church. She looked to church counselors for therapy and spoke of her shame and hurt to ministers Paul Tucker and Piazza. In return for the spiritual balm, she gave her time and money to the church. She volunteered at the teen center and tithed thousands of dollars a year.

In the middle of her healing process, life dealt another blow. Her adoptive brother Danny was diagnosed with AIDS. He died of a brain tumor in 1995.

"I spent a lot of time going to church in off-hours," she says. "I would light a candle and sit in the pews. I would just try to understand how that happened. It was a difficult, dark period of my life."

In 1996, Piazza unveiled a stunning new $20 million building campaign that promised to bring to Dallas and the gay community a world-class cathedral. At the time the program launched, attendance and giving had reached an all-time high with 1,200 members contributing an average of about $34 per person.

With the campaign in full swing, Piazza asked the congregation to step up and give as much as they could to make the dream a reality.

Frey, who already was contributing $10,000 a year, sent in another $1,000 check along with a letter praising Piazza's powerful sermons, and in 1997 she was asked to join the board of directors to help get the fledgling campaign off the ground. She also donated her time as a consultant on the building project and had access to all of the church's financial records as well as its lists of people solicited for donations.

Despite the prosperity of the previous year, the church was not meeting its operating expenses. More people were coming to church, but they were kicking in less. Contributions had fallen in December 1997 to an average of $26 a person. The church was more than $65,000 short on cash for operating expenses, which was carried into the new year.

Starting in 1997, the church shifted money between accounts to meet expenses. It was not a one-time deal.

Information obtained by the Observer reveals that the church placed a hold on $50,000 worth of checks that December to keep afloat. It borrowed nearly $74,000 from operating funds to try to raise money for the building fund, and still the project was more than $100,000 short for the new year.

Again in 2002, the church ran short on money for basic operations and dug into the building fund's purse for more than $263,000.

An e-mail sent to a congregant in April 2003 by the church's executive director, Ken Upton, defends the church's financial actions. He admits that money was borrowed from the building funds "when giving was down," but justifies the move since "the general fund pays a commercial rate of interest to the capital fund, the same as if the funds were invested, so any suggestion that the capital fund is being shortchanged is nonsense."