Although he avoided the media frenzy that dogged his predecessors Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart, Tilton was a heavy in his day. At its apex, his empire reaped $80 million annually, before an ABC investigation put the screws on his allegedly fraudulent outfit in 1991.

Tilton's march toward televangelist titanhood began in the early 1970s. According to "Primetime Live," Tilton was then struggling through college, enamored of getting hogged up on Saturday night as a prelude to local tent revival meetings. He and his cohorts would run down front, imploring the hucksters to "save" them along with the rubes. Listless at university, Tilton took the yuks to heart by establishing his own canvass-based road show. A decade in the wilderness paid dividends with the establishment of Word of Faith Family Church north of Dallas. This sterile edifice became the headquarters of the wildly popular nationwide program "Success-N-Life" -- a faith-based "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire."

Tilton's spiel was hardly novel. He borrowed heavily from Pentecostal "prosperity gospel" teachings and specific biblical passages that implied a monetary and spiritual quid pro quo from God if "vows and seeds" were "paid and sown." Tilton was an innovator in one sense: He was the first TV preacher to follow up saturation television exposure (he was on the air in all 235 American TV markets) with a massive and sophisticated direct-mail operation. Each envelope contained a "gift from God" -- "miracle" cornmeal packets, holy oil, faith rings, cutout angels -- designed specifically to create an obligation to reciprocate financially.

Clearly recognizing that his target audience was generally poor and gullible, Tilton commiserated by claiming that God hadn't sent him to "the fat cats of this world." This shrewd pitch (he often recalled his own past travails) came by way of a quirkily engaging delivery. Breaking off trancelike midsentence to speak in tongues was standard -- "sonda basoya" being the minister's favored bit of faux-Sumerian sputtering.

Tilton also built credibility through homespun -- and scripted -- testimonials: A hapless couple would recount their mishaps on cue while one of Tilton's well-scrubbed cronies prodded and nodded as needed. Without fail, the vignette would conclude with newly prosperous followers lounging by their dandy new pool or suburban hearth, earnestly crediting Tilton's "miracle plan for man."

The final segment of "Success-N-Life" was ritually subdivided between serial readings of hefty, incoming vows and spontaneous, vicarious healings. In a boilerplate charade, still practiced by Tilton's heir Benny Hinn, the evangelist would press his eyes shut and run off a laundry list of ailments that God was healing that very moment. One minute the "demonic spirit of cancer" was vanquished; the next a nebulous "growth in the head" was cured.

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