The Tax People boasted that its “Tax Dream Team” included former I.R.S. Cota was sentenced to two years in prison. Bell won more than 20 counties across Texas including a number of West Texas and Texas Panhandle counties such as Potter and Randall Counties, … A judge shut the firm down the next year, ruling that it was an illegal pyramid scheme that had cost customers and investors at least $84 million. His Topeka lawyer, Jerry Berger, said at the time that Mr. Cooper was unaware of a sealed 148-count federal indictment against him and his “Dream Team.” Mr. Cooper had been living in Puerto Vallarta with his wife, Mary Cooper, and two children, Mr. Berger said.Eric Melgren, the United States attorney for the Kansas district at the time, said that Mr. Cooper and his confederates had been “selling something that was too good to be true,” and that it was just “bad advice, wrapped up in glossy packages and false promises.”Mr. Other members of his team pleaded guilty to money laundering, conspiring to defraud the federal government and other charges and were given much lighter sentences.Mr.
Cooper’s business involved soliciting investors who would pay up to $1,200 plus $100 a month for each “package” of tax-avoidance methods they received, with promises that their income tax obligations would shrivel.The Tax People was the subject of a front-page article in The New York Times in September 2000, part of a series on tax schemes that was awarded a Pulitzer Prize.That article examined Mr. Cooper’s claims that “golf, hunting, fishing and even vacations with your family” could become tax-deductible expenses for those who bought the company’s system. At a civil court hearing, Charles W. King, a professor of marketing at the University of Illinois at Chicago, testified that The Tax People was a legitimate marketing firm.Professor King’s testimony came after Mr. Cota had admitted in court that the firm’s claim to have signed up thousands of tax professionals was false, and that the real number was 541.Mr. She said a police officer had recommended the system as a legal way to reduce income taxes.“The Tax People were encouraging you to start your own business, just so you could have a tax write-off, but there was no other real intention other than tax deductions,” Ms. Szarama said in a phone interview, adding that she had grown suspicious after joining because the tax-avoidance strategies seemed vague. When asked which team member should be queried, Mr. Cooper stood up and walked out of the room.Carla Stovall, the Kansas attorney general at the time, asked a state court in 2001 to shut down the business. Michael Cooper, a Beaumont pastor, former candidate for United States Senate, and President of the NAACP of Beaumont, announced his endorsement of Senator Royce West in the upcoming Democratic Primary runoff election in Beaumont Thursday morning. Cooper and his team, court papers showed, falsely asserted that “every strategy contained in the Tax Relief System is absolutely sound, unassailable and proven over the past 40 years,” and that the system “was approved for continuing education credit for C.P.A.s in all 50 states.”Richard D. Anderson, a Kansas state court judge, ordered the firm closed and directed Mr. Cooper to forfeit his assets.“At its core,” the judge wrote, “the Renaissance marketing plan is a clever scheme to extract money from consumers through the use of misrepresented facts, exaggerated claims and projections, undisclosed material facts and false promotions.”Judge Anderson jailed Mr. Cooper for contempt of court and ordered him to forfeit $13.6 million, but freed him 13 days later on Mr. Cooper’s promise to travel to Mexico to recover $2 million that he said belonged to him.