(continued)

Meanwhile, an Internet job posting said the Royal Guard had 200 openings for "an elite team of highly trained men and women who will provide the following services: Inter-national and domestic risk management; intelligence and protective operations; VIP/executive protection to dignitaries and celebrities; special event security; counter-surveillance and counter-terrorist measures."

How did the South Bronx-raised star of New Jack City and Jungle Fever get mixed up with a movement that preaches anti-government paranoia and outright racism?Sills grew even more alarmed after an application Snipes's representatives sent to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms requesting the right to utilize weapons on the property turned out to contain false information (claiming, for instance, that the group already owned the property). Though Snipes offered to pay several times the market value for the parcel, the sale was eventually nixed by the local zoning board after Sills testified against it. The sheriff remains convinced that Snipes's determination to buy the land was related to the Nuwaubians. "If all he wanted to do was buy a piece of property," Sills says, "he could have gone to another county and gotten a similar property for one-tenth of the price."

How Snipes first got involved with the criminal cult remains a source of puzzlement. The group was started in the late 1960s in Brooklyn, where York—a prophet, spiritualist, and according to the group's website, "author of over 350 books" on subjects ranging from Egyptian architecture to alien abduction—lectured to a small band of followers, preaching, among other things, that the world would soon end; that the devil cast a spell thousands of years ago to keep black people spiritually ignorant; that York is an extraterrestrial from the planet Rizq; and that malevolent aliens walk among us, poisoning our minds via pop culture. Despite York's more outlandish claims, however, some of his teachings appear to have struck a chord with black nationalists—including rap pioneer Afrika Bambaataa and hip-hop artists such as Mobb Deep's Prodigy and MF Doom—eager to assert links to the ancient Egyptians. This aspect of York's teachings may have caught Snipes's eye as well.

In 1993, with money donated by hundreds of followers, York relocated the group to a 476-acre property in Putnam County, where he built the village of Tama-Re, a sprawling Egyptian-themed complex of pyramids, obelisks, and statues of Egyptian gods, which he declared a sovereign nation. Unsurprisingly, the compound, also known as the Egypt of the West, ran afoul of local building codes, bringing constant battles with local law enforcement. "The first major altercation occurred when building inspectors showed up and were met by armed individuals who refused to allow them onto the property," Sills recalls. "Another time I went out there and two armed guards stood in front of my vehicle and would not move. I believe that Mr. York wanted a Waco situation."

Possibly, it was through the Nuwaubians that Snipes found his way into the radical tax protestor movement. The cult issued millions in false bills of exchange to the IRS, a technique pioneered by the Montana Freemen, a white supremacist Christian Patriot group whose 1996 standoff with federal agents in Montana led to the longest federal siege in modern U.S. history. Surprisingly, given their racial and political differences, the Freeman and the Nuwaubians found common cause in a shared dislike for government and a penchant for conspiracy theories.

Tax expert J.J. MacNab claims that in 1999, four members of the Freemen traveled to Georgia to teach the Nuwaubians how to process phony bills of exchange (often checks falsely drawn from the U.S. Treasury). Sills, the Putnam County sheriff, confirms interaction between the two radical groups. He says that while visiting the compound in 1999, he met a high-level Freeman named Everett Leon Stout, who was notorious for issuing phony warrants for the arrest of law enforcement officers and eventually issued one for the arrest of Sills himself. In 2002, Stout was indicted for fraud, and in 2004 York was sentenced to more than 100 years in prison for rape and child abuse. His followers remain devoted, however. In November, a handful of deputies in Clarke County, Georgia, sympathetic to the Nuwaubian cause, were fired for giving imprisoned members of the group preferential treatment, and the theme of the 11th annual Nuwaubian Ball, held at Atlanta's Fox Theater on December 29, 2006, was "The Noble and Illustrious Rev. Dr. Malachi Z. York is Innocent!"

It's not hard to see why the anti-tax gospel might have appealed to Snipes, whose seven-figure payday on Blade II would have entitled Uncle Sam to about a one-third cut. Looking to avoid the massive bill, he somehow hooked up with Kahn, whom the actor's lawyer now blames for Snipes's predicament. The folksy 63-year-old accountant was a far cry from the high-powered moneymen who usually oversee the finances of Hollywood's A-list. Kahn operated his practice, American Rights Litigators, from an office above a Victorian costume shop in Mount Dora, Florida, with his wife, Kathleen "Kookie" Kahn. Kahn was a passionate advocate of the so-called 861 Argument, which maintains that Americans may be taxed only on wages earned from a foreign company. Though this fanciful interpretation is frequently cited by radical tax protestors, the IRS has always dismissed their assertion as fraud. Courts have invariably agreed. "The batting average of tax protestors in the courtroom is .000," says New York Times reporter David Cay Johnston. "Every court that has heard the arguments of the tax protestors has rejected them as nonsense."

Ominously for Snipes, prosecutors have won serious jail time for defendants in a number of recent cases. "The government has gotten very serious with these people," observes Heidi Beirich of the Southern Poverty Law Center. "Snipes hasn't paid taxes in years, and I think there's a pretty good chance he'll do time. They sent Richard Hatch to jail, right?"

If the case does end up in court, as seems increasingly likely, Billy Martin's contention that Snipes was an unwitting victim of unscrupulous advisers will be difficult to maintain. The actor didn't help matters when he sent an Orlando Sentinel reporter an impassioned e-mail in which he pointed out that "being a black male that asks questions doesn't help the situation." Calling himself an "artist and scholar seeking truth through diligent study and spiritual practice," he added, "Perhaps people like that have now become the enemy of the State." He also took the opportunity to direct the reader to several popular tax protestor websites.

Even more telling was the strange notation that Snipes scrawled on the Conditions of Release form he signed: "All rights reserved without prejudice." Among their other arcane legalistic beliefs, radical tax protestors maintain that including the words without prejudice is an indication that a contract was signed under duress. Whether Snipes intended to signal that he considered the contract invalid is another question that may be answered in court.

If he does end up before a jury, Snipes can always rely on his famous leonine charisma, which, judging from his appearance in Ocala, remains very much in effect. Working in his favor will be the still bewildering notion of a famously Afrocentric star getting mixed up with the radical right. As one tax protestor recently noted on a movement message board, "There is no jury ... in the world that will ever believe that Wesley Snipes made friends with and conspired with a known white supremacist to willfully fail to file his taxes."

Then again, if audiences bought him as a half-human-half-vampire vampire slayer, you never can tell.

---

This article originally ran in the March/April 2007 print edition of Radar Magazine. For a risk-free copy of our current issue, click here

READ MORE
• Fast Company: How high-flying Web star-up DEN imploded among allegations of drug use, guns, and pedophilia
• Love and Kate: As years of hard living and bad boyfriends take their toll, is the world's last supermodel in free fall?