One was a devout polygamist in an insular Mormon sect. The other was a shady Armenian businessman known as “The Lion.” Together they pulled off a near‑billion‑dollar tax scam.
Jacob Kingston was a member of “The Order,” an insular Mormon polygamist sect, when he built a biodiesel refinery. He partnered with shadowy Armenian businessman Levon Termendzhyan to ship the fuel overseas and take advantage of lucrative tax credits given to renewable energy producers. But the operations were largely on paper, as the company racked up big government checks for fuel never produced. The unlikely pair spun a web full of dirty cops, political connections, and transnational money laundering that ripped American taxpayers off for nearly one billion dollars.
In the podcast “Kingdom of Fraud” from Novel and iHeartPodcasts, host Michele McPhee explores one of the largest tax frauds in history and the colorful characters behind it. The series recounts how members of a polygamist sect and a globe‑trotting fixer exploited a broken system, and how investigators took them down.
OUR SPOILER-FREE REVIEWS OF "KINGDOM OF FRAUD" BEGING THE FINAL 11 MINUTES OF THE EPISODE.