One of the biggest questions people have about Rev. Moon is where he gets his money from; the answer is a vast network of legal and illegal businesses all over the world, everything from fishing to arms dealing. He’s particularly big in the fishing business, in the US, Japan and all over Asia. One of his businesses, True World Foods, provides sushi-grade fish for a large percentage of the sushi restaurants in the US, particularly in the San Francisco area. And one of his ministers just got busted for poaching sharks.

Federal prosecutors scored a coup last week when Reverend Kevin Thompson, Bay Area leader for the Unification Church — aka the Moonies — was sentenced to one year behind bars for running the world’s largest baby-leopard-shark poaching ring. But previously undisclosed evidence suggests that the conservative newspaper publisher and church supreme leader Reverend Sun Myung Moon both knew of and encouraged Thompson’s illegal operation.

This was a major operation. The Feds put the value of just the East Bay operation at $1.2 million, but True World Foods is the nation’s largest supplier of sushi-grade fish. And in a sermon, Thompson spilled the beans about the whole thing:

None of this circumstantial evidence, most of which Torres detailed in federal court records, established a direct link between Thompson’s sharks and the King of the Ocean. But the pastor voluntarily made that link himself. In a 2003 sermon captured on audiotape, Thompson said he personally informed the True Father about the shark enterprise. “When I had the chance to tell our founder Reverend Moon about it … he told me, you know, ‘You need twenty boats out there fishing!’” he boasted. “He had this big plan drawn out, you know.” Thompson, a Brit who speaks with a Scottish accent, also said he had to convince the excited Moon not to expand the operation, apparently out of fear that it would attract notice.

The 35-minute sermon, once available on the church’s Web site (BAFC.org), has been taken down, but Full Disclosure recently obtained a digital copy (an excerpt of which is posted on our news blog, 92510). In it, Thompson describes his shark operation in detail.

And it could lead to nailing Moon himself:

Clearly, the Thompson audio is damning, and it likely played a role in getting the local churchman a stiff sentence for actions that, no matter how creepy, essentially boil down to poaching. But it’s unclear whether the feds will use the audiotape to hook the biggest fish of all. We may find out soon: The US Attorney’s Office has slated a major press conference on the shark-ring case for February 12.

Let’s hope they nail the SOB. Robert Parry has been on Moon’s tail for years and documents the findings about Moon by the Defense Intelligence Agency. Among the many findings of the DIA: that Moon, despite his public anti-communist stance, has helped finance the cash-strapped North Korean dictatorship’s weapons program with tens of millions of dollars in hard currency. Why was nothing done about this? I suspect because the staggering amount of money he has used to buy political influence in the US is paying off for him.