Mike Warnke

Mike Warnke rose to fame in the mid-1970s as a Gospel-oriented comedian and lecturer, claiming to have been a former Satanic high priest. Both his albums and his autobiography "The Satan Seller" sold in the millions, and Warnke became both a favorite among Contemporary Christian performers, and a preferred lecturer of anti-occult movements, who considered him an expert on Satanism and the "international Satanic conspiracy".

In 1992, two investigative journalists from Cornerstone magazine belatedly researched Warnke's background and interviewed people from his past; what had begun as a friendly biography turned instead into a full-blown exposé of lies and deceptions, dating back some twenty years. Old friends and acquaintances (who hadn't spoken out up to the time, thinking either nobody would listen, or that his ministry had been helping others) told a very different story from Warnke's, while proceeds from his records and performances (including donations made on behalf of a troubled-youth center he was supposedly developing) had gone to build a church in a remote location where services were never held, to pay off persons who'd left his ministry (including two ex-wives) to keep them from publically denouncing him - or into Warnke's own pocket. (Even the stories related in "The Satan Seller" were shown to be inconsistent and unreliable, both with modern Satanism and with the calendar; nobody could have done all the things he'd described doing in the time-frame allowed, even with the Devil's help.)

Warnke defended his actions and statements, explaining "I am a comedian

• I tell stories (to entertain and to make a point)", but he couldn't

stop his ministry from collapsing after the exposé appeared. While he has issued apologies, performed public acts of repentance, and now continues his comedy (and lecturing, and preaching) career on a much smaller scale, the disappointment caused by his years of deception and phony claims continues to haunt him, and his thousands of onetime fans and admirers.