Under The Banner Of Biodiesel

Polygamist Jacob Kingston got fabulously rich running a company that, the government charges, collected $500 million in tax credits it didn’t earn.

- Jesse Hyde And David Voreacos

On the afternoon of Aug. 23, 2018, federal agents fanned out across the Salt Lake City airport. They were looking for Jacob Kingston. He was 42, with short, dark hair and a salt-and-pepper beard. According to the IRS, Kingston had defrauded the U.S. government of more than a half-billion dollars, and now he was fleeing to Turkey. The agents feared that if he boarded KLM flight 6026, he’d never come back.

Kingston is a member of the Order, the largest Mormon polygamist clan in the U.S. Authorities call it an organized crime group. Concentrated in Salt Lake City, its 10,000 members control more than 100 businesses in the West, including a casino in Southern California and a cattle ranch on the Nevada border. Closer to home, it runs a tactical arms company that specializes in semiautomatic weapons.

The government had spent years investigating Kingston and a company he ran called Washakie Renewable Energy LLC, the most successful in the Order’s portfolio. At a plant along the Utah-Idaho border, Washakie made biodiesel that it shipped out on rail cars, but the bulk of its profits came from $1-per-gallon tax credits that the IRS administered. The credits—cash from the government, basically—had made Kingston wealthy. He sat in a suite at Utah Jazz basketball games, hobnobbed with state power brokers, and moved one of his wives, Sally, into a mansion in a leafy Salt Lake suburb.