Mark Peterson/Redux

He came to me when I least expected. I was in a hotel bed, enrobed in terry cloth, my teeth brushed, my hand aloft holding the remote. This was a year ago, and the soft glow of cable TV was the room's only light. I was flitting between channels when I happened upon BET. There I saw an old white man preaching to an audience of elderly black people. And as I wondered what on earth this pasty alter kocker was doing on black TV, it came to me: I had seen this man before.

It had been years, and he had changed some: a few more wrinkles, a little hitch in his gait, the hair a bit more aggressively black. But it was him. Peter Popoff was back. And he was as mesmerizing as ever.

Sitting on a stage, in an upholstered chair, Popoff implored his television audience to call an 800 number so that he could send them a secret “faith tool” that God had recently given him as he was “praying about the four red moons of this year of Jubilee.” If that wasn't incentive enough, there was more reason to reach for the phone. On the screen, below Popoff, flashed the message “Call now for your free miracle spring water.”

As if to answer the very question that occurred to me—what does one do with miracle spring water?—Popoff explained that good times were ahead, very good times. “I can see God leading people into new homes, new automobiles!… God gives supernatural debt cancellation!… And I'd like to send you the miracle spring water.”

The show cut to video of Popoff working a room of sick, elderly African-Americans. “Is that your cane?” he asked an old woman. “I believe God has given you a divine chiropractic treatment! Amen! Hallelujah! Amen in Jesus's name! You can walk now without the cane. Take a few steps and make the Devil mad!”

The woman stood up, with his help, started shaking her hands, and then, as the organ and drum picked up the tempo, started shaking her hands faster. She never took very many steps, but she vibrated with energy. Popoff yanked her cane away and tossed it up onstage. The scene dissolved to a woman sharing a bit of testimony with Popoff and the crowd. “I took your holy water and put it in my son's shoes,” she said. “I put it in his bed, I put it on his pillow, and my son joined the church and he got saved and he's still in church—and then I got $3,800 and new furniture.”

Peter popoff in the 1980s

Such blessings! The prevailing sentiment in the room was Thanks be to God—but also Thanks be to Peter Popoff. He was hugging people, punching the air with them. Everyone had a story: Addictions had disappeared. Appliances had been delivered. All proof of the miracle water's efficacy. And getting off crutches, that was big, too—this is why people needed Popoff's healing touch. “You know where that pain went?” Popoff cried after one healing. “I'll tell you where that pain went. It went back to the pits of hell!”

Staring at the TV, I was transfixed. This was vintage stuff—a sort of resurrection, if you will. Like so many televangelists, Popoff had his heyday in the 1980s, back when preaching on TV was big business—and plenty mainstream. The flamboyant, seemingly pious preachers who solicited cash for enormous, if dubious, ministries were household names. But one by one, they fell to disgrace: Jim Bakker paid off a woman who'd accused him of rape; Jimmy Swaggart was caught with a prostitute at a roadside motel. But none were humiliated quite as publicly as Popoff.

Popoff had been the best at what he did—the boldest and baddest, the most don't-give-a-damn cheesy. He dared you to doubt him, which helped insulate him from charges that he was a fraud. With a promise to heal the sick, Popoff convened huge crowds, where he relied on a shtick that involved calling out the name and ailment of someone in the audience he had never met, as if God had just vouchsafed him the information. “I'm looking for an Ada Mae, and I know that she has kidney problems! Where are you, Ada Mae?”—that sort of thing. (Steve Martin borrowed this bit of Popoff's routine for his 1992 flick Leap of Faith, and Chevy Chase had fun at Popoff's expense in Fletch Lives.)

But a key component of his act eventually spelled his downfall. In 1986, a team of freelance debunkers, including the magician James Randi, took a radio scanner to a Popoff revival, where they overheard Popoff 's wife, Liz, feeding him names and illnesses. Apparently, plants in the audience would chat people up or get them to jot down details, then feed their information to Liz, who passed it on to her husband through an earpiece. Listening through the gizmo in his ear, Popoff would call out to the crowd as if he possessed the omniscience of the Lord.

Randi's tape of the ruse made its way to The Tonight Show, where Johnny Carson—who harbored great disdain for charlatans—exposed Popoff 's technique. The Tonight Show exposé made national news, and in 1987 the Peter Popoff Evangelistic Association filed for bankruptcy. He seemed done for.

Popoff had been the boldest and baddest of televangelists—the most don't-give-a-damn cheesy.

Yet here he was, all these years later, peddling miracle water and his own healing touch to an audience of African-Americans who seemed not to have gotten the memo that he was a mountebank. It appeared to me that Popoff was exploiting more than just American forgetfulness. He was tapping into something far more powerful: our desire to get something for nothing.