Rev. Bill Bob Proverb
| |
Affiliation
|
Television Evangelist
|
Status
|
Last seen receiving large donations to rebuild his ministry and get wife Leona into drug rehab
|
Episode Appeared In
|
|
Played By
|
The Reverend Bill Bob Proverb is a television evangelist, preaching the gospel to millions via satellite TV from his IGG (In God's Glory) church. His message is that he has martyred himself on the "cross of luxury" because nobody wants to see the old-fashioned raggedy-butt preacher anymore, so he wears fancy silk suits, owns million-dollar homes, all paid for by donations from his viewers. His wife, Leona, is a singer and performs various spiritual music on the show, but she is also a drug addict and her arrest by Detective Ricardo "Rico" Tubbs sends Proverb into action, denouncing the Organized Crime Bureau on his show, then claiming a vendetta against his ministry (and when Tubbs was under suspicion of raping one of Proverb's "angels", Faye Nell, his wife then raised the false claim Tubbs tried to rape her too). Proverb's record showed a genuine display of humanitarian work, visiting homeless shelters, spending 1/3 of his yearly donations to homeless causes, skid row hospices, two clinics in New Orleans, and others. He helped out in Africa during the famine there in the 1970s and suffered scarring in his lungs as a result of the constant sandstorms there. Proverb's rival in the tele-evangelical realm is Mason Mather, who doesn't have a satellite distribution arrangement and desperately wants one, so he used Leona's arrest to set up Tubbs on the rape charge so Metro-Dade would work on shutting Proverb down to get his satellite channel, and he arranged for Proverb's ministry to be struck by lightning and destroyed. After the person responsible for the destruction, an engineer named Carl Becker, confesses to everything and Mather kills himself by climbing the transmission tower and being electrocuted, Proverb began an aggressive donation drive to rebuild his ministry and get Leona into drug rehab, and within 2 minutes he had raised over $100,000. Disgusted, Tubbs and Crockett turn off the TV channel where Proverb was broadcasting on.