End times hall of shame: Man nets $200Gs selling tickets to the Rapture

By DEREK CLONTZ
Your World Report

Shifty Alfredo Mendes hauled in a whopping $200,000 selling tickets to the Bible’s rapture.

Police in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, say the twice-convicted con man shamelessly published newspaper ads claiming true believers would be lifted directly into Heaven alive from an unspecified location west of the city.

For $100, he promised to reveal the location - and 2,000 true believers, most of them dirt poor, scraped up the cash and sent in the fee.

“If there ever really is a Rapture, I know one place Mendes isn’t going - and that’s up,” joked police investigator Raul Gonzalez, pictured after the arrest at Mendes’ home, told me exclusively.

“He took money from the poorest of the poor, women and men who sold their possessions and wiped out their life savings.

“Some people might not like me saying this, but I hope there’s a ‘reverse Rapture’ that sucks him straight into hell.”

Mendes, 32, was arrested on fraud charges when the rapture failed to materialize and people who followed his map to a grassy meadow - where they waited and waited and waited - began to complain.

Cops found him relaxing by his backyard pool sipping drinks with a bevy of half-naked beauties catering to his every whim, official reports say.

Gloria Correa, 62, fell for the scam - and she couldn’t be more embarrassed.

“I feel like an old fool,” she told reporters. “At my age I should have known that if the Good Lord wanted to take me to Heaven, he wouldn’t publish advertisements in the newspaper and make me buy a ticket.

“He‘d take me while I was asleep in my bed or washing my clothes.”

Peter Kruger, a German who moved to Belo Horizonte after World War ll and still agonizes over the fact that he was “a fire-breathing Nazi thug,” says he bought a ticket from Mendes for “a damn good reason.”

“With my Nazi past, I thought it might be the only way I’d ever get to see Paradise,” he explains

Although only 2,000 people bought tickets, the “secret location” quickly became common knowledge and an estimated 8,000 excited men, women and children showed up for the event.

To make a bad situation even worse, say cops, at least 200 people were arrested for public drunkenness, possession of drugs, indecent exposure and fighting before riot police broke out teargas and water cannons to disburse the unhappy crowd.

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