Suspect finances halt Maui nonprofit

A grass-roots Maui charity that claimed to be raising $20 million for a 42-acre post-traumatic stress and traumatic brain injury treatment center for service members has dissolved after being investigated by the state attorney general’s office, officials said.

Stay Strong Nation parlayed a website and song it created into an appearance in Times Square in New York City, a national Fox News segment, a Huffington Post column about veterans issues and a proclamation by Oregon’s governor noting Stay Strong’s efforts.

Stay Strong Nation was gearing up for a nationwide awareness and fundraising tour when the Hawaii attorney general’s office began to take a look at the tax-exempt group in early 2011.

"As a result of our inquiry, they voluntarily agreed to dissolve and shut down their operations," Hugh Jones, supervising deputy attorney general, said last week.

Jones said there were "what we thought were inappropriate expenditures," but didn’t have details as to what those expenditures were. Stay Strong Nation dissolved as a corporation March 1, Jones said.

Kathryn Kanemori, another Hawaii deputy attorney general who worked on the case, said, "It had to do with mainly I think their campaigning — there were a lot of travel expenses."

There were questionable expenditures for meals and lodging, she said.

"But I think overall, the main reason why we felt that the business model wasn’t going to work was because so much of the money that had been put into the organization to get it started was loans from themselves," Kane­mori said.

Although Stay Strong Nation offered three ways to donate money on its now-defunct website, Jones said he didn’t think the charity raised much money. How much was raised remains unclear. The Internal Revenue Service audits fewer than one-half of 1 percent of all tax-exempt organizations annually, officials said.

Additionally, the charity touted an unregulated and unproved dietary supplement, ProArgi-9 Plus, as a treatment for PTSD and traumatic brain injury. Stay Strong’s vice president, Gresford "Lewis" Lewishall, previously admitted he was on his way to becoming a ProArgi-9 Plus distributor.

A late 2011 YouTube video noted Lewishall had used a live Web seminar in the Cayman Islands that "spoke to the health needs of his audience so that all of them wanted to be on ProArgi-9 Plus by the end of the webinar."

In an email to the Star-Advertiser last week, Lewishall said he is not giving up on the efforts started by Stay Strong Nation.

"They (the attorney general’s office) want us to start over, and we will because we are dedicated to create awareness for our service members that are suffering PTS/TBI," Lewishall said.

Stay Strong President L.A. Keith Crosby previously said the organization was "aboveboard on everything." Crosby told the Star-Advertiser in 2011 that Stay Strong Nation had raised a "minuscule" amount of money, but would not specify how much.

"We’re doing a lot of TV interviews, a lot of radio interviews, (but the contributions have been) minuscule because we’re not really asking anything from the public other than, say, $5 or $10 donations," Crosby said. "We’ve got those but nothing major."

The two maui men behind Stay Strong Nation said they were just "regular guys" out to improve the lives of U.S. service members who suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury, two widespread wartime afflictions.

Crosby said he was a maintenance worker at Hale Mahina Beach Resort, a musician, music producer, a former retail shop manager, and a Vietnam combat vet who served in the "Iron Triangle" in 1969.

Lewishall said he taught English in Japan in between appearances on behalf of Stay Strong, including an early 2011 interview on Fox News. He moved to the U.S. from Jamaica in 1978, was a music promoter and also drove a tour bus on Maui, according to the group’s former website.

The two also collaborated in Boo You Back Productions to produce CDs; Gateway to Paradise, a music-related business; and two other nonprofits: the Nene Preservation & Awareness Society of Hawaii, and National Domestic Violence Awareness and Solutions Inc.

Stay Strong Nation had a website, StayStrongNation. org, and was soliciting donations as far back as 2008 for a CD with a "Stay Strong" song co-written by Crosby and for a then-$15 million PTSD treatment center, according to a news story produced at the time by the Army.

Although he said he developed PTSD in Vietnam, Crosby said in 2011 that he didn’t profess to be an expert on the disorder or TBI. Lewishall had no formal background in those fields, either, Crosby said.

"What we’re doing is raising awareness, and then we’ll get qualified people to run (the treatment center)," Crosby said at the time.

Despite that, Lewishall was asked on the 2011 national Fox News segment to define PTSD and talk about how it affected troops.

The American Institute of Philanthropy, a charity watchdog group in Chicago, said previously that with tighter economic conditions, donors should make sure their money goes to "credible nonprofits with track records that are actually helping veterans."

Deputy Attorney General Kane­mori said a final requirement was for Stay Strong Nation to take down its website.

It’s still accessible, but the only page up says in big block letters, "To our service members, past or pres­ent, the nation will never forget or forsake you … and neither will we."