Friday, May 26, 2006 | 7:15 a.m.
Jeffs, 50, was placed on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list in May on criminal charges of sexual misconduct with a minor and unlawful flight to avoid prosecution.
Jeffs has also been accused of arranging marriages between underage girls and older men.
The FBI considers Jeffs armed and dangerous. Federal authorities also believe the church leader travels with armed bodyguards.
The FBI has issued a $100,000 reward for information leading directly to Jeffs' arrest, although the church leader has not been seen by anyone outside the FLDS community since 2004.
Jeffs inherited control of the church in 2002 after the death of his father and former church leader, Rulon Jeffs.
A construction company with ties to fugitive polygamist church leader Warren Jeffs has worked on nine projects for the Las Vegas Valley Water District since 2004, earning about $7.5 million from the work .
Asked Thursday morning at a job site about the company's ties to Jeffs, Terrell Dutson, a project manager for JNJ Engineering Construction Inc., said: "I am going to say yes and leave it at that."
He later said that increased attention on Jeffs - recently placed on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list for charges of sexual misconduct with a minor - and on the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that Jeffs leads, is worrisome to company employees as it brings more scrutiny of firms with church ties.
"It just means we have to be on the up," Dutson said. "And we are."
In addition to the Water District projects, JNJ received one contract this year from Las Vegas and two from Clark County.
The city project, for $303,045, was for work on the Pioneer Trail, a six-mile walking path that ends at the Las Vegas Mormon Fort, according to city spokesman Jace Radke.
The county hired JNJ to begin work on two projects this year - a wetland habitat restoration near Henderson (where Dutson was interviewed Thursday), and a water-line relocation project, spokeswoman Stacy Welling said. The combined value of those two contracts is $784,620.
JNJ operates out of Hildale, Utah, which is nestled next to Colorado City, Ariz., on the states' shared border, and also has a sister operation in Las Vegas. JNJ President Jacob Jessop travels between Utah and his home in Las Vegas, Dutson said, and was headed to Utah on Thursday.
Mohave County (Ariz.) attorney's office investigator Gary Engels, who has played a key role in the probe of FLDS and Jeffs, said Jessop is a member of the church in good standing. And it is likely that Jessop sought and received Jeffs' permission to bring a branch of the construction company to Las Vegas, Engels said.
When in Las Vegas, Jessop stays in a house on Gilbert Lane that he bought for about $1 million in February, according to county tax records. Engels said business in Hildale/Colorado City, home to 5,000-8,000 Jeffs loyalists, is stagnant, and Las Vegas was a natural move for church members looking to make money in construction.
"Las Vegas is a good place for (Jeffs') people to work," he said. "There's a lot of construction out there."
In the last few years, a growing number of FLDS members have started businesses in Nevada, said Sam Brower, a private investigator hired by a firm representing a group of excommunicated members seeking reparation from the church.
Nevada's business-licensing laws make it easy for church members to create corporations and trusts that go undetected, he said. Both Brower and Engels said that with the privacy that Nevada offers companies, church members can hide money from authorities and covertly transfer funds for Jeffs. Neither investigator, however, said such was the case with JNJ.
"Some of them are businesses that actually have people working for them, some are just bogus shell corporations," Brower said. "Nevada keeps all that company information totally private, secret. You can't get to it."
On Thursday, a man who identified himself as Ted Jessop was working in a different area of the wetlands on a project not related to the JNJ contract.
Jessop, 50, said that he had been kicked out of the FLDS church more than 10 years ago by Jeffs' father and former church leader, Rulon Jeffs. Jessop says he left behind his only wife, who was promptly assigned to another church member.
Now remarried and working for a Henderson construction company, Jessop said that he bumps into men who he recognizes as FLDS members on the Las Vegas construction circuit.
When employees from JNJ started work at the same wetlands site, Jessop said he had to smile. He knows that JNJ President Jacob Jessop goes by the nickname "Jake," he says, because he is Jake's uncle.
Questioned further, Ted Jessop produced an Arizona driver's license with a Colorado City address. A few years ago, he said, he would have wanted to join back up with what he called the "polygamist construction" crew. Today he doesn't want anything to do with FLDS, he said, because of Warren Jeffs:
"He's made changes that I think are fanatical. The hold he has on families and the things that he's done to them."
Meanwhile, JNJ has a handful of bids pending for the Las Vegas Valley Water District. In two of the projects, the company is the lowest bidder.
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