A Philadelphia charity that provides scholarships to the children of police officers and firefighters killed or injured in the line of duty paid $118,596 in legal fees in 2024 \u2014 more than three-and-a-half times more than it gave out in scholarships \u2014 according to federal tax filings reviewed by Broad + Liberty.<\/p>\n
The charity, Hero Thrill Show, Inc., also appears to have skipped filing its annual federal tax disclosure \u2014 a filing required by law for tax-exempt organizations \u2014 for at least one fiscal year, leaving a significant gap in the public record.<\/p>\n
The question the filings cannot answer \u2014 and that the charity\u2019s chief executive has refused to answer \u2014 is a simple one: who is receiving the money?<\/p>\n
The Hero Thrill Show has been a Philadelphia staple since the 1950s, when police and firefighters combined to create a stunt show using fire ladder trucks and police motorcycles. Having endured its own hardships and management difficulties, in 2006 it fell into the management of James \u201cJimmy\u201d Binns, a prominent Philadelphia attorney probably best known for his association with the \u201cRocky\u201d film franchise and Binns\u2019s own affinity for boxing.<\/p>\n
For years now, however, the charity has been consistently claiming<\/a> it is spending well in excess of six figures on legal fees and rent, even though only one lawsuit appears to have been filed against it in the last several years and even though the charity does not have any retail office front.<\/p>\n In the years immediately following Binns\u2019s arrival, legal fees were minimal \u2014 totaling roughly $49,700 for all six years from 2006 to 2011 \u2014 averaging out to roughly $8,300 a year.<\/p>\n (Dollar amounts have been rounded to the nearest thousand for the majority of this article for ease of reference and reading. All 990 forms relevant to this report are linked to at the end of this report.)<\/p>\n That modest spending has changed dramatically in the last decade. By 2018, the organization was reporting $200,000 in annual legal fees. The expenses have remained at six figures in every year for which records are available, reaching $175,000 in the fiscal year ending June 2022 and $119,000 in the fiscal year ending June 2024.<\/p>\n No explanation for the legal expenditures appears anywhere in the public filings, and Binns has never offered comment to this outlet\u2019s questions over years<\/a> of<\/a> reporting<\/a> on the charity. Binns did not respond to multiple text messages and emails sent to the contact points he freely distributes on his own website<\/a> in advance of this article.<\/p>\n To put those legal expenses in context, consider the Cathedral Soup Kitchen, based in Camden, New Jersey, which served more than 350,000 meals in 2024 \u2014 six days a week \u2014 to people experiencing homelessness and poverty, while also operating a culinary arts training program and employing 63 people. Its total revenue in 2024 was approximately $8.4 million. Its legal fees<\/a> that year were zero.<\/p>\n Since fiscal year 2017, the Hero Thrill Show has reported more than $1 million in legal fees and expenses categorized in ways consistent with legal services \u2014 a total that does not include the fiscal year ending June 2023, for which no filing exists.\u00a0<\/p>\n In two of those years \u2014 fiscal 2019 and fiscal 2021 \u2014 the expenditures were categorized as \u201cmanagement fees\u201d rather than legal fees.<\/p>\n For purposes of this analysis, Broad + Liberty is treating those two years\u2019 management fee expenditures as legal fees. The assumption is not a leap: the management fee line and the legal fee line sit adjacent to each other on the 990 form, the dollar amounts in those years are consistent with every other year\u2019s legal fee spending, and no management activity of any kind appears anywhere else in the filings that would explain a six-figure management expense for an all-volunteer organization with no paid staff.<\/p>\n Federal law requires tax-exempt organizations like the Hero Thrill Show to file a 990 each year precisely because Congress intended the documents to be public \u2014 giving donors, watchdogs, and ordinary citizens the ability to examine whether a charity is making good use of the money entrusted to it. No such filing exists for the fiscal year ending June 2023.<\/p>\n What the public record does show comes only from an indirect source: the \u201cprior year\u201d column of the FY2024 filing, which accountants routinely populate for comparison purposes.\u00a0<\/p>\n Those numbers reveal that the year HTSI chose not to document publicly was, by a significant margin, its worst operating year in recent history. The organization reported roughly $346,000 in total expenses against only $117,000 in revenue \u2014 a net operating loss of approximately $228,000. By comparison, in FY2020 \u2014 the year with the highest total expenses on record \u2014 the organization still managed to bring in enough revenue to hold its net loss to around $143,000. In FY2023, expenses were nearly three times the revenue raised.<\/p>\n The financial questions raised by the Hero Thrill Show\u2019s tax filings are compounded by what those same documents reveal about how the charity is run.<\/p>\n Under federal rules, tax-exempt organizations are required to answer a series of governance questions in their annual 990 filings. The Hero Thrill Show\u2019s answers paint a picture of an organization structured to minimize outside scrutiny. The charity has not submitted to an independent audit in any year for which records are available, despite holding more than $3 million in assets.<\/p>\n The charity\u2019s Schedule O \u2014 the section of the 990 where organizations are required to elaborate on governance practices \u2014 states that the 990 is presented first to Binns, who reviews it and offers comments before it is shared with the board. That means the accountability sequence is reversed: Binns reviews his own financial report before the board charged with overseeing him sees it.<\/p>\n The same Schedule O answers the question of whether the organization makes its governing documents available to the public with a single declarative line: \u201cNo documents available to the public.\u201d That answer has appeared in the charity\u2019s filings going back at least to fiscal year 2018. It was not always the case \u2014 an earlier filing answered that documents were available upon written request \u2014 but at some point the policy changed, and no explanation for the change appears anywhere in the public record.<\/p>\n The charity\u2019s address of record is 1125 Walnut Street in Philadelphia \u2014 the same building where Binns practices law as special counsel for the Beasley Firm, a prominent personal injury firm. The charity has no independent retail office front, making the tens of thousands of dollars in annual occupancy expenses listed in its filings difficult to account for. A voicemail left for the charity\u2019s board chair was not returned.<\/p>\n The FY2024 filing also carries a $3,360 line item identified as a tax penalty \u2014 most likely assessed for the late or missing FY2023 filing. The charity offered no explanation for the penalty in its Schedule O, despite the fact that Schedule O exists precisely for that purpose.<\/p>\n One other development in the FY2024 filing is difficult to explain. The number of voting members on the governing body nearly doubled between FY2022 and FY2024 \u2014 growing from 16 to 31 \u2014 with no explanation offered anywhere in the public record for why the board expanded so dramatically in the span of two filing years.<\/p>\n Broad + Liberty\u2019s repeated searches of Philadelphia civil court records and the federal Eastern District of Pennsylvania have identified only one lawsuit filed against the Hero Thrill Show during Binns\u2019 tenure. That case, filed in September 2020, alleged that a young girl was burned when her leg touched the hot exhaust pipe of a motorcycle used in the show. The case was settled through arbitration in January 2023, with the Hero Thrill Show ordered to pay $50,000 to the plaintiff\u2019s family.\u00a0<\/p>\n Court records from the case also revealed that the attorney who appeared to represent the Hero Thrill Show is employed by Continental Casualty Company, a subsidiary of CNA Financial \u2014 suggesting the charity may have had insurance coverage that paid some or all of its legal defense costs. The Hero Thrill Show\u2019s 990 filings show zero spending on insurance in every year for which records are available.<\/p>\n Taken together, the public record presents a charity that has paid more than $1 million in legal fees to unidentified recipients over seven years, skipped a required annual filing during its worst financial year on record, never submitted to an independent audit, structured its governance so that its sole executive reviews his own financial disclosures before the board sees them, and declared that no documents are available to the public \u2014 while its chief executive has refused to respond to press inquiries across four years and dozens of documented contact attempts.<\/p>\n The charity has never provided a public accounting for any of it.<\/p>\n (All 990\u2019s can be accessed here: Fiscal Year ending 2024<\/a>; FY 2022<\/a>; FY 2021<\/a>; FY 2020<\/a>; FY 2019<\/a>; FY 2018<\/a>; FY 2017<\/a>; FY 2016)<\/p>\n NOTE TO READERS: This story was reported entirely by Todd Shepherd. Drafts of this article were written with significant assistance from an AI writing tool. Shepherd reviewed, edited, and is responsible for all factual content.<\/p>\n Todd Shepherd is Broad + Liberty\u2019s chief investigative reporter. Send him tips at [email\u00a0protected]<\/a>, or use his encrypted email at [email\u00a0protected]<\/a>. @shepherdreports<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A Philadelphia charity that provides scholarships to the children of police officers and firefighters killed or injured in…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":857256,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5132],"tags":[5229,349840,349841,349842,228518,8622,1448,2830,1311,14844,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":["post-857255","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-philadelphia","tag-america","tag-bl-investigates","tag-hero-thrill-show","tag-jimmy-binns","tag-must-read","tag-nonprofit","tag-pa","tag-pennsylvania","tag-philadelphia","tag-philadelphia-police-department","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116725344431907288","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/857255","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=857255"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/857255\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/857256"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=857255"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=857255"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=857255"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}