The Florida preacher who is soliciting donations to start a religious college in Poultney went bankrupt in 2010 and recently had his nonprofit status terminated by the Internal Revenue Service.
Tommie Zito says he has the cash needed to finalize a deal to purchase the former Green Mountain College campus from whiskey baron Raj Bhatka. But publicly available records provide reasons to question whether he has the means to launch and oversee a multimillion-dollar institution with 1,000 students.
In an interview at the campus, where he is holding a weeklong series of events for supporters, Zito said he is waiting to close the sale so he and those working with him have time to get more organized. Neither Zito nor Bhakta has disclosed the purchase price.
In the meantime, Zito emphasized, he is actively fundraising.
“We’re going to raise a lot of money,” he said. “And we’ll be good stewards of it.”
Zito is associated with several not-for-profit entities that are registered with the state of Florida, but Vermont Public could not locate an active public charity under Zito’s name. His current ministry organization, American Awakening, Inc., had its 501(c)(3) status revoked last year because it failed to file an annual report with the IRS for three consecutive years, according to a federal database.
Asked if a donation to Zito’s work is tax-deductible, the preacher did not give a clear answer.
“It would. It will be. It just depends,” he said.
Zito said that one of his nonprofit entities is “being recalibrated, let’s just say, for this little transition,” and that he has the “best of the best of the best” nonprofit lawyers working on it.
The lack of public disclosures leaves prospective donors and local residents with little insight into the viability of Zito’s plan to assume management of a 115-acre campus that is central to Poultney’s future, and which its current owner says costs more than $1 million annually to maintain.
American Awakening, formed in 2010, has never reported raising more than $298,000 in any single year. Its most recent publicly available filing, from 2021, showed $98,000 in contributions. Most of the money was spent on travel, car expenses and meals to support Zito’s ministry. The nonprofit ended the year with a negative fund balance.
Zito preaches in churches and seeks to convert people on the streets when he travels. He’s made appearances in Vermont several times over the years and has posted to Facebook about his success evangelizing in the Green Mountains. “Imagine this…The Gospel of Jesus works in a liberal city and state. Transgenders coming to Christ, Lesbians, Muslims,” he wrote during a May 2025 trip.
Part of the appeal of Poultney, he says, is the prospect of creating an evangelical hub in the nation’s least-religious state.
He noted that the storyline has proven irresistible to national media outlets, several of which have already published stories about the preacher who is buying a college campus from a liquor salesman.
Derek Brouwer
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Vermont Public
Tommie Zito held a series of events this week on the former Green Mountain College campus. Spirits entrepreneur Raj Bhakta owns the property, but Zito says he has a deal in place to purchase it.
Zito, originally from New Jersey, distinguishes his work from that of many other charismatic evangelical preachers, who run megachurches and accrue personal wealth. “I don’t take a salary for this,” he told attendees at an Ohio church in 2023, according to a video of the sermon posted online. Zito described an unspecified point in his career when he lived alongside “the biggest Hollywood celebrities,” had a 70-person staff and hosted billionaires at his services.
“I was about to go buy a jet, cash. Millions of dollars,” Zito said.
Then God spoke to him.
“He said to me, ‘If you pay a price nobody’s willing to pay, you’ll see what nobody’s seen,’” Zito recounted in the sermon.
Zito’s path has also led to unpaid bills and bankruptcy protection, according to records in Florida and federal courts.
Before starting American Awakening, Zito helmed a not-for-profit called Tommie Zito Ministries. The organization brought in more than $1.5 million in 2006, but donations dropped by more than half over the following two years, according to a federal tax filing.
In 2007, the corporate owner of an office building in Miami Beach sued Tommie Zito Ministries in Florida state court for unpaid rent. A judge eventually ruled in favor of the landlord and ordered Zito’s nonprofit to pay $383,000.
Shortly after the ruling, in April 2010, Tommie Zito Ministries filed for bankruptcy and liquidated its assets.
In addition to the court judgment, the organization also owed more than $225,000 to the IRS for six years of unpaid taxes, according to the bankruptcy petition.
By that point, the organization reported that its most valuable asset was an “inflatable air dome” worth an estimated $40,000. The trustee overseeing the bankruptcy later determined it had no resale value, court filings state.
After legal fees, creditors split $729 in total proceeds.
Through a spokesperson, Zito declined a request for a follow-up interview to discuss Tommie Zito Ministries and did not respond to written questions about it.
While Tommie Zito Ministries was in financial trouble, Zito registered his new public charity, American Awakening, and later obtained tax-exempt status until that status was revoked last year.
In the years that followed, Zito also operated a small school called Zoe Bible College. One iteration of the school launched in the fall of 2015 at a church in Fort Myers, according to Facebook posts from the time.
On its website, Zoe Bible College listed tuition as $4,000 per year for a two-year program. First-year courses included an introduction to praying on behalf of others, known as intercessory prayer. Second-year courses included “Spiritual Warfare” and “Methodologies of Multiplication.”
The school announced via Facebook, in June 2017, that three students had graduated.
Zito did not respond to emailed questions about the former school. He recently told the New York Post that he’d run Zoe Bible College for about five years. He decided to “push pause” on the project “about 10 years ago,” the outlet quoted him as saying.
Zito said his forthcoming “Z University” in Poultney will train the next generation of evangelists — “multiplying myself, multiplying this team, the DNA of what we do, in other students.”
Several dozen volunteers were present on campus when Vermont Public briefly visited during Zito’s campus preview week.
Zito had set up band equipment in a banquet hall, where he was holding services throughout the week. Electric guitars were positioned in front of a large, built-in glass cabinet that was still stocked with Bhakta’s branded Armagnac blends.
Zito would be preaching from a lectern that still had Green Mountain College emblazoned across the front.
“I think this school is going to flourish here,” Zito said. “I really do. I really believe that.”