On the outskirts of Las Vegas, ­Warren Jeffs, the prophet and leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, the polygamist sect of Mormonism known as the F.L.D.S., barreled down Interstate 15 in a red Cadillac Escalade. Driving him was Isaac Jeffs, one of his dozen or so brothers. Naomi Jeffs—a beautiful 32-year-old blond with hair to her knees who was both Warren’s former stepmother and the wife he reportedly called 91—rode in back. They carried $57,000 in cash in the lining of a suitcase, 16 cell phones, 12 pairs of sunglasses, four laptops, three wigs, a fistful of keys to other luxury vehicles, and a cache of handwritten letters addressed to “the Prophet.”

When a Nevada state trooper pulled the S.U.V. over for an obscured license plate, he didn’t know that the hollow-cheeked 50-year-old passenger offering only a contact-lens prescription as identification was on the F.B.I.’s list of most-wanted fugitives or that Warren Jeffs was fleeing charges of sexual misconduct in Utah and Arizona, where his colony of thousands of followers had lived by his word as though he were God. (View slideshow.)

That was in August 2006, long before the night this April when the sect became lurid Page One news everywhere, thanks to police raids on the West Texas compound that Jeffs’ church had financed. He had relocated hundreds of his most favored followers from Utah to a 1,700-acre former game ranch that he had anointed Yearning for Zion. Police reported that a 16-year-old girl had called a family-violence hotline and described being betrothed, beaten, raped, and impregnated by a 50-year-old man with multiple wives. For a moment, it looked like Waco revisited: Authorities faced off against dozens of Jeffs’ followers, who held hands and formed a human chain around their sacred white stone temple. When the polygamists finally relented, more than 400 children were removed from the ranch. Inside the temple, police seized evidence that pointed to a secretive world of power, sex, and submission, all reportedly controlled from prison by Warren Jeffs.

Over the years, as the leader of the F.L.D.S., Jeffs has had an ongoing conversation with God that’s resulted in prophecies both mundane and apocalyptic. He would have biannual revelations—usually on April 6 or December 31—that the end of the world would occur, wherein Christ would come to “lift up” his followers as the righteous, just as the rest of humanity was felled by pestilence and plague. Jeffs’ end-time visions meant real-life restrictions for those who followed him: no earthly entertainment, no flesh exposed from wrist to neck to ankle, no striped clothing, no dogs. Even the color red was banished: Jeffs predicted that Christ would return in red, former church members say, and that any mortal driving a red vehicle, or a convertible of any color, was committing blasphemy. But there he was on that hot August night, being arrested outside his own red S.U.V., a prophet hypocritical and humbled.

A year later, Bruce Wisan drives a convertible Mustang headed for Short Creek, Warren Jeffs’ polygamist community in the desert, on the Utah-Arizona border. The car is a rental—the only one Budget had left—and it’s very red. Wisan knows that isn’t good.