“Seeing me driving in a bright-red car is going to be a killer,” he groans. “The prophet said that to wear red is sacrilegious, and so people went through all their closets and got rid of red. You don’t see red anywhere in that town. I can’t believe they gave me a red car. You’re going to get shot.”

“Me?” I ask.

“Yeah,” he says. “They wouldn’t dare shoot me.”

Wisan is neither a prophet nor a polygamist, but he holds an important position in the sect. In a sense, he has been hired by the state of Utah to replace Jeffs as the head of his community. Wisan has been put in charge of the United Effort Plan, the legal trust that the polygamists started by pooling their resources and creating a communal society 66 years ago. The U.E.P. owns about 85 percent of the land in this enclave and most of what sits on it. Worth an estimated $110 million, the trust holds all the assets—hundreds of homes, a few farms and factories, thousands of acres of land, a church, a zoo, several schoolhouses—accumulated by the labor, frugal living, and generous tithing of generations of these isolated believers. So conservative was their spending that, before Wisan, the trust never even had a checkbook.

Life under Prophet Warren Jeffs was restrictive and cruel, but his abuses went mostly unnoticed until 2004, when he seemed to have completely lost it. Jeffs, and the trust he controlled, had been hit with two civil lawsuits, later dismissed, charging the prophet with, among other things, sexually abusing a nephew. He announced in February 2005 that he’d ignore the suits, explaining that God had told him to fire the trust’s lawyer and refuse to defend himself against the unholy power of the state. There was also evidence that Jeffs had already begun draining the trust’s coffers, Wisan says.

So in May 2005, a state judge removed Jeffs from power and appointed Wisan to take over his orphaned flock.

Now Wisan is in the midst of trying to do something that, to his knowledge, has never been done: set up a functioning economy on the still-smoldering ashes of a theocracy. It is up to him to privatize the trust’s assets and get these radical believers on the grid, fiscally speaking. Wielding the blunt instrument of his accounting trade, he’s trying to use homeownership, property taxes, subdivision ordinances, and a few fire hydrants and other infrastructure amenities to bring these outsiders into the modern economic world.

But those he’s trying to help—Jeffs’ followers, including the police chief, two mayors, and virtually every resident—have tried to foil him at each turn. Meanwhile, Jeffs continues to advise community leaders, despite the fact that he is serving two consecutive five-year-to-life sentences in a Utah state prison for rape as an accomplice.

The polygamists believe Wisan is an agent of the devil, he says, and want nothing to do with him. They came up with a name for him almost as soon as he arrived: state-ordained bishop—S.O.B. for short.