“The people felt like, Oh, he’s going to take the land. He’s working for the devil. Why are you doing these horrible things to us? ” Wisan says. “There was great fear of me, great fear of what I was like.”

Bullheaded and bald, Bruce Wisan, 61, is a C.P.A. and a lifelong Mormon. His life appears well ordered. He has been married to one woman, Jean, for 37 years, and they have four children and three grandchildren. He and his wife enjoy golfing and boating and are active members of their church. Wisan says he disdained the practice of polygamy, like most Mormons, even before he took on the F.L.D.S. job. Most of his days are spent working at his office in Salt Lake City, where he heads Wisan Smith Racker & Prescott, one of Utah’s biggest accounting firms, with 51 accountants that serve 4,500 clients, including the state’s governor and many of its large construction firms. Wisan’s home, in a nearby neighborhood, is close to a golf course that he plays often, and he drives a BMW 545i, having recently sold his Porsche.

He frequently starts sentences by saying, “Well, you know me, I’m so bashful,” and then proceeds to prove the opposite, representing himself as a bit of a cowboy in the realm of accounting. “My business is advising; it’s consulting. People don’t call up their C.P.A. and say, ‘Hey, I’ve had a great day. Let me tell you about it.’ They call me up and say, ‘I’ve got this problem.’ So I’m a problem solver.”

Apart from his private clients, Wisan has worked for the state of Utah over the years as a trustee or as a court-appointed receiver. He has liquidated firms on the brink of bankruptcy, and helped others pay off ­debtors and back taxes and return to solvency. Over time, his work has made him the manager of a roadside motel, a wedding reception hall, a chain of Subway sandwich shops, an appliance warehouse, and a bowling alley and bar, even though he doesn’t drink. Often, those he was assigned to help were hostile, but nothing could have prepared him for the F.L.D.S.

We pull into Short Creek in the rented red Mustang. “Here we aaaarrrrrre,” he says, as though we’ve entered another dimension. The community sits in a 13-square-mile valley bracketed by a ridge of sandstone mountains. Cell-phone coverage ends as we drive past the Bank of Ephraim building. The streets are empty, and the only cars on the road are large S.U.V.’s and pickup trucks, all with darkly tinted windows. Technically, the community encompasses the border towns of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Arizona, but since the beginning, locals have called the area Short Creek for the dry riverbed that cuts between the two towns. For the most part, the towns function as one place, and their combined population of 7,000 or so is made up almost entirely of polygamist Mormons, direct descendants of the pioneers who came to the desert after the Great Depression to live in accord with their belief that multiple wives provided the passage to heaven.

"Do you understand the culture enough to understand what the hold on the people is?" Wisan asks me. Like most of his questions, this one is rhetorical. “Okay. F.L.D.S. lesson No. 1: Warren Jeffs’ hold on the people is through fear. When I first went down here, I knew two things: I knew that he controlled where people lived, and I knew that he controlled whom they married.”

When Jeffs took charge of the community, he quickly moved to make every marriage his decision. At his whim, marriages would also be ended and families evicted from their homes. “If I go home one day and I’m excommunicated, and Warren kicks me out of my house and reassigns my wife and tells my kids not to ever talk to me again, I mean, I’d lose everything,” Wisan says. The unfairness upsets him, his face reddening. “I mean, you don’t have any trial, you don’t have any hearing, you don’t have any, ‘Let me explain something...’ ”

He recalls, “After I got appointed, I talked to a girl who was on a moving crew. They do it at night, 2 or 3 in the morning, to make sure nobody is looking. They could move a house in less than an hour. They’d go in, and they’d Saran Wrap the dressers; they wouldn’t unpack anything. Couple hundred people, trucks—boom.”

Wisan pulls the Mustang into the driveway of a large brick home, hurries up to the door, and knocks. Stefanie Colgrove answers, her blond hair swinging down to her waist. Before she can say a word, he cracks a joke about how his red car makes us a moving target. She laughs knowingly and invites us into a living room the size of a hotel lobby, where a crowd of children—she has seven—are sitting around eating cereal.