Sun Myung Moon called both North Korean leaders and American Presidents his friends but spent time in prisons in both countries.
His followers around the world cherished him while his detractors accused him of brainwashing recruits and extracting money from worshippers.
But these contradictions did nothing to stop the founder of the Unification church from turning his religious vision into a worldwide movement and a multi-billion dollar corporation stretching from the Korean Peninsula to the US.
Today, the Unification church has three million followers, including 100,000 members in the US and has sent missionaries to 194 countries, church spokesman Ahn Ho-yeul said. But ex-members and critics say the figure is actually no more than 100,000 members worldwide.
The church’s holdings included the Washington Times newspaper, the New Yorker Hotel, a midtown Manhattan art deco landmark and a seafood distribution firm that supplies sushi to Japanese restaurants across the US. It gave the University of Bridgeport $110 million over more than a decade to keep the Connecticut school operating.
It acquired a ski resort, a professional football team and other businesses in South Korea and also operates a foreign-owned luxury hotel in North Korea and jointly operates a fledgling North Korean car maker.
Born in 1920 in a rural part of what is today North Korea, Moon said he was 16 when Jesus Christ first appeared to him and told him to finish the work he had begun on earth 2,000 years earlier.
Moon, who tried to preach the gospel in the North, was imprisoned there in the late 1940s for alleged spying for South Korea; he disputed the charge.
When the Korean War broke out in 1950, he went to South Korea. After divorcing his first wife, he married Hak Ja Han Moon in 1960.
They have 10 surviving sons and daughters, according to the church.
In South Korea, Moon quickly drew young acolytes to his conservative, family-oriented value system and unusual interpretation of the Bible.
He conducted his first mass wedding in Seoul in the early 1960s, and the “blessing ceremonies” grew in scale over the years.
A 1982 wedding at New York’s Madison Square Garden – the first outside South Korea – drew thousands of participants.
“International and intercultural marriages are the quickest way to bring about an ideal world of peace,” Moon said in a 2009 autobiography. “People should marry across national and cultural boundaries with people from countries they consider to be their enemies so that the world of peace can come that much more quickly.”
Moon began building a relationship with North Korea in 1991, even meeting the country’s founder, Kim Il Sung, in the eastern North Korean port city of Hamhung.
In his autobiography, Moon said he urged Kim to give up his nuclear ambitions and that Kim responded by saying that his atomic programme was for peaceful purposes and he had no intention to use it to “kill my own people”.
When Kim died in 1994, Moon sent a condolence delegation to North Korea, drawing criticism from conservatives at home. The late Kim Jong Il, who succeeded his father as North Korean leader, sent roses, prized wild ginseng, Rolex watches and other gifts to Moon on his birthday each year.
Moon sought, and developed, a good relationship with conservative American leaders such as former Presidents Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr.
Yet he also served 13 months at a US federal prison in the mid-1980s after a New York City jury convicted him of filing false tax returns. The church says the US government persecuted Moon because of his growing influence and popularity with young Americans.