Is the U.S. Navy Veterans a helpful charity or an illusion? Try finding the leaders and following the money.

The U.S. Navy Veterans, a nonprofit organization that the IRS certified as a tax-exempt charity, is the focus of this investigation by the St. Petersburg Times. The Navy Veterans group lists 85 officers in its national headquarters and state chapters, but the Times could only find one of them, Bobby Thompson, who operated out of a duplex in a low-income area of Tampa. From the same location, Thompson had offices for a political action committee called NAVPAC. The Navy Veterans charity maintains an extensive Web site, has filed scores of tax returns and state registration papers with the IRS and state regulators, but the newspaper found that the Navy Veterans nonprofit is all but invisible.