Lutfee Abdul Waalee, convicted of trying to pass a fake U.S. Treasury check for $25 million, is a member of a black separatist group called the Moors who believe in the "redemption theory."

That's the notion that the United States has been trading birth certificates on the open market as a form of capital since 1933 and that citizens can "redeem" the value of their accounts and write gigantic checks.

Or something like that.

However it goes, the Justice Department doesn't share the faith, and neither did a federal court jury that said Waalee, 48, of Penn Hills, was guilty of bank fraud and passing false financial instruments.

Yesterday, he was sentenced to three years in federal prison and ordered to pay a little more than $9,000 in restitution to PNC Bank.

He called the checks "certified tenders" that he claimed had been issued either by the Treasury or the Federal Reserve Bank in Philadelphia. He passed PNC checks in 2001 and the $25 million check in June 2002 at the Citizen's East Community Development Federal Credit Union.

The restitution is for two bad PNC checks that the bank honored before realizing they were fake.

The sentence also took into consideration nearly $70,000 in bad checks that Waalee tried to pass in Georgia for mortgage payments and other debts. But those checks, like the $25 million Treasury check, weren't honored.

Waalee was convicted in January, but his wife, Allien Green, who deposited the fake checks into the PNC account, was acquitted.

The trial was bizarre. Waalee initially represented himself, then had a lawyer represent him, and then went back to representing himself.

As a redemption theorist, he subscribes to this belief:

When the United States went off the gold standard in 1933, the government went bankrupt. Government leaders, in order to secure credit from foreign powers, secretly pledged the "lifetime worth" of American citizens as collateral.

The government began trading birth certificates on the open market as a form of capital. Each certificate is worth between $600,000 and $1 million and sits in a U.S. Treasury account. Any American is entitled to "redeem" the value of his certificate and write checks on his account.

Redemption theorists say the government enslaves U.S. citizens by using them as collateral for international loans.

The government, they say, registers the birth certificates as securities and backs each with a large amount of money in individual accounts. The dollar figure varies, depending on the theorist, but the number most often cited is $630,000.

To get at that money, believers file a series of Uniform Commercial Code documents, which they think entitle them to redeem their "value" by filling out a "certified tender of payment" on their nonexistent Treasury account.

The theorists believe that their Social Security number also is the number of their Treasury account.

As part of the scheme, followers also sometimes file false Internal Revenue Service forms and currency transaction reports in the names of law enforcement officials they want to harass, and they often file meritless lawsuits against authorities.

Waalee did that in 2002, when he sued Secret Service Agent Eric Fuchs, saying Fuchs and other agents used what he described as "gorilla tactics" in a search of his home in June 2002.

He wanted $1 million, but a federal judge threw out the lawsuit.