Sun Myung Moon by the governments of both North and South Korea. Businesses he promoted included News World Communications, an international news media corporation known for its American subsidiary "The Washington Times", and Tongil Group, a South Korean business group (chaebol), as well as various related organizations. Moon was born in what is now North Korea. When he was a child, his family converted to Christianity. In 1947 he was convicted by the North Korean government of spying for South Korea and given a five-year sentence to the Hŭngnam labor camp. In 1954, he founded the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of
United States v. Sun Myung Moon York Civil Liberties Union, called the prosecution "an indefensible intrusion in private religious affairs." The "New York Times" and the "Washington Post", which had both been critical of Moon, expressed concern about the government's prosecution of him and the consequences it might have for other religious groups. Michael Tori, a professor at Marist College (Poughkeepsie, New York) suggested that Moon's conviction helped the Unification Church gain more acceptance in mainstream American society, since it showed that he was financially accountable to the government and the public. In 1991 Pulitzer-prize winning reporter Carlton Sherwood wrote a book in Sun Myung Moon's