The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2014 Read online

  But as they lowered him into the concrete mold, the man woke and scrambled out, assaulting several people before police arrived.

  Bolivia is the poorest country in South America.

  NATHANIEL RICH

  The Man Who Saves You from Yourself

  FROM Harper’s Magazine

  NOBODY EVER JOINS A CULT. One joins a nonprofit group that promotes green technology, animal rights, or transcendental meditation. One joins a yoga class or an entrepreneurial workshop. One begins practicing an Eastern religion that preaches peace and forbearance. The first rule of recruitment, writes Margaret Singer, the doyenne of cult scholarship, is that a recruit must never suspect he or she is being recruited. The second rule is that the cult must monopolize the recruit’s time. Therefore, in order to have any chance of rescuing a new acolyte, it is critical to act quickly. The problem is that family and friends, much like the new cult member, are often slow to admit the severity of the situation. “Clients usually don’t come to me until their daughter is already to-the-tits brainwashed,” says David Sullivan, a private investigator in San Francisco who specializes in cults. “By that point the success rate is very low.”

  Sullivan became fascinated with cults in the late sixties, while attending Fairview High School in Boulder, Colorado. It was a golden age for religious fringe groups, and Boulder was one of the nation’s most fertile recruiting centers, as it is today. (There are now, according to conservative estimates, 2 million adults involved in cults in America.) “You couldn’t walk five steps without being approached by someone asking whether you’d like to go to a Buddhist meeting,” says John Stark, a high school friend of Sullivan’s. Representatives from Jews for Jesus and the Moonies set up information booths in the student union at the University of Colorado, a few miles down the road from Fairview High. Sullivan engaged the hawkers, accepted the pamphlets, attended every meditation circle, prayer circle, shamanic circle. When the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi led a mass meditation session at the university, Sullivan was there, watching from the back of the lecture hall.

  Sullivan was not religious. Though raised Catholic, by high school he considered himself a “hardcore atheist.” Before the family moved to Boulder, his father had managed a used-car dealership in Salina, Kansas. His mother worked in a pawnshop. On Thursday nights, during the late shift, Sullivan sat with her at the counter, where he met criminals, alcoholics, and grifters trying to stay one step ahead of bill collectors. He saw how people could be manipulated if you exploited their weaknesses. He learned about desperation and the lies people told to arouse sympathy. From his grandfather, a funeral-home director who, Sullivan suspects, forged death certificates for the local Catholic church, he learned how to keep a secret. The suicide of a gay priest was called a heart attack. The botched abortion of a pregnant nun was pneumonia.

  During spring break in 1968, inspired by On the Road, Sullivan and Stark set off on a tour of the Southwest in Sullivan’s baby-blue Pontiac convertible. They visited Drop City in southern Colorado, eating brown rice and tofu under geodesic domes, and the New Buffalo Commune outside of Taos, New Mexico, washing dishes after the communal meal and hitting on the women. Stark remembers how excited Sullivan would become when he entered these communities. “He had a wanderlust, a powerful urge to immerse himself in these different cultures.” When they spent the following summer in Mexico City, Stark noticed that Sullivan had begun to speak with a Mexican accent.

  “There was a soul-searching element of it,” says Sullivan. “But I was also curious to know what the gurus were getting out of it. And I wanted to figure out how they picked up all those girls.”

  The spiritual groups, he soon realized, shared a simple tactic: they demanded that their followers suspend critical thought. “They’d say, ‘You have to break out of your Western mentality. You’re too judgmental. You have to abandon your whole psychological-intellectual framework. Your obsessive materialism is blocking you from seeing the truth.’

  “I became disturbed by how dramatically they transformed people, and in such a short period of time. They could take some regular American kid and all of a sudden he’s wearing saffron robes, walking around barefoot, all painted up, with a tiny ponytail and shaved head, dancing for hours, selling flowers and incense, living on the floor and eating disgusting food, repeating Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare, Hare Rama. They persuaded a lot of intelligent young people to drop out of college, fuck up their whole career track, break up with their boyfriend or girlfriend, and go off to some retreat. Next thing you know, they’ve lost contact with their family, they’re scrubbing latrines with toothbrushes and liquidating their personal savings.”

  In 1974, Sullivan briefly dated a woman whose grandparents had joined something called the Peoples Temple in San Francisco, led by the Reverend Jim Jones. Sullivan’s girlfriend called him one day in tears. Her grandparents had announced that they were following Jones to a settlement he was founding in Guyana. They had already packed their suitcases, but Sullivan helped persuade them not to go.

  He received another call around the same time from a friend whose sister was being initiated into a group called the Divine Light Mission. The DLM’s leader was a pudgy thirteen-year-old boy from Haridwar, India, named Prem Rawat. He was said to be the reincarnation of his father, the Perfect Master Guru Maharaji, the founder of the DLM, who died when Rawat was eight. The DLM had millions of followers in India, but its adolescent guru wanted to bring his message to America. He arrived in 1971, preceded by a press release: “He is coming in the clouds with great power and glory, and his silver steed will drift down at 4 p.m. at Los Angeles international airport, TWA Flight 761.” A crowd of reporters and screaming young acolytes greeted him at the airport. The DLM incorporated as a tax-exempt church in Colorado and established an ashram in Wallstreet—an abandoned town ten miles west of Boulder that had been conceived, in 1897, as a socialist utopia.

  When Sullivan arrived in Wallstreet, supplicants were lined up alongside a creek outside the ashram, waiting to be granted admittance to the Perfect Master’s chambers. Once inside, they bowed before the guru’s feet, made an offering of a khata, a ceremonial scarf purchased at the gate for a buck fifty, and received a blessing. Then they sat and listened for hours to the boy’s droning pronouncements:

  “The lotus flower grows in filthy water, yet it is pure.”

  “You do not want to just polish the car, the outside. You want to work on the inside.”

  “When we die, we will become one with God. It will be like a drop of water that falls in the ocean. Can you take that same drop out again?”

  Sullivan stood in the back and watched as the boy gawked at the breasts of the American girls who bowed before him. (Three years later, at age sixteen, Rawat would marry a twenty-four-year-old Pacific Southwest Airlines stewardess named Marolyn Johnson.) But the boy did not interest Sullivan nearly as much as did the boy’s mother.

  Mata Ji, “Holy Mother,” was a large, buxom woman in a sari who wore wraparound green-tinted sunglasses. She stood behind her son, scrutinizing every visitor. Occasionally, displeased by something her son said, she leaned close and whispered into his ear. The boy would stiffen, his eyes widening, and nod abjectly. When he repeated her lines she rewarded him with round pieces of taffy, hand-feeding him as one might a trained monkey. Holy Mother caught Sullivan staring. When Sullivan began to ask skeptical questions to some of the followers, a lackey asked him to leave.

  Back in Boulder, Sullivan found his friend’s sister. She was a smart, pretty girl from the East Coast with artistic aspirations and a trust fund—an ideal recruit.

  Sullivan met her in Boulder’s Beach Park. The conversation did not get off to a good start.

  “How can you possibly sit in judgment of an ancient Eastern religion?” she said. “In India they have a deep and powerful understanding of life. We in the West, we’re spiritually impoverished. We’re a new society without traditions. Their civilization has been around f
or aeons!”

  “They’ve been conning people for centuries,” said Sullivan. “That’s the only thing that’s ancient about this.”

  “The Perfect Master says humility is a good thing, poverty is a good thing, manual labor is a good thing. What’s wrong with that?”

  “If that’s the case, then why doesn’t he ever lift a finger? Why does he fly first class or in chartered jets?”

  They went back and forth like this for an hour. Finally Sullivan took a different approach.

  “Forget about their philosophy,” he said. “Let’s focus instead on who is really in power.”

  He explained what he’d seen at the ashram, the way the mother dominated the son. Sullivan knew that the girl had come to Boulder to escape her alcoholic mother.

  “If you join the DLM, you’re not going to be working for that little boy,” said Sullivan. “You’re going to be working for Big Momma.”

  That cut it. She stopped visiting the ashram, finished college, and got a master’s degree in fine arts. The Divine Light Mission, she realized, was not her calling. But Sullivan had found his.

  She introduced herself as Stella Zrnic, a twenty-four-year-old Croatian immigrant who had recently moved to San Francisco. She knew nobody in America and hoped that Dr. Kurt Robinson might help her. She had found Dr. Robinson’s email address on a website that offered dream interpretation. In the About Me section of the site, Dr. Robinson had written: “I am a true subconscious communicator.”

  “I’m writing to you because of the dreams and nightmares that I cannot get rid of,” Stella began her letter.

  Dr. Robinson responded immediately. “Give me a call,” he wrote, providing a private phone number. “I can help you.”

  Soon they were talking on the phone every day. Dr. Robinson’s voice was cheerful, friendly. He didn’t sound like any therapist Stella had ever met.

  “It was brave of you to move to a strange country without knowing anybody. You are very nice, and very smart. But I worry about you.”

  “You do?”

  “Of course I do,” said Dr. Robinson. “You’re too young to be so unhappy, to be contemplating suicide.”

  He asked about her dreams.

  “I have nightmares where someone is chasing me,” she said.

  Dr. Robinson didn’t seem particularly interested in that. She tried again.

  “I had a dream about my mother having sex with my boss.”

  “Describe it for me.” After she did, he said, “Describe it again—in more detail. I want to see how your mind works.”

  He told her to read his book, which was available on his website. It was confusing, and terribly written, but she persisted because he kept asking her about it. He was thrilled when she told him that she’d enjoyed it.

  “Have you been in any serious romantic relationships?”

  “I was seeing someone in Croatia. But we’ve been growing apart since I moved to America.”

  “How old were you the first time you had sex?”

  “Sixteen. ”

  “Was it a positive experience for you?”

  He mentioned that he led a psychology workshop at his home in Orange County, California. He hinted that his students lived with him.

  “They want to learn how to be happy,” he said. “I’m here to help them.”

  “Can I visit your workshop?”

  “I can cure people from a distance. My soul can travel outside of my body.”

  She pressed, but Dr. Robinson demurred. There were no openings available, and a long wait list. Besides, she wasn’t mature enough. If they continued to speak regularly, however, she might yet prove herself.

  “It’s just that I miss my family,” she said. “And my old friends.”

  “But you don’t need them anymore. We’ll be your family. We’ll be your friends. Do you trust me?”

  “Yes. I think so.”

  “I need to be certain,” he said.

  “How will you be certain?”

  “Do you have a camera?”

  The psychological methods used by a cult leader are the same as those used by con men, advertisers, and politicians. As Margaret Singer writes in Cults in Our Midst:

  Cult leaders and con artists are opportunists who read the times and the ever-changing culture and adapt their pitch to what will appeal at a given moment. These manipulators survive because they adapt and because they are chameleon-like. So, at some times we get cults based on health fads, business-training programs, get-rich-quick schemes, and relationship improvement seminars; at others we get fundamentalist religious cults, Eastern meditation groups, identity or hate groups, longevity groups, and so forth.

  Singer, who died in 2003, was a mentor to Sullivan. “She was the most knowledgeable and intuitive person I ever met,” says Sullivan. “She taught me how to recognize the influence of a cult leader, even in people who disguised their connection to a group. She taught me how to keep my composure. And, most invaluably, she taught me how to resist being programmed.”

  Like Singer, Sullivan doesn’t think that any cult leaders are true believers. “Some of them come to believe their own bullshit—they almost have to in order to be convincing. But on a deeper level they know they’re full of shit. I say that because the guru’s teachings will always correspond with his desires. For example, if there is a pretty young convert, the Holy Spirits will always decide that she has been specially ordained to be the leader’s consort, whereas the homely, hardworking woman will always be reserved for one of his schmucks. It’s the same thing with money—the richest devotee is always considered the most devout.

  “Some leaders do make mistakes. They surround themselves with a small circle of sycophants and start to believe too much in their own powers. These are the ones, like David Koresh or Jim Jones, who are most likely to take everyone down with them in a grand extension of their narcissism. And even so, they resort to mass suicide only when they come under threat and have no other way out. Marshall Applewhite of Heaven’s Gate, for instance, had a terminal illness. But the most powerful cults, like Scientology or est, don’t for a minute believe their own bullshit, at least not at the higher levels. The people in control know it’s a game of money and power.”

  Sullivan first worked with Singer in the early nineties. One case involved a woman posing as a psychologist, who had persuaded several of her male clients to undergo sex-reassignment surgery. (The men later alleged that they had been brainwashed.) Singer also collaborated with Sullivan on an investigation of a therapist based in Carmel, California. Sullivan’s involvement began when he received a call from a lawyer named John Winer.

  “I’ve never had a dilemma like this,” said Winer. “I have a potential client, a woman living in Carmel, who alleges outrageous things against her therapist. It sounds crazy, but I’m convinced she’s telling the truth. If she is, it’s a huge case. But then I deposed the therapist, and either he’s telling the truth or everything is a lie.”

  The woman claimed that her therapist, Dr. James D. Nivette, had seduced her and turned her into his personal sex slave. Nivette flatly denied this, and he seemed trustworthy. He was beloved in his community: a consultant for the Monterey Police Department, a volunteer at the local VA hospital, and a professor at Monterey Peninsula College. His patient had a personality disorder, he said, and had fallen in love with him. When he rebuffed her, she concocted an elaborate sexual fantasy.

  The woman’s story did seem outlandish. She claimed that Nivette worked for a clandestine government agency more secretive than the CIA, and that one day he had taken her to a remote trailer park near Napa Valley (she couldn’t remember the exact location) where everyone addressed him by a code name. He drove a black Porsche with a license plate that read zauber, German for “magic.” And he really did have magical powers, she claimed—in fact, he was a practicing wizard! He had also served as a fighter pilot during the Vietnam War and was shot down while flying over China. At the POW camp he seduced a female guard, who help
ed him escape.

  She said that after she tried to end the relationship, Nivette climbed through her window in the middle of the night and crawled into her bed. She awoke with a pistol pressed against her temple. “If you open your mouth,” he said, “I’ll kill you and I’ll kill your daughter.” He raped her, then slipped back out the window.

  Winer hired Sullivan to find out whether there was any evidence to support the woman’s story. The reason he chose Sullivan, he says today, “is his knowledge of psychology . . . He’s very creative in the way he approaches a case. He is able to talk to clients in a way that makes them feel he understands them. People say things to him that they wouldn’t ordinarily say.”

  Sullivan drove to Carmel and interviewed Nivette’s accuser. He examined Nivette’s public records at the local courthouse. He spoke to Nivette’s sister and his elderly mother’s caregiver. He interviewed security guards at Monterey Peninsula College. After two days, he called Winer.

  “Don’t tell me,” Winer said. “She’s out of her mind.”

  “No, man. Even worse. She’s telling the truth.”

  Nivette, Sullivan had found, had a history of sleeping with his young female patients. If a woman refused his advances, he diagnosed her as delusional and had her committed. Nivette was so powerful in the community that nobody reported him. He collected guns and swords and intimidated his mentally fragile patients with talk of mystical powers and secret government connections. He did have FBI clearance, but it was only to work at the VA, where he counseled Vietnam vets with post-traumatic stress disorder. The FBI hired him because he claimed to be a Vietnam veteran, but Sullivan discovered that this was a lie—during the war Nivette had been a student at UCLA. Sullivan also found, in Texas, another victim of Nivette’s. She confirmed the story of the Napa trailer park and gave him directions to it.