James Warren Jones, forty-two, was booked for investigation of lewd conduct and held on $500 bail. On his arrest sheet, he listed his employer as Disciples of Christ, his occupation as pastor. Significantly, the only physical malady he reported was “possible hemorrhoids.” Jones was bailed out promptly, and his followers went immediately to work.
Within twenty-four hours, they had an outside attorney on the line and a medical defense in the mails. The Temple promptly retained Los Angeles lawyer David Kwan, who was known for his ability to get things done. On December 14, 1973, a San Francisco urologist wrote to Kwan: “Reverend James Jones has been under my urological care since October 1970. He has obstruction of the outlet of the urinary bladder due to strategic enlargement of the prostate gland.... Moreover, there is chronic inflammation of the prostate. These conditions cause urinary frequency. Even prior to seeing me, Reverend Jones had learned that jogging or jumping in place afforded improved initiation of urination. I encouraged his continuing that technique....”
The Temple prepared a press release to be used if the matter ever leaked to the public. It hardly tallied with Jones’s medical defense—the release maintained that the arrest had been prearranged as retaliation for the near-riot. “When Rev. Jones turned and told the officer, in startling plain English, to get lost, he was arrested.”
With his groundwork readied, Jones asked to meet with his acquaintance Captain Marchesano to discuss the charge. The captain first checked with the arresting officer, Kagele, who insisted that Jones’s behavior could not have been health-related. Then Marchesano met with Jones at the Temple but refused to intervene.
Jones and two or three aides also paid a visit to Ramparts Station where, according to Vice Squad Lieutenant Bob MacIntosh, they offered $5,000 to Marchesano and him for the stationhouse fund. The veiled bribe offer was phrased so as to be unprosecutable. Marchesano refused the donation.33
When the case arrived in court on December 20, 1973, Municipal Court Judge Clarence “Red” Stromwall, a former police officer, dismissed the charges at the request of the city attorney’s office. The city attorney’s file listing the detailed reason for the dismissal motion vanished, and none of the prosecutors later recalled having made such a decision.
Jones was not yet in the clear, however. As part of the dismissal, he had signed a “stipulation as to probable cause,” a document admitting that the officer had had reason to arrest him. This protected the police against a false arrest suit but also reflected negatively on Jones. He and Tim Stoen worked to keep the records from prying eyes. In January 1974, Jones visited the Los Angeles police records division, then Stoen followed up with two phone calls. He was told that only minors qualified to have their records sealed. Stoen, then Mendocino County assistant district attorney, made similar calls to state agencies—always careful to say he was operating in a private capacity. All his requests were turned down.
Yet on February 7, 1974, in chambers, without notifying the prosecutor or arresting officer and without a court reporter present, Judge Stromwall ordered all the case records sealed and destroyed. He also instructed various law agencies to destroy their files on Jones’s arrest, an action rare if not unprecedented in Los Angeles sex cases.34
To make sure the order was executed, Stoen went to the state attorney general’s office and asked that Jones’s record be pulled and destroyed. Stoen said he was afraid that undefined malevolent people might use the records to “get Jones.” His argument struck the state records expert, Deputy Attorney General Mike Franchetti, as downright bizarre. Franchetti refused Stoen’s request.
The seal-and-destroy order rankled Officer Kagele so much that he filed an internal protest in the police department, actually taking his complaints all the way to then-Police Chief Ed Davis, who referred him to future Chief Daryl Gates. Gates said nothing could be done about the court’s order. But others besides Kagele, mainly city police records personnel, were concerned, because they feared the minister might have access to children. Eventually, the State Department of Justice special services division asked Stromwall in writing to vacate his “invalid” sealing order but he refused. That put in motion some slow legal machinery. Jones would not learn that records of his lewd conduct case had survived after all until the fall of 1977. By that time, he had moved abroad permanently—and had too many problems already.
In the cities, Jones wanted his organization to be rooted in the streets of the black community. But as a practical matter, he did not have the energy or inclination to do more than send representatives to community meetings and to recruit a few of the young black community activists. As a white preacher from the Midwest, he was at a decided disadvantage in rough neighborhoods and housing projects where traditions of hard survival and violence ran deep, where turf battles were fought over dope, prostitution, federal dollars and jobs.
Jones only dabbled in this bare-knuckles world, and usually with stand-ins. Chris Lewis was Jones’s most notorious second in the ghetto—the perfect Temple antihero, a black Robin Hood with the physical equipment of Sonny Liston. He was a likable freewheeling street person when he was in good humor; but he was as unpredictable as a bleeding bull. The six-foot-two, 220-pounder had earned his street scars, smarts and rap-sheet on the heroin-fencing-burglary circuit.
When Lewis was introduced to Jim Jones through a relative in 1969, he was a heroin addict and community activist in the Western Addition. He joined the Temple and went to Redwood Valley for detoxification—one of the few true needle users to come to the Temple’s antidrug program.
For about a week in 1969, Chris Lewis went cold turkey. Sweating and shaking, his withdrawal took place under the supervision of other Temple members, Jim Cobb among them. They talked to him, played chess with him and took turns being supportive. Toward the end, they brought him outside to chop wood to take his mind off the pain.
After Lewis beat the habit, he wore many hats for Jones—bodyguard, chief enforcer and reformed junkie. During the Temple’s urban expansion campaigns, the ex-con probably was Jones’s most prized recruit. Lewis effectively lectured troubled teen-agers about the ugly realities of prison: “It’s blood on your knife, or shit on your dick.” He bolstered Jones’s security forces directly as a guntoter and indirectly as a threatening presence to discourage traitors. Chris Lewis was a special case; Jones liked and admired “Teddy,” as he fondly called him. While he built up Lewis’s image as an enforcer and a virile stud, Jones also realized that he never could break Lewis’s independent spirit. Lewis did pretty much what he pleased. He walked out of meetings without being challenged. He broke church dietary rules himself and took kids out to hamburger joints for junk food.
The other members respected Lewis. But they feared the wide mood swings that had enabled him to survive in community politics that were as rough as street fights.
Lewis was very much involved in internal politics and power games of the Western Addition Project Area Committee (WAPAC), a community group that provided a check on the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency and its urban renewal projects. At a Redevelopment Agency meeting in July 1971, Lewis got in an argument and tried to choke redevelopment Executive Director Justin Herman with his own necktie. Two years later, Lewis carved an even deeper notch in his reputation:
In November 1973, at a meeting attended by about a hundred people, an altercation developed between WAPAC factions. On one side was Lewis, an affirmative action officer for WAPAC. On the other was twenty-two-year-old Rory Hithe, the WAPAC director and a secret Black Liberation Army member, who had pleaded guilty two years earlier to conspiracy in the 1969 torture slaying of Black Panther Alex Rackley in New Haven, Connecticut.
With the crowd looking on, a fight started between two women—Hithe’s sister, Michelle, and Lewis’s wife, Mae, who was a Temple member. Chairs were thrown and people tumbled to the floor as Lewis and Hithe became involved in the scuffle. Lewis pulled his .38-caliber revolver, then three shots rang out. People screamed. Lewis had killed Rory
Hithe with a bullet to the head and wounded Michelle Hithe in the thigh.
With Lewis booked on murder and assault charges, Jim Jones came to his aid, footing the bill for the famed defense lawyer James Martin MacInnis and putting up Lewis’s $100,000 bail.
Just prior to the trial, newspaper accounts alleged that the BLA had infiltrated WAPAC, and several top WAPAC officials resigned amid accusations of death threats and stolen payroll checks related to BLA activity. The disclosures meshed nicely with Lewis’s defense. His attorney contended that Lewis had fired in self-defense, though his victims were unarmed. Portraying his client as a political moderate, MacInnis said that Lewis was attacked for his opposition to radical political corruption.
Although the prosecution pointed out that Lewis had come to the meeting armed and although two ministers testified that Lewis did the shooting, it took the jury only seven hours to acquit him.
Jones claimed at a Temple meeting that the shooting sprang from Lewis’s failure to follow his instructions that night. “I have to bleed my people for you,” he told Lewis, noting that he had spent $36,000 in Temple money on legal fees and other expenses.
Although Jones later would say that helping Lewis was the biggest mistake of his life, some benefits accompanied the expenditure. First, Jones proved to his people that he would stick up for them all, no matter what the cost. Second, he put Chris Lewis deeply in his debt. The events also bespoke both Lewis’s willingness to kill and Jones’s power to play the justice system like a cello. And Lewis’s reputation on the streets was not damaged either; black politicians and community leaders knew that Jones had a strong henchman as a bulwark in his security squad.
Knowing he had been saved from prison, Lewis promised contritely to pay back every penny. Faithful to his word, he hand-delivered $500 and $1,000 cash payments. To raise the money, Lewis returned to his days of fencing, selling “hot” car radios, dresses and other wares in quasi-government agencies or on ghetto street corners.
It was almost inevitable that the Temple would be caught up one way or another in the Symbionese Liberation Army’s kidnapping of Patricia Hearst. This kidnapping-brainwashing by a ragtag group of eight revolutionaries became the center of news media attention in the mid- 1970s and thrust one of the world’s most powerful publishing families into contact with the radical community in the San Francisco Bay Area. The primary mechanism for this intercourse was a multimillion-dollar food giveaway program demanded as a ransom by the newspaper heiress’s captors. The SLA simultaneously named a watchdog coalition of community groups to oversee food distribution to the poor in the Bay Area, and asked WAPAC to chair the coalition.
Jones’s statements inside the church, and to sympathetic radicals outside it, probably best indicated his true feelings about the SLA. His rhetoric was unrestrained. He as much as said that terrorism was understandable, that the kidnapping of Patricia Hearst was an important lesson to the ruling class. Expressing admiration for the SLA, he had the Symbionese Declaration distributed among his members. Later, he even allowed circulation of a rumor that Chris Lewis helped put up the SLA during its underground sojourn.
At the same time, Jones followed a circuitous strategy designed to convince his primary enemies—law enforcement and the press—that the Temple deplored the SLA and terrorist violence.
On February 13, 1974—just nine days after the kidnapping—members hand-carried a $2,000 check to the Hearst family mansion in Hills-borough, a suburb of oak-shaded dales and winding streets. While reporters from every imaginable news agency camped along the street outside the Temple members presented their contribution to the $2 million People-in-Need food program. The Temple’s $2,000 was meant as a good-will gesture toward Patty Hearst’s family, especially her father, Randolph Hearst, president of the Temple’s nemesis, the San Francisco Examiner. Thanks to an introduction by Bob Houston’s father, AP photographer Sammy Houston, news of this “antiterrorist” largess went across the nation on the AP wire.
Yet two weeks afterward, the San Francisco police intelligence unit opened a file on Rev. Jim Jones which it shared with the department’s antiterrorist unit. Based on an intelligence inspector’s interview with a Temple member described only as a black woman housekeeper in her mid-fifties, the report said, “Jones advocated to the congregation the overthrow of this established government by means of force and violence ... and it was discussed approximately one year ago that Hearst would be a target as he represented the Capitalistic Society.”
The report went on to say that, based on newspaper photos, the informant recognized Hearst’s boy friend, Steven Weed, and SLA members Donald DeFreeze and Nancy Ling Perry at various meetings. The informant also said she saw armed guards in cars outside Temple meetings in Ukiah.
The rather sensational and disjointed information was thought unreliable and was not publicly disseminated. Nevertheless, the intelligence division received two letters from Tim Stoen within the next month, both of which took pains to explain the Temple’s antiterrorist convictions and to dissociate the church from Chris Lewis.
In his April 8 letter, Stoen said he was writing at the suggestion of two patrolmen who had investigated a kidnapping and assault reported by Temple members. “The circumstances suggest that a ‘militant’ group may have been involved.... As an assistant district attorney, I can attest that Rev. Jones consistently ... attacks scathingly the B.L.A., the S.L.A. and other groups.... Moreover he and the rest of us are most grateful for the excellent response of the SFPD ... when the bomb was planted last month under his bus.”
Police records showed no evidence of a bomb being reported. And the alleged kidnapping incident did not check out at all.
A week later Stoen again wrote the intelligence division, reporting inexplicably that Chris Lewis—“recently acquitted of second degree murder against a B.L.A.”—had no connection with the Temple, except that his wife had attended services and that members had been trying unsuccessfully to get him into drug rehabilitation work.
“Since the trial, however, Lewis seems to have finally realized how much grief he’s caused.... As a result he has agreed to leave the community.... If Chris Lewis ever returns to San Francisco and gets involved with any issue with the police, we will not only ask our members to wash their hands of him but to completely oppose him.”
The letter did not mention that Lewis had been dispatched to the Temple’s new mission in South America....
Between 1971 and 1974, Jim Jones had suddenly found himself challenged by three serious enemies—the press, Temple defectors and the Establishment, including law enforcement agencies. Traitors had breached security from the inside, and outsiders were threatening to reach behind closed walls. The cracks could grow and merge and ultimately bring the walls crumbling down, and Jones knew it.
With a combination of offense, defense and limited retreat, he minimized his losses and in some ways turned liabilities into assets. But like an injured daredevil, he kept repeating his dangerous stunts, always putting himself in conflict with the larger world, always showing his allies that enemies really were out to get him.
At every turn he made new enemies and increased the likelihood of the old ones forming alliances. When he applied his absolute and amoral pragmatism in defense of the church, the remedies tended to come full circle and do additional damage. When he intensified church discipline to prevent defections and disloyalty, Jones utilized harsh practices that actually caused defections. When he tried to build a political power base for ego needs and as a defensive tactic, that would backfire too. Though he might win powerful friends and make the church less vulnerable to attack, he would increase the church’s visibility and subject it to new scrutiny containing the seeds of destruction.
Still, Jones did not lose sight of reality entirely. He knew only so many lies, deceptions and cruelties would go unnoticed. In an effort to stay one step ahead of his enemies, Jones advanced a new vision of a faraway sanctuary. In fall of 1973—shortly after the desertion of th
e eight and about a year after the Kinsolving series—he and Tim Stoen prepared “immediate action” contingency plans for responding to a crack-down by the press or police. In a handwritten outline, Stoen listed means of fleeing the country—a flight to Canada on twenty-four hours notice; a flight to Canada and then to “a Caribbean missionary post” on three weeks notice; and a mass exodus to the Caribbean on six months notice. The “Suggested Long Range Plans” were: “1. Stay here in California until first sounds of outright persecution from press or government. 2. Have already developed a mission station and Christian retreat in the Caribbean, e.g., Barbados, Trinidad....” The plan also called for flying all members to the settlement at the first signs of persecution.
As the plan was refined and fleshed out, the Temple zeroed in on Guyana, a small underdeveloped country on the northeastern shoulder of South America. As an early step, Temple researchers studied the country’s economy and extradition treaties between the United States and Guyana.
Why Guyana? For one, Jones had been favorably impressed back in 1961 during his stopover in what was then British Guiana. Its politics were socialistic and moving further left. It was the only English-speaking country in all South America and, perhaps more important, was governed by blacks. Besides, it was small enough and poor enough that Jones could easily obtain influence and official protection there.
On October 8, 1973, in Redwood Valley, the issue was put squarely on the table, as Resolution 73-5. Should the board of directors of Peoples Temple vote to authorize establishment of a branch church and agricultural mission in Guyana? Jim and Marceline Jones, Tim Stoen, Carolyn Layton, Archie Ijames, Sharon (Linda) Amos and Mike Cartmell made it official with a unanimous vote.
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