Raven

by Reiterman, Tim

  At 10:30 A.M., Richartz had called the FBI office in Chicago in her search to locate Ptolemy Reid, the Guyanese official and friend of the Temple who was visiting the mayor of Gary, Indiana. Reid was at that moment in a police-escorted motorcade on the way from Midway Airport on the south side of Chicago to Gary, less than a half hour away. Richartz told the FBI and Chicago police that it was an emergency: Jonestown could be invaded within the hour and only Dr. Reid could stop it. Both agencies turned down her requests to contact the motorcade, she would later say.

  As a last resort, Marceline Jones and two Temple aides flew to Chicago to try to find Reid. At O’Hare Airport, they rendezvoused with Charles Garry, who had been in Detroit. Driving to the house in Gary where Reid was staying, they could find only his wife. But Mrs. Reid assured Marceline that Guyanese Defense Forces would not invade Jonestown and that Jim Jones would not be arrested.

  Marceline immediately communicated the news to San Francisco staffers, for relay to Georgetown, then she headed for Guyana. When word reached Jim Jones, he called off the alert. The six-day siege had drawn to a close. His exhausted people had proved their readiness to die. Less than one month after his move to Jonestown, his power was total. Should members start to doubt that enemies lurked, that the settlement’s very existence was threatened, they had only to think back to those days on the line, their faces streaked with mud, their arms aching from brandishing pitiful weapons.

  The week following the six-day siege, Ptolemy Reid returned to Georgetown, and attorney Haas immediately sensed that the government had jammed the legal machinery. Haas’s Guyanese cocounsel, Clarence Hughes, also began noticing strange things. The legal file on the Stoen case vanished from the Registry for days, then the judge locked it up. On September 16, Haas and Hughes filed another motion for the jailing of Jones for contempt of court. Nothing happened. However, unbeknownst to them, two letters were written that day:

  One from Guyana’s Washington ambassador, Laurence “Bonny” Mann, to Foreign Minister Fred Wills noted that the U.S. State Department had alerted him that Guyana might receive “widespread and unfavorable media coverage of what is now becoming known as ‘L’Affaire Jones.’ ” Though acknowledging Jones’s noncooperation with the Guyana courts, Mann said his government told inquiring reporters that the Temple had not violated any Guyanese laws. But, he added, “the Temple would be injudicious to allow emotional affections for a child to embarrass the relationship with the Guyana government.... We ought to be concerned [about future] media or Congressional accusations that the Guyana Government is harbouring a fugitive, or blocking the execution of a court order.”

  The second letter to the Guyanese Foreign Minister alleged precisely that. U.S. Consul Richard McCoy wrote: “It is our understanding that the Government has issued instructions that the Court Order [in the Stoen case] not be implemented. For instance, the warrant for the arrest of the child remains unsigned.... The Embassy is concerned over the apparent intervention on the part of the Government.... On the surface, it appears that Jim Jones is impeding the resolution of a case involving the well-being of a young child.”

  The letter pointed out that the Embassy was concerned about precedent, because similar cases involving a number of American children in Jonestown could arise in the future.

  The Temple was also concerned about precedent. “Pragmatically, the issue of John Stoen is not an isolated custody case to us,” wrote Carolyn Layton in a Temple chronology. “From the political perspective we know that if we do not get backing on this issue, how could we ever have confidence in the government backing us on far more controversial issues? We also know that if John Stoen were taken from the collective, it would be number one in a series of similar attempts.”

  Believing he no longer could trust Guyana, Jones ordered a search for other havens. On September 30, the Temple sent letters to the Washington embassies of more than a dozen countries, many in the Third World, asking their policies on immigration and cultivation of farmlands. The church got initial replies from the Ivory Coast, Brazil, Greece, Tunisia, Bangladesh, Malawi, Canada and others. The Temple also wrote the U.S. State Department asking about several countries including North Korea and the Stalinist state of Albania.

  At the same time that the Temple was making these rather peculiar inquiries, the Federal Communications Commission was monitoring the church’s radio broadcasts in response to complaints from amateur ham radio operators. In fact, the FCC overheard strange discussions on September 12, only two days after the siege.

  “Tonight,” one official cabled to another, “I heard a ‘Mr. Hill,’ one of the leaders, talking about an arrest warrant and something illegal that they had done, also talk of extradition. It appeared that Mr. Hill had been shot at and harassed.”

  A week later, on September 19, the FCC actually taped two Temple members discussing the events of the six-day siege. One said, “It was an ordeal I wouldn’t want to repeat, but you would have been proud of your friends, the seven hundred-plus; you would have been proud of them as they were prepared to lay their lives down for what they believed.”

  Again Jones’s madness had come dangerously close to discovery by outsiders. But inside his walls all was strangely serene. When San Francisco radio operator Mike Carter arrived in Jonestown at the end of September, he expected to find a camp of solemn people, shaken by their brush with death. Instead, people were looking healthier and happier than he had ever seen them.

  Several months later, Stephan Jones was standing by the kitchen in Jonestown when sixteen-year-old Vincent Lopez approached him. “You know, I saw something,” Vincent began, “and I’m just gonna tell you. (You know) that time Dad got shot at from the bush? I saw K. run into the bush, turn around and shoot.”

  Stephan looked at him for a moment, then turned away.

  FORTY

  On the Defensive

  With the New West story on press, with Tim Stoen gone, and with worries mounting about government inquiries, Peoples Temple had turned to Charles R. Garry. In the eyes of many, the selection of Garry—a nationally renowned lawyer of the Left and chief counsel to the Black Panther party since 1968—conferred additional credibility upon the Temple as a political organization. With so many seemingly nonpolitical accusations flying about, the choice of Garry helped the church present itself as a victim of political conspiracy. In practical terms, the Temple was retaining not only a fine trial attorney but also a master at handling news media.

  Garry, while not the most eloquent of barristers, was the tough, blunt advocate Jones needed during stormy times, a sort of folk hero with a personal history that meshed with the openly leftist image Jones wanted. Born the son of Armenian immigrant parents who had escaped the Turkish massacre, Garry had been reared in a farm town in California’s Central Valley, where as a youth he taught Sunday school and felt poverty and prejudice. As an avowed Marxist lawyer, Garry had the reputation of a fighter on behalf of the underdog. He prided himself on his street fighter’s image and his trademarks—his flashy clothes and cars, his creatively direct language. Now, silver-haired and balding, nearly seventy years old but hardly mellowed, Charles Garry made perhaps the worst mistake of his career by accepting the Temple case. Garry, like so many others, was about to become a victim of Jim Jones. Because of Jones’s deceptions and because Garry sincerely believed in the Temple’s espoused political aims, because of Garry’s own style and his willingness to forgive eccentricities and excesses in political cases, the lawyer was drawn into the accelerating current.

  On his desk Garry kept a sign that read: “The only clients of mine who go to San Quentin are the ones who lie to me.” He always insisted on hearing the truth, and he made no exception in the case of the Temple. In fact, Gene Chaikin and other Temple representatives at least went through the motions of confessing all. They admitted that some New West allegations were true technically—there were beatings, for instance. But the alleged offenses, they said, were placed in improper context, exaggerated or i
nstigated by the very people now making the charges. They provided Garry with seemingly strong documentation showing the corrupt nature of their detractors.

  Garry accepted the Temple’s general thesis—that practices such as beatings had been discontinued long ago and certainly did not exist in Guyana—and set about defending the church to the best of his ability. He treated it as a political case. His office became intimately involved with church members.59

  Over the next year and a half, Garry served as adviser to the Temple and as insulation between Jones and his enemies. Temple representatives visited or called almost daily to discuss mounting problems. While relatives and others attempted to retrieve children from Jonestown, Garry blocked their efforts at each juncture. He believed, based on affidavits which he took personally in many cases, that the Jonestown residents wanted to remain there. He supported his client against press inquiries too, making information available when it tended to help the Temple’s case, holding it back when it did not. He insisted on controlling the Temple’s public stance.

  Garry and his office helped the church file hundreds of Freedom of Information Act requests of various government agencies to determine whether the Temple was being investigated. And when the Temple went public with Dennis Banks’s disclosures about the Treasury Department gun-smuggling probe, Garry told a September 8, 1977, press conference: “We’ve come to the conclusion that there is a conspiracy by government agencies to destroy the Peoples Temple as a viable community organization.” The results of FOIA requests, however, caused Garry eventually to change his assessment, to conclude there was little government interest in the Temple, let alone a conspiracy. But, as the Temple’s advocate, he did not make those findings public.

  Garry found himself defending a church under siege in a constantly fluctuating situation. The initial problems posed by the New West article expanded quickly: a paternity suit and litigation on two continents; lawsuits filed by Tim Stoen and concerned relatives; a countersuit against Tim Stoen; new press disclosures; accusations of libel.

  At the same time as these pressures built, Garry was confronted by discoveries of his own. His client was exhibiting dangerous behavior; his people showed a complete lack of independent thinking. Garry could not overlook the problem, though he kept his criticisms within the lawyer-client relationship.

  About a month after the six-day alert, the spirit of that crisis was resurrected in a letter Teri Buford left Garry aide Pat Richartz before going to Jonestown. The disturbingly fatalistic missive, dated October 9, 1977, befuddled and concerned Richartz. She asked some San Francisco members to interpret the letter for her, but they merely shrugged and acted mystified.

  Buford wrote: “Should anything happen that would kill Jim or bring about a last stand ... in Guyana—please try to put both his life and death in perspective to the people.”

  “I am sure that many will say it was perhaps a ‘crazy or hysterical act’ [but] we maintain the right to choose the circumstances of our deaths....”

  In response to September’s terrifying events and to Buford’s letter, Richartz typed a very forthright six-page answer, criticizing the Temple. Expressing uncertainty about the Temple’s retreat itself, she said, “I am not convinced that ... revolutionaries have the right to leave the ‘belly of the beast’ free of the conflicts and contradictions....” Like others on the Left, Richartz could not comprehend how an organization could fight for socialism in a jungle six thousand miles away. And she sincerely doubted that the Temple functioned socialistically, particularly in reaching decisions. “You feel,” she wrote, addressing Jones, “that the answer lies in establishing a socialist colony—a model. But the model isn’t really visible to us [in San Francisco], and the model panics when you panic or are disturbed.... All roads lead to you—there doesn’t seem to be any independent thinking or ... collective element in the decision making ... we should be thinking in terms of what happens when you are gone —sick—not available? And perhaps I don’t really know all there is to know....”

  Richartz did not understand that Jones had no intention of allowing his people to survive him. In the closing pages, her letter quoted Black Panther Huey P. Newton’s writings on a concept that Jim Jones had bent to his own ends: “revolutionary suicide.” Jones had redefined the term as self-destruction in the face of the enemy. This twist allowed Jones to transform a cowardly defeatist act of final protest into a dignified revolutionary “conquest.” The concept described by Huey Newton, however, was something else entirely. Newton had called for incessant struggle against oppression no matter the odds (that was the suicide part of it). There was no room in Newton’s view for surrender to the oppressor, nor to conditions created by the oppressor—poverty, drugs, street crime etc. He used the word “suicide” not literally, but to mean a fight to the death against overwhelming adversity. The defeatism and petulance implicit in Buford’s letter and Jones’s actions could not have been more contrary to the spirit of Newton’s term. As the Panther expressed it: “You do not beg because your enemy comes with a butcher knife in one hand and the hatchet in the other.”

  That month, October 1977, Charles Garry hand-carried the written critique to Jonestown, along with some of his own misgivings. The events of September had troubled him. The willingness to sacrifice everything for one person—John Victor Stoen—conflicted with his collectivist principles. Also, he wanted to meet privately with his client and see for himself whether Jones actually was mad or merely prone to overdramatize, or whether he had actually manipulated Garry and his friends on the Left.

  It was a pity Garry could not have seen the antics that preceded his visit, for they might well have provided the definitive answer. Jones had wanted his son Stephan, while walking down to the plane to greet Garry, to suddenly act as if he had been shot, with fake blood and the works—all to convince Garry there was really a conspiracy. Stephan discouraged the idea, and Jones finally agreed it would be counterproductive.

  As it turned out, Charles Garry was impressed with Jonestown. It seemed a clean, efficiently operated socialist utopia, exactly as the church had billed it in its brochures. The people—some of whom he interviewed at length for various court cases—appeared healthy and happy. Garry soaked in the atmosphere, taking in details that would help him later describe Jonestown’s virtues to the San Francisco press.

  At one point, Garry had a private talk with Gene Chaikin, the seemingly sincere lawyer who had told him by phone during the siege that Jones was a madman. For several hours, they inspected the settlement together. This time Chaikin was singing a different tune. He talked of his blossoming love of agriculture and allayed Garry’s worries. He conceded Jones had become overly emotional during the six days in September, but insisted that Jones now was on an even keel. As for the threats to commit “revolutionary suicide,” Chaikin said they were merely means of coercing Guyanese authorities to back off. In other words, Garry and his friends had been duped so that Jones could get what he wanted—John Stoen.

  Garry fumed at the thought of being used, and under the corrugated metal roof of the open-air pavilion, he cross-examined Jones. “I want to clarify some doubts in my mind,” he said sharply. “I have problems with an organization which professes to be Marxist yet is willing to sacrifice the whole for one person.”

  Instead of arguing, Jones put on his soapiest preacherly manner, common as an old shoe. While his aides flitted around him like children, he tried to soothe the lawyer. “We overreacted,” he explained. “We got panicky. It was a mistake. No one ever intended to die.”

  “Well, it was a stupid fucking thing to do,” exploded Garry.

  Jones claimed that it was his “emotional” followers who had pushed him into the whole business. Then Jones said that he personally agreed with the criticisms contained in Richartz’s letter but that everyone else disagreed.

  One evening after entertainment in the pavilion, Jones drifted into a discourse about sex in the church. While Marceline, Maria Katsaris, Teri B
uford and others listened, Jones said, with self-sacrifice dripping from his voice, that he gave his body to church members to keep them happy and to preserve his little socialist society. And he boasted of having sex with sixteen in a single day. He then turned to his wife: “You know, I gave you the same opportunity, to have sex with anyone you wanted.”

  “I never did,” said Marceline.

  “You could have,” he repeated.

  The discussion over sex gave Garry pause—but not enough to negate his positive feelings about the mission and its people. Garry went back to the States and defended his client, overlooking Jones’s eccentricities and forgiving his past excesses. “I have seen paradise,” he told me and other inquiring reporters.

  Soon new problems reached toward “paradise,” reminding Jones of his vulnerability. On October 31, 1977, Jones’s attorney in the lewd conduct case in Los Angeles, David Kwan, wrote him: “It is most urgent that you contact me as soon as possible.” Eventually the matter was referred to Garry. The problem: On October 17, the state attorney general’s office moved to overthrow the judge’s order to seal and destroy Jones’s lewd conduct case records. Hundreds of pages of legal documents would be filed during the next year’s legal fight. Though the state lost two key decisions, it kept pushing to preserve records that would rend Jim Jones’s reputation beyond repair, appealing higher and higher. The exile’s problems would simply not go away.

  One afternoon around the beginning of November 1977, Sam Houston phoned me. His voice sounded raspy, as though he had a bad cold. “I’m ready to tell my story, Tim,” he said. “My doctor says I’ve got throat cancer. I might lose my voice and everything else—so I’ve gotta say it now.... Maybe if I tell my story, it will get ... someone to find out about this church.”

  In the Houston family living room, Sam and Nadyne placed photo albums before me as I sat on the sofa. Sam, his voice already partially throttled, sat beside me. Nadyne took a chair by the fireplace across the room, her beauty-shop curls framing a soft face. The heavy albums introduced the family in an intimate, slightly awkward way. As we turned the pages of the album together, the life of a model child materialized in photographs taken by his proud father, in mementos and newspaper clippings of his achievements. Bob Houston had done all the right things—from grade school through the University of California—he had studied hard, attended church faithfully, excelled in the Scouts, took music lessons, played in the school band, won awards for scholastic and artistic achievements. With each page, the terrible tragedy of his death became clearer.