33. Marchesano disputed MacIntosh’s recollection. In a 1979 interview, he told Reiterman he recalled no such meeting nor such a veiled bribe. Though Kagele was not present for the meeting with Jones, the vice officer recalled that he had heard about the bribe offer at the time it allegedly was tendered. There is disagreement about the timing of the Temple donation offer too. Kagele believes it occurred after dismissal of the lewd conduct charges; MacIntosh thought it preceded dismissal.
34. Judge Stromwall declined to answer questions directly from the San Francisco Examiner in March 1979, but he answered some written questions from the Los Angeles press corps. He defended all his actions in the case, including his right to order Jones’s records sealed and destroyed. He was asked whether he had any discussions with Kwan other than in the presence of a representative of the city attorney’s office. “It’s not my practice to discuss any case without both sides being present,” he replied, according to the March 29, 1979, San Francisco Examiner.
35. In 1950 whites had comprised 89 percent of the population, blacks 5.6 and Asians 3.9. By 1960, blacks, many of whom came from the South seeking work, increased their percentage to 10.1. By 1972, the racial breakdown was 69.4 percent white, 14.1 black and 14.3 Asian, according to Frederick M. Wirt’s Power in the City, p. 33. And the “minority” population would continue to grow.
36. The power-acquiring techniques of the Temple were neither unique nor inventive. Other close-knit organizations—for example, the Black Panther party in Oakland and Delancey Street Foundation in San Francisco—had won favor with Establishment figures and in some ways became partners through use of bodies available to them. In San Francisco, when issues of concern to left and liberal communities arose, Delancey Street and Peoples Temple either were involved themselves or were consulted. Jones and Maher, while not bosom friends, discussed matters of mutual interest such as protecting Indian leader Dennis Banks from extradition.
37. Hongisto later became police chief of Cleveland, Ohio, and was nominated to become head of New York State prisons. He returned to San Francisco and was elected to the Board of Supervisors.
38. Population breakdowns are estimates from Guyanese and American officials. The black minority government for obvious reasons does not like to distribute official statistics.
39. Though Jones added to the eclectic creed and made adjustments almost daily, the Temple’s principles were no more jumbled than earlier pioneer communal societies. And some Temple lifestyles bore remarkable similarities to earlier communities, and their sexual, psychological and economic features. Their effect, if not intent, was to create great dependency and a psychological wall around the community.In political respects, the Kaweah Cooperative Commonwealth, founded in the Sierra Nevadas in the 1880s, blazed a trail much like the Temple’s. Its founders hoped to promote a kind of Christian anarchy—a mixture of Marxism and utopian socialism.
Another California utopia, Icaria Speranza, founded in 1881 by two French-men near Cloverdale, about 25 miles south of Ukiah, espoused a community property concept resembling the Temple’s. The community creed—that brotherhood among men was contingent upon complete equality of social rights—was consistent with Jones’s concept of social justice, as were other guiding principles —the authority of the majority and control of the individual by the society. However, the Temple’s supposed “authority of the majority”—or participatory democracy—was perverted by Jones’s personal magnetism and conniving.
Templelike criticism or catharsis sessions were not new inventions in history. The Oneida Community, founded by John Humphrey Noyes in the mid-1800s in New York, conducted mutual-criticism sessions that, unlike the Temple’s, incorporated safeguards against authoritarian tendencies. However, Jones, Noyes and a number of other communal leaders recognized the tremendous potential for control through sex and through relative isolation from outside morality. Noyes’s closed community was perhaps ahead of its time in carrying on sexual experiments and selective breeding. While Jones arranged marriages, broke down sexual barriers and used sex to elevate and humiliate, his practices were not scientific enough to be labeled experiments.
Probably inadvertently, Jones almost duplicated some techniques of Thomas Lake Harris, a famous nineteenth-century mystic. One hundred and ten years before Jones had visions of an Indianapolis holocaust and a sanctuary among the California redwoods, Harris had envisioned himself “dwelling in the vicinage of the great forests of Sequoia near the Pacific.” He moved seventy-five people from Brockton, New York, to establish a Santa Rosa area community called Fountaingrove. Harris separated husbands and wives and split children from their families, to train them to endure hard times, just as the Temple did with its “survival training.” And as with Jones, a scandal eventually brought his downfall. In Harris’s case, a San Francisco newspaper carried allegations of communal baths and mate-swapping. Harris—who had also adopted the title “Father” —was accused of having relations with five women in a single day (a feat Jones boasted to have tripled).
40. According to most definitions, Jones qualified as a cult leader. Cults are distinguished by charismatic leaders, and are based on a personality, not a creed. In his arrogance, the cult leader sets himself up as the fountain of all truth. Usually his most powerful truths are prophecies and revelations that cannot be tested. And he often creates the illusion of giving more to his people than he takes for himself.Because commitment can be stronger than fear of death, cult leaders have a tremendous responsibility toward their members. As history has proved, they can exploit that commitment for good or evil.
However, in the universe of cults, Peoples Temple, with a claimed membership of 20,000 and a maximum of 3,000 to 5,000 regularly attending members, was a small planet. Jones’s church was basically a one-state organization with satellite congregations. The Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church, on the other hand, claims 30,000 members in the United States alone, and has a worldwide following. The Church of Scientology, which maintains it is not a cult, claimed 5.5 million members worldwide in 1972. But as Jones reminded his people again and again, he was seeking quality rather than quantity.
41. Reiterman called Dawsey’s house in Macon, Georgia, and the homes of some of Dawsey’s relatives, but attempts to get Dawsey’s comment were unsuccessful. A woman answering the phone May 12, 1980, at his home said Dawsey had nothing to say, then hung up.
42. Although Carlton Goodlett volunteered the existence of the company in a 1979 interview with Reiterman, he declined to name the company, list the partners or provide details about its activities. He said he would not discuss the details because the other partners were embarrassed about having been involved with Jim Jones. However, he insisted that the Temple had invested no money in the company. Goodlett gave the name, California Import Export Co., to author James Reston, Jr., yet the California Secretary of State’s Office showed no record of incorporation.
43. There are some hints that John realized his paternity was a confused matter. In an undated letter, a friend of Lynetta’s named Lois wrote her, “Dear Lynetta, please excuse my delay in answering your most interesting letters. Certainly enjoyed hearing of John Stoen and his discussion of his fathers. Where did he learn that type of language? He sounds like a very mature and interesting child.” Ex-members confirmed that John spoke of his “two fathers.”
44. Stoen would claim in a 1979 interview with Reiterman that he consented to sending John to Guyana only to allay the church’s fears that he was becoming disloyal, too. He said he really was planning to get John out of the church prior to departure, but Jones moved the boy sooner than expected.
45. In an Oct. 10, 1978, affidavit, Carolyn Layton said that the papers shown to Joyce Shaw stated that the church had esteem for Bob Houston and urged Shaw not to pressure the Houstons into removing their grandchildren from the church.
46. Others have reported that Jones collapsed at the Housing Authority when he heard about a Treasury Department investigation of the Temple.
Yet, by best recollections, the collapse occurred March 23—the day of Stoen’s disappearance. Furthermore, it is unlikely Jones knew of the Treasury investigation at that time. An affidavit by Dennis Banks, who tipped the Temple to it, says that he himself did not learn of the probe until May 1977. As for the validity of Jones’s collapse, Sandy Bradshaw believed it might have been faked, simply to allow Jones to disappear from public life temporarily.
47. The Temple’s Grenada visit went so well that Prime Minister Eric Gairy stopped off in San Francisco less than a month later, on June 2, before leaving for London for an award from Queen Elizabeth. He was welcomed at a Peoples Temple reception by Lieutenant Governor Mervyn Dymally, Mayor Moscone and other dignitaries. Less than two weeks later, Gairy opened the Organization of American States general assembly by repeating his call for an international inquiry into flying saucers. Such calls went over about as well as his oppressive government in Grenada. In March 1979, his government was overthrown by rebels, and a Marxist government installed.
48. Although the Temple never responded directly to the allegations one by one, their defense was printed by San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen, probably the church’s most widely read media acquaintance. His lead item on Aug. 18, 1977, said: “The Rev. Jim Jones, target of a ceaseless media barrage these days, wants to come home and answer the charges being leveled at him and his Peoples Temple, but his lawyer, Charles Garry, is advising against it. ‘Garry thinks Jim would be chewed up by the media,’ says Jones’s aide, Mike Prokes. ... ‘This campaign against Jim,’ suggests Prokes, ‘is orchestrated at the highest level, perhaps FBI or CIA....”
49. In a resignation letter prepared in mid-July on Housing Authority stationery, Jones said he was resigning because he received an appointment to the California State Board of Corrections and he noted that the City Charter prohibits anyone from belonging simultaneously to state and city commissions. (Governor Brown’s office later would say that Jones’s name had been submitted for the position and he was being considered at one time, but he never was appointed.) Although the church publicly denied it, drafts of Jones’s resignation letters indicated that the Temple’s troubles with the news media actually prompted his resignation.
50. According to documents seized by the Los Angeles district attorney’s office in 1979, 50 pieces of property deeded to the Temple since Aug. 31, 1976, had been sold for a total of almost $1.5 million. That figure included only eight pieces of property in San Francisco, where the Temple had a few dozen communes, and only eight pieces in Ukiah, where the San Francisco Examiner located some 30 Temple properties, at least $1 million worth. So it appears that the Temple’s total real estate holdings were worth well in excess of $2.5 million.
51. The $10 million figure is an estimate shared by Stoen and financial officer Debbie Blakey; it is consistent with assets recovered after the holocaust of 1978. Jones had told Stoen in 1970 that the church goal was to accumulate $10 million, and within five years, he told the attorney, “We’ve reached our goal.” Former members, church members and law enforcement sources said the Temple kept numerous bank accounts all over California. There were better than a half dozen accounts in various San Francisco banks alone, in the names of the Temple, Apostolic Corp., the Joneses and prominent members.Even the search for the highest interest rates was a learning process for the Temple’s plodding financiers. Although millions of dollars were available for investment, they struggled to obtain a mere 10 percent return on their money. For instance, in 1974-75, the Temple investors were guided largely by a San Francisco newspaper article which noted the high interest rates available through Canadian banks on short-term prime certificates of deposit.
Jones made various members trustees for his personal wealth, which Stoen believed exceeded $1 million when the minister came from Indiana in 1965. In return, the church paid Jones a salary of $20,000 and agreed to meet all his financial needs, including legal defense. In another trust arrangement, the children of Jim Jones were to receive $23,000 on their twenty-first birthdays, a protection not accorded other children in the Temple. From a technical standpoint, this arrangement allowed Jones to publicly plead personal poverty, and it constituted another bond between the man and his church, a financial one.
52. Six weeks after the holocaust, when Mike Touchette heard about the Temple’s multimillion-dollar accounts, he was too angry to speak.
53. Associacion Evangelica de las Americas, formed ostensibly for church-related purposes, began operating in late 1975 with a bank account in Union Bank of Switzerland, Panama. The lawyers formed a dummy corporation, called Bridget, S.A., in case of lawsuits, and in Dec. 1975 opened an account with Swiss Banking Corp., Panama. Although the initial deposits were under $5,000, the Temple soon wired larger amounts—$20,000, $100,000, $200,000 or more. Wire transfers were used on the assumption that the money could not be traced that way.For purposes of security, convenience and maximizing income, the money was spread around the world—in accounts in Switzerland, Panama, Venezuela, Guyana, Trinidad and the United States. As the exodus began in the late 1970s, the accounts in the U.S. became temporary repositories for operating expenses and for funds ultimately transferred to foreign accounts. Because of ease of withdrawal and concealment, the Temple placed the bulk of its money in Panama and Swiss banks, often in numbered accounts, or in the names of longtime but low-ranking members who almost certainly never would quit.
An example of how the church sought to disguise its assets and to keep money moving: the Panama account under Associacion Evangelica de las Americas first was transferred to Associacion Religosa por San Pedro, another front religious corporation. Then the funds were shifted to a numbered account, and later under the name of Esther Mueller, Jones’s longtime housekeeper. In Oct. 1978, seven time deposits ranging from $200,000 to $1.6 million would be transferred to the name of Annie McGowan, another elderly Temple member. Similarly, even the dummy corporation Bridget was made into a numbered account.
The amounts in various accounts varied from nearly nothing to millions of dollars. The church reportedly kept up to $2 million in Union Bank of Switzerland in Zurich, but usually no more than $1 million, and even these funds were later transferred to Panama. The funds kept in Caracas, where the Temple frequently did business, were limited too; in fact, the final balance would be $33,757 in Maria Katsaris’s name. For a time, the church maintained an account with the Banco Mercantile in Panama City, as well as a separate account operating Temple boats. In Trinidad, an account contained funds for purchasing equipment and supplies for Jonestown. The balance in the Guyana banks seldom dipped below $1 million —most of it in external accounts in U.S. dollars. Although Jones had promised to deposit millions of dollars in Guyanese banks, he kept most Guyana funds out of the official Guyana bank, the National Cooperative Bank of Guyana, because he feared money would be frozen there if the Temple were forced to flee the country. Also, Jones did not want to lose money on reconversion from the weak Guyanese dollars to U.S. dollars.
54. Freitas was defeated in his 1979 reelection bid in part because of his office’s handling of the Peoples Temple case and the Dan White murder prosecution. His opponent, Arlo Smith of the state attorney general’s office, hit very hard on Freitas’s Temple probe and the conduct of the Stoen voter fraud investigation. Ironically, the state attorney general’s office itself could come up with no evidence of wrongdoing, though its voter fraud reinvestigation, it should be noted, was hamstrung by the destruction of old voter records.
55. A World Airways spokesman later told Reiterman that although there were no negotiations about a plane at the time, there may possibly have been a call to World by Mazor. However, there was no record of such a call, no discussion with Daly nor with senior vice-president Brian Cook, the spokesman said.
56. According to a Banks affidavit in Sept. 1977, the Indian leader met with David Conn in May 1977 at the El Cerrito home of another Indian activist, Lehman Brightman. There, after reading him some disparaging
material about Jones, Conn asked Banks, then a fugitive, to do two things—one, make a public denunciation of Jones; two, meet with a Treasury agent. All this, claimed Conn, would help Banks’s chances at avoiding extradition to South Dakota. Conn later would say that he respected Banks and was only trying to spare him embarrassment. For his part, Banks—benefactor of a $20,000 Temple donation and never a great fan of government agents—logically considered Conn’s approach a blackmail attempt, so he informed the Temple. Soon Temple members began eavesdropping under the home of Conn’s former wife, and were able to confirm the existence of the Treasury investigation—before many of the guns had been shipped.
57. Traces by the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms after the November 1978 holocaust determined that several guns recovered in Jonestown were purchased legally at the San Francisco Gun Exchange.
58. On Sept. 29, the Temple learned about the search from its shipping agent in Miami, who told them that seven customs men held up the cargo, then pulled and searched one crate at random. In reaction, the Temple alerted Charles Garry, who asked customs for an explanation, but the agency refused to explain the search, and would neither confirm nor deny the investigation.Assistant Guyanese Police Commissioner C. A. “Skip” Roberts shared the Aug. 26, 1977, customs report with Temple women public relations workers. (Roberts told the authors in 1981 that he did so after the Temple demanded to know why Guyanese authorities were checking incoming cargo so closely.) The Temple memo on the contents said Interpol had sent the customs report to Guyana “because [the] investigation disclosed allegations that Jones intends to establish a political power base in Guyana and that he may currently have several hundred firearms in that country.”
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