by Karen Jonson
Justice may have been delayed (over and over again) in the criminal trial of Prakashanand Saraswati, but now we had a measure of justice. But, sadly, it was only a half measure. Unfortunately, after the long battle by so many people to get him into the courtroom, and a glorious courtroom fight and conviction, the DA team made the curious decision to release on him on own recognizance that evening to await sentencing on Monday.
It was a decision that would come back to bite them on the provervial ass.
114
Weekend Negotiations
A Low Blow
SUNDAY, 6 MARCH 2011.
After the verdict, the girls had planned to take a much-needed break over the weekend.
On Friday evening, they enjoyed dinner out in a San Marcos restaurant, and posted photos of themselves with the biggest smiles I’d seen on their faces in a long time. But there was something different about these smiles. They projected an interesting mix of innocence—and power. These three women were happy and proud of what they had accomplished. But their happiness was short-lived.
I planned to meet them on Sunday morning at Austin’s annual kite festival. But when I called Kate, she was upset. “You’ll never guess what happened! My father called us.”
“What? Why?”
“About a half hour ago, he called my phone. I refused to talk to him. But Vesla did. He begged us to ask the jury to give Prakash probation. In fact, the defense lawyers have been calling Cathy all weekend, trying to negotiate an offer of probation. We said no.”
I met Kate in the park and we continued discussing this low blow. Apparently, when the lawyers couldn’t make a deal with Cathy, so the Barsana Dham team decided to use the father to try and influence his daughters. This was the first time he had spoken to either of them in almost three years. He had never met his first grandchild, Kate’s one-and-a-half year old daughter. And he had just learned Vesla was five months pregnant with her first child, also a girl. And now he was calling to beg them to show leniency to their abuser!
“You’re hurting the person I love the most in the whole world,” he implored. Vesla told him that was too bad, and hung up.For the entire time that they were waiting for the trial, Vesla had held out hope that her father would one day wake up, see the truth, and leave the man who had sexually abused her as a child.
After she hung up on her father that day, she gave up on any chance of a reconcilation.
115
Day Ten
And Then He Was Gone
MONDAY, 7 MARCH 2011.
At 9:10 a.m., Prakash was not in the courtroom for his sentencing.
I noticed there were far fewer devotees in the courtroom than usual, and started watching those who were there more closely. Some were talking to each other. Some were sitting quietly. A few were reading. Overall, their demeanor seemed odd, considering the gravity of the situation.
By 9:35, members of the prosecution team started looking around the courtroom.
At 9:40, it was clear that Prakash was a no-show. Cathy walked over to me and said, “It looks like we are missing one swami.”
The courtroom descended into chaos as everyone sprung to action. Hays County officials called all the area hospitals and issued a warrant for his arrest. While we were waiting for Judge Ramsay, I called Eric Dexheimer, who was also absent from the courtroom.
“Eric, it’s Karen. I see you aren’t here today.”
“No. My editor thought two weeks was enough for one story.”
“Oh? Because something is happening.”
“What?”
“Prakash is not here. He didn’t show up this morning and no one seems to know where he is.”
“Wow. You really know how to bury the lede (journalism-speak for the beginning of a story)! What’s going on there?”
“We’re waiting for the judge to arrive.”
“Okay. Keep me posted.”
I also called my insider friend who told me there had been a meeting the night before at Marsha’s house, where Prakash had been staying. All the devotees had gone to his dinner at about 5:00 p.m. I passed this information on to the prosecution. This piece of critical information gave us his last known time and location.
Many times during the three-year wait for his trial, I imagined Prakash not showing up. And now, when he was finally a convicted felon, he was on the run, a fugitive from justice.
When Judge Ramsay arrived, Cathy requested the trial proceed in absentia, but Kearney, who was the defense’s spokesman for the morning’s drama, made a fuss about his client being involuntarily MIA.
Kearney: “We have not located our client, Your Honor, and we don’t know the reason for his absence at this time. We’re still trying to determine that. You know, we don’t know if he’s laying in a ditch somewhere. We don’t know where he is, and so we’re certainly not in a position to say that he has voluntarily elected not to be here. We have no information to that effect, and we’re trying to locate him.”
Cathy: “Well, the alternative is you don’t know either whether he just took a one-way flight to India, right?”
Kearney tried to shift the blame to the prosecution.
Kearney: “You know that Dennis Dement, the investigator for the district attorney’s office, called your sheriff and asked to send a car out to look for him?”
Cathy: “Your Honor, he’s not an investigator for the district attorney’s office, Dennis Dement.
Kearney: “For the defense.”
Cathy: “Well, we don’t - I mean, that’s - that’s coming from this lawyer telling us what somebody - some other investigator not associated with anybody is doing. If they want to put Dennis Dement on the stand, we’ll be happy to hear from him here.”
As the heated discussion between the lawyers waged on, Judge Ramsay requested their presence in chambers, and we were all dismissed until after lunch. I received a call from Eric and my insider source, who told me the story was headline news on the Stateman website.
When we returned to the courthouse, there were five news trucks in the parking lot—one for every news station in the area. When we walked up to the courtroom doors, Eric held them open for us. I smiled at him: “You made it.”
Although Cathy and Amy fought to have the trial proceed as intended, Judge Ramsay made the final decision.
Judge Ramsay: “The Court’s plan is to release the jury on the defense request until nine o’clock in the morning. We’ll proceed at nine o’clock in the morning. And you have a motion?”
Kearney: “Yes, Your Honor. In view of all of the media and far-reaching press coverage on the fact that our client did not show up this morning - it’s all over the Internet. It’s on every news station. It’s everywhere that - we would ask the Court to sequester the jury just out of an abundance of caution. It’s so easy for some family member or friend or neighbor to mention to them what they saw, and there’s no way to undo that. And so just because of the extensive media coverage, we’re asking that you sequester the jury.”
Judge Ramsay: “Request is denied. Bring the jury in, please.”
Cathy: “And, Your Honor, just for the record, we will ask that - we will call Prabhakari Devi tomorrow as our first witness. So if you can let her know she needs to be here, with or without her attorney.”
Kearney: “Which one do you think it will be?”
Cathy: “I’m guessing probably the former. The real question is who it’s going to be. That’s the question.”
As he was leaving the courthouse, Kearney stopped to talk to the KXAN television news reporter, Chris Sadeghi.
Sadeghi: “It has been a bizarre day. We were supposed to hear testimony to start the sentencing phase of this trial, but instead, we ended up hearing testimony from a detective on the attempts to locate Swamiji. Now, the argument becomes is the 82-year-old man unable to make it, or is he on the run? The question on everyone’s mind is where is Swamiji? His attorney could only wonder, like everyone else.
Kearney: “He’s been real si
ck this last weekend and we have an eighty-two-year-old client, with severe, you know, health issues.”
To me, the most striking aspect of the surreal day was that not a single devotee looked the least bit concerned about their guru’s sudden disappearance.
116
Day Eleven
Fugitive from Justice
TUESDAY, 8 MARCH 2011.
Even though Cathy had made it clear that she wanted to put Prabhakari on the stand to question her about Prakash’s disappearance, she never got the chance.
Overnight, Prabhakari and Peter S. lawyered up, and each requested immunity from prosecution for their testimony. Hays County gave immunity only to Peter. They weren’t going to let Prabhakari skate away scot-free.
However Peter’s testimony was completely useless, as was that of the two other witnesses the defense trotted out. One was a Hispanic male devotee who was brought to the stand for an obvious reason—to appeal to the Hispanic members of the jury. I even thought I saw one of the Hispanic men on the jury roll his eyes at the insulting ploy. Their second witness was an Indian doctor from Oklahoma who detailed a litany of illnesses that supposedly afflicted Prakash. He was a staunch Kripalu devotee and was not Prakash’s doctor. However, it hardly mattered who was on the witness stand or what they said, because the fact remained that Prakash was not there. His lawyers had the audacity to continue fighting for probation, even though their client was now a fugitive from justice.
Amy said it best:
“I never thought I’d see it. Never thought I would see someone stand up here and ask a jury to give a fugitive probation, let alone someone who’s been convicted of 20 felonies who - what does he do right after? Goes out and commits more felonies. And he wants to ask you for probation, and by doing it he tells you that, well, God, how’s he going to defend himself in prison, like he thinks you’re dumb enough to think that they’re going to put an 82-year-old ailing man in general population with people that are going to hurt him; that this State of Texas is crazy enough and doesn’t have the sense to have a special ward for geriatric patients for people who need medical attention. And you think somebody with as much money and lawyers as he has access to is going to be stuck in a place where he can’t defend himself and where he can’t get the proper medical needs? Please. There’s a place for people like him.
“But you know what? Even if he was still sitting there in that recliner, we would be up here asking you to sentence him to prison. That was the plan all along. Even if he was still there (pointing to his empty Lazy-Boy chair), we’d be asking you to - for him to go to prison because the very same people that are helping him hide, the very same people who aren’t - even bother looking for him, who are on the line for $11 million and can’t even bother to call him to see if he’ll answer his call - those very same people who are helping him hide would be the very same people who would be helping him do whatever he wants to do while he's on probation.”
Prakash’s charges of indecency with a child carried a jail sentence of two to twenty years per charge. Cathy had said all along she would request jail time, and that she would ask for at least eleven years. However, now that Prakash was on the run, she asked the jury to give him all 400 years.
“For the rest of their lives, will they have to stop themselves from recoiling from the touch of their partners because - every time they reach to caress their breasts, will they think of him? He’ll always be there. When Shyama finally finds love, she’s going to have to explain to him, ‘I was molested as a child.’ It’s always going to be there for her. When Vesla brings her newborn child to her breast to feed it, will she see his face? Every milestone for the rest of their lives, they will see him, and they will remember his touch, and they will remember what he did to them, and it will never leave them. When he acted on his sexual desire for these girls when they were children, he gave them a life sentence. All we’re asking you to do is sentence him to 20 years. And, besides, for a fugitive from justice, he shouldn’t get anything less.”
The jury deliberated for one hour. The twelve members of the jury gave Prakash fourteen years per count for a total of 280 years. Judge Ramsay ruled the penalty per charge would run concurrently, instead of consecutively, which meant Prakash would serve just fourteen years in a penitentiary. However, he would now be facing additional charges as a fugitive.
Whether it was fourteen years or 400, the once-glorified guru was going to jail—if the U.S. Marshals could find him.
117
The Wicked Flee
A Run for the Border
U.S. MARSHALS QUICKLY FOUND that Prakash had crossed the border into Mexico at Nuevo Laredo on Sunday night—and that he was neither alone, nor broke.
The Austin American-Statesman ran an article on 1 April 2011, under the headline, “Guru Still in Mexico, say U.S. Marshals”:
“The U.S. Marshals Service is reasonably confident that convicted guru Prakashanand Saraswati is still ‘hunkered down,’ in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, according to Hector Gomez, supervising deputy marshal of the agency’s Austin office. ‘I really think we’ve got him landlocked now.’
“He declined to identify how the marshals knew Prakashanand was hiding out in the border city, but he said the latest hard evidence of the guru’s location was reliable as of about a week ago.
“Gomez also said the agency has evidence that Prakashanand left the country ‘with loads of cash,’ presumably to use to bribe a pilot to fly him out of Mexico, probably to India.”
Two women close to Prakash were also missing—his assistant Vishi and a woman named Allison, who went by the Hindi name, Chittra. Allison was fluent in Spanish, so it made sense for Prakash to take her with him. And, of course, Vishi was his long-time servant. Why he did not want Prabhakari is anyone’s guess. Perhaps they had a falling out over the failed defense strategy. Or maybe he assumed she would continue to run Barsana Dham.
But Kripalu had other ideas. Within ten days of Prakash’s run for the border, he kicked Prabhakari and her family out of Barsana Dham, telling them to go to New Jersey and run a JKP center there. But that did not pan out and all four Tonnessens, including their son, moved to Colorado, then later to Idaho, where they were from originally. Meanwhile, Kripalu also removed the brother, Luke, from priesthood.
Kripalu also created a new management team that included only two of the former members: Diwakari and Katie W. He added three Indian men to the team, naming one of them as the new president. He instructed devotees to remove photographs of Prakash from the prayer hall at Barsana Dham. And—the oddest thing of all—he changed the name of the ashram to Radha Madhav Dham. Later in the summer, he reportedly performed a death ritual in India for Prakash. I’ve been told that, according to Indian custom, this act meant that Prakash “was dead to him.”
As Kripalu’s partner in crime for nearly sixty years, Prakash had become a serious liability overnight—and Kripalu now wanted to wash his hands of him.
118
The $10 Million Dollar Question
Who Got the Money?
NINE MONTHS AFTER HIS ESCAPE, the San Marcos Record reported the following:
“When Saraswati skipped town, District Judge Charles Ramsay issued a warrant for his arrest and ordered the forfeiture of his $1 million bond - which had been paid by electronic transfer by one of his followers. The guru is believed to be hiding in Mexico, authorities say, but is the subject of a worldwide manhunt. His passport had been confiscated after he was charged; though authorities fear he could have obtained a false one… In April of this year, the case was featured on ‘America’s Most Wanted.’”
And what about the $10 million bond? After Prakash’s trial, Peter S., the devotee responsible for the bond, hired four of the best bail-bond lawyers in Texas and got out of paying the bond scot-free. The only money paid to Hays County was the forfeited one million dollars in cash and an extra $200,000, which was the amount charged to Prakash for the penalty phase of his trial.
On November 4, 20
11, the San Marcos Mercury reported:
“When a Hindu guru convicted of child molestation skipped town before his sentencing in March, observers were heady with speculation about what Hays County would do with $11 million in bonds posted by a follower of the disgraced spiritual leader.
“As it turns out, Hays County snagged ‘only’ $1.2 million from the deal - the $1 million forfeited cash bond that has already been made public, plus $200,000 from a settlement agreement with TV infomercial entrepreneur Peter Spiegel. The agreement absolved Spiegel from liability for the $10 million bond he signed to guarantee Prakashandand Saraswati’s appearance in court.
“The county still has a $10 million judgment against Saraswati, so if police ever find the guru, the county could attempt to get $10 million out of him.”
With Prakash still at large and the loss of the anticipated bail bond, the best that can be said about this situation is that Prakash no longer enjoys the fame he so desperately craved. Also, his and Kripalu’s sordid con game is finally exposed for exactly what it is. He no longer gets to visit the man he had a sixty-year-long masochistic relationship with, playing the faithful slave to Kripalu’s dominating master. Nor does he get to surround himself with his adoring devotees playing the roles of faithful slaves to their dominating master.
It’s no coincidence that while I was in India for New Year in 2004, Prakash was busy finalizing the creation of several JKP trusts for which Kripalu’s three daughters were named as administrators. After Kripalu’s arrest in Trinidad, lawyers in the U.S. researched JKP’s funds on behalf of a woman who was raped by Kripalu as a child and found JKP’s money was hidden in a “complicated network of India-based trusts”; no doubt the very ones that Prakash had set up.
This clever pre-planning makes it extremely difficult for anyone to hold Kripalu, Prakash, or the organization financially accountable for any criminal actions of the gurus.
