Raven

by Reiterman, Tim

  Another opening. “You lazy ass fuckers,” Jones bellowed. “We got twenty-seven thousand acres here. Why don’t you want to develop this land ... ? ”

  Jones continued ridiculing Jerry for suggesting the very things he himself had promised. Jerry kept suggesting they go back and “run things” after the nuclear war Jones had prophesied. And Jones kept mocking him, to roars of laughter:

  “[All you’ll find] is just toothless slobs with long stringy hair down the side of their faces and balls all radiated away and sunk up inside ‘em. ... all you’ll have is dirt and cockroaches, big as a bulldog. You gonna take them over, Jer?”

  Sobered, Jerry confessed, “At first I wanted to go back, but I don’t want to go back now.”

  Jones had just gotten what he wanted: a public acknowledgment that Jonestown was infinitely preferable to going back to the United States.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Close Encounters

  Joe Mazor had come upon the scene like a hired gun. At one point in the summer of 1977, access to ex-members who had “gone public” was unrestrained; the next, reporters and law enforcement investigators found themselves contacting a hard-boiled private detective whose name sounded like some sharpie’s pseudonym and whose voice dragged through a leathery throat full of cigarette smoke. The arrangement was all the more curious, given Mazor’s background as a onetime convict who served a sentence for passing bad checks and who in newspaper file photos wore a patch over one eye.

  Among Mazor’s first Temple clients were Jeannie and Al Mills—prime sources of the New West and Examiner articles. Soon his covey of clients numbered over a dozen, and he was serving as both conduit to the press and a shield from us. Meanwhile, he was reportedly trying to spring his clients’ children loose from the Temple.

  “Private” investigator was hardly an apt title for Mazor, given his inordinate appetite for publicity. One day in August 1977, Mazor phoned me. One of his clients possessed documentation that would hang Tim Stoen, he said. This was particularly tantalizing because it was not publicly known that Stoen—who appeared to be the Temple’s number two man—had defected.

  “What kind of documentation?” I asked.

  As usual, Mazor had a knack for avoiding the direct answers. “Come to my place this afternoon. Bob Graham of the district attorney’s office will be here to pick it up.”

  Nancy Dooley and I drove to 1800 Pacific, an elegant high-rise apartment building in the heart of Pacific Heights.

  In a moment, a blond woman was showing us to Mazor’s conspicuously posh living room, accented by a fireplace and large windows framing a panorama of the bay. As we sank into a velvety sofa and waited for Mazor, we were left in the company of Mr. S., a gnomish man in a drab brown suit who crouched at the edge of the fireplace. Though introduced as Mazor’s legal counsel, Mr. S. volunteered not a syllable. When we asked the name of his Temple client, he muttered, “I don’t know.” Soon another member of Mazor’s team walked in—Bob K., a public relations expert from a well-known San Francisco public relations firm. This all seemed a bit excessive. Joe Mazor was either doing a wonderful business or gambling on instant fame that would bring wealthy clients to his door.

  Finally Mazor himself entered, playing the gracious host. In place of the eye patch was an eye that seemed to swivel independently of its owner. In sleek suit slacks and a dress shirt, powerful but paunchy, he looked more like a successful attorney than did his retiring Mr. S. In the course of our conversation Mazor dribbled out information designed to make his business seem flourishing and exciting..

  Then Mazor, in effect, promised to give us the first concrete evidence of criminal wrongdoing by a top Jones aide, Tim Stoen. The private eye contended that the Temple illegally took the property of one of his clients—former Temple security chief Marvin Swinney—then paid him off for his silence. The proof? A tape recording of a conversation between Swinney and Tim Stoen, plus the photostat of a grant deed from Mendocino County.

  The grant deed to Swinney’s house in Redwood Valley indicated the “gift” was made in June of 1973, yet the ownership transfer was not recorded until September 22, 1975, shortly after Swinney and his wife Mary defected. Though the deed was notarized by Tim Stoen, Swinney and his wife had given sworn affidavits that they had never signed it.

  Producing the documents with a flourish, Mazor pronounced the whole property transfer a phony. “Tish Leroy [a Temple member in Jonestown] told three other members who are clients of mine now that she did it—using liquid paper and Temple membership card signatures.”

  In the spirit of good showmanship, Mazor waited for the arrival of DA’s investigators Bob Graham and Dave Reuben before playing the tape. It contained two conversations recorded on Swinney’s answering service recorder in December 1975; in each, Swinney had reached Stoen in the Mendocino County district attorney’s office.

  “My only involvement is to get [you to sign] the paper thing,” Stoen was saying on the recording; he wanted Swinney to sign a new document stating that the church had purchased the property and authorizing it to assume Swinney’s loans. There was also money changing hands. Under an agreement negotiated with Jones, the Swinneys had been slated to receive $10,000 upon leaving Ukiah, with a promise of $3,000 later. Jones had not wanted to pay out until the Swinneys were packed and ready to leave.

  In the second conversation, Stoen got down to business. “This [document] will acknowledge that the property was purchased in full, that it authorizes us to pay it off, to deal with the bribe problem.”

  “To deal with the what problem?” Swinney replied.

  “The bribe problem,” repeated the attorney. “Somebody can say you were bribed.... This is a goddamn legitimate transaction.”

  Later that day, I phoned the Swinneys in the Carolinas and found they had been threatened by Chris Lewis and had never received the balance of $3,000. Meanwhile, the district attorney’s office listened to the tape. Since it had been made while Stoen worked in Mendocino County, they had to pass the buck. The recording was kicked among several law enforcement agencies, none eager to accept jurisdiction. Eventually, the secretary of state’s office took up the matter but would drop it because documents experts could not prove forgery: Mazor had produced only a photostat, and the original deed was still missing.

  Since the story was shifting from the United States to South America, the Examiner wanted to send me to Guyana with or without permission to enter Jonestown. Already conflicting reports had surfaced about the quality of life, with Temple supporters describing Jonestown as a utopian community and with defectors—such as Mrs. B., whom I interviewed around this time—calling it a concentration camp. At this point Joe Mazor surfaced again.

  Mazor had a plan, an ambitious plan for an expedition to Guyana. Once there, he hoped to use U.S. court documents to wrest some eight children from the Temple on behalf of their parents or guardians. He was inviting the Examiner to cover the trip.

  Despite Mazor’s obvious ulterior motives—publicity, for one—it seemed worthwhile to see whether his trip did shape up: covering efforts to bring out several children would more likely produce a story than wandering around Guyana without an entree to Jonestown. With each phone call, Mazor kept me posted. Chances for the trip looked better and better.

  The day-to-day delays stretched into weeks. Mazor then explained that in order to save money, he was trying to persuade Ed Daly, the colorful president of World Airways, to donate a charter to undertake a mercy mission like controversial Operation Babylift during the fall of Saigon. But postponements continued. Daly himself probably would not go after all, Mazor said; he was ill. (The airline later denied that Daly had ever negotiated for a plane with Mazor.55) Eventually the timeliness for the trip had been lost.

  By late September, after the initial surge of Temple stories, I had returned to my East Bay beat. Now and again Mazor would call, preoccupied with his plans to rescue children, and with the idea of bringing Tim Stoen to justice. The ex-convict seemed t
o have a visceral hatred for the ex-prosecutor.

  That fall, in the course of one conversation, Mazor coyly talked of going into Jonestown with some “backup,” using an amphibious approach through the Venezuelan jungle. He seemed to be inviting me to cover an armed assault on Jonestown—first there would be a rocket launcher attack on the radio transmitter and tower to create confusion, then a quick commando raid to nab children. Though he spoke hypothetically, hearing this made me extremely uncomfortable.

  “Look, Joe,” I said, “there’s no way we would be part of anything done by force.” It was hard to tell whether he was joking or just spreading his macho thick. I seriously doubted this paunchy private detective could ever pull off such a caper. I wondered whether he was trying to bait me into saying something supportive.

  Meanwhile, Mazor pursued his other agenda. It did not matter to him that Tim Stoen had left the Temple. He wanted to see Stoen penalized—and perhaps to get some decent commissions out of the business as well. But Mazor’s efforts collapsed. The detective complained to me one day that some former clients—Jeannie and Al Mills and the Swinneys—had dropped complaints against Stoen after Mazor arranged to have the lawyer’s notary revoked on their behalf. Mazor was particularly offended that the Millses had put up Stoen at their Berkeley home, like a long-lost brother. “With or without them, I’m going to keep after Stoen,” he vowed.

  While Mazor’s and other probes were stymied, another futile investigation wound down. Since February 1977, the U.S. customs service had been looking into Temple gun smuggling. Over a dozen former Temple members had alleged that 170 weapons—most collected in earlier gun turn-ins—had been shipped secretly in the false bottoms of crates of machinery bound for Jonestown. Within three months, the Temple had learned about the investigation and taken evasive action. David Conn, a longtime friend of Al Mills, had inadvertently tipped off Jones by mentioning the investigation in a talk with radical Indian leader Dennis Banks—and Banks had informed Jones.56

  Although the Temple continued to buy and send guns and ammunition to Guyana during the investigation, they exercised more caution. Jones used code when ordering weapons over the radio. In one conversation in August 1977, Jones spoke to security chief Jim McElvane in San Francisco:

  “I want you to go to the Bible Exchange at Second and Mission,” Jones began. “They have a flashlight, the kind with black metal and it’s twenty-four inches long. Do you copy?” The only “exchange” on Second Street was the San Francisco Gun Exchange—“Bible” was the church code for “gun.”

  In this particular case, Jones might well have been ordering flashlights. But several days later, the orders were more direct: “For God’s sake,” Jones demanded at one point, “send me ten copies of the book and I’ll review it.”

  Clever as the Temple’s smuggling techniques were, there still were several close calls both in Guyana and in the United States. When a customs inspector at the Georgetown airport questioned one Temple woman who was carrying six guns in her crate, she became flustered and sputtered: “All I have ... is arms and other things.” Sharon Amos covered for the terrible slip, and the officials permitted her to pass unsearched.57

  The Temple took pains to avoid a repeat of that experience. Amos found that inspectors tended to check crates more diligently than duffel bags, so the church started using those. And there were other diversionary tactics as well: using people in wheelchairs to arouse sympathy; using women to flirt with some inspectors and handsome men to flirt with the gay ones; putting Kotex on top of sensitive cargo to embarrass the inspectors and hurry the procedure; arranging for inspection at night, when it was easier to turn the head of a customs agent with a few well-placed bottles of liquor.

  In August, U.S. customs watched ports in Houston, New Orleans and Miami for Temple cargo—a fact the Temple soon learned from Guyanese Police Commissioner C. A. “Skip” Roberts, who received a copy of an August 26, 1977, U.S. customs report through Interpol. Meanwhile, on August 29, customs agents made a spot check in Miami of the shipment bound for Jonestown. The weapons search was pure hit-or-miss—in fact the agents apparently checked only one crate out of ninety located. Nothing was found, and the shipment went through.58 By early September, customs had discontinued its investigation altogether.

  During the customs investigation, the Temple purchased at least three guns in the San Francisco and Ukiah areas which eventually found their way into Jonestown. An undetermined number of other guns were smuggled into the settlement from the States. On October 31,1977, about two months after customs halted its investigation, Jack Beam, Sr., walked into what the Temple called “The San Francisco Bible Exchange” and purchased a Remington Model 700 .308-caliber bolt action rifle that, one year later, someone else would use to kill Representative Leo Ryan.

  Although my Guyana trip had been postponed indefinitely, I kept monitoring the conflicting reports about conditions in Jonestown and listening to tapes of intercepted radio traffic. One day I received a call from Mrs. B. about a mystery escapee. “Come to my house tomorrow if you want to meet a man who escaped from Jonestown,” she said.

  It was my day off, but I agreed. My hopes for a useful encounter, however, were low. There always seemed to be a problem with accounts about Jonestown. Mrs. B. had already told me her story of degradation, yet admitted she had been well fed and not beaten or abused; also, she was unwilling to be quoted by name.

  Among some San Francisco row homes, I located Mrs. B.’s house. Mrs. B. welcomed me warmly, then introduced me to a black, bearish man in a heavy woolen overcoat. The coat clearly served as shelter night and day; it marked him as a derelict.

  Shyly, Leon Broussard shook my hand and smiled. His face was roundish, his eyes sad to the point of liquefying. His silvery hair appeared thick and healthy, but the yellowness around his eyes and the dry pink tongue made him appear ill. His speech was a smooth blend of inflections right out of Cajun country. He talked quickly about the tribulations of his nearly fifty years—birth in New Orleans, a career as a merchant seaman and cook, more recently his life on the skids. At one point, he slid a merchant seaman card from a battered wallet as proof of his story, and showed me a passport paid for by the Temple and dated April 14, 1977—early in the exodus period. Unfortunately it did not even show whether he had, in fact, traveled to Guyana. The used pages had been torn out; the blank ones now served him as an address book.

  Dates seemed to slip his mind. While on the skids in San Francisco, he had wandered into the Temple somehow. He slept there several weeks. Then they invited him to the tropics where, they said, Leon could munch popcorn all day and listen to exotic birds and watch children play. “They told me I was going to the Promised Land, and they paid my way.” Shaking his head forlornly, he insisted, “I don’t hate Jim Jones or those people, but the way they treated me, I couldn’t do a dog like that.”

  Though he did not know exactly where he was, at least he was warmly greeted in Jonestown. Jim Jones personally wrung his hand and said, “Nice to see you.” But he soon realized those were the only kind words he would hear. That very night at the welcoming dinner, Jones had said, “I know you all came here to work. But I’m afraid you’ll have to wait until tomorrow to start.”

  To Broussard, Jonestown was like a work camp in the southern swamps. They issued him clothing, rubber boots to keep his feet free of swamp rot, and a toothbrush. They assigned him sleeping quarters in a canvas-roofed barracks.

  The former cook found the food so unpalatable, with rice in everything and everything on rice, that he sneaked into nearby Port Kaituma without authorization and feasted on chicken, papaya and watermelon. For his binge, the Temple confiscated some pocket money he had been given en route to Jonestown.

  Though it was little incentive, Broussard knew the rule: no work, no food. He cut grass at first. Next, he toted lumber from the sawmill back to the camp. But the wood was heavy, the haul long for a man whose toughest recent labor had been panhandling.

  Under the
watchful eye of club-wielding Johnny Brown Jones, Broussard labored until the lumber rubbed a raw spot on his shoulder. Then the pain and disillusionment came pouring out of him. He pleaded: “I’d appreciate it if you would let me rest for fifteen minutes.” But the young foreman made him work until he broke down crying. “I’d appreciate it if you’d just kill me and get it over with,” he said at one point.

  Finally, Broussard had the temerity to take his grievances to Jones. It was only about a week after he had arrived. “I want to go home,” he told Jones, in front of others.

  “You’ll have to pay your own way home, Leon,” Jones replied. “I brought you to this wonderful place, so you’ll have to get back on your own.”

  While Broussard protested that he had no funds, James Edwards hit him and others yelled, “Don’t fight back. Don’t fight back, Leon. If you do, we’ll make you wish you’d never been born.” A crashing blow to the chest forced the wind out of him and knocked him to his knees.

  Edwards—who had confided misgivings about Jonestown to Mrs. B. months earlier—stood over Leon screaming, “The next time, you watch your mouth and what you say to Father.” Leon regained his feet slowly.

  Then other men and women shouted, “Get on your knees, Leon. Get on your knees. You crawl to Jim and beg forgiveness.” When Leon reached the polished black shoes and khaki pant cuffs of Jim Jones, he cried, “I’m sorry, Jim.”

  Looking down at the top of Broussard’s graying head, Jones said, “You’re not so good that I can’t put a bridle on your mouth and blinders on your eyes, and put you in that hole.”

  There was a trench, roughly nine feet deep by nine feet square, where the slackers were dumped, Broussard knew. A few children who maintained they were sick and unable to work were lowered into that excavation and made to dig in the mud, first light till last light.