Tuesday, July 27, 2010
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It comes as a shock to learn today that the Utah Supreme Court has overturned Warren Jeffs' 2007 conviction of accomplice to rape. The jury had found him guilty of forcing 14 year old Elissa Wall into marrying her first cousin. Jeffs' attorneys had always contended that their client was being persecuted solely for his religious beliefs and that Utah was trying to send a message to the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints (FLDS) located in the southern part of the state. Most have believed that with Jeffs' conviction in Utah and facing other charges in Arizona and Texas, he'd spend the rest of his life in prison. The Arizona charges have been dropped, he'll now receive a new trial in Utah and it's uncertain what will happen in Texas.
Prison has been extremely difficult for Jeffs, who's repeatedly gone on fasts and on at least one occasion tried to kill himself. The FLDS has replaced him with a new prophet, although many feel he still wields considerable power behind bars. It is unthinkable to many women and men who've escaped the FLDS and had their lives severely impacted by Jeffs, that he may one day be free to reign again.
A number of women had banded together to bring Jeffs down and felt they'd succeeded.. One can only imagine what they're thinking and feeling today.
Friday, May 14, 2010
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I’ve been spending time in prisons lately speaking with murderers in Colorado and Kansas, which raises fundamental questions for me as a journalist. What’s the job of a reporter in this situation -- to challenge the false or outlandish things a killer is saying or simply let him or her talk? “InColdBlog” obviously gets its name from the gold standard of all true crime writing, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, and I’ve often thought about Capote having a full five years to sit in a cell with Dick Hickock and Perry Smith before they were executed in 1965. Capote spent most of his time with Smith, the actual killer of the four members of the Clutter family, and the impression we have decades later is that not only didn’t he judge Smith, but grew quite fond of the man over time. One criticism of In Cold Blood was that Capote was too sympathetic to someone who’d slaughtered four innocent people.
When I’m in prison with inmates who’ve done the worst possible things, I find that I’m not judgmental, either. I usually feel empathy toward them and never walk out of a jail without thinking that but for the grace of God, there go I. This does not alter my view of their guilt or that they should be incarcerated, perhaps for life. Sometimes, my feelings in this arena bother me and I’m haunted for days after I’ve left inmates behind in their cells. I’ve also had trouble breathing after exiting some prisons, as if I’ve been standing too close to evil or being too accepting of it. I’ve never known how to reconcile all this inside myself, but I do know one thing: I can’t change my visceral and emotional response to being around killers.
Over time, I’ve decided that these feelings have something to do with being a writer and the role we assign ourselves, for better or worse, as members of society. We have lawyers, judges, and courtrooms to determine the guilt or innocence of those arrested for crimes (by and large, I think our system of due process, for all its shortcomings and tediousness, is the best in the world). We have prison chaplains and other religious functionaries to offer inmates forgiveness or salvation, if that’s what they’re looking for. We have psychiatrists to decide it those behind bars are legally sane or not. But we don’t have anyone inside the criminal justice industry who’s primarily interested in why tragedies happen or what might be learned about the nature of human violence. That’s what I go into prisons looking for and that’s why I let the killers talk and talk without much interruption, even if I know some of what they’re saying isn’t true: I want to know more about now they think and feel (or can’t feel), and why they’ve done what they’ve done.
Having visited prisons for the past 25 years, I’ve been repeatedly struck by how there seems to be little or no correlation between intelligence and brutal behavior. Very bright and articulate people do horrific things and then rationalize their actions with clouds of elaborate language. I’m always most unsettled by encountering truly smart criminals who have no compunction about taking other lives. There’s an entire school of thought today that says criminal behavior is the result of bad genes and chemical imbalances in the brain. I’d like to believe this because it might make humans more predictable, but I have some doubts. I’ve come to believe that the underlying reality of much of the violence I’ve observed or written about is grounded in emotional processes we still understand very little about. Why do people stop feeling? Why can they snuff out a stranger, but feel deeply about their children or a pet? We’re going to be exploring and uncovering emotional mysteries here for decades and centuries to come, just as scientists are doing with physical matter.
I recently spoke with a man who’d gunned down another man and the unmistakable feeling the killer conveyed was that he was greatly relieved to have committed the murder. This was the only way he’d seen to lessen his anxiety, when he had a thousand other alternatives. Crime teaches me that we are still in the primitive stages of human development.
Last June 10, James von Brunn was armed with a rifle when he burst into the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., as several thousand people milled around and looked at exhibits. He emptied his gun into the crowd, killing an African-American security guard, 39-year-old Stephen T. Johns, before being shot and hospitalized in critical condition (he died in early January 2010).
On February 17 of this year, Joseph Stack of Texas sent a very personal anti-government message by flying a small plane into a federal building in Austin to protest American tax laws. Before he set his house on fire, loaded his plane with an extra gas tank, and slammed it into a structure holding IRS offices, killing both IRS employee Vernon Hunter and Stack himself, he’d posted this online manifesto:
“I would only hope that by striking a nerve that stimulates the inevitable double standard, knee-jerk government reaction that results in more stupid draconian restrictions people wake up and begin to see the pompous political thugs and their mindless minions for what they are. Well, Mr. Big Brother IRS man, let’s try something different; take my pound of flesh and sleep well.”
His suicide mission generated numerous supporters in cyberspace, including Facebook groups like “The Philosophy of Joe Stack,” which quickly had 2,000 fans. Websites held tributes to the dead man and then came a video game challenging players to burn down a house and fly a plane into a building.
The Secret Service, meanwhile, has reported that death threats against President Obama have been up 400% since he took office, the highest level ever for a White House occupant. Two preachers, Wiley Drake in Buena Park, California, and Steven Anderson of Tempe, Arizona, have made no secret of their prayers for Obama’s death, and on the Internet, the President’s enemies have geared up to sell t-shirts, teddy bears, bumper stickers, framed tiles, and note pads carrying a Biblical quotation from Psalms 109:8: “Let his days be few…Let his children be fatherless and his wife a widow.”
On March 4, 2010, John Patrick Bedell of California opened fire at an entrance to the Pentagon, wounding two police officers before he was fatally shot. Bedell had been diagnosed as bipolar or manic depressive and been in and out of treatment programs for years. His parents reported him missing January 4, a day after a Texas Highway Patrol officer stopped him for speeding in Texarkana. He returned to his parents’ home, but the next time he went missing he showed up with a 9mm handgun in D.C. and began shooting outside the Pentagon. His assault came four months after a deadly attack on the Army’s Fort Hood, Texas, post, allegedly by U.S. Army psychiatrist Major Nidal Malik Hasan, a Muslim with radical Islamic leanings, who killed thirteen people and wounded 30 others. Hit by return fire, he survived the worst mass shooting ever at an American military base. He was convinced that America was conducting a “war on Islam” and he was committed to doing “good work for God.”
All the shooters had one thing in common: they were virulently anti-government and had no compunction about attempting to kill people, usually people associated with our government, for this set of beliefs.
Day after day on national and local talk shows across the country, the federal government is attacked by both the right and the left, but most prominently by those on the right (the day before the recent health reform bill vote in the House of Representatives, protesters spit at African American Congressmen and hurled racial slurs at them). This is, in many cases, a general assault on government itself. Commentators can do freely this under the First Amendment, but at what point do they stop to consider the effect of their words on listeners who might not be stable or as sane, and certainly not as successful in life, as they are? When do they start seeing themselves as powerful members of our society whose thoughts can have a potent impact on others? When do these cease viewing themselves as victims of our society, rather than participants with it and part of the governmental structure they’re assaulting?
Hating government for the sake of it, or the fun of it, is at the very least unproductive and at worst something that incites others already on the edge. How many more mass shootings before we recognize that words matter and feelings count? It’s all an abstract discussion until you’re the one being shot at.
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
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On this mid-June morning, I’m driving across Kansas and into the heart of America’s second civil war. Up ahead is Wichita, where two weeks ago Dr. George Tiller, the nation’s most prominent abortion doctor, was gunned down in the lobby of his Lutheran Church. It was well known in the anti-abortion movement that Dr. Tiller always wore a bulletproof vest, so his alleged killer, Scott Roeder, shot him once in the forehead from only inches away. This landscape of flat farm country and political assassination is deeply familiar to me, because I grew up in rural Kansas and have spent more than two decades on my own journey into domestic terrorism.
Twenty-five years ago this week, a group of neo-Nazis called The Order killed Denver talk show host Alan Berg -- his death became part of the largest-ever federal investigation into homegrown terrorism. My book on the case, Talked to Death, came out in 1987 and since then America has changed dramatically. Our political/religious divisions and our bitter emotions, still on the fringes in the mid-1980s, have entered the mainstream through cable TV and the Internet. All day long on blogs and every evening on the airwaves the new civil war is played out for mass consumption (FOX’s Bill O’Reilly and MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann reach just under five million viewers per weeknight). In the past few years, hate groups are up more than 50%. Common ground has become increasingly uncommon -- my side has to be right so that yours can be wrong. “Bleeding Kansas” was at the center of the first American Civil War, fought over race. It’s a key battleground state again in the new war being fought around God and human sexuality.
The FBI has launched a federal investigation to see if Scott Roeder acted alone in allegedly killing Dr. Tiller. From his jail cell in Wichita, Roeder quickly began issuing statements that America could expect more violence from people like him. Within 24 hours of Dr. Tiller’s death, a father and his nine-year-old daughter were gunned down in southern Arizona. The police arrested Shawna Forde, leader of the anti-illegal immigration group Minutemen American Defense, as the key suspect in the murder of Brisenia and Raul Flores. Ten days after Dr. Tiller was assassinated, white supremacist James von Brunn opened fire in Washington D.C.’s Holocaust Museum, killing a black guard. On June 13, longtime Republican activist Rusty DePass said on Facebook that a gorilla that had escaped from a zoo in Columbia was “just one of Michelle’s [the First Lady’s] ancestors -- probably harmless."
With the ongoing battles over abortion and immigration, a faltering economy, and the election of an African-American President, racial fears are rising again. Those who monitor hate groups, like the Southern Poverty Law Center, warn of more troubles ahead. What could be more symbolic of our current civil war than a doctor getting murdered for helping (under the laws of Kansas and the U.S.) women confronting serious health issues -- by someone who fervently believes that God is sanctioning his actions? I’ll be looking for some answers in Wichita.
Monday, April 27, 2009
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April 20, 2009, was the tenth anniversary of the massacre at Columbine High School, just a few miles from my Denver home. My wife, Joyce, and I visited the school a few days after the shootings and my lasting image of the event was seeing the adults kneel down in the springtime mud and sob, mystified over why our children were killing one another. In recent weeks leading up to this ten-year milestone, America has seen an outburst of mass killings -- in Pittsburgh, Oakland, Seattle, upstate New York, and elsewhere. They’ve occurred inside a church, a medical facility, and an immigration center. What they all have in common with Columbine is that they’ve been driven not by any form of personal gain, but purely by emotion. Feelings of rage erupted into gunfire and, in several cases, the killer ended up dead, just like at Columbine.
When kids go to school across the United States, they are forced, year after year, to learn about the abstractions of algebra and the complexities of biology or chemistry, but no one teaches them how to manage their emotions. To my knowledge, there are no mandatory classes about dealing with shame, guilt, fear, confusion, abusive comparisons, anger, and jealousy. Students aren’t given good alternatives to self-judgment and self-hatred. With a trillion or so dollars on the table to bail out the auto and financial industries, and trillions more spent on the U.S. military, maybe a few bucks devoted to this kind of instruction would save the lives of people we love in the future.
My 1994 book, Sweet Evil, tells the story of Jennifer Reali, a 28-year-old Colorado Springs wife and mother of two young daughters, who had an affair with Brian Hood, a 32-year-old Prudential salesman, born-again Christian, and father of three young children. During several months, he convinced Jennifer, a sensitive and intelligent woman, that God would never forgive her for their adultery, but wouldn’t mind if she dressed up in her husband’s army clothes and gunned down his wife, Dianne. Jennifer did just that and two days later walked into the Colorado Springs police station and confessed everything. She got life in prison, while Brian was eligible for parole after a dozen years.
Prior to the murder, Jennifer had never been in legal trouble or barely had a traffic ticket. She was, according to those who knew her best, a “normal” person who exploded into violence for a few seconds and then returned to herself, crying uncontrollably and apologizing to everyone for what she’d done. It was almost as if she expected the legal system to forgive her after she came to her senses, but it didn’t and she’s now in the 19th year of her sentence. My wife and I visit her at the Colorado Women’s Correctional Facility in Denver and we’ve become good friends. She wants to write about her experience and we’re assisting her.
Over the course of writing ten books about crime, I’ve come to think of evil not as a person, place or thing, but as a process that ends in tragedy. We’re trying to get Jennifer to break down the steps of that process. And to show readers what led her to abuse herself emotionally, first with her husband and then with Brian, and to show how a bright and decent human being can turn into a monster because he or she has no emotional intelligence. Maybe a piece of writing like this could help us understand how someone with no criminal past and no criminal tendencies can gradually turn into a death machine. It might even help deter a future killer. Who knows? Perhaps one day our culture will begin to value this kind of knowledge as much as photosynthesis and higher math.
Thursday, April 02, 2009
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Earlier this week, Oprah Winfrey did a one-hour program on the first-year anniversary of the Texas raid on the YFZ ranch, where Warren Jeffs took a 12-year-old bride when he was a fugitive in 2006. Since the raid, a dozen FLDS men, including Jeffs, have been indicted by Texas authorities for a variety of crimes involving bigamy, underage marriage, and sexual assault on a minor. Controversy has erupted among journalists who've covered the Jeffs's case for years who feel that Oprah saw and presented the most pristine and santized view of the FLDS that was possible. Phoenix TV reporter Mike Watkiss blasted Oprah, saying that "she perpetrated a lie" about the sect and "got played likea tool." On May 21, 2008, seven weeks after the raid, I and several other journalists were given a tour of the ranch by FLDS spokesman Willie Jessop and lawyer Rod Parker. We spent most of the time in Zion Academy, where the children studied as Warren Jeffs’s photo stared down at them from virtually every wall. A reporter asked Jessop if he thought it was appropriate to display Jeffs’ picture so prominently to the youngsters, since he’d recently been convicted on two counts of accomplice to the rape of a fourteen-year-old girl. He was also about to be charged with other offense involving underage girls,. Jessop, who’d been friendly and folksy up till now, scowled at the assembled press and declared that Jeffs’ recent trial in Utah had been bogus. Why, Jessop was asked, if the FLDS wanted more credibility in the outside world, it didn’t distance itself from the convicted felon who remained its Prophet and spiritual leader?
Rising up to his full height, Willie sneered and said quite loudly, “For a member of the FLDS to turn his back on Warren Jeffs would be the same thing as a Christian turning his back on Jesus.” It was the most revealing and chilling moment of the tour for me.
The issue in these kinds of cases is usually freedom of religion versus criminal behavior. Oprah focused on the clothes and hair and interaction of the women at the ranch, barely referring to the crimes. Things like incest and rape and the other crimes documented in my book were kept out of sight and hearing range. Oprah got her "exclusive" but we learned almost nothing about what put Jeffs in jail.
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
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July 24, 2008
Ladies and Gentlemen of the Senate Judiciary Committee,
I’m an investigative journalist and the author of 19 non-fiction books. Since 1985, I’ve been writing about that line where religion crosses over into criminal behavior. In early 2006, my wife, Joyce, suggested that I look into the story of Warren Jeffs and the FLDS, because she believed that women in particular would be interested in this story. She was right, and this is a significant point. Historically, societies can be measured by how they treat women and children.
That spring, I began traveling to Colorado City, Arizona, interviewing townspeople, ex-church members, and law enforcement. In 1953, Arizona had raided this community to root out the FLDS polygamous lifestyle, and had failed both legally and in terms of public opinion. Fifty years later, the state was employing criminal investigation techniques to target specific individuals who were breaking the law, and they were having success. Both Arizona and Utah were building a new approach to tackling what many have called religious terrorism.
One victory came with the capture of fugitive Warren Jeffs, the Prophet or leader of the FLDS. In September 2007, he was convicted on two counts of accomplice to rape for forcing a fourteen-year-old girl to marry her first cousin. Back in the 1970s, Jeffs was the principal of the FLDS-run Alta Academy, just outside Salt Lake City, and students there later described how he’d abused them emotionally and physically. His nephew, Brent Jeffs, eventually sued Warren and two of his brothers, alleging that when Brent was five, they’d repeatedly sodomized him in a bathroom in the school basement. Brent’s brother, Clayne, another victim of these attacks, committed suicide. In 2004, when Brent filed a lawsuit against the Prophet, Jeffs responded to this legal action the same way he had to the American government and our criminal justice system: he’d ignored them. As the FLDS Prophet, he’s also ignored:
1) The child labor laws of Arizona, Utah, and Nevada. Young FLDS boys were sent off to work in the church’s construction companies, and because they were hardworking and unpaid, the sect could underbid the competition and generate both private and government business. One FLDS-run company, New Era Manufacturing, has a Department of Defense contract for aircraft wheel and brake manufacturing worth $1.2 million. JNJ Engineering has an $11.3 million deal with the Las Vegas Valley Water District. A third FLDS company, Paragon Contractors Corporation, has been fined more than $10,000 by the U.S. Department of Labor for employing twelve-to-fifteen-year-old boys, and not paying them.
2) Jeffs ignored the Mann Act, which makes it illegal for minors to cross state lines for sexual purposes. As the Prophet, he routinely commanded men to marry women and teenage girls in secret ceremonies in Caliente, Nevada, across the border from the FLDS home base in the twin towns of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Arizona.
3) Jeffs ignored the laws against bigamy and underage marriage in Arizona and Utah, selecting the men who’d receive new brides and joining them in “spiritual marriages.” These “plural wives” with dependent children then became eligible for welfare payments -- and welfare fraud. Colorado City has received eight times the welfare assistance of comparably-sized towns in the area. Despite violating these laws, Colorado City has been awarded $1.9 million from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to pave the streets and improve the fire department and water system; more than $12 million a year from Arizona in health insurance premiums for the poor; and a $2.8 million airport from Washington, D.C. The FLDS openly despises the American government while taking its money, a tactic they call “bleeding the beast.”
4) Jeffs ignored the fate of hundreds of teenage males in his community -- known as “Lost Boys” -- after they rebelled against forced child labor and his other harsh rules. He tossed them out of Colorado City and Hildale, leaving them to fend for themselves on the streets of St. George, Utah, Salt Lake City, and Las Vegas. Some of the young men broke laws and were arrested, burdening local police departments and publicly-funded social services.
5) Jeffs ignored outside law enforcement because the border towns’ police force was made up of FLDS members utterly loyal to their Prophet. After Jeffs had gone underground to avoid arrest, Colorado City Police Chief Fred Barlow wrote him the following letter: “Dear Uncle Warren, I would first like to acknowledge you as the one man that was and is called of God to stand at the head of his priesthood and the Kingdom of God on the earth in this day and time. I rejoice in the peace that comes over me when I follow the directives that you have sent to me through Uncle William Timpson...I am praying for you to be protected and yearn to be with you again...And I know that you have the right to rule in all aspects of my life...”
6) Jeffs ignored the genetic disorders caused by the sect’s inbreeding. In Colorado City and Hildale, Phoenix pediatric neurologist Dr. Theodore Tarby uncovered the largest occurrence in the world of a rare disease called Fumarese Deficiency, which produces overly large heads, misshapen brains, deformities, seizures, and even death. The severe condition was one more drain on public monies needed for medical care.
7) Following his arrest, Jeffs and his lawyers successfully fought efforts to get at FLDS financial records, stored on computers in the vehicle in which the Prophet had been traveling. No complete picture exists of the FLDS income streams that supported Jeffs’ lavish fugitive lifestyle, paid his colossal legal bills or other vast expenses. In 2003, the FLDS bought the Texas ranch for about $700,000. Today it has an assessed value of $20.5 million. Where did all the funds come from for these improvements, and for other purchases of land in South Dakota and more recently in Colorado? Has money been laundered or taxes evaded?
Until the FLDS is thoroughly investigated by those with subpoena power, the full extent of the sect’s sexual abuse, forced marriage, underage marriage, and financial schemes will remain unknown. A nationwide network now exists of people who’ve escaped the FLDS and understand its workings from the inside out. They’ve spent years trying to get law enforcement to investigate the sect more fully, are willing to testify against Jeffs and his church, and they’d welcome federal action. The FLDS has become both a national phenomenon and a national problem -- creating generations of victims spread across the Southwest. None of this is about religious freedom or faith, and FLDS members should not be treated any differently from any other American citizen. This is about uncovering and prosecuting individual criminal behavior by those who’ve violated state and federal laws, which is the best way to stop those who terrorize in the name of God. I respectfully ask you to consider these words and warnings from someone who’s spent more than two years investigating this sect. Thank you.
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
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On July 11, 2008, I received a call from a lawyer in Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's office who invited me to testify at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing planned for July 24. Senator Reid had followed through on his commitment to launch a federal investigation and introduce a bill in the Senate regarding crimes associated with polygamy. He'd also invited the Attorney Generals from Texas, Arizona, and Utah to testify, along with two U.S. Attorneys. I was on a panel that included Dr. Dan Fischer, whose family Warren Jeffs had torn apart, and Carolyn Jessop, an ex-FLDS wife. We all presented written statements and were then questioned by several members of the Judiciary Committee. Senator Reid himself delivered the opening remarks and pushed forward his theme that this sect resembles organized crime. The day before, he'd submitted a bill asking for money for a task force to investigate the FLDS and other funds for victims of the sect. In the days leading up to the hearing, the FLDS launched fierce criticism against Senator Reid and those who were testifying. The Senator was unfazed and his commitment to this issue has been unwavering.
On July 22, Warren Jeffs and five other men were indicted in Texas for allegedly committing bigamy and underage marriage. By July 28, all had been taken into custody. Jeffs may be extradited to Texas for these criminal proceedings.
Saturday, June 21, 2008
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After reading "When Men Become Gods," Senator Harry Reid (D-Nevada) called our house and wanted to speak with me about the book. I was in San Angelo, Texas attending the second round of hearings in the child custody case, after 460 children had been removed from the FLDS compound near Eldorado. Senator Reid was very enthusiastic about the book and asked me to write him a detailed letter outlining the potential crimes of Warren Jeffs and the FLDS sect. He wants to launch a federal investigation of the FLDS and wanted to give my letter to Senate and House committee heads who would be looking into this issue. When we were speaking, Senator Reid said this about the book: "This book shines much needed light on the disturbing activities of these outlaw communities. I only wish it had been written years ago." He's moving forward to start the investigation.
Sunday, May 04, 2008
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I’m often asked how the FLDS generates money. Where did all the financial resources come from to support Warren Jeffs when he was on the run from law enforcement for two years? How did the sect pay for the 1,700 acres and huge limestone temple down on the ranch just raided in Texas? One answer is that FLDS men are highly industrious and very successful in the construction business. They have numerous companies spread across the Southwest, which until recently has seen a building boom, and their earnings are funneled back into the church and its leadership. The sect excels at underbidding other construction outfits, because it employs boys from its own community without having to pay them much -- or nothing at all. Some have called this “slave labor.” The FLDS has undercut its competition not just in the private marketplace, but also in government contracts. Many men in the sect have been officially married to one wife, but might have a dozen or more unofficial “spiritual wives” who could qualify for welfare payments -- another way to drain money from the government. The sect calls this tactic “bleeding the beast.”
The raid occurred in darkness and changed many things, literally overnight. After the authorities entered the compound outside of Eldorado, Texas, Representative Kay Granger, a Fort Worth Republican, wrote to her fellow Congressional members requesting a hearing to look into a Department of Defense contract awarded to an FLDS company. A contract worth $1.2 million had been given to New Era Manufacturing, formerly based in the FLDS hometown of Hildale, Utah, before it relocated to Las Vegas. New Era supplies wheel and brake components for military aircraft. The “Fort Worth Star Telegram” reports that New Era has employed church followers at little or no pay.
“As a Member of Congress,” Granger wrote, “I am concerned that federal tax dollars may have been misused to fund this sect’s illegal activities.”
In recent years, with the FLDS drawing more and more negative publicity for its marital practices and allegations of sexual abuse, the federal government finally took notice. In 2007, Nevada Senator Harry Reid, the Democratic Majority Leader and highest-ranking Mormon in U.S. history, asked Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to investigate the sect. At the time, Warren Jeffs was in jail in Utah awaiting trial for accomplice to rape. Senator Reid was dissatisfied with how Utah and Arizona had handled the potential criminal activities of the FLDS and wanted the Department of Justice to launch a comprehensive probe of the church, including its finances. Reid basically called on the feds to approach this as they might an investigation into organized crime. Gonzales failed to respond, but after the Texas raid the Senator made the request again, this time more forcefully, calling on new Attorney General Michael Mukasey to take action. Mukasey is considering the options.
There are parallels between how Michael Corleone gained power over his fictional Mob family in “The Godfather,” after Don Corleone began to falter, and how Warren Jeffs took control as the Prophet of the FLDS, when his father got sick and then died. Will there be more parallels between these stories -- with the feds investigating a religious community as if it were a crime family?