Tina Susman

NIAGARA FALLS: A stunt to make Niagara Falls rise

The long-struggling New York city wants to revisit its daredevil past to boost its economy, and it's aiming high.

July 27, 2011

Tina Susman

NIAGARA FALLS, N.Y.

There is no shortage of legends surrounding the cat that went over Niagara Falls in a barrel.

Some say it survived, proving the barrel was sturdy enough to carry humans down the falls. Some say it died. Some say it rode shotgun with Annie Edson Taylor when she became the first person to survive a barrel roll over the falls in 1901.

Mark DiFrancesco of Niagara Falls' Daredevil Museum offers another twist on the tale.

"Legend has it the cat was black going over the falls but came out of the barrel white" from fright, he said, straight-faced, as Independence Day visitors eyed the museum's yellowed newspaper clippings, old photographs, bashed-up barrels, tattered life vests and a dented jet ski.

That the legend of the cat lives on 110 years later says something about Niagara Falls' passion for its daredevil past, which seemed as dead as its economy until state lawmakers latched onto the idea of using that death-defying spirit to try to boost the city's finances.

High-wire artist Nik Wallenda approached officials recently with a plan to cross the cataract on a wire the width of a nickel. The performance would be featured in "Life on a Wire," a Discovery Channel show expected to begin airing this year. To clear the way for the spectacle, legislators last month approved a one-time exemption from a 50-year-old ban on daredevil acts at the falls.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo has not indicated whether he will sign the bill, which has won support from local tourism officials and most city leaders. Backers say that even though the city wouldn't profit directly, visitors who come to watch Wallenda would spend money in its restaurants and other businesses, and the television show could trigger a long-term surge in tourism.

But not everyone is sold on a made-for-reality-TV event as the solution to the city's economic problems, especially one that could end in tragedy.

"Are we that desperate?" local historian Paul Gromosiak asked the Niagara Falls City Council this month.

Some think so. Council members voted 4 to 1 to endorse the wire walk.

--

Once synonymous with romantic honeymoons, burgeoning industry (Nabisco made Shredded Wheat here) and Hollywood glamour (Marilyn Monroe played a murderous wife in the 1953 hit "Niagara"), the Rust Belt city has struggled for decades.

A few blocks from the shady parkland surrounding the falls, dilapidated neighborhoods speak to the city's decline. Crumbling brick and boarded-up windows mar streets lined with once-gracious homes. Derelict storefronts haunt Main Street. Low-slung motels and vacant lots stand in sharp contrast to the high-rises, colorful cafes and manicured gardens across the Rainbow Bridge in Niagara Falls' likewise-named Canadian sister city.

There, officials spent decades building a bustling tourist industry while their New York counterparts banked on factories and plants -- now gone -- to pay the bills.

Since 1960, the city's population has fallen by more than half, to 50,000. Though tourism officials say more than 8 million people visit each year, they don't necessarily stay the night. The city's hotel occupancy rate this year is 51.7%, its best in years but still lagging behind the national average of 59%, according to Smith Travel Research. Hotel revenue last year was about $76 million, compared with $420 million for hotels on the Canadian side.

Last month, the city's school district announced a halt to night games for varsity sports teams, to save money on stadium lighting.

"We're very depressed here," said tour guide Michele Brundidge as she led visitors through the Daredevil Museum -- actually a convenience store whose heat-and-serve burritos, ice cream bars and cold drinks share space with artifacts left by those who tried to conquer the falls.

When tourists glimpse the Canadian skyline with its giant Ferris wheel and hotels overlooking the falls, they ask, "Can't we go over there?" Brundidge said.

If the prohibition against daredevil acts is eased, Wallenda would have one year to perform his feat, which would take him across the Niagara River in front of Horseshoe Falls. At more than 170 feet high and 2,200 feet wide, it is the biggest and most spectacular of the three cataracts that make up Niagara Falls. The wire would be attached to cranes on either side of the gorge; Wallenda's representatives say there would be no bolts or other damage to the environment.

Some key players -- including parks commissions in New York and Ontario, Canada -- have yet to embrace the idea. Skeptics such as Mayor Paul Dyster of Niagara Falls, N.Y., worry about copycats.

"We're concerned about that, but we're also concerned about our first responders who would have to go and rescue people," Dyster said.

Even on a hot summer day, gusty winds and sheets of cold spray wash over visitors on viewing platforms, hinting at the harsh conditions Wallenda would face. His path would begin on the U.S. side, take him across to Canada and then perhaps back again, depending on conditions, said Winston Simone, a friend of Wallenda's and one of the producers of "Life on a Wire."

--

If sanctioning potentially deadly behavior to boost a moribund economy sounds ghoulish, Simone and state Sen. George D. Maziarz, whose district abuts Niagara Falls, emphasize that it isn't an invitation to others to try their luck on the falls.

Maziarz drafted a bill after Wallenda and his representatives asked about bringing the high-wire act here.

"It has been many years since anyone has been able to follow in the footsteps of the Great Blondin," the legislation says, referring to Jean-Francois Gravelet, the first high-wire walker to cross the falls, in 1859. He made the trip several times, once stopping midway across to cook and eat an omelet. "In the meantime, tourism in Niagara Falls has declined. ... [Wallenda's feat would] give the city a much-needed shot in the arm."

The Niagara Tourism and Convention Corp. agrees. "People today still come here and ask questions about the daredevils," said spokesman Nick Mattera. "They want to know about their history."

And if Wallenda falls?

"It would certainly be a tragic end to an exciting attempt," Mattera said, before adding: "He's a pro. He's a seventh-generation wire walker, and we have all the confidence he'll be able to achieve this."'

So does Simone, who refuses to use the word "daredevil" to describe Wallenda and says the 32-year-old is "in perfect physical condition."

"He takes the art form incredibly seriously," Simone said.

Wallenda's great-grandfather, Karl Wallenda -- founder of the famous Flying Wallendas -- fell to his death in 1978 while walking between two towers in San Juan, Puerto Rico. The family blamed the accident on poor rigging of ropes that were supposed to hold the wire taut.

But drama is part of the draw, said Bill Bradberry, a Niagara Falls civic leader. He has no desire to watch Wallenda's walk. "Are they crazy?" he said of the men and women who have gone over the falls and through the rapids in everything from huge bouncy balls to pickle barrels.

But if it takes Wallenda to bring visitors back, so be it, he said as he showed a visitor Civil War graves at the city's Oakwood Cemetery.

"This area has a very, very, very rich history," said Bradberry, who is the local NAACP leader. Slaves fleeing to Canada via the Underground Railroad passed through the area, and the Niagara Movement, a precursor of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, was founded here.

The cemetery also holds remains of some of the falls' stunters, including Annie Edson Taylor.

Like today's lawmakers, Taylor saw the falls as a way out of financial trouble, and on Oct. 24, 1901, she became the first person to successfully ride them in a barrel. But fame and fortune never came, and when Taylor died penniless 20 years later, the Oakwood Cemetery Assn. gave her a grave.

On a scorching Sunday, a beer stein engraved with "Annie" and adorned with an artificial flower sat atop her grave. Beside Taylor lies Carlisle D. Graham, the first person to ride a barrel through the raging rapids below the falls, in 1886.

Down the row is Capt. Matthew Webb. He was the first person to swim the English Channel in 1875. He died eight years later trying to swim the Niagara rapids.

"This is where our history is. Right here," said local historian Michelle Kratts, adding that the city owes much to its daredevils. "These are the people who are going to bring us back."

 

Another Iraqi casualty of war: Their waistlines

 Monday, September 08, 2008

 By Tina Susman, Times Staff Writer

BAGHDAD -- In a land where just staying alive is a challenge, Haider Kareem Said's problem might seem trivial. He's overweight.

But that isn't a mere annoyance or something Said can fix with diet and exercise -- he's 5-foot-4 and weighs 495 pounds. So last month, Said had a band surgically strapped around his stomach, an operation relatively new to Iraq that is proving to be a godsend for people facing an unusual consequence of the war: obesity.

For most of the last five years, sectarian violence has drastically altered Iraqis' lifestyles. Most retreated to the safety of their homes and became increasingly sedentary, rarely venturing out of their neighborhoods. To go out was to risk being kidnapped, killed by a bomb or caught up in the other violence plaguing Iraq. Curfews hindered people who tried to remain active.

Said, 25, had a photographic supply shop but closed it for three years because of security concerns.

"I stayed home and couldn't do anything. All I did was play PlayStation and eat," Said said while awaiting his surgery in Baghdad's St. Raphael Hospital.

The ankle-length brown gown he wore could not hide his heft. Fat rolled around his ankles, and his rounded feet barely fit into his slip-on sandals. His face, soft and absent of contours and lines, made him appear younger than his years. "When I worked, my weight was a lot less, but those three years really had an impact," Said said, estimating his weight gain in that time at about 200 pounds.

Statistics on obesity in Iraq are difficult to come by, but a World Health Organization survey in 2006 found that 26% of men and 38% of women ages 25 to 65 were obese, with a body mass index of 30 or higher. Though no direct comparisons are available, roughly 33% of American men and 35% of American women were considered obese in a 2005-06 study done by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Health Statistics.

Said's BMI is 83, the highest ever seen by Dr. Ramiz S. Mukhtar, the only surgeon in Iraq who performs gastric band surgery.

Mukhtar would not discuss the reason for Iraqis' growing weight problem beyond saying that they eat too much unhealthful food and don't move around enough.

But Said's uncle, Jabar Said, agreed that the war had made many Iraqis fatter, himself included.

"People are unemployed. They're sitting at home. Sometimes they're depressed and that makes them eat more. Obviously, the security has had a direct influence on the activities of people," he said, his belly pressing against the fabric of his white dishdasha. "I've been on a diet for the past two years. I've only eaten one meal a day, but I didn't lose anything because I don't move a lot."

Now that the violence has decreased, he hopes to shed the roughly 65 pounds he's gained.

The uncle spoke in the Said family home in east Baghdad the day after his nephew's surgery. Friends and relatives had gathered to welcome home the younger Said, who had arrived a few hours earlier.

A plasma TV was on one wall of the long, narrow living room. At the opposite end was another television. They are symbols of the Saids' comfortable middle-class life, and of the unhealthy habits adopted by many Iraqis during the war.

The fall of Saddam Hussein didn't just usher in chaos and violence -- it also introduced satellite television to Iraqis. Suddenly, with scores of channels to watch, even people who weren't forced to stay inside often did.

Ironically, TV may have saved Said.

About a year ago, he was channel surfing and stumbled on "Beauty Clinic," a show on Lebanon's Future TV that focuses on cosmetic surgery. It featured a segment on gastric banding.

"I saw the before-and-after results, and I was amazed, so I decided to do it," he said. He began planning a trip to Lebanon to find a doctor. Then a friend told him that Mukhtar could perform the operation, which, in simple terms, drastically shrinks the stomach by strapping a band around it.

Once the band is on, the amount of food patients can consume is limited. If they eat too much, they vomit.

For Said, finding a Baghdad surgeon meant avoiding the humiliation of traveling in public.

"I was embarrassed to be so fat," he said. "When I walk down the street, everyone looks at me. It's as if I were Saddam Hussein, the way everyone stares."

Said said that even as a child he had a weight problem, something he attributes to loving food and hating exercise.

The surgery took about 45 minutes, Mukhtar said. He has performed about 150 of the operations in the last 2 1/2 years, he said. He'd have done more if the price tag of about $4,000 wasn't so steep for most Iraqis.

For Said, the next step is learning to eat tiny portions totaling about 2,500 calories a day, a fraction of what he used to consume. That means giving up the delicious mounds of chicken, beef, sheep's head and fish, along with honey-soaked sweets like baklava, that his mother used to make for him.

He acknowledged being worried that when his appetite returns, he will have problems adjusting to his stomach's limited capacity. And he said he has no intention of starting to exercise.

"I'm not into sports," he said with a laugh.

--tina.susman@latimes.com

 

Uganda's Cult Murders

Copyright 2000 Newsday, Inc. 

Newsday (New York)

April 1, 2000, Saturday

THE CULT'S MYSTERY / HOW DID ITS LEADERS DUPE SO MANY PEOPLE TO THEIR DEATHS?

By Tina Susman. AFRICA CORRESPONDENT

Kabumba, Uganda-He was a pillar in his community, a respected family man who shared his wealth with others and donated the land for the Roman Catholic church that sits on a grassy hill at the entrance to his village. She was a bawdy beer vendor whose sexual talents made her a hit with the men in her hometown.

Somehow, these seemingly opposite characters came together to form an outwardly pious sect which, 11 years on, has emerged as a sinister scheme that milked slavish followers of their wealth, freedom and their lives. Now, Joseph Kibwetere and Credonia Mwerinde are the most wanted fugitives in Africa, believed to be on the run after allegedly orchestrating the murders of more than 900 people who joined their Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God.

As mysterious as their whereabouts is the manner in which Kibwetere, 68, and Mwerinde, believed to be in her 40s, duped so many people to their deaths in these lush, mist-shrouded mountains.

"Maybe it's that lady who changed him, because he changed after she came," said Francis Bahizi, principal of the primary school that sits on the same land as the church in Kabumba, a remote farming village where Kibwetere was considered a model citizen.

"That man was acting as an example for all people to follow," Bahizi said.  "In a village, you have someone who says something and you believe it. That was that man."

Mwerinde, on the other hand, sold her father's brewed banana beer and was shamelessly promiscuous-some say she was a prostitute-in her hometown of Kanungu, just 25 miles away but a two-hour drive along the narrow, rocky roads that lace through southwest Uganda.

"She was a harlot girl, getting so many men, living with one man for one month, then going to another," said Matthew Rukanyongira, a Kanungu businessman who rented a house to Mwerinde and who later rented a garage and a shop to the cult leaders.

By Friday, four mass-killing sites had been discovered at cult properties scattered throughout the region, and police had yet to excavate several others used by the cult to practice its fanatical form of worship.

At least 530 charred bodies were found in the church at the cult's headquarters in Kanungu on March 17. Since then, bodies piled like logs atop one another have been found at all four cult sites searched by police-beneath each freshly planted field, under every newly laid floor and inside every recently dug toilet.

Most of the people, including scores of children, appear to have been killed in the past couple of months with machetes, knives and pieces of cloth that remain knotted tightly around their decomposing necks.

Police speculate the cult leaders decided to kill off members after followers became skeptical about Kibwetere's claim that the world was about to end. They apparently began demanding back the money they had given the two, who created the sect after their personalities changed drastically and mysteriously in 1989.

Suddenly, Mwerinde began making the rounds of Kanungu telling people she had been called upon by the Virgin Mary to build a church that would strictly follow the Ten Commandments and guarantee its adherents entry to heaven.

"She used to tell me, 'You, Pius, do you want me to leave you behind in hell?'" said Kanungu's local council chairman, Pius Kabeireho, like Rukanyongira one of many powerful men she tried to recruit. "I said no to joining that religion. I said, 'If you are to leave me behind, just leave me behind.'"

Rukanyongira speculates that the reason for Mwerinde's change was a desire for wealth and her decision to use her persuasive personality to trick people into selling their property and giving her the proceeds.

"She said everything we have, we get it from sin, we get it from bad ways, " he said. "She said we must sell it, and when we give her the money she will give it to Mary."

Kibwetere, a wealthy, educated man in a backward region where such attributes command great influence, was apparently a ripe target for Mwerinde, who needed someone to head up her movement. Accompanied by two other women, she arrived one day in 1989, recalled Theresa Kibwetere, 64, while sitting in the living room of the rambling stone farmhouse she once shared with her husband. Around her were the remnants of her previous life-yellowed wedding pictures in dusty frames, portraits of the studious-looking man she married, and paintings of the pope, the Virgin Mary and Jesus Christ.

Mwerinde quickly endeared herself to the deeply religious family with claims that Joseph Kibwetere himself had been chosen by God to lead her new church. "At first I believed what she was saying," said Theresa Kibwetere, rolling a rosary around in her weathered hands.

Mwerinde and Kibwetere set about trying to convert the village but did not get far because of their fanatical discipline, which included urging people to kneel and pray for eight hours on the concrete floor of the Catholic church and to adopt a code of absolute silence. At first, Kibwetere's wife and children followed his lead and joined the sect, but within a year they had become worried by the sect's extremism and cruelty and by the way Mwerinde took over the house. Within a few months, about 200 cult followers had accepted the harsh discipline and were living in the house, which had been emptied of most goods at Mwerinde's orders.

"Everything was taken away from here. They left only this furniture and these pictures," said Theresa Kibwetere, nodding at the musty wooden chairs and sofa and the old pictures on the wall. The Kibwetere children were evicted from their bedrooms and moved to a workers' shed out back, where they slept without mattresses on the lumpy, stone floor. Many days they went without meals, and if they broke a cult rule by asking for food or refusing to pray, they were punched and kicked into submission by Mwerinde and Kibwetere.

One of his sons, Giles, 37, speculates that his father's transformation from a kindhearted man to a monster can be linked to a downturn in his considerable fortunes in the 1980s. A venture into opposition politics failed, and his farm suffered. The family's 80 valuable cows were poisoned, something they suspect was a result of Kibwetere's political activity.

"I think maybe after he lost so much property he resorted to a new God. Even his religious views changed a lot," said his son. In the fiercely religious Kibwetere's weakened state, he says it could have been easy for him to believe in Mwerinde, described by many as an intensely persuasive woman whose outgoing, allegedly pious nature hid a wicked, greedy heart. "She was an evil woman camouflaging herself in prayer," said Giles, who recalls once being beaten so viciously with a lantern by Mwerinde that the lantern broke in half.

Even Theresa Kibwetere liked Mwerinde at first and welcomed her into their home, despite the fact that Mwerinde forced all the adults to sleep together in one room-ostensibly to enable them to pray together day and night. Now, Theresa Kibwetere believes her real reason was to maintain absolute control over the fledgling cult.

"She was a commander. Whatever she said must be done-had to be done," she said. "She was a great enemy to me. If I'd stayed with him, I would not be living now. She would have smashed me to pieces."

Whether it was a genuine belief in the religion or greed that persuaded him to stay in the cult when the rest of the family abandoned it, Theresa Kibwetere does not know. After Mwerinde, in one of her many rages, doused Theresa Kibwetere's clothes with kerosene and set them on fire, the family ordered the cult followers and their leaders out of the house. They appealed to Kibwetere to leave the cult and stay with them, but he refused and left, adhering strictly to his code of silence even when Giles visited him for the last time in 1997 in the Kanungu compound.

One of the few photographs of Kibwetere and Mwerinde, taken two years ago in Kanungu by Rukanyongira, shows a serious-looking pair dressed in dark clerical clothes-she in a nun's habit, he in a priest's collar-with large crosses hanging around their necks and their hands placed primly on their laps.

He has a slightly cherubic face, while she looks like a plain, boxy woman with bags under her eyes.

How they convinced so many people-cult membership is estimated at anywhere from 1,000 to 4,000-to believe in them is attributed to their combined persuasiveness and to many of their mostly uneducated followers' deep religious convictions and willingness to believe what a relatively rich man like Kibwetere told them. "They could follow Kibwetere because they said, 'If he can go that way, why not me?'" Bahizi said.

Theresa Kibwetere last saw her husband in 1995 when he emerged briefly from his life of religious seclusion to come home for the funeral of one of his 16 children. As had been his strange custom for the previous five years, he said not a word, not even when his wife made one last attempt to bring him back into the family fold.

"I greeted him, and when he was going away I said he should always come and see his family. He remained silent, and from that time I never saw him again, " she said, admitting that she still misses him when she remembers their previous life. "Yes, yes, quite a lot," she said, "but what can I do?"

Giles is not as sentimental. He says Kibwetere should go to hell for what he did. "I don't miss him," he said. "I missed him as a father who brought me up, but I don't miss him as a criminal."

LOAD-DATE: April 1, 2000

Copyright 2000 Newsday, Inc. 

Newsday (New York)

March 28, 2000, Tuesday

WHERE DEATH REIGNED / A SURVIVOR TELLS OF UGANDA CULT S BIZARRE REGIME OF SILENCE

By Tina Susman. AFRICA CORRESPONDENT 

Rugazi, Uganda-They were up each day at 3 a.m. for an hour of prayers, then roused again at 5:45 and sent without breakfast to work in the fields. Bedtime came whenever their leaders chose to stop preaching to them. There was no speaking, no music, no soap, no snacking and no sex, and the rules were set by a self-proclaimed Head Apostle who was prone to frightening seizures when his authority was challenged.

Yet somehow Joseph Kibwetere managed to lure thousands of people into his fanatical sect and then many of them to their deaths, said Father Paul Ikazire, a Roman Catholic priest who once supported the cult but cut ties with it after becoming disillusioned with what he saw.

Yesterday the death toll from the cult leaders' apparent mass murder of their followers-already believed to be more than 600-grew as 74 bodies were pulled from the soil of a sugar cane field planted recently at one of the cult's properties.

"When I left I warned the fathers who were there that they should dissociate themselves. In fact, I told also the believers that this religion is not a religion according to the pope, according to Christ, and that people are going astray," Ikazire, 82, said yesterday, 10 days after the first of three mass killings was discovered in the hills of southwestern Uganda.

Despite the oddities of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God, however, and despite its leaders' angry warnings that his denunciation of the sect could doom him, Ikazire said he was stunned to learn of the slaughter. "I never suspected that. It had never come into my mind," he said as prisoners drafted into the gruesome service of digging for corpses worked at a neighboring home owned by Dominic Kataribabo, a sect leader who used to be a Roman Catholic priest along with Ikazire in this village near the Rwandan border.

Police began searching the property last weekend after finding several hundred bodies at two other cult compounds in the region. In Kanungu, as many as 500 people were burned to death March 17 in a fire set inside the cult's main headquarters. One week later, 153 bodies, including those of 59 children, were found buried behind a cult house in Buhunga.

Police are treating all the deaths as murders, saying it appears the cult leaders, whose fates are unknown, decided to kill their followers after persuading them to sell their belongings and hand over all their money. In return they were promised entry to heaven when the world ended, but the world did not end as cult leaders claimed it would on Dec. 31, 1999, and the followers began demanding their belongings back.

For 10 years, Kibwetere, a former school principal and failed politician, and Cledonia Mwerinde, who described herself as a former prostitute, recruited people into the church with promises of salvation. Ikazire remembers when they first came to Rugazi in 1990 with a plan to join Catholic Church leaders in teaching the values of the Ten Commandments.

"I was in the parish down there," he said, pointing toward town from the hillside grove of trees in which his house is perched. "They said they had brought a message from heaven telling them the people of this area were no longer keeping the Ten Commandments and that we should call the people together so that they may talk to them. This we did. People came, and they talked to them, and in fact some of them confessed they had done wrong."

Ikazire said he supported Kibwetere because it did not appear he was planning to create his own religion. "The main idea they came with was to help people come back to God-not to take over, but to join us."

Within a year, Ikazire developed misgivings. He visited one of Kibwetere's compounds and discovered the leader was preaching a new religion. Worse yet, he concluded that rather than teaching people to live by the Ten Commandments, Kibwetere and Mwerinde were violating them.

"For example, they were asking people to sell their land, to sell their property and to bring the money all to them," he said. "To ask people to give all their money, to sell their property, this is not good."

As Ikazire spent more time around the sect, he learned other things that bothered him. "Their rule was not to speak-not to speak at all, so nobody could give information to others. They were speaking in signs," he said, gesturing with his hands to indicate the form of communication that took place. "Even the children remained silent."

Children were not allowed to attend public schools as they might learn "bad manners," Ikazire said, and even the youngest were not immune from the punishing schedule Kibwetere invoked: rising at 3 a.m. for prayers, back to bed until 5:45, into the fields to farm, first meal at 10 a.m., back to the fields and then supper-often porridge-at about 6 p.m. followed by more prayer. If Kibwetere or Mwerinde decided to preach, followers could be forced to sit up until 1 a.m.

Their sermons were the only spoken words allowed in the compounds, he said, hence it was impossible to criticize or question the leaders. "This I saw was very, very dangerous."

Mondays and Fridays were fasting days, and eating during the rest of the week was permitted only during scheduled meal times. This was about the only time, other than during prayers, when men and women could be together. Even husbands and wives were kept apart, forced to live in different dormitories and barred from physical contact.

One of the more bizarre rules was the rule against skin soap, which forced people to wash with laundry powder. One day, Ikazire recalls, a woman had a bar of hand soap and began to wash with it, driving Mwerinde into a rage. "She took that soap and tried to beat her with it," he said.

Kibwetere frequently lost his temper, Ikazire said, particularly when his authority was questioned. During one meeting when Ikazire wanted to express his concerns over the cult to Kibwetere, he said the cult leader ordered him to say his piece in two minutes.

"I said two minutes was not enough time. He stood up and he came and stood over me like that," Ikazire said, standing erect with his fists clenched, his eyes wide open, and his body appearing to shake uncontrollably. "I stayed seated and I said to myself if he tries to beat me, I will tell him what is what."

Kibwetere fell into such seizures often when he became irritated, perhaps by something as benign as fidgety children, Ikazire said.

By 1994 Ikazire, who had lived with the group but not joined officially, had decided to cut his ties with the cult. Kibwetere and Mwerinde were angry and warned he would be dead by the end of the year, although they did not say how he would die.

After that, Ikazire said, he had no contact with the cult but saw their members, usually dressed in black and dark green, coming and going from the nearby compound where the latest bodies were found. He won't say whether he thinks the leaders are dead or alive or whether he believes they murdered their faithful followers, but he's sure of one thing: that they never believed what they preached and wanted only to get rich.

"A real priest does not demand money from believers," he said. "They don't ask you to bring money, money, money."

GRAPHIC: AP Photos - 1) A Ugandan child uses leaves to ward off the smell as jail prisoners dig outside compound in Rugazi, where 74 more bodies were unearthed yesterday. 2) At right, a police officer adjusts a prisoner's mask to block smell amid digging. 3) AP File Cover Photo - Undated photo believed to be cult members, including Joseph Kibwetere, second from left, and Cledonia Mwerinde, in white.

LOAD-DATE: March 29, 2000

Copyright 2000 Newsday, Inc. 

Newsday (New York)

March 27, 2000, Monday

MORE UGANDA BODIES EXPECTED / POLICE SUSPECT ANOTHER BRANCH OF CULT MURDERS

By Tina Susman. AFRICA CORRESPONDENT

Bunyaruguru, Uganda-It was an odd but seemingly law-abiding bunch of religious zealots who lived in the isolated house at the top of the steep hill, and it wasn't until they began digging toilets-more toilets than they could possibly need-that townspeople began getting suspicious. Then came rumors they were building a giant boat to take their followers into another world, and finally one of the church leaders was seen burning a pile of personal belongings, including clothes, mattresses and pillows.

Yesterday, police following the unspeakably gruesome trail of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God, whose leaders are known to have led at least 600 followers to their deaths, dug up a body at the cult's branch in this village and expected to find more in the mysterious toilet pits and beneath the newly planted fields of sugar cane and beans.

"Definitely, definitely, I'm sure there must be more bodies," said Gen. Jim Muhwezi, the parliamentary representative for the region, which includes Kanungu, where the charred remains of an estimated 500 followers were discovered March 17 locked inside a burned church. A week later, another 153 bodies-including more than 50 children-were found buried about 20 miles away in Buhunga in a cult compound, and police are searching several other sites the organization owned.

At first, officials thought the deaths were a mass suicide reminiscent of the 1978 People's Temple killings carried out by 912 followers in Guyana, because the church at Kanungu, where the cult maintained its headquarters, had its doors and window shutters nailed shut to make escape impossible. Someone poured gasoline throughout the church interior and then set a fire that quickly roared through the locked-up building. Villagers heard a loud bang as the sealed structure filled with flames and heat and eventually burst.

"We thought it was a bomb," said 12-year-old Deruevosio Turyanureba, one of those who came running up the hill to the sprawling compound. By then, he said, nearly everyone was dead except one man whose screams could be heard as he tried in vain to escape. "There were so many people burned the police just took a bulldozer and buried them all there," he said, pointing to a huge mountain of dirt on which someone had placed two bunches of flowers.

The suicide theory was scrapped after the Buhunga bodies, many of them slashed, hacked, clubbed and strangled, were found in the ground beneath a mud house by villagers digging for valuables after a huge fire at the site. "When we saw the fire, some children came running and said, 'Oh, did they leave some money there?' and they started digging in the ground, and they found the bodies," said Charles Kabazamu, whose banana plantation abuts the land on which the cult's compound sat. So deep were the bodies stacked that they could not all be pulled from the ground, so fresh dirt was simply dumped back over the mass graves and the site abandoned.

Now, officials believe the cult's leaders, whose whereabouts are unknown, systematically began murdering their followers-estimated at anywhere from 1, 000 to 5,000-after the devout became disgruntled with the spartan lives they led and began doubting their leaders' claims. Followers were forced to sell all their belongings, to hand their money over to the cult's main leaders, self-proclaimed prophet Joseph Kibwetere, 68, and his assistant Gredonia Mwerinda, 40, and to live on starvation rations. Families were separated, communication with non-cult members was forbidden, and sex was outlawed.

Local residents said cult followers were a weak, hungry-looking group and that the cheery-looking school in Kanungu hadn't operated in several months. Inside the abandoned classrooms lay report cards and class programs dated in 1998. Writing scrawled on the chalkboard of one room said: "Let us kill ourselves," and "Let us go and burn."

"Anyone who was living here, even a child, was just living on one cup of porridge a day. We could see everyone living here was miserable," said Kabazamu as he roamed the now-abandoned Buhunga compound, where the smell of death still lingers. In return for such sacrifice, the followers were guaranteed a trip to heaven when the world ended at the start of 2000, as Kibwetere and Mwerinda claimed it would.

"When it didn't, they had a problem," said Muhwezi, the region's representative. "The leaders then said they had a new vision-that the world was going to end by the end of 2000, but how would they maintain all these people?  That's why they decided to burn them all up."

From villagers' and police accounts, it appears cult leaders first murdered the followers and buried their bodies in cult compounds, then staged the " mass suicide" in Kanungu, possibly by herding everyone into church for supposed prayer and then trapping them inside and starting the fire. From there they returned to Buhunga and set that compound on fire to cover the murders there. If the numbers of dead found in Kanungu or Buhunga are anything to go by, police will find scores more in Bunyaruguru.

The body of a naked man was pulled yesterday from the dirt at the back of the house where the toilet digging had begun a few weeks back. "These people had been here more than eight years, and when they came they were very good people. So recently when they started to dig all these toilets I came to them and said, 'What are you doing?'" said the village chief, Gregory Katureebe, as storm clouds gave the scene an even more sinister element. "They said they were just digging toilets, but when they started to dig that big one in the back I came to stop them because there was a rumor they were going to build a boat that was going to take people to another world."

Last week, he said, two days after the Kanungu inferno, one of the cult's ministers stood over a fire in the yard of the Bunyaruguru house burning a pile of personal belongings.

Nobody knows where Kibwetere and Mwerinda are, but some theorize they escaped and are on the run, perhaps hiding with surviving followers or across the nearby Rwandan border.

The misty hills of southwestern Uganda seem an unlikely setting for such mayhem. Dubbed the Switzerland of Africa for its hills, this is a region of farming villages connected by narrow dirt roads that curve through velvety green slopes covered in banana, mango and coffee trees. But it is an area seemingly plagued by dreadful deeds. One year ago, eight foreign tourists were murdered while on a safari to view rare mountain gorillas in nearby Bwindi National Park, and six years ago an ethnically motivated genocide killed a half-million people in neighboring Rwanda.

People who lived near the cult's compounds said while the people who lived in them did not mix with other villagers, they never caused trouble. In Kanungu, the sprawling compound included a garden blooming with daisies, lilies and roses, and a school for cult followers' children. There was also a neatly tended graveyard dotted with wooden crosses.

"It's easy to see why people would not suspect them," said Muhwezi, defending officials against allegations they should have known something was wrong and rescinded the cult's authorization to operate legally. "When you look at their objectives, you couldn't deny them. They said they believed in the Ten Commandments. What's wrong with that? And where they stayed they had no problems with the local people. They paid for everything, they paid all their taxes, and they didn't bother anybody."

This is not the first religious cult to plague Uganda. In the far north of the country, government troops have been battling more than a decade the rebels of the Lord's Resistance Army, whose leader, Joseph Kony, claims to be a prophet who will install a rule of law based on the Ten Commandments. Leaders of another Ugandan doomsday sect, the 1,000-member World Message Last Warning, were charged with rape, kidnaping and illegal confinement when police broke it up in September.

President Yoweri Museveni on Tuesday blamed unemployment, AIDS and lack of education for the ability of cults to grow in his country, saying people with no hope were reaching for miracles. But Muhwezi said the problem also has to do with a combination of Uganda's brutal past, when dictator Idi Amin outlawed most religions, and the new freedoms ushered in by Museveni since 1986.

"Now with the new constitution, people are free to manifest any religion, and I think there are opportunists and thugs who have taken advantage of this, " he said. "Since there are people who will follow them and give them all their money, why not?"

LOAD-DATE: March 27, 2000

Kidnapping for Kicks

Newsday (New York, NY)

September 17, 2002 Tuesday

Carried Away by Need for Thrill;
Service will kidnap you - it's all legal, and raising hackles

By Tina Susman. STAFF WRITER

With his close-shorn hair, T-shirt and snappy silver cell phone clipped to the waistline of his jeans, Brock Enright looks like a lot of other 20-something New Yorkers gulping coffee at a SoHo diner.

On this cloudy weekday morning, though, the guileless-looking Enright is planning an abduction, and he's awaiting word from his cohorts that the time is right to grab the target. It could happen in the foyer of a building, in a garage, in the abductee's own home or in a public but secluded spot. A team specially chosen by Enright will grab the prey, then bind and gag him with duct tape and take him into hiding for a few hours, a couple of days, or longer.

When he goes free, he won't call the police or the FBI. He won't try to recoup any money Enright makes off the job. He'll just take the little bag of necessities that the kidnappers will give him - a bag containing money to get home, his ID and a bit of food - and return to a life that in his mind, at least, was sorely in need of adventure.

That's why he will have paid Enright at least $1,500, and probably closer to $3,000 to $4,000, for an abduction and hostage experience, complete with strong-arm tactics, deprivation, threats and whatever abuse he can tolerate. Sex is out, but just about anything else goes, says Enright, an artist and entrepreneur who launched his macabre business a few months ago.

"There's this extreme sports aspect to it," said Enright, 26, describing his clients as men and a few women in their 20s, 30s and 40s who are willing and able to pay for adventure but unwilling or unable to take genuine risks, either for psychological or personal reasons. "They're control freaks who want to lose control. They want to get away from their everyday lives without having to do it themselves."

Given the recent rash of well-publicized child abductions, and the still-fresh memories of foreign hostage situations that ended in death - Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in Pakistan, and Kansas missionary Martin Burnham in the Philippines, among them - it's no surprise Enright's business has critics. They include police, who fear that one of the staged kidnappings could go wrong and lead to injury or death. As long as Enright's customers pay for the service, however, and agree to be grabbed and held, there's nothing illegal about it, says NYPD spokesman Mike Collins.

Even so, professionals who work on real abduction cases say the idea of making money by simulating violent abductions is repellent, particularly with the public so jittery about terrorism threats and child snatchings.

"I'm all for bringing thrills into life, but I think this crosses the line," said Jerry Nance of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which investigates cases of long-term missing children. Many have been gone more than 20 years. "I guess it's inevitable that no matter what is happening in the world, no matter how tragic it is to society, somebody's going to try to figure out a way they can make a buck off of it. There's no law against felony stupidity."

If he's bothered by such criticism, Enright, who looks like a young, softer-featured Anthony Perkins, doesn't show it. He also shows no interest in delving into the supposed therapeutic value that many clients see in his service. To Enright, it's a job, and his clients are "everyday people," often with families and full-time jobs, who might also get their kicks on Internet chat sites or playing paintball. In fact, one of the most remarkable things about Enright is how utterly unremarkable he seems as he discusses his business and himself.

Raised in Virginia Beach, Va., Enright calls his own life relatively uneventful and draws a blank when asked about his most perilous moment. He even has trouble coming up with his life's most exciting event and finally cites a recent trip to Italy and Turkey, the first time he had traveled abroad. Fake abductions began as a schoolboy prank, Enright says. If a friend wanted to skip school, Enright would abduct the friend so he had to miss school.

By the time he came to New York four years ago to pursue a master of fine arts degree at Columbia, Enright had begun videotaping staged abductions of friends and producing them as art projects. A showing of some videos, along with his sculpting and other work, in a Brooklyn gallery in June prompted enough calls from hostage wannabes that Enright went into business. He calls his company Videogames because of the video camera that records each abduction. So far, he says he has carried out about 30 abductions, and business is booming enough that during one recent week he had seven cases pending.

While customers come seeking everything from thrills to assistance in confronting personal fears, Enright, who conducts extensive interviews before agreeing to take them on, says they all have one thing in common. "I can tell there's something in them that wants to pop," he said. "They don't really want to commit to danger fully, but they still want to experience danger, so you organize it."

Another common thread, said Enright, is the fear that clients admit to when the ordeal is over - a fear that begins from the moment they sign a contract and hand over their daily schedules, keys to their homes, and whatever else he might need to carry out an abduction. While they know they will be grabbed, they don't know precisely when, where, how or by whom. "Everything becomes suspect," said Enright, who has snatched people in bed, on the street as they leave the gym, even in their bathrooms.

Randy Wilcox awoke from an evening nap to find several masked intruders in his apartment. "The beginning was pretty intense because all these guys came in with masks. I didn't know exactly what to expect. I guess I wasn't prepared for all those people, and that was scary," said Wilcox, who had signed up for an abduction three or four days earlier. He opted for a brief ordeal: the attackers bound him tightly with duct tape, almost mummifying him, then taped him to the floor and eventually abandoned him there. He was discovered several hours later by a friend.

For Wilcox, the experience was intended to be therapeutic. Severe depression had not been relieved by medication or traditional therapy, said the 25-year-old temp worker. "I felt like this was more life-affirming, that maybe it would put me closer to an appreciation for banality, for the simple things in life," said Wilcox, who insists he was so shaken that he suffered post-traumatic stress afterward.

Enright's longest case so far has involved a man who spent a week bound and blindfolded to measure his tolerance for mental and physical discomfort. Lately, more and more people are using the experience as a way of testing their abilities to escape, said Enright, adding that no one so far has gotten away from the abductors. There have been some close calls, however, such as the time two friends were abducted together. The one who had organized the abduction had failed to tell her friend that it was planned, something that had to be hastily explained after the grab had taken place. One client described being bound to a chair and hitting his head hard on the floor when it was shoved over accidentally by one of his abductors.

Such incidents worry Enright's critics, who wonder how long it will be before an abduction goes awry and someone gets hurt or killed. "People might think they're witnessing a real abduction and either attempt to intervene or call the police," said Nance, a former police officer. "If I saw something like that going on, the response could be that you think the person being abducted is in harm's way, and that entitles a police officer to use deadly force."

Enright insists he keeps abductions out of the public's eye to avoid such scenarios and adds that he never intended the business to be a lifelong endeavor. Like a work of performance art, he says his goal is to build it up to a certain level and then, when the mood strikes, end it.

If he has any personal opinions about his clients, such as why they don't test their mettle by traveling to foreign lands or climbing mountains, he won't say, but he displays a certain level of scorn in the post-abduction gifts that each client receives. They include T-shirts printed with the client's most memorable utterances during the experience. Enright's favorites: "I cried three times" and "Mommy."

Lagos' Amazing Garbage

Copyright 1998 Newsday, Inc. 
Newsday (New York)

July 31, 1998, Friday

WHO'S TAKING OUT THE TRASH? / MOST NIGERIANS, BUT ONLY INTO THE STREETS

By Tina Susman. AFRICA CORRESPONDENT

Lagos, Nigeria - It's the last Saturday of July, and as on the last Saturday of each month, little is moving in Lagos. This is Environmental Day, the one day each month when by law people must spend the morning sweeping the streets outside their homes and trying to get rid of, or at least conceal, the filth of this astoundingly filthy city.

"They're not keen," admits the man in charge of this mission, Emmanuel Festus Golit, who is being interviewed on national television and taking questions from viewers calling in to discuss things like how best to store their trash. "I would say maybe 50 percent of the people take part. Perhaps next month we'll get 60 percent."

Cleanup day lasts till 10 a.m. Until then, no cars except those on official business are permitted on the streets. Residents are expected to collect the bottles, cans, paper, rags and other shreds of trash from around their homes and pile them into trash containers or neat piles for the state to pick up and deposit in the city's dumps.

The United Nations Development Program estimated in a 1996 report that 89 percent of Nigerian households were using unhygienic means for getting rid of waste - in other words, dumping it anywhere they wanted. That, combined with the fact that only 31 percent of households have access to safe drinking water, no doubt contributes heavily to the poor health conditions that have given Nigeria one of Africa's worst child mortality rates. About 20 percent of children don't reach age 5, according to the UN, and dysentery is the cause of death second only to malaria.

Many in Lagos seem oblivious to the mountains of litter that line their streets and send acrid clouds of smoke into the air when people try to burn them away. A mound of waste rises behind a sign declaring "Do not drop rubbish here." Men nonchalantly face walls declaring "Don't urinate here" and do just that. Attempts to put garbage where it belongs appear futile. After the latest Environmental Day, a garbage bin downtown was stuffed to twice its height with trash, sending the excess tumbling into the street to be blown away in the wind or washed into the clogged sewers in the next rainstorm.

Garbage is serious business in Lagos, a city of an estimated 9 million people living in a country where basic services like trash collection and electric power have been allowed to collapse by a succession of corrupt, neglectful governments. The spectacle of an official of the current military government such as Golit, in full military regalia no less, sitting on national television telling people they should clean up the city isn't lost on viewers. "Isn't this something the state should be doing?" says one woman incredulously as she clears away breakfast dishes in a hotel restaurant.

"It's the job of all citizens to keep Lagos clean," says Golit, commander of the Lagos State Waste Disposal Board, which estimates it picked up 26 million tons of garbage last month. Judging by the streets, that's a tiny portion of what needed to be collected.

Just ask Dr. Funlola Harold-Sodipo of the Lifeline Children's Hospital. Rather than depend on the government to cart away the daily accumulation of trash, much of it dangerous medical waste, the clinic hired a private contractor. Before long they were visited by Waste Disposal Board officials demanding they sign a contract to use its services and agree to pay for daily pickup.

"It was very little, only about 250 naira a month officially, 85 naira equal one dollar , but we said no, we didn't want to sign, because we had arranged things for ourselves," said Harold-Sodipo. The state persisted and eventually served the clinic with an order to either sign the contract and pay, or go to court. They kept the private firm but "In the end, to avoid going to court, we signed and paid," she said. "If we're lucky they come once a month."

Golit advised viewers to buy a trash can and put it outside the house so they wouldn't be tempted to toss the day's trash out the front door onto the street. With Nigeria's population increasing at an alarmingly high rate of 3.4 percent annually, and cities like Lagos burgeoning with millions more people than they were built to hold, it's clear trash cans alone won't do the trick.

Officials in Ibadan, the capital of neighboring Oyo state, say they may have the ultimate weapon in what Golit describes as a veritable "war" on the burgeoning trash problem. The state governor, Col. Ahmed Usman, wearing a mask over his nose and mouth, recently oversaw the opening of an Ibadan factory that claims to be the first in Africa dedicated to transforming garbage into organic fertilizer for farmers.

The factory, designed by a group of professors at the University of Ibadan, was dreamed up after Usman expressed shock at the filth of Ibadan, whose big Bodija market alone produces as much as 40 tons of garbage daily. Ideally, officials say, the factory will provide farmers with fertilizer far cheaper than the chemical-laden products most currently used, while taking the country a step forward in its battle against blight.

The Owl House

Copyright 1998 Newsday, Inc. 
Newsday (New York)

April 30, 1998, Thursday

POSTMARK NIEU BETHESDA: A FREE SPIRIT IS HONORED IN HINDSIGHT

By Tina Susman. AFRICA CORRESPONDENT

Nieu Bethesda, South Africa - If this were anywhere but South Africa, the Owl House might never have created such a stir. But this is a country where free thinking was tantamount to treason until a few years ago, and this is a dusty, desolate outpost 25 miles from the nearest tarred road, where electricity didn't arrive until 1992 and where you still can't buy a daily paper or a tank of gas.

So imagine the residents' shock in the 1950s when Helen Martins, the quiet divorcee living alone at the end of a dirt road, began buying colored bottles from the township children, crushing them in her coffee grinder and gluing the sparkling pieces across the walls, ceilings and windows of her home. After she had transformed the inside, Martins began working on the outside, creating a ghostly garden of crudely fashioned concrete-and-glass sculptures that reflected her fascination with owls and eastern religions and convinced townspeople she was a hedonistic madwoman.

"Most of the people thought Helen was not right," says Georgina Skota, who as a child would cart colored bottles to Martins' doorstep and who now shows visitors the monument to eccentricity called the Owl House, which has created a thriving tourist industry in this otherwise forgettable dot in the Karoo desert. "I won't say she was mad, but there was something wrong. She was lonely and longing for something. I think she was lonely for love and light."

By almost any standards, Martins, whose life is portrayed in Athol Fugard's play "The Road to Mecca," led a wretched existence. Raised in this quiet hamlet and doomed, as the youngest daughter, to forfeit a life of independence for one of servitude to her ailing parents, she rarely saw much beyond the cacti and tumbleweed surrounding the drab family home. So late one particularly bleak night, following the deaths of her parents and the failure of her second marriage, Martins lay in the dark in her narrow childhood bed, pondered the gray monotony of her life, and decided to fill it forever with color and light.

"At the beginning she only had an idea to brighten up the one bedroom, but I think she liked the results so much that she just kept going," said Skota, who recalls being frightened at first of the dirty, ill-kempt woman with the wild hair who would open the door to the dark house and trade candies for bottles to crush.

As time passed, Martins became more comfortable with the township children, and as arthritis and failing eyesight began hampering her ability to create new work, she hired black laborers from the nearby township to help. The result was even more isolation from the few hundred white villagers, living as they did in a time of staunch apartheid and ruled by the dictates of the fundamentalist Dutch Reformed Church, whose spire towers over the town.

For them, Martins' sculpture garden of concrete camels, nude sun worshipers, mermaids, kings, buddhas, and countless other figures, most facing east toward Mecca, was tantamount to heresy. "They would say, Don't go near Helen's house. She's a hex!' " recalls Skota, who remembers Martins in fact as a friendly but shy woman who liked children though she never had any of her own.

As the townspeople shunned her, Martins became more reclusive. She only opened her door to people who knew a secret knock. Her eyesight began failing and her hands were mangled by glass cuts and gnarled by arthritis, but she refused to see a doctor. As her physical condition deteriorated, so too did her mental state, until one cold winter's day in 1976 she stood in the kitchen beside the window overlooking the sculpture garden and swallowed a bottle of poison. Her body was cremated and the ashes scattered over the sculpture garden.

The past disdain for Martins is nowhere to be found nowadays in Nieu Bethesda, which is reached by way of a winding gravel road that snakes through the Sneeuberg Mountains, past desert monoliths reminiscent of the American West and through valleys shaded by giant weeping willows.

The town itself is barely a town. Life revolves around the six-room Owl House, where a steady stream of visitors wanders around the sculpture garden and peers into the glass-covered bedrooms, kitchen and larder, whose shelves are stacked with dozens of mason jars filled with crushed glass that Martins never got around to using. A tea room-cum-souvenir shop across the road sells small concrete owls with amber glass eyes.

Women more than men seem to appreciate the Owl House, says Skota, speculating that they can better empathize with the plight of a woman hemmed in by conservatism and condemned rather than appreciated for her free spirit. The evidence of visitors' mixed feelings about Martins is clear in the visitor's book. "She was nuts," wrote one visitor, amid other lofty commentaries on the Owl House's artistic merits.

Whether it's art or not, the Owl House and its odd resident are the best thing that ever happened to Nieu Bethesda, something Skota laments was never appreciated until long after Martins' death. "We feel very ashamed now that when she was alive, the people didn't want to know her. Now we want to give her praise and respect," she said. "She gave our town life."

The Tale of Beau Brummell

February 10, 1993, Wednesday

Peaceful Colony Facing Crisis as Doors Open to Blacks, Gays

By TINA SUSMAN, Associated Press Writer

WARMBATHS, South Africa

Once upon a time, a former rock 'n' roll singer bought a farm in a quiet valley where he could shed his clothes and enjoy nature far from South Africa's strife.

For 14 years, Beau Brummell and his band of nudists peacefully enjoyed their sunbathed colony, an oasis of naked tranquility in an intolerant land. Suddenly, the changes enveloping the rest of South Africa have crashed like a meteorite into the country's only nudist colony, Beau Valley, where residents are ready to dethrone the self-proclaimed King of Nudity following his decision last month to allow blacks and homosexuals.

"Just as our own country is in turmoil at the moment, so is my nudist colony," said Brummell.

Brummell says he wants to be part of the "new" South Africa but is facing racism and homophobia from angry shareholders, who are suing Brummell.

"The years of apartheid are still very much alive and well among the whites here," Brummell said in an interview as rain fell over the lush glen. On the rare occasions non-whites have visited Beau Valley, other nudists have been hostile, he said.

Residents say the main problem is Brummell, who sold them shares in a family-style retreat only to change the rules without consulting them.

They accuse Brummell of diverting their fees for personal use, which Brummell vehemently denies, and of using his status as majority shareholder to run a fiefdom. Police seized the resort's financial records in a raid Feb. 7.

"Gays and blacks are not the problem at all," said Jonathan Egan, one of Brummell's detractors. "The problem is Mr. Brummell changes his theme. The original theme was naturism for families, and now he's advertising it as a gay retreat."

Egan acknowledges racism and homophobia are behind some of the anger. He doesn't want his sons sharing the retreat's communal showers with gay men, Egan says.

Of the 100 time-share bungalows, 41, including Egan's, are for sale.

Most Beau Valley shareholders are families with children, who spend holidays and weekends around the swimming pool, volleyball court, and fishing pond. No alcohol is sold.

Brummell, born Michael Bush 50 years ago, bought the 80-acre farm, 100 miles northeast of Johannesburg, 21 years ago with money earned as a pop singer, movie-maker and cowboy hero known as "Beau the Untamed."

The stage name "Beau Brummell" was adopted during his six years in Europe, where he released 11 pop singles, including a 1963 hit, "I Know, Know, Know," and hobnobbed with some rich and famous types.

The original "Beau" Brummell was a 19th century English gentleman, George Bryan Brummell, known for his dapper dress. This undressed, South African Brummell also is not to be confused with the mid-60s San Francisco rock group, the Beau Brummells.

After growing up in a conservative, religious South African family, Brummell describes his years in Europe as the start of his education.

"I learned what freedom was," said Brummell, a towering man with silver beard, wavy locks, and an aristocratic bearing. He also learned the art of self-promotion.

Brummell's office in Beau Valley is covered with publicity shots: Brummell naked in the African bush with cheetahs; Brummell clothed with Raquel Welch; Brummell posing with one of his heroes, anthropologist Raymond Dart.

He has become one of South Africa's leading celebrities, despite being a "proud atheist and great Charles Darwin man." In one newsletter, he describes himself as only somewhat less well-known than F.W. de Klerk and Nelson Mandela.

Police have staged periodic raids on Brummell's home, seizing brochures and filing pornography charges.

But the conservative town of Warmbaths, 10 miles away, has grown to appreciate the business Beau Valley brought it. When Brummell's two children were expelled from a Christian school in 1988, other parents put pressure on the headmaster until he resigned.

The Tale of Gen. Butt Naked

Copyright 1997 Associated Press

August 3, 1997, Sunday

Former Gen. Butt Naked trades bullets for pulpit in Liberia

By TINA SUSMAN, Associated Press Writer

MONROVIA, Liberia _ The macabre annals of Liberia's civil war include gunmen in drag, human skulls used as soccer balls and the videotaped torture of the ousted president. But nothing compares to the tale of Gen. Butt Naked.

Nude except for lace-up leather shoes and a gun, the general led his fierce Butt Naked Battalion into battle on behalf of the warlord Roosevelt Johnson, who hired the unclothed warrior for his fearlessness and fighting skills.

As the war wound down, so too did Gen. Butt Naked's commitment to kill. Today, he is an evangelical preacher leading his Soul-Winning Evangelistic Ministry on a crusade against war and warlords.

He now uses his birth name - Joshua Milton Blahyi - and wears a suit and tie as he roams the battered capital with a microphone preaching peace and reconciliation.

"I was just an ordinary man, but I was also very spiritual. I was deep into occult," Blahyi, 25, said as he explained how he became a ruthless general. His fighters were among the most notorious in the seven-year conflict that wracked the West African nation, founded 150 years ago by freed American slaves.

The war began when Charles Taylor launched a cross-border invasion aimed at ousting President Samuel Doe. A rival faction that emerged the following year captured Doe and filmed torturers as they sliced off his ear and mangled his face before killing him.

Seven warring groups, including Johnson's, formed over the years, and about 200,000 people died before warlords signed a peace accord that cleared the way for presidential elections July 19.

Blahyi publicly urged voters to reject the warlords running for office, but they still chose Taylor by a landslide. Blahyi's political views and religious conversion were big news here, evidence of how famous his antics became even among Liberians hardened by one of the world's weirdest wars.

Drunk and drugged teen-agers and boys composed much of the warlords' fighting forces, and in their intoxicated states they would waltz into battle wearing flowing dresses, colorful wigs and carrying dainty purses looted from civilians.

They took ghoulish glee in displaying their trophies: posting a victim's head on a table set in the middle of a Monrovia intersection; using the skull of another victim for soccer practice.

Civilians rarely seemed fazed.

But the Butt Naked Battalion stood out, not just for its nudity but for its brutality and its apparent fearlessness. Blahyi says this was a result of a contract with the devil, sealed at the age of 11 when he was initiated into a satanic society that demanded regular human sacrifices and nudity on the battlefield to ensure protection from his enemies.

He started out as an armed robber and killer - killing too many people to count, Blahyi says - and was recruited into the war in 1994 when Johnson asked him for help.

"I agreed, because at that time they offered me a lot of money. Everything I did, I did on a commercial basis," said Blahyi, speaking in the dingy, shabbily furnished second-floor apartment he shares with several other people in Monrovia.

Blahyi said he was required to make a human sacrifice before battle. Usually it was a small child, someone whose fresh blood would satisfy the devil.

"Sometimes I would enter under the water where children were playing. I would dive under the water, grab one, carry him under and break his neck. Sometimes I'd cause accidents. Sometimes I'd just slaughter them," he said in a matter-of-fact manner.

Before leading his band of fighters to the front lines, Blahyi would stop and strip to only his shoes, then charge into the fray yelling orders to his loyal followers.

It was during one of these battles, on the New Bridge linking central Monrovia to the outskirts, that Blahyi's conversion began. He was naked on the front line when, he says, God appeared and told him he was a slave to Satan, not the hero he considered himself to be.

That was in June 1996, when Monrovia was in the midst of fighting that nearly destroyed the city and led to international pressures for a peace accord.

Blahyi admits it took awhile to accept his new calling, but in November he finally turned full time to preaching and even attended theology school in Nigeria.

When he goes out to preach now, he says he sometimes encounters relatives of his victims. "I feel very bad, so bad," he said, but he insists it was satanic powers that possessed him in the past and he cannot be held responsible.

To try to make up for his past, Blahyi is now selling cassettes of his sermons for $ 20 each to raise money for a school for ex-fighters such as himself.

"Even now I'm fighting. I'm fighting a spiritual war," Blahyi said, before heading outside into the rain for another day of preaching.

Dog Bears Witness

Copyright 2001 Newsday, Inc. 
Newsday (New York)

March 29, 2001 Thursday

High Stakes in Penny-Ante Case;
Man faced 10 years in theft of 58 cents

By Tina Susman; STAFF CORRESPONDENT

Belvidere, N.J.-The charge was burglary, punishable by as much as 10 years in prison. The booty: 58 cents. The key witness: Sasha, a hulking hound whom the defense attorney subpoenaed in an attempt to prove her client's innocence. The verdict: not guilty-sort of.

The rambling case of Michael Monroe reached its bizarre conclusion yesterday in Warren County Superior Court nearly two years after the alleged crime, closing a saga that some say should never have started. In the end, more than $16,000 in public funds was spent jailing Monroe and paying for his three-day jury trial on burglary and criminal-trespass charges stemming from the disappearance of 58 cents from the front seat of a Navy blue Chevy Tahoe in June 1999.

Prosecutors alleged Monroe, a down- and-out construction worker, slipped his arm through a slightly open window of the pricey SUV, helped himself to the spare change and might have helped himself to the vehicle had the owners not scared him off. The defense insisted that Sasha, a Rottweiler who tips the scales at nearly 100 pounds, was in the car, making it impossible for anyone-much less the frail-looking Monroe-to break in.

"Nobody in their right mind is going to get into a vehicle with a dog that looks like this! Nobody!" defense attorney Regina Lynch said in her 45-minute closing arguments, pointing toward a 3-by-4 color photograph of Sasha.

Fearing raucous results, Judge John Kingfield on Tuesday had opted to show jurors the dog's picture rather than require the subpoenaed dog's presence in court.

The jury deliberated 30 minutes before declaring Monroe not guilty on both the burglary and criminal-trespass counts, but that still left the judge to decide one charge: theft of the 58 cents, which for technical reasons was an unindictable offense not decided by jurors. As Monroe wept with relief upon hearing the jury's findings, Kingfield declared him guilty of theft, saying he was convinced Monroe had stolen the money despite jurors' conclusions.

Assistant Prosecutor James Janci, who had vowed to seek the maximum penalty of 10 years on a burglary conviction, then asked for the maximum of 180 days in jail and a $1,000 fine for theft. But the judge sentenced Monroe to time served (95 days) and set him free.

For all the case's comic undertones, those involved said it raised serious issues.

"This is not about 50 cents or 52 cents or 58 cents," Janci said in his closing arguments, countering allegations the offense was too menial to warrant such aggressive prosecution. "This is about the crime of burglary."

Prosecutors emphasized Monroe's record, which included 15 convictions on charges from forgery to cocaine possession. "This individual has total contempt for the balance of the law," Janci said.

Lynch insisted this was a case of the rich against the poor, of the charmed against the underdog, with Monroe and Sasha as pawns. She said David Laman, the SUV's owner, hoped to make a quick buck after he claimed to have seen Monroe in the car when he left a ShopRite with his wife.

He complained to ShopRite officials of the alleged break-in instead of phoning police, Lynch said, alleging his plan was to get the store to compensate him for lax parking-lot security. Only after the store notified police did the Lamans find themselves involved in a court case, and one that could reveal a potentially worse crime than burglary: animal cruelty on their part, Lynch said.

Monroe disputed Laman's insistence that the SUV's windows were open several inches to give Sasha air, and he said he approached the closed vehicle after hearing the yelps of the hot, thirsty dog. The Lamans came out and accused him of breaking into the car, fearful he might report them for leaving their dog in danger, Monroe said.

In a tearful appeal to the judge for a light sentence, Monroe, 50, pleaded for the chance to turn his life around.

"I know I haven't been an angel all my life," he said, but he begged to be allowed to return to Pennsylvania and spend time with a dying sister. "Let me go home. I'm tired. I just want to go home."

None of the jurors would explain the verdict or Sasha's impact on the case as they left the courthouse.

The Goat Who Would be Mayor

Copyright 2003 Newsday, Inc. 
Newsday (New York)

January 1, 2003 Wednesday

Attack Really Got Town's Goat

By Tina Susman. STAFF CORRESPONDENT

Lajitas, Texas - It's hard to say which subject stirs greater passions here: the mayor's election, or the mayor's castration.

Given that the mayor is a goat, you might expect the castration to be taken in stride. But given that it was performed by a lout with a paring knife, who left the beloved mayor bleating in agony after assaulting him on a cold night one year ago, it's easy to understand locals' lingering horror at the event.

What's especially galling to Lajitas residents is the sinister manner in which Clay Henry, as the mayor is affectionately known, apparently was drawn to his fate: by someone offering him a beer. For not only is Clay Henry famous for being a four-legged mayor, he is also famous for his love of beer, especially Lone Star, and is known to happily nuzzle up to any stranger wagging a bottle of the brew in front of his furry tan-and-white face.

The alleged assailant, Jim Bob Hargrove of Del Rio, Texas, went free in August after a jury deadlocked on felony animal cruelty charges. Jurors apparently were hesitant to convict someone for doing what is commonly done to goats, and they voted 8-4 in favor of acquittal.

Prosecutors say they have no immediate plans to retry Hargrove, which suits William Ivey, the man credited with producing the political dynasty that spawned Mayor Clay Henry III and his two hoofed predecessors, Mayors Clay Henry I and Clay Henry Jr. "I think the man who did the crime must have suffered considerable attorney's fees by now, and I'd certainly hope some shame and embarrassment," Ivey said. "Maybe that's enough, because it won't do the goat any good to have another trial."

Ivey traces the goat dynasty to a foggy night in the 1980s, when a rare bout of bad weather shut down the local airstrip and trapped a group of Houston businessmen in Lajitas.

"The liquid libations were flowing pretty freely. Everybody was happy and warm," said Ivey, who at the time owned Clay Henry I - then just a simple goat with no political aspirations. "They decided that since Lajitas didn't have a mayor, they'd just elect one." But their choice of a man from Houston, 670 miles from Lajitas, did not go down well with townspeople.

"I said if some jackass in Houston can be mayor, then I can run my goat for mayor," Ivey said.

Running under the slogan, "You have to give a darn," Clay Henry I was elected. What began as a bit of fun evolved into serious business for Lajitas as Clay Henry's fame spread. He was invited to appear on "The Tonight Show" with Johnny Carson, and visiting show-biz types, such as Willie Nelson, enjoyed partying with him, Ivey said. Like the current mayor, the first one also enjoyed his beer.

Clay Henry I lived to the ripe age of 23, before being killed by his own son, Clay Henry Jr., in a fight over a female goat. Clay Henry Jr. succeeded him and served until 1998 before stepping down and paving the way for the current Clay Henry's election.

Now, Clay Henry III lives in a sunny pen with his female companion and their two offspring, one of which is expected to succeed him when the town decides it's time for a new mayor. Meanwhile, he maintains a tireless work schedule and down-home style, personally greeting all visitors to his hay-strewn office, which is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week.