Squabble over the Jonestown millions

Press, 17 April 1979, Page 17

Squabble over the Jonestown millions

By

WILLIAM SCOBIE,

“Observer,” London

The ashes of the cult leader Jim Jones have been scattered over the Atlantic; the relics of his Peoples Temple have been auctioned off; and on March 13 the sole remaining “true believer,” Jones’s former right-hand man Mike Prokes, put a bullet through his head, but the ghosts of Jonestown continue to haunt America.

Four months after the tragedy that left more than 900 people dead in the Guyana jungle, a tangle of lawsuits, official investigations and unresolved mysteries remains. The biggest question is still: Who should get the Jones millions, and where are they? The cult’s financial empire has been estimated at an astonishing S26M by the “San Francisco Examiner,” in a copyrighted story; but there may be other assets hidden in foreign banks which could push the total higher.

More than SI2M has been discovered in Panama alone; another SSM is reportedly held in other foreign accounts from Caracas to Zurich. California real estate, plus cash, gold and jewellery found in San Francisco and in Guyana is worth at least a further S3.M. There is more elsewhere. Not bad for a smalltime hot-gospel hustler who began his career selling pet monkeys on the streets of Indianapolis. Lawsuits filed against Jones’s “church,” however, already total some SSOM. Thgy range from a $4.3M

claim by the Justice Department to pay for the military airlift of 913 bodies out of Guyana to a $265,000 suit by local authorities in San Francisco to cover costs of a special election to replace the late Congressman Leo Ryan, murdered while investigating the Jonestown commune. Inquiries into the tragedy’s causes are also piling up. A San Francisco grand jury is looking into

the possibility that Ryan and his party were lured to their deaths as part of a Temple conspiracy. The F. 8.1. is investigating alleged smuggling of drugs, poisons and guns from California to Guyana. And a Congressional committee is studying the extent of United States Government knowledge about the Jones cult prior to the mass-sui-cide. Why, it wants to know, wasn’t the Congressman better informed? These official bodies plan to question Mark Lane, who, as Peoples Temple lawyer, may be the only surviving, and presumably unbiased, witness able to say if and why Jim Jones" ordered the slaying of Ryan and his companions. Lane has also been named in a SIOM wrongful death lawsuit brought against the Peoples Temple and its associated in California; and he is being investigated by the New

York Bar Association. The controversial Lane, aged 51, who won national attention with his “crusades” to uncover conspiracies in the deaths of President Kennedy and the Reverend Martin Luther King, has found a new conspiracy theory in Jonestown. As he tells it, the F. 8.1., C.I.A. and State Department knew about the possibility of a massacre yet did nothing to prevent it.

Lane’s critics charge that he was the only outsider aware of Jones’s paranoia, drugs and suicide drills. But he talked of Jonestown as a socialist paradise and failed to warn Ryan of the dangers. In one interview, Lane was quoted as saying that he knew food given to Ryan’s party might be laced with drugs, and so ate only the cough-drops he had with him: “I sure as hell wasn’t going to touch the cheese sandwiches.’” . It was this article, in the “Washington Post,” which led to the New York Bar inquiry. Meanwhile Lane is lecturing on his Guyana experiences, at $2750 a shot, and putting finishing touches to a book about the cult, to be called “The Strongest Poison.” Surviving members of the sect, numbering about 100 in San Francisco, face an array of legal, financial and emotional woes. After the suicide of Mike Prokes

— the former close aide to Jones who called a press conference to defend the Temple, then shot himself in a nearby lavatory — psychiatrists feared Jonestown might claim a second wave of victims.

“We are worried that survivors might follow Prokes’s example,” said Dr Lowell Streiker, psychologist and cult authority, who is counselling exTemple members. “Most are deeply depressed. They cry every day. They have nightmares. They refuse to get out of bed. They feel they were duped; and now they are rejected by United States society.” People who returned from Guyana, says Streiker, cannot find jobs or homes; they are watched by the F. 8.1. and police, and even relatives regard them with fear and suspicion.

Surviving leaders of the Peoples Temple have been forced by court order to surrender all its property and assets, in the United States and abroad, for eventual disposal by an official receiver. And last month in a somewhat ghoulish action, many of Jim Jones’s relics were snapped up.

The San Francisco church building went for $300,000 to a clergyman representing the “Korean Evangelical Church.” Someone paid $3O for a sack of mothballs. Jones’s spacious oak pulpit went for $1250 to a lawyer who plans to turn it into a liv-ing-room bar. — O.F.N.S, Copyright.