Jesus Freaks (9 page)

“Yeah,” he answered, swinging his guitar onto his back and sticking his hands into the pockets of his bell-bottom pants. “So what are
you
doing here?”

“Just hangin',” Jim said.

The stranger smiled and turned his head over toward a crimson van that was pulling up to the curb. There was a young girl riding shotgun. Jim gladly accepted his new friend's invitation to come and have dinner with them. They both piled into the van with the girl and her friend, another attractive hippie chick. Strands of colored glass beads separated the driver and front passenger seats from the rest of the van.
All the other seats had been torn out. Intense conversation ensued as the van rolled down the streets of San Diego. They were talking about a revolution of love.

“Love means getting together,” said the girl behind the wheel.

“Yeah, and sharing everything,” added the one riding shotgun, flashing a smile at the star-struck teenager.
⁹

LaMattery went for dinner and wound up staying six years. At first, when he was living at The Family mission in downtown Los Angeles, he didn't even know David Berg existed, or that there was another large group of disciples in Texas. Berg's youngest daughter, Faithy, and her husband were running the colony in Los Angeles.

Jim LaMattery soon took his guitar into the streets to sing about the revolution of love. It was about Jesus, but not the same Jesus he'd learned about growing up in the Catholic Church. This was radical, revolutionary. Jesus as Che Guevara, the Cuban revolutionary, not like that good shepherd from Sunday school. It was radical, but there was also a feeling of safety in the sect. It seemed like the war in Vietnam would never end. The prospect of the draft hung over LaMattery and his generation like a mushroom cloud, and The Family was a ready-made bomb shelter. Just before his encounter with The Family, LaMattery had started a summer job picking apricots on a farm outside San Diego. Here was an alternative—a radical, communal alternative to getting sucked into the military or some dead-end job. They were going to change the world, and they had God on their side.

“They made rebellion look great,” he recalled years later. “It was a radical stance against the government. They called it the ‘gospel of rebellion.' They used the shell of religion to control people. That put a holy stamp on the whole thing. It wasn't just a playground or some kind of experimental living. You had some very devoted people.”

Among those LaMattery brought into the fold was Donna, a nineteen-year-old convert and his future wife. When the word came down to leave the country—that the United States of America was about to face the wrath of God—Jim and Donna didn't think twice. They took off to a new Family outpost in Denmark, on the site of a vacated Danish army base that had been taken over by a band of European hippies.

David Berg's unorthodox ideas about sexual freedom had not yet filtered down to rank-and-file members of The Family. “It was so fundamentalist. It's hilarious to look back on it now,” Jim recalled. “It was no drugs, no sex. You were strictly there for God, to be a revolutionary for Jesus.”

Shula, who had just flown into England with Aaron and their baby, was getting a very different view of life in The Family. She was about to have one more close encounter with her horny father-in-law.

“We had gone to live in Berg's house in London,” Shula recalled. “I was trying to cook for him and keep this house up while I had Merry, a new baby. It was like a month after having her. I was still healing. One night Aaron sent me into Berg's room. He and Maria were watching something on
TV
about the Royal Family. They were really into the Royal Family. He offered me a glass of wine and started kissing me. We didn't have sex. He told me he had just been with Becky and Rachel [two of Berg's other wives] and was worn out. I think he was just a drunk and couldn't get it up. Well, the next night he comes up to me and starts kissing me again and wanting to have sex. I told him, ‘You know, I'm really tired. Can we do it another time?' It was the truth on my part. Obviously, he took it personally. When I told Aaron that I'd turned Berg down and said I was tired, he couldn't believe it. Aaron said, ‘What! You didn't have sex with the prophet!' Maybe Aaron was trying to get back in his father's good graces by letting him have sex with me. Berg would play games with his kids—promote one and demote another.”
¹⁰

Aaron was already losing his father's trust. Having his wife turn Berg down certainly didn't help his cause. But there were deeper problems. Aaron had long suffered from bouts of depression, and he was once again sinking into that mix of anger and melancholy. He and Shula were sent off to Sweden, where they briefly crossed paths with Jim and Donna LaMattery.

“Aaron was flown into Sweden,” LaMattery said. “He was in a world of confusion when he got there, and I was told to babysit him. I knew he had been shifted to me for babysitting duty, but no one told me why. They just said to watch out for him. We had a lake there, and we would go out. He was a great guitar player, but a really miserable
guy. Aaron was always a little strange. We would go out to eat and he was always in left field. Back in California, he would go on these crazy expeditions, singing through the streets of LA. But he seemed really depressed and despondent in Sweden.”

Shula could see her husband was going down into the spiritual spiral of depression. “Aaron knew that his dad did not want us back in England,” she said. “Merry was about nine months old. Aaron was really depressed.”

After Sweden, Shula, Aaron, and Merry moved into a Family colony in Paris, where the eldest son of the Endtime Prophet continued his descent. One night she saw him writing a long letter to his father. “He was really depressed. I looked over his shoulder to see what he was doing and he was writing about how Jane [Aaron's mother] would leave him in the house [as a baby], and he'd scream for hours. He put the letter in an envelope, and wrote on it, ‘Goodbye dad. You're the best dad a son ever had.' Then he gave it to me to mail. It was a suicide note.”

Jane Berg, the Endtime Prophet's long-suffering but ever-loyal wife, was dispatched from London to Paris to deal with her suicidal son. Before she arrived, Aaron's behavior worsened. “One night he wanted to have sex,” Shula recalled. “I just said, ‘No. I'm tired,' and he pushed me out of bed and onto the floor. It was totally out of character for the way he treated me. It was evil. He was possessed. I called Jane and she told me to lock him in a room and pray for him until she could come and deliver that spirit out of him.”

Jane arrived the next day and told Shula she was taking Aaron with her to Switzerland. It was the last time Shula would see her husband.

According to a statement later released by The Family, Aaron Berg died in a climbing accident. He was last seen alive in Geneva on April 3, 1973, when he headed into the Alps “to pray and be alone with the Lord.” His body was found nineteen days later at the bottom of a cliff—on Easter Sunday.

Berg claimed his son's death fulfilled one of the “Laurentide Prophecies” issued back in Quebec in 1969 at the founding gathering of The Family. “I saw a vision of Aaron dying on a mountain, and the Lord said, ‘Thy Aaron shall be taken from thee and depart on the mount!' And he did! God's word never fails!”

“His music helped start the Jesus Revolution, and he was one of its hardest-working witnesses,” Berg said. “But his mind was much stronger than his frail body…so God has now enabled him to cross forbidden borders, escape his enemies and help us as never before!”
¹¹

Shula knew it was no accident. She knew from the beginning that Aaron committed suicide, and David Berg had blood on his hands. Years of paternal abuse and cruel manipulation, she says, caused her husband to take his own life. Her theory as to what destroyed her husband would be confirmed fifteen years later in another one of Berg's prophecies. Then, in the eighties, the focus of the prophet's wrath would be his granddaughter, Merry, the child of Shula and Aaron Berg.

Merry Berg did not have a stable upbringing after her father's death. Shula took another husband in the inner circle, a loyal devotee named Ralph Keeler Irwin, but the marriage never really took. Merry was shuttled between Ralph, Shula, and her grandmother, Jane Berg, and her new mate, Stephen.

In the aftermath of Aaron's suicide, Jane Berg sent Shula and Merry to Spain with two trusted members of the inner circle. “Jane invited me back to Paris six months after Aaron died,” Shula said. “I was really out of it. The full impact of what had happened to Aaron had just hit me. Berg wanted Jane to take care of me. They said, ‘Pick any of these guys you want to marry.' Jane called Ralph and I in and did this prophesizing thing over us. She talked me into having sex with him. I didn't get involved with anyone else at the time. If I was going to get pregnant, I wanted to know who it was. And I got pregnant.”

Don Irwin was born into The Family in 1974. Shula, Ralph, Merry, and little Don were together off and on over the next few years. They were a family—of sorts—but this was the seventies, and this was The Family. It was a chaotic time. There was a battle raging for control of the sect in several continents around the world. There was also a big proselytizing push at the time in—of all places—Libya and Tunisia. Then, amidst all the chaos all around the world, another child was born.

TENERIFE, CANARY ISLANDS
January 1975 – Emergencia Maternidad

The “flirty fishing” team in Tenerife. Front row (l-r) are Sue Kauten, Queen Rachel, David Berg, and Karen Zerby.

RICKY WAS BORN
just after noon on Saturday, January 25, 1975, on Santa Cruz de Tenerife, in the Canary Islands, the Spanish archipelago that dots the North African coast between Morocco and the Western Sahara. His biological mother, Karen Zerby, and his spiritual father, David Berg, hopped in a taxi that morning and rushed down to a little clinic near Plaza Charco. They'd stopped at the more upscale Bellevue Clinic, but no one was around to help with the delivery. “There was
no room in the inn, so we had to go down to the stable,” Berg would later explain. “Hallelujah!”
¹

They came to the Canary Islands to conduct an experiment. Ricky was the experiment. On the second day of his life, Ricky was taken from the clinic to his new family's home, where a series of nannies would help raise the Prophet Prince.

He had dark curly hair, long black eyelashes, and a birth weight of 7.7 pounds. Berg was sure that had prophetic significance, as he had a long fascination with the mystical properties of the number seven. Berg was forty-nine years old (seven squared) when the world finally began to realize—in 1968—that he was the long-awaited Endtime Prophet. At the time of Ricky's portentous birth, David Berg weighed 77 kilos. Not only that, the prophet calculated that the Prophet Prince was born in the seventh hour of the seventh day. (That numerology works if one considers that the day starts at 6
A.M.
and Saturday is the final day of the biblical week.) To make the timing of his birth even more auspicious, the child was born in 1975 on the 25th day of the month. Two plus five equals seven. And it doesn't stop there. The bill for the overnight stay at the
Emergencia Maternidad
was 7,000 pesetas.

David Berg christened the baby “Davidito,” or Little David. According to the Endtime Prophet, Ricky and his mother, Karen “Maria” Zerby, were destined to be the two witnesses credited with ushering the apocalypse in the eleventh chapter of the Book of Revelation.

Sara Kelley, a devotee who would emerge as Ricky's most influential nanny, arrived on the island with her husband, Alfred, on March 19, 1975. She was given a copy of a child care book entitled
How to Raise a Brighter Child
and told to keep detailed records of the newborn's activities and handling. “Someday,” Berg told her, “you will be writing his story to share with the whole world.”
³

Sara's tale would be called
The Story of Davidito
.

Ricky had four nannies and teachers in the early years of his life—including Sara Kelley and Sue Kauten, who would go on to serve as his mother's longtime personal secretary. Sara would have the greatest impact on Ricky's life. She would chronicle the highly sexualized environment in which he was raised. But decades later, on the other side of the world, Sue Kauten would pay the ultimate price for the child-rearing experiment on the isle of Tenerife.

It all started as a kind of lark. Sara and Sue were among the first Family staff summoned to Tenerife, a sun-drenched Canary Island known for its tropical parks, beaches, quaint fishing port, and lively nightlife along Veronica's strip—a street lined with nightclubs full of globe-trotting party animals.

Tenerife was the third stop on Berg and Zerby's exile from the United States. The first stop was their failed mission to Israel, where the Endtime Prophet had to scrap his vision for a Family kibbutz. After
a brief return to the United States, they flew off to London, where they set up shop in an apartment in Bromley. They started “witnessing” in nightclubs and discotheques.

It was prime mission territory for Berg, a prophet who definitely liked his drink. Berg soon found that potential converts were more interested in dancing with his young wife than listening to what he had to say about the end of the world. It was here, amid the mirror balls of London's swinging social scene, that the Lord gave Berg his most infamous revelation.

Berg was to become God's pimp. Karen and the rest of his female disciples would be heaven's harlots. They would bring men to Jesus—and The Family—by selfless acts of sexual sacrifice. Berg gave his erotic evangelists detailed instructions, right down to what they should whisper into the ears of potential converts on the dance floor of discipleship:

“Flirty fishing” originated in London, but it wasn't until 1976 that Berg sent out a flood of letters to trusted members with explicit illustrations and provocative titles like “God's Love Slave” and “The FF Explosion.” Even before the letters went out, the flirty fishing crew was creating quite a stir on Tenerife. All these American women were hitting the clubs in low-cut dresses, flirting with men, and talking about Jesus.

At the time, hardly anyone in The Family knew the whereabouts of their prophet. New members of the team would be flown into Bar
celona, met by a trusted insider, and taken aboard a tramp steamer. “You drop off the face of the earth and wind up on this island in the middle of the Atlantic. It was an adventure,” recalled one member of the Tenerife team. “We were all young, in our early twenties. It was an idyllic place. You were living on this tropical island with this big volcano. It was a relatively simple existence, but it was exciting. None of the bad stuff had really kicked in yet. You have a sense that you are chosen to be there. It makes everybody there feel important and special, but it also creates a high level of paranoia.”
⁶

Mostly, it was just a lot of fun. “It's not like you were in some conservative backwater. Most of the tourists were northern Europeans who were pretty tolerant of our weirdness. We just came across as other people on holiday. That was our front. There were all these gorgeous girls, and there was David Berg test-driving FFing (pronounced ‘eff-eff-ing') before unleashing it on the entire Family. It was all pretty amazing.”

To others, flirty fishing didn't seem all that strange. Miriam Williams was only seventeen when she met some of Berg's disciples in Greenwich Village in 1971. She soon went off with them to a commune in upstate New York. “It was a campground with about 300 people,” she said. “People were living together, sharing everything. It was a mixture of Christianity and communism. It appealed to me.”

Later, as a Family missionary in Europe, Miriam found herself sharing more than her material possessions. “At first, it was just flirting, but if necessary, you'd have sex with men to get them to join,” said Williams. “Most of us weren't that shocked by it. It wasn't that much different than the whole hippie, free love thing. We were already having sex with people in the group.”
⁷

It didn't take long for the European press to smell a story on Tenerife. Ricky had just celebrated his second birthday when a pair of Swedish journalists came to the island in February 1977. “Our Tenerife Family had their first magazine interview by two Swedish reporters, to whom Dad gave a beautiful witness, and they took lots and lots of pictures of everyone, especially Mommy [Zerby], Daddy [Berg] and Dito [Davidito/Ricky],” Sara wrote. “We were very busy meeting reporters and new people and even stopped on the street by complete strangers.”

Swedish journalists were the first to publish an infamous photo of the Tenerife flirty fishing crew. The picture, later published in
Time
magazine in August 1977, and countless times thereafter, shows the Endtime Prophet surrounded by twelve of his holy hookers, all of them with big smiles and visible cleavage. Bearded and beaming beneath his receding hairline, Berg sits in the front row with Sue Kauten and Queen Rachel (an early Family leader) on his right and Zerby on his left.

Flirty fishing was now in full swing. Berg's sect rented several homes, including an old villa with a special FFing room. “Some of the girls would come in there. Some would go to the guy's place if you could trust them. There was a rule you weren't supposed to sleep with anyone on the first date,” one member of the crew recalled. “Berg ran a tight ship. Everybody had to write reports. ‘Whom did you see? What did you talk about?' Berg called himself the fisherman. He was a spiritual pimp. He ran this line of girls. He'd say, ‘Ok, we're going to focus on this guy.' Either he had money or was considered to be spiritually hungry. Berg would read the reports, then get some revelation.”

In
The Story of Davidito
, Sara recalls how she first learned that “FFing” had something to do with Ricky's not-so-immaculate conception. “The Lord has reminded me many times how Davidito was conceived by the ultimate in love, total sacrifice and total giving,” she wrote in her diary, “and that the Lord is using him to teach us about love.”
⁸

About six weeks after Sara came to the island, Berg and Zerby had been gone the whole day and well into the night. Ricky spent much of the day out on the porch, bouncing up and down in his new “Johnny-Jump-Up.” Mom and Dad came home around 11: 30 P.M. with a shy, young Canarian named Carlos, the biological father of the Prophet Prince and a waiter in one of the hotels where Zerby and Berg stayed when they first came to Tenerife.

Berg sat in his chair next to the fireplace of their home, sipping a glass of wine and gazing at Carlos with a strange look of affection. Then he moved over and sat beside the young man before taking Karen and the handsome waiter into Ricky's dimly lit bedroom. They all looked down at the baby asleep on his stomach.

“What dark hair he has and so brown,” Carlos said.

“Why not?” Berg replied. “He was born in Spain. He's Spanish.”

“So Carlos was the one the Lord had used to give us Davidito!” said Zerby, who had never been sure. “Do you really think so? Do you really think it's Carlos? Why him?”

“Honey, he loved you from the first. He loved you the most, he fell so hard for you,” said Berg, raising his wineglass for another toast. “He still loves you, and the Lord wants to bless him.”

Berg sensed that Karen—not to mention Carlos—was a little uncomfortable with this strange introduction to their son. Berg later spent half the night berating Zerby for not showing enough love toward the biological father of the Prophet Prince during his visit. The next day, they invited the Spanish waiter back to the house after work. Berg told Zerby to put on one of her long, sexy dresses and try, this time, to be more loving toward Carlos. Sara helped prepare the love chamber with candles. It was the first time the new nanny had seen flirty fishing in action. “It was such a beautiful sample and she showed so much love and obedience to the Lord's words,” Sara wrote in her diary. “They made love on the floor!”
⁹

Ricky was still an infant when Berg began plotting his next move. One week after Sara chronicled Zerby's exploits in the love chamber, the couple was off with the baby Ricky to Libya. In the month's preceding Ricky's birth, Berg's disciples around the world had been distributing a tract praising the dictator, entitled “Khadafi's Third World.” Why this intense interest? Perhaps Berg respected Khadafi's cocky willingness to stand up against American power, or he was drawn to the Muslim leader after Berg's rejection by the Israeli government. Maybe he was looking for another hideout from the news media, government investigators, and dismayed parents. And, like other apocalyptic prophets of the mid-seventies, Berg saw shades of the Antichrist in the fiery colonel. Maybe he was someone The Family could use—at least until the Great Tribulation.