One Hand Jerking (37 page)

When Manson was released in 1967, he went to the Scientology Center in San Francisco. “Little Paul” Watkins, who accompanied him there, told me, “Charlie said to them, ‘I'm Clear'—what do I do now?' But they expected him to sweep the floor. Shit, he had done
that
in prison.”

In Los Angeles, he went to the Scientology Celebrity Center. Now this was more like it. Here he could mingle with the elite. I managed to obtain a copy of the original log entry: “7/31/68, new name, Charlie Manson, Devt., No address, In for processing = Ethics = Type III.” The receptionist—who, by Type III, meant “psychotic”—sent him to the Ethics office, but he never showed up.

At the Spahn Ranch, Manson eclectically combined his version of Scientology auditing with post-hypnotic techniques he had learned in prison, with geographical isolation and subliminal motivation, with singalong sessions and encounter games, with LSD and mescaline, with transactional analysis and brainwashing rituals, with verbal probing and the sexual longevity that he had practiced upon himself for all those years in the privacy of his cell.

Ultimately, in August 1969, he sent members of his well-progammed family off to slay actress Sharon Tate and her unborn baby, hairstylist and dealer to the stars Jay Sebring, would-be screenwriter Voytek Frykowski and his girlfriend, coffee heiress Abigail Folger. The next night, Manson accompanied them to kill supermarket mogul Leno LaBianca and his wife.

In 1971, my old friend, Ed Sanders, founder of the Fugs—the missing link between rock and punk—was covering the Manson trial for the
L.A. Free Press
and working on a book,
The Family
, about the case. I wrote to him for permisson to print any material that might be omitted from his book because the publisher considered it in bad taste or too controversial. Otherwise, I told him, I would have to make up those missing sections myself.

Sanders put a notice in the middle of one of his reports: “Oh, yes, before we ooze onward, I am not, nor shall I be, the author of any future article in
The Realist
titled ‘The Parts I Left Out of the Manson Story, by Ed Sanders.'” He assured me that this was “a joke,” but also, understandably, it was a safeguard.

I had known Ed for ten years. He was always on the crest of nonviolent political protest and outrageous cultural expression, such as
Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts
. In 1961, he got arrested with others for trying to swim aboard the
Polaris
nuclear submarine. The next year he published a parody catalog listing actual relics, such as Allen Ginsberg's cold-cream jar containing one pubic hair. He sent the catalogs to universities and sold the items at outlandish prices. But now his courage and determination had taken a different path, and I flew to New York to pore through his Manson files. Sanders was a data addict, and his research notes were written in the form of quatrains. He had become an investigative poet.

When I returned to San Francisco, a young man with a child on his shoulders came to my house and rang the bell. I opened the door, and he served me with
a subpoena. The Church of Scientology was accusing me of libel and conspiracy, simply for having
announced the title
of an upcoming article, “The Rise of Sirhan Sirhan in the Scientology Hierarchy”—which, ironically, I no longer planned to publish. They were suing me for three-quarters of a million dollars. I published their complaint in
The Realist
:

“[This] was published for the purpose of exposing plaintiff to public hatred, contempt, ridicule, obliquy, and did cause it to be shunned and avoided, intended to injure plaintiff in the further proselytizing of the religion of Scientology and to heap embarrassment and humiliation upon it through the distribution of the aforesaid statement throughout the State of California, the United States of America and the world at large. . . . “[The statement] was intended to be understood by the general public and readers, and was so understood by them, charging, asserting and imputing that the plaintiff is not involved in a religious movement, but rather some form of unlawful or unethical activity and that the plaintiff employs criminal methods in furthering its religion. . . .

“As a direct and proximate result of the foregoing, plaintiff has suffered pecuniary loss in that many members, prospective members and persons in the general public have not made or have decreased the amount of their fixed contributions, offerings and donations to plaintiff because of the defamatory statement. . . . Plaintiff does not know at this time the exact amount of the pecuniary loss resultng from the foregoing, and plaintiff prays to leave to amend this allegation and insert the true amount of the loss when the same becomes known to it. . . .

“Defendants have conspired between themselves and with other established religions, medical and political organizations and persons presently unknown to plaintiff. By subtle covert and pernicious techniques involving unscrupulous manipulation of all public communication media, defendants and their co-conspirators have conspired to deny plaintiff its right to exercise religious beliefs on an equal basis with the established religious organizations of this country. These conspirators have utilized what has now become their modus operandi of hiring strangers to write libelous documents for them and then trying to hide behind them. Publication of said statement and the proposed article is one act in furtherance of that conspiracy.

“Said conspirators and diverse other parties, members of the established social, religious and economic society of America today, have a conspiratorial party line whereby they harass, ridicule, defame and malign any new organizations, religious, social or economic, regardless of their merits, when it appears that they are about to become a threat to the established orders‚ source of funds
or membership. Said conspirators thereby seriously protect their established order and economic well-being for their own selfish, economic, social and ideological reasons and thereby prevent dissemination of new ideas and freedom of speech. . . .”

By publishing their complaint, I allowed Scientology to reveal more about itself than anything I could have imagined about Sirhan. My attorney, James Wolpman, filed a petition to remove the suit to a federal court because of the constitutional question it raised concerning freedom of the press. It reached the interrogatories stage, with questions such as, “Have you ever spoken with or received communication from Sirhan Sirhan, his immediate family or his duly authorized agents or attorneys?” I refused to answer, on the grounds that it was privileged information.

Scientology eventually offered to settle out of court for $5,000, but I refused. Then they said they would drop the suit if I would publish an article in
The Realist
by Chick Corea, a jazz musician and Scientologist, but that wasn't quite the way I made my editorial decisions, and I refused again. Scientology finally dropped their lawsuit altogether. However, their records show that they had other plans for me. Under the heading “Operation Dynamite”—their jargon for a frame-up—a memo read:

“Got CSW from SFO to
not
do this on Krassner. I disagree and will pass my comments on to DG I US as to why this should be done. SFO has the idea that Krassner is totally handled and will not attack us again. My feelings are that in PT, he has not got enough financial backing to get out
The Realist
or other publications and when that occurs, will attack again, maybe more covertly but attack, nonetheless.”

Later on, I flew to Kansas City to participate in a symposium at the University of Missouri, where I would link up with Ken Kesey. He had written to me from Mexico about this event with Henry Kissinger, B.F. Skinner and Buckminster Fuller. I, in turn, was supposed to contact Ed Sanders, who proceeded to compose a song about Kissinger. However, the Student Activities Office had sent Kesey a copy of the previous year's program. This year's program was honoring the memory of Robert F. Kennedy. So Sanders had to compose another song:

Before singing it at the university, he announced, “In the course of my research in Los Angeles, it became evident that Robert Kennedy was killed by a
group
of people including Sirhan Sirhan.” In
The Family
, he had written, in reference to the Process Church of the Final Judgment, to which Manson had ties: “It is possible that the Process had a baleful influence on Sirhan Sirhan, since Sirhan is known, in the spring of '68, to have frequented clubs in Hollywood in occult pursuits. He has talked several times subsequent to Robert Kennedy's death about an occult group from London which he knew about and which he really wanted to go to London to see.”

Since the London-based Process Church had been an offshoot of Scientology, this looked like it could be a case of satirical prophecy. I was tempted to return to my original premise involving Sirhan, but it was too late. I had already become obsessed with my Manson research. I was gathering piece after piece of a mind-boggling jigsaw puzzle, without having any model to pattern it after. It was clear that members of the Manson family had actually but unknowingly served as a hit-squad for a drug ring. Furthermore, conspiracy researcher Mae Brussell put me in contact with Preston Guillory, a former deputy sheriff, who told me:

“We had been briefed for a few weeks prior to the actual raiding of Spahn Ranch. We had a sheaf of memos on Manson, that they had automatic weapons at the ranch, that citizens had complained about hearing machine-guns fired at night, that firemen from the local fire station had been accosted by armed members of Manson's band and told to get out of the area, all sorts of complaints like this.

“We had been advised to put anything relating to Manson on a memo submitted to the station, because they were suposedly gathering information for the raid we were going to make. Deputies at the station of course started asking, ‘Why aren't we going to make the raid sooner?' I mean, Manson's a parole violator, machine-guns have been heard, we know there's narcotics and we know there's booze. He's living at the Spahn Ranch with a bunch of minor girls in complete violation of his parole.

“Deputies at the station quite frankly became very annoyed that no action was being taken about Manson. My contention is this—the reason Manson was left on the street was because our department thought that he was going to
attack the Black Panthers. We were getting intelligence briefings that Manson was anti-black and he had supposedly killed a Black Panther, the body of which could not be found, and the department thought that he was going to launch an attack on the Black Panthers. . . .”

And so it was that racism in the Sheriff 's Department had turned law enforcers into unintentional collaborators in a mass murder.

After the panel at the University of Missouri, Ed Sanders and I went to the cafeteria for lunch. Ed ordered a full vegetarian meal and then couldn't eat any of it. I had never seen him so shaken. It was because the Process people had been hassling him. He said he was having trouble sleeping. Occasionally he mumbled things to himself as though they were marginal notes describing the state of his depression.

I recalled that, in the summer of 1968, while the Yippies were planning a Festival of Life at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, some zealots from the Process cult visited me in New York. They were hyper-anxious to meet Tim Leary and kept pestering me for his phone number. The Process, founded by Scientology dropouts, first came to the U.S. from London in 1967. Members were called “mind benders” and proclaimed their “dedication to the elimination of the grey forces.”

In January 1968, they became the Process Church of the Final Judgment, a New Orleans-based religious corporation. They claimed to be in direct contact with both Jesus and Lucifer, and had wanted to be called the Church of the Process of Unification of Christ and Satan, but local officials presumably objected to their taking the name of Satan in vain.

The Process struck me as a group of occult provocateurs, using radical Christianity as a front. They were adamantly interested in Yippie politics. They boasted to me of various rallies which their
vibrations alone
had transformed into riots. They implied that there was some kind of connection between the assassination of Bobby Kennedy and their mere presence on the scene. On the evening that Kennedy was killed at the Ambassador Hotel, he had been to a dinner party in Malibu with Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate.

Bernard Fensterwald, head of the Committee to Investigate Assassinations, told me that Sirhan Sirhan had some involvement with the Process. Peter Chang, the district attorney of Santa Cruz, showed me a letter from a Los Angeles police official to the chief of police in San Jose, warning him that the Process had infiltrated biker gangs and hippie communes.

And Ed Sanders wrote in
Win
magazine:

“[W]ord came out of Los Angeles of a current FBI investigation of the RFK murder, the investigation growing, as the source put it, out of ‘the Manson case.' Word came from another source, this one in the halls of Government itself, that several police and investigatory jurisdictions have information regarding other murders that may have been connected to the Robert Kennedy shooting; murders that occurred after RFK's.

“A disturbing fact in this regard is that one agency in the Federal Bureaucracy (not the FBI) has stopped a multi-county investigation by its own officers that would have probed into such matters as the social and religious activities of Sirhan Sirhan in early '68, and into the allegations regarding RFK-connected murders.”