Heavily armed agents arrested Yahweh early last Wednesday at a New Orleans hotel. Simultaneously, law-enforcement officers fanned out in four other Southern cities, pulling in 12 cult members. Another surrendered on Thursday, two days after a federal grand jury handed up an indictment charging the cult members with racketeering, what the FBI calls “a pattern of terrorism.” Sixteen of the 17 indicted were charged with ordering or committing a total of 14 murders. According to the indictment, some of the killings were initiation rites; others–such as a 1981 decapitation–punishment for disobedience; and still others, acts of vengeance against people who’d defied the movement. In 1986, the grand jury said, two men who had ignored the cult’s orders to vacate an apartment complex were shot to death.
The arrests come at a time when the Yahwehs, operating as the Temple of Love, Inc., were looking more legitimate than ever. The group owns four motels, three grocery stores, several apartment complexes and a school, all in low-income areas. But it was the Yahwehs’ alleged mafiosilike methods that first attracted the attention of the FBI four years ago. Arson, threats of violence and extortion, the indictment charges, were part of the leader’s management technique. A judge last year ordered the group to pay nearly $1 million to 27 tenants the Temple of Love had evicted in Opa-Locka, a black suburb of Miami; but he did not rule on whether Yahweh himself had ordered the 1986 killings. During the trial, a former cult member confessed involvement in four killings.
Even the man who calls himself the “prince of peace” doesn’t deny people were killed by some in the movement. “I believe there is some validity to the charges,” his lawyer, Ellis Rubin, told NEWSWEEK. “But there is no connection between the charges and Yahweh Ben Yahweh. It’s like three Catholics get together and plan a robbery or a murder. And the Feds indict the pope.” Except that it’s hard to imagine Rome remaining silent if John Paul II went to jail. “I wouldn’t try to cross them,” was all one Liberty City resident would say about the Yahwehs last week.
