Krishna's Arsenal
 Chaos • 227

Joe Sanchez, a ten-year veteran of the Berkeley Police Department, was cruising Telegraph Avenue in his patrol car. In the late sixties, when Berkeley was really wild and crazy, Sanchez was flying missions over Vietnam. But as he drove past the mural that marked the site of the battle for People's Park, Sanchez was thinking that Berkeley hadn't changed.

Here it was in 1979, and Telegraph Avenue was still lined with tarot-card readers, jewelry makers, and vendors hawking crystals and tie-dyed T-shirts. The street was also full of human flotsam: longhairs ranting at invisible demons; barefoot, greasy-haired girls; would-be musicians dragging around guitars.

The scene didn't bother Sanchez. People could do whatever they wanted, as long as they didn't break the law. But if they did, they'd have to deal with him, and that could be unpleasant. Sanchez was one tough cop. His fellow officers referred to the area of the city he patrolled as "The Wall of Sanchez."

Sanchez turned off Telegraph and rolled past the blue-and-white Hare Krishna temple at 2334 Stuart Street. Even the religions that had sprung up in the sixties were still here, he noted. He stopped his cruiser to let a tall man with a military-style haircut cross the street. Well, maybe some things had changed. Sanchez watched the guy walk into the tem-

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ple. At least they weren't wearing robes anymore. And they weren't dancing in the street and stopping traffic like they used to.

Sanchez glanced at his watch. It was almost time for his break. He was thirty pounds overweight. For months, he'd been promising his wife he'd go on a diet. But postponing its start by one more day wouldn't hurt. He thought maybe he'd cruise over to Top Dog and get himself a couple of smoked bratwursts. He was about to radio in, when he saw a tan Dodge van with Washington license plates shoot through the stop sign.

Sanchez hit his lights and went after the van. This section of Berkeley was plagued with petty crime — punks doing B and Es, kids taking joyrides, and dopers snatching purses. If you didn't stay on top of everything that moved, the vermin would swarm over decent citizens like cockroaches taking over a kitchen.

"What's the problem. Officer?" the driver, Michael Pugliese, asked as he handed Sanchez his license.

Sanchez looked him over. He was a good-looking kid with thick black hair that hung over his blue eyes.

"The problem," Sanchez said, whipping out his ticket book, "is that you ran that stop sign back there. This is a residential area. What if kids on their way home from school — "

"You got the badge and the gun," Pugliese interrupted. "That means you can stop me. That doesn't mean you can give me a lecture. Just write the damn ticket."

"Get your registration and get out," Sanchez snapped, ready to give the wise-guy punk as hard a time as he could.

The kid dug through the glove compartment and opened the door. "Here you go. Officer," he said, pronouncing it "Off-fiss-sir." "Let's see how fast you can write me up."

Sanchez studied the license.

"You got a problem," he said. "This has expired."

Pugliese's bravado disappeared.

"You're kidding," he said. "Let me see."

Sanchez handed it to the kid.

"Oh, yeah," he said, "I forgot. I got a new one."

Sanchez took the license back, and the kid reached for his wallet and rifled through the plastic cards. When he pulled out a Washington driver's license, Sanchez caught a glimpse of a California license.

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"Let me see that other license," Sanchez said as the kid handed him the Washington license.

"I don't have to show you that," the kid said. "You'll show it to me here, or you'll show it to me down at the station," Sanchez said in his no-bullshit street voice. The kid frowned and pulled out the license. "Stay here," Sanchez said and went back to his cruiser. He laid the licenses out on the front seat. The expired license was issued to Michael Ralph Pugliese, bom 3-13-55, five feet nine inches tall, 150 pounds, brown hair, blue eyes. The Washington license was issued to Dino Bhandu, same birthdate, same physical description. The second California license was issued to Lance Presley, same birthdate, same physical description. The two California licenses had the same address, 2334 Stuart, the Hare Krishna temple.

Sanchez radioed in the three licenses for a records check and then walked back to the kid.

"So, who the hell are you, my friend?" Sanchez asked. "Depends on the time and the place and who wants to know," Pug-liese/Bhandu/Presley answered.

"I've been working nothing but Krishnas for almost a year, and I still have no idea who some of them are," Joe Sanchez was saying into the phone. "They go up to Washington state and get their names changed. Apparently, all you have to do up there is appear in court. Even Han-sadutta, the guru, has done it. He calls himself Jack London now. Can you believe that?"

"At thia point, I'll believe anything," said Sergeant Tom Westfall. "I like the name Dino Bhandu the best. It's got a lounge-lizard feel to it."

Westfall had been the Krishna cop in West Virginia for so long, he had developed a sense of humor about the movement. Sanchez had not. He was overwhelmed by what he was fuming up.

"I think that guy Michael Ralph Pugliese aka Dino Bhandu aka Lance Presley may be wanted for jewelry-store robberies in Japan," Sanchez said.

"I've never heard of him," Westfall said. "He probably isn't part of Kirtanananda's empire.''

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"I'm telling you, Tom, the Berkeley temple is like a halfway house masquerading as a church," Sanchez continued. "The whole congregation has a criminal record. Every time I run one these devotees through the computer it comes back with heavy-duty paper. I've arrested fifteen devotees in the last year and not one of them on penny-ante charges. I'm talking assault, armed robbery. A couple turned out to be German nationals wanted by Interpol."

Sanchez put an elbow on his desk and rested his head on the palm of his hand.

"The money that pours into that temple is unbelievable," he continued. "I'd say at least ten thousand dollars a week goes right to Hansadutta. I know what they're doing and I'm pulling my hair out because I can't get anybody interested. I've talked to the FBI about what's going on. I laid the whole sankirtan scam out for the IRS. I made the case for them. All they had to do was move on it. And do you know what happened? I got a form letter from them, thanking me for my interest. I'm just a local cop, Tom. I can't deal with these people by myself. I'll get a warrant to arrest somebody on a Tuesday, and on Wednesday he's in the Philippines."

"Me too," Westfall said sympathetically. "I got guns, drugs, women getting beaten up, a half-dozen fundraising scams going on at once, and I can't get the feds to shake a leg."

Sanchez and Westfall spent the next half hour exchanging information.

"Keep a list of everybody you meet, Joe," Westfall said just before they hung up. "Kirtanananda and Hansadutta are old friends. "My guess is, I'll find some of your guys out here and you'll find some of mine back there."

Hansadutta stepped out of the trailer that was set aside for him at the Mount Kailasa farm. It was early morning and the thick Pacific fog was rolling across the hills, giving the farm an eerie, otherworldly beauty. Hansadutta walked down to the World War II jeep only he was permitted to drive and put a .357 magnum on the seat beside him. Then he went charging up the road past the duck pond and the white barn with Hare Krsna Farm painted on the roof in huge red letters. The peculiar

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spelling of Krishna was due to believers' reluctance to spell the god'sname in full.

The 48o-acre farm is located at the top of the Maycamas Mountains, which separate the northern portion of California's wine country from the Pacific Ocean. It has meadows and ponds, deep woods, and grassy bluffs. Hansadutta liked to ride around and picture the karmi attack that was sure to come any day now. If they built a bunker up on that bluff, three devotees with machine guns could seal off the dirt road that wound out to Highway 175, he thought. If they laid a minefield along that row of fir trees to the north, karmi foot soldiers would be in for one hell of a nasty surprise.

Hansadutta grinned as he drove back to the farmhouse and its makeshift temple. If anything was more fun than real-life cops and robbers, it was real-life war. He walked into the temple and the devotees prostrated themselves to offer obeisances. Without looking at them, he walked up to his vyasasana and sat down.

"We are in the age of Kali-yuga," Hansadutta began. His words were slightly slurred, the aftereffects of last night's Percodan. "Kali is the worst stage of the four yugas, the age of war and death, depravity and ignorance. It has lasted five thousand years, four hundred and twenty-eight thousand years remain."

Hansadutta looked at his devotees. Their faces were upturned; all eyes were on him as they drank in every word. This was as it should be.

"Krishna sent Prabhupada to this planet to lead us out to Kali-yuga,"

Hansadutta continued. "But only a few were enlightened enough to recognize who he was and follow him."

Hansadutta paused. He glanced over the devotees, confirming that they were among the chosen few.

"We used to think the karmis would join us," he resumed. "Now we know how naive we were. We underestimated karmi depravity. They are the spiritual descendants of men who rode with Genghis Khan. They live to kill and rape."

Hansadutta nodded at a devotee, who handed him a silver cup filled with spring water. He drained it and handed it back to the devotee.

"Genghis Khan had horses and swords. The karmis have missiles armed with nuclear weapons. It is only a matter of time before they

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blow themselves off this planet. That is their nature. That is their destiny.

"It is Krishna's mercy that we will survive this holocaust. That is why he led us to this secluded place high in the hills. But the karmis will come for us. We have everything they need: food, water, shelter, and clothing. Most of all, we have Krishna. They hate us most of all for that. We will have everything; the karmis, nothing.

"We must continue with the preparations we have been making for the struggle that lies ahead. Go now. I will join you later."

Vladimir Vassilievich, aka Vladimir Panasenko, or Vipra, stood up and stretched; then he began walking the quarter mile up the dirt road to his shop in the bam. A youngish-looking Ukrainian with a round head, large nose, and skinny arms, Vipra liked to think of himself as the keeper of the royal tool box. He was a superb mechanic who, by himself, kept the temple's fleet of vans running. He was also an excellent gunsmith, who could take apart, clean, and reassemble an auto-made rifle in minutes with his eyes closed. It was Vipra who kept Mount Kailasa's arsenal well oiled.

Vipra kept his past a secret. Only a few devotees knew that he had been a sports-car mechanic and a part-time photographer before he joined the Krishnas in 1974. He had had a teenage wife and a 1960 short-wheelbase Ferrari Berlinetta. He had been certain the world could offer him no more. Then he discovered the Krishnas. He read their books and decided that Prabhupada was absolutely right.

"When you find the truth, you must surrender," he announced to his wife.

She went back home to her parents and filed for divorce. Vipra moved into the Berkeley temple and signed his Ferrari over to the temple president. The temple president immediately sold it for $25,000, quit the movement, and moved in with his girlfriend. He used the money gained from selling the Ferrari to enter law school.

Vipra arrived at his bam, walked into his workshop, and snapped on the lights. He thought of his ex-wife and wondered where she was and what she was doing. He missed her and often thought of her— almost as often as he thought abut his Ferrari. No matter how hard he tried to concentrate on Krishna, the car kept creeping back into his mind. He closed his eyes and remembered the excitement. He could feel the adrenaline rush he used to get, racing the blood-red car through the

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turns on Highway I in Big Sur. The car had been appreciating in value faster than a Van Gogh painting. The last one like it to go on sale in America had fetched $650,000.

Vipra shook his head and walked over to the workbench. He was rebuilding the transmission of a 1975 Mercedes, one of the cars that devotees had given to Hansadutta, when the gunfire erupted. That wasn't unusual. Taking target practice by shooting at human silhouette targets was part of the daily routine for most devotees. Vipra listened and picked out the sounds of an HK-9I assault rifle, a nine-millimeter, a .357 magnum, and a .45 long Colt.

Then he went back to work. The gunfire continued for half an hour and then stopped. Vipra looked up from his work bench and listened for a minute.

"That's funny," he said aloud. "They usually shoot all morning."

An hour later, one of the sankirtan van drivers walked into the workshop.

"Bad news, Vipra," the driver said. "A five-year-old boy got shot."

Vipra dropped a socket wrench and looked up at him. "Where? How?"

"He got hit in the hand. They took him to a hospital over in Lake-port."

"How'd it happen?"

"I didn't see it," the driver said.

"Well, what did you hear?" Vassilievich asked impatiently.

"I heard what Hansadutta said."

"And what'd he say?"

"When the police come, Spencer will say he did it."

Vassilievich nodded. Spencer Lynn Joy was the acting president of Mount Kailasa.

"Spencer was cleaning a gun in one of the trailers. The gun somehow went off. The bullet went through the wall of the trailer and hit the boy in the hand."

Vassilievich picked up a rag and wiped off his hands.

"What really happened?" he asked.

"What happened is what Hansadutta said happened," the van driver said. "He's the guru, he knows best."

"Go get me some prasadam," Vipra said. "I want to keep working."

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What Vipra really wanted to do was think. He sat down on the rear bumper of the Mercedes and tried to picture the accident. It wasn't hard.

He knew there could hardly be a worse cliche than the story about the gun going off while being cleaned. The first thing you did in the cleaning process was disable the firearm. Second, the chance that a kid could "accidentally" get hit in the hand defied all probability. Mathematics said it almost couldn't happen. The farm was huge. Vipra had often sat in the meadow outside his workshop for half an hour before anybody walked by.

Vipra also had often had often seen Hansadutta shoot in the direction of devotees. It was horseplay to him, like boxers sparring. The kid probably had his arm outstretched, holding a target for a supposedly infallible guru who was a supposedly infallible marksman. Vipra wondered if he should relate his doubts to somebody. He considered it for a couple of days.

But by then it was too late.

The boy and his mother were gone, bundled onto a plane bound for India and one of the temples Hansadutta controlled there.

Bill Benedict attended Mangal-aratik on the morning of February 2, 1980, just as he did every morning. As he left the temple, he glanced at the enlarged photograph of a Berkeley cop named Joe Sanchez that was hanging on a wall above the pay phone.

Beware: This man hates you! a sign under the photograph said. Benedict shook his head. If he had anything to say about it, the picture wouldn't be there. But he didn't. It was Hansadutta's temple, not his.

Benedict, a black-haired, brown-eyed, thirty-nine-year-old devotee, was one of the Krishna heavyweights who had been left off the GBC. He had founded the San Diego temple in the late sixties and was president of the Berkeley temple in the midseventies. With Jayatirtha, James Immel, he had started Balarama's Enterprises, a flourishing Krishna business that wholesaled incense and scented oils.

Benedict walked a block from the temple down Stuart Street, where he had parked his car. As he approached it, he noticed the driver's door was ajar. A sinking feeling came over him. He distinctly remembered having locked it,

He ran to the car and looked on the backseat. Sure enough, his

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aluminum Haliburton briefcase was gone. The briefcase contained three checkbooks, a twelve-hundred-dollar round-trip Pan Am ticket to India, and seven credit cards. Benedict returned to the temple and called the Berkeley police. Who but Joe Sanchez should arrive at the scene to take the report.

Two weeks later, Joe Sanchez called Benedict at home and asked him to come to Berkeley police station.

"We've got some leads," Sanchez said after they sat down in a small room detectives used to interview suspects. "People have used your checks and credit cards to purchase goods all over the place. It's the weirdest collection of stuff you've ever seen."

Sanchez opened a folder and read from a list typed on a piece of yellow legal paper: bolts of silk and velvet, horse saddles, cameras, ladies' sportswear, farming equipment, thirty-eight cases of black and white floor tiles, sewing machines, knives. Sanchez paused and looked at Benedict.

"And nine guns," he said. "Nine guns."

Benedict shook his head in dismay. "Who'd want all that stuff?"

"I can't figure it," Sanchez said. "We estimate that about a dozen businesses have been bilked out of a total of eleven thousand, four hundred fifty dollars' worth of merchandise."

"Any idea who the thieves are?" Benedict asked.

"Not yet. That's why we asked you to come in."

"Me? Why?" Benedict asked.

"We've done a lot of legwork," Sanchez said, paging through the file. "We've interviewed clerks at Sears, J. C. Penney, Emporium Cap-well, and a couple of gun stores. The same two men bought all this stuff.

Benedict was disturbed. "From what you're telling me, I think devotees might have ripped me off," he said to Sanchez. "What do you mean?" Sanchez asked. "I can't be sure. Give me a little time. I'll check it out." "OK, but don't tell the people at the temple what you're up to." Benedict went up to Mount Kailasa, parked beside the farmhouse, and walked into the makeshift temple.

Benedict was shocked. For a second he thought he might faint. The temple wasn't makeshift anymore. The floor had been covered with brand-new black and white tiles. Hadn't Sanchez told him thirty-eight cases

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of black and white tiles were bought with one of his forged checks?

Benedict glanced at the deities, then hurried to the altar to take a closer look. Radha and Krishna were both dressed in lavish new clothes made of silk and velvet. Sanchez had told him about rolls of silk and velvet purchased with one of his forged checks at the Fabric Center in Sacramento. The deities' new apparel also explained the sewing machines that had been bought in a store near the Fabric Center, with another forged check.

The next day, a Saturday, Sanchez waited all day for Benedict's call. It didn't come. On Sunday morning Sanchez finally called his home. Benedict's wife answered.

"He went to the farm, walked into the temple and found the tiles!" she said. "And not only the tiles—one of the sewing machines!" "Why didn't he call me?" Sanchez asked.

"He went to the Berkeley temple instead. He's blabbing it all over the place. I'm really scared. People in the temple are trying to get him to cover up what he's found out."

Sanchez wasted no time. He jumped in his car and started combing the streets of Berkeley for Benedict's car. He found it parked on Oregon Street. When he spotted Benedict, Sanchez jumped out and motioned for Benedict to walk back to him. Then, Sanchez opened the passenger door and pointed to the front seat.

"I found something out," Sanchez said as he got in the car. "What's that?" Benedict asked. "Your wife's got all the brains in your family." "What're you talkin' about?"

"I've been trying to get hold of you," Sanchez said. "You won't return my calls and I can't find you anywhere. Today your wife tells me you've been running around the temple telling everybody how you got ripped off. She's afraid those guys are going to blow you away. You know something? She could be right."

Benedict kept looking at his shoes. He didn't say a thing. "Let me ask you a question," Sanchez said. "Your wife says Hansadutta told you he was going to take care of things for you. Are the devotees who ripped you off still in the temple?" Benedict nodded.

"Shouldn't that tell you something?" Sanchez asked. Benedict was silent. Finally he looked at Sanchez.