Joseph A. Mazor's story is wildly exaggerated to serve the paranoid story line---and not necessarily by him. As a casus belli for the great wizard's psychic break with reality it's pretty ham-handed.
When Mazor got into trouble in 1975 by overstepping state licensing restrictions he quite clearly states for the record what his status was--he worked as an employee for his wife's firm---she was the only "licensed private investigator" in the family. Ten years later, however, a new wife shoots him dead. This is about the lowest of the low, but not that much lower morally than Sir Lionel Luckhoo.
Mazor was a theatrical fabricator---a creator of trouble, but the PT's response (A letter to President Carter? With all those exclamation marks????) was designed for attention and justification, but not credibility. (Like having all those Arabs attend Flight School in the U.S., and have them eat pork and submit to lap dances.)
Where would any of these families get the money to pay for these sorts of services? They were barely middle-class to begin with and became much more impoverished after their time in the Temple. This is not some big smoking-gun of an unanswered secret for everybody to go yoo-hoo over. It is Act I, Scene I play-writing that does not hold together. It does not pass the sniff test.
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August 26, 1975, The San Mateo Times, page 19, Private Investigator Accused of Soliciting,
A 41-year-old employee of a San Francisco investigating firm has been accused by the San Mateo district attorney's office of illegally soliciting business for an attorney. According to Deputy Dist Atty. Douglas J. Gray, a complaint has been filed against Joseph A. Mazor, 41, of San Rafael, an employee of Mazor Investigations of San Francisco, a firm owned by his wife, a licensed private investigator. Gray said Mazor has been accused of violating the State Business and Professions Code. Gray said Mazor is charged with soliciting business for the San Francisco legal firm of Norman Plummer, William Greenspan and James Lee.
He reported Mazor visited Richard Post, 28, charged with the kidnapping arid murder of Ruth Wilhemsen, 21, who was seized from the: Serramonte Shopping Center on June 29. Her body was later found off Skyline Boulevard south of Black Mountain Road west of Hillsborough. According to Gray, Mazor visited Post at the county-jail in Redwood City on July 9 and 10. Post is now- represented by Greenspan. The charge calls for a $500 fine, a six-month term in the county jail or both. Dist. Atty. Keith C. Sorehson said this morning that Greenspan is subject to disciplinary action by the State Bar of California.
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November 16, 1985, San Jose Mercury News, Private Eye Slain, Private Eye Slain,
A private investigator who once tried to obtain property for ex-members of the Peoples Temple was shot to death in his home Friday, and his wife of a year was taken into custody. Joseph A. Mazor, 46, an ex-convict licensed by the state as a private eye, was shot once in the chest at his Sunset District home. His wife, Nancy Lou Thomas, 38, was arrested on a charge of homicide.Thomas told police that her husband had threatened to kill her and her 13-year-old son in the past....
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The extreme hyperbole of the PT "counter-attack" lands well within the bounds of deception
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Some background is provided by a blog-web page called philropost.com, which cites as "proofs" an article in the Berkeley Barb, which represents the PT public-relations counteroffensive. I would be able to give this more credence except the FBI copy of the article is so notoriously substandard and illegible, even for them, that it means the FBI is willing to look like buffoons in order to keep the information contained in it a secret (Philro quite pointedly doesn't give the date of the article, saying "Fall of 1977." It would be a miracle if a legible copy were available on this planet.) So the whole Dennis Banks-David Conn (My! Isn't that a name!) angle is pure bullshit. We aren't dealing with any kind of dichotomy here---everybody is working out of the same box of Crayolas.
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www.philropost.com
5. What role, if any, did local, state or national intelligence agencies play in the establishment, maintenance, and protection of the People's Temple before and after the move to Guyana?
Up until the Spring of 1977, Peoples Temple was a church highly-acclaimed for humanitarian service. Then a fierce campaign burst on the scene, in the Murdoch and Hearst presses in San Francisco. It pursued the church relentlessly, with innuendoes, insinuations, and unsubstantiated charges accusing the church of fraud, coercion, irregular notarizations, misuse of government funds, break-ins, intimidation, to implications of murder. All investigations that were whipped up were later dropped for lack of evidence. Every attempt to rebut the charges in the press was met with a refusal to print a word.
These attacks were not launched by amateurs. No "disgruntled ex-member" had the resources, funding or connections to launch a relentless, one-sided campaign, which also included the foreign press, especially cities known to have large concentrations of Guyanese immigrants, like London and Toronto. Intensive lobbying campaigns in both Washington and Georgetown (the Guyanese capital) ensued.
Who would have the power and clout to do this? The tiny but influential group had three components: disgruntled ex-members, without power, resources or funding; government plants in the group who later defected; and non-member government-based handlers.
The smear campaign, first line of attack, was launched by a couple named Elmer and Deanna Mertle, who changed their names to Jeannie and Al Mills for publicity purposes. They were veterans of the far-right-wing John Birch Society, having claimed a political conversion to the left when they joined the church.
It turned out that there was no conversion. They had been coordinating all along with a man named David Conn, who admitted to the Berkeley Barb in the Fall of 1977 that he had been "investigating Peoples Temple all the (six) years his friends the Mertles were members." David Conn also tried to bribe/blackmail Native American leader Dennis Banks into denouncing Jim Jones publicly, under threat of being extradited back to a South Dakota jail. Although Banks, a man with nineteen children, feared he could be killed in jail, he swore out an affidavit and went public with the tale. In his affidavit, he also swore that Conn had bragged of his ties with the Treasury Department.
David Conn and his ex-wife Donna, had also bragged of "high priority Treasury Department numbers" in secretly taped conversations. Indeed, in just the second smear against Peoples Temple, the I.R.S. tax code was quote chapter and verse, as to what it would take to remove the federal tax exemption of a church.
Their specific grievance was listed as political – that the church was secretly involved in politics.
It is likely that the Mertle/Mills and Conn were F.B.I. agents, common enough for infiltrators of left-wing groups by J. Edgar Hoover's COINTELPRO in the 60's and early 70's. Jim Jones was swiftly gaining a reputation as a political dissident, setting up Peoples Temple as a public forum for a whole host of leaders and causes on the left.
But the Mills and Conn were only the kernel of a more menacing group of personnel. Joseph Mazor, whom the Temple discovered was an agent of Interpol, through a document authored by a known Interpol agent, Louis B. Sims, told the Berkeley Barb that it was he who hired the expensive P.R. firm of Russom, Lowry & Leeper, to launch the smear campaign against Peoples Temple, as confirmed with one of their account executives, Bob Kenney. Mazor refused to disclose his source of funding, but said that they were "not present not past members of Peoples Temple," i.e. an outside government source.
(It defeats the purpose if the "expensive" PR firm you've hired is willing to be quoted in the press that you engaged them to undertake a smear campaign.)
Mazor had also been mysteriously granted a State investigator’s license (including bonding) in May, 1977, "just in time to investigate Peoples Temple," even though he sported a recent prison record for fraud and bogus checks. A letter from the State of California claimed that high-level recommendations had overridden their normal strictures against bonding a convicted forger.
The San Jose Mercury News said, that Mazor was a "private investigator who once tried to obtain property for ex-members of the Peoples Temple," which can only mean he was tasked with the recovery of real estate lost by members to the church. Not very deep-six work.It was also Joseph Mazor who claimed to have led the mercenary raid into Jonestown in September, 1977, claiming that his original assignment had been to kidnap children and then "kill all the adults," i.e. mass extermination.
Oh puleeze Philro--Mazor was an invited guest on more than one occasion. This is looking like a mood-disorder on top of insensate nonsense.
Just days following the tragedy, Mazor was paraded across the t.v. screen, claiming that "It was considered that Jim Jones would become a major political force in the Caribbean within five years." Was this his motive for involvement all along? And what of the known planned move to the then-Soviet Union? Would that have lessened the concerns? Undoubtedly not. But the key here is that these concerns were now international.
Indeed, the concerns were very international, beyond the province of the F.B.I. and into the province of the C.I.A. In fact, this was turned into an international matter nearly as soon as it began. In the Fall of 1977, just a month or two after the original smear in Murdoch’s New West magazine, duplicate smears appeared in newspapers thousands of miles apart, in the Toronto Star, where there was known to be a large concentration of Guyanese immigrants, and in the New Times weekly in the Soviet Union, with the interest of discreditation in a camp we wanted as "friends."
Yeah...they were headed for Russia for sure---a group that couldn't get a fucking possessive apostrophe in People's Temple right is going to learn a Cyrillic-script language. Nobody in Toronto or Moscow gave a shit about Jim Jones and his non-starting agricultural experiment. Forbes Burnham had thousand's of hands from the House of Israel for his demos and dirty tricks. Jim Jones' was a supernumerary from the get-go.
The headline of one was "Profits of a Prophet" and the other, "A Prophet Heads South With Profit," with the corresponding texts similar. This was an expression never used in any other press coverage. The articles appeared within two weeks of each other, and could not have originated from any standard U.S. news service.
From there on in, scores of "dirty tricks" pursued Peoples Temple at every turn: anonymous threatening phone calls falsely blamed on the church, phony break-ins, even physical attacks on individuals. A reporter, Kathy Hunter, was lured to Guyana by a phony call claiming to be the Prime Minister, then when she arrived, she was taken in hand by one Pat Small, a woman thought to be C.I.A. by the Guyanese government. The rest was a series of bomb threats and fire alarms, disruptions of the Guyanese Parliament, and finally a government invitation to leave. All the press in the U.S. blamed Peoples Temple, although the church had nothing to do with it.
The person coaching reporter Kathy Hunter through this entire fiasco was one Timothy O. Stoen. Stoen had been the church's top attorney, strategist and close confidante and friend of Jim Jones. It was Stoen who appeared to be a classic agent provocateur, compliments of the U.S. government, during his years in Peoples Temple, pushing terrorist ideas as extreme as building bomb factories and poisoning the water supply of Washington, D.C. Thank God no one followed through.
Stoen came to Peoples Temple claiming to be from the far left, but later information surfaced that he was really a far right wing ideologue who had run spying missions to East Berlin in the early sixties.
Stoen was in a favored position in the church, had no personal grievance to force his departure, and no relatives left in the church. Yet upon leaving, he falsely claimed paternity of Jim Jones’ own son, John Victor, by his wife, Grace Stoen. Scores of people had known for years the truth of the child’s paternity, which had been repeatedly admitted and discussed by both Timothy and Grace Stoen.
Stoen set up lobbying offices in Washington to push his false causes, and shuttled back and forth between Washington and Guyana. The source of his funding (being out of work, and having lived "communally" in Peoples Temple) has been undisclosed to this day, though Stoen was discovered to have secret accounts in countries where the church had never done any banking.
Stoen's false vendetta was pushed ferociously through the courts, and shortly after the Stoen’s attorney came to Guyana to file court papers, a mercenary raid on Jonestown ensued. Thereafter, Stoen lodged repeated mercenary threats, even being recorded in a Ukiah Daily Journal editorial, and the State Department log in Georgetown, Guyana. This documentation appears in "SNAKE DANCE."
Just days before the tragedy at Jonestown, Stoen told a Temple member that he had "vowed to destroy Jonestown" and that he was "counting on Jim [Jones] to overreact."
Stoen also used the false paternity claim to lure Congressman Leo Ryan to Jonestown, to his death. The Congressman’s aid had been secured as early as a whole year before the tragedy when, on November 18, 1977, Ryan unsuccessfully petitioned the U.S. Justice Department to force the child’s return to the States. The Congressman arrived in Guyana long after the matter had already been decided in Jones’ favor in the Guyanese courts, yet he wrote the San Francisco Temple that he was indeed going to Jonestown to "retrieve Tim Stoen’s son."
Stoen knew this was a "non-issue," cruelly pushed to destabilize Jim Jones personally, to justify military threats against a peaceful community, and to force the disbandment of Jonestown. Yet he augmented his campaign by soliciting false affidavits from two spiteful young women, Yulanda Crawford and Deborah Layton, to brand Jonestown as "a concentration camp" and provoke a Congressional investigation he knew he could not fairly win.
This extreme, false, and dangerous vendetta went yet one step further. Why was it Leo Ryan who was targeted for the deadly mission overseas? Look at Ryan’s record. He was the most vocal anti-C.I.A. critic in the entire U.S. Congress at the time! Leo Ryan and the C.I.A. had an ongoing hatefest. There would have been no one more tempting for the C.I.A. to target for death than Congressman Ryan.
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We can thank the FBI for the fine investigative work that follows:
[PDF] Categories( click to retract ) - The Vault - FBI
vault.fbi.gov/jonestown/jonestown-part-168-of-288
jFA TOR "JOSEPH MAZOR IS A SPECIAL AGENT FOR INTERPOL ... drew to handle the media” on the Peoples Temple “project”. Sources. 'ilgase to-the Barb ...
The Berkeley Barb, A Conspiracy Behind Peoples Temple Expose? by Art Silverman,
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Temple Flyer Charges Joe Mazor as INTERPOL Agent - Jonestown
jonestown.sdsu.edu/AboutJonestown/PrimarySources/PTMazorflyer.html
Joseph A. Mazor was both an ex-convict and a licensed private investigator in the State of ... of the many contradictions in his relationship with Peoples Temple.
Joseph Mazor Letter to Charles Garry - Jonestown
jonestown.sdsu.edu/AboutJonestown/.../MazorToGarry_text.html
CIA - Alternative Considerations of Jonestown & Peoples Temple
jonestown.sdsu.edu/Jonestown_com/CIA.htm
Peoples Temple had been historically non-violent for twenty-five years, including life at.... Joseph Mazor, whom the Temple discovered was an agent of Interpol, ..
Joseph Mazor Letter to Charles Garry - Jonestown
jonestown.sdsu.edu/AboutJonestown/.../MazorToGarry.html
While it is still unknown how or when San Francisco private investigator Joseph Mazorfirst came into contact with disaffected members of Peoples Temple and ...
Temple Flyer on Joe Mazor - Jonestown
jonestown.sdsu.edu/AboutJonestown/.../PTMazorflyer_text.html
Jim Jones &. Peoples Temple. WE HAVE DOCUMENTED PROOF THAT “PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR” JOSEPH MAZOR IS A SPECIAL AGENT FOR INTERPOL ...
Jonestown, Harvey Milk, and George Moscone By Alex Constantine
www.whale.to/b/sunday9.html
The People's Temple parishioners did NOT commit "suicide," despite widespread belief.... Joe Mazor, the private detective hired by the Concerned Relatives to ...
Lane-temple .Lawyer Broke Code; Said He Was Reporter .
news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1454&dat=19790205...
... element in Mark Lane's intelligencegathering campaign on behalf of the People's Temple proved to be an un successful attempt to win over Joseph Mazor, ...
Why Did Vincent Die In Guyana? . - Google News
news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1665&dat=19781215...
In 1973 the county sent Vincent to a foster home run by Peoples Temple members. ...Peoples Temple and left Guyana in 1977 Private detective Joseph Mazor ...
A Sympathetic History of Jonestown: The Moore Family Involvement ...
books.google.com/books?isbn=0889468605
Rebecca Moore - 1985 - Religion
Several hired a private detective to investigate Peoples "Temple and report on the condition of relatives in Jonestown. Joseph A. Mazor first investigated Peoples ...
RPP Honors the Martyrs of Peoples Temple Agricultural Project
ruralpeople.atspace.org/honoring_the_legacy_of_november_18th.htm
Honoring the Legacy of the Peoples Temple Martyrs of November 18th, 1978 ....Joseph Mazor, hired hand of the defector organization "Concerned Relatives" ...
A Sympathetic History of Jonestown: The Moore Family Involvement ...
books.google.com/books?isbn=0889468605Rebecca Moore - 1985 - ReligionSeveral hired a private detective to investigate Peoples "Temple and report on the condition of relatives in Jonestown. Joseph A. Mazor first investigated Peoples ...
A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Hope, Deception, and ...
books.google.com/books?isbn=145162896XJulia Scheeres - 2011 - HistoryMazor had a reputation as a con man: “Report to Adult Authority,” Parole report forJoseph A. Mazor, December 16, 1970, RYMUR 89-4286-2018-S-1-0-1a.
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Raven: The Untold Story of the Rev. Jim Jones and His People By Tim Reiterman. page 436,
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February 4, 1979, New York Times, page 1, Mark Lane and People's Temple: Cult's Defender Now Attacks It, by John Crewdson,
Praise for Jonestown
Mr. Lane praised Mr. Jones and described Jonestown as an unarmed, peaceful, socialist-agrarian community whose success made it an embarrassment to the United States. Mr. Lane also said that no
one was being held there against his will.
In his memo Mr. Lane recommended that the Temple retain him to conduct "a full-scale investigation," principally by filing requests for Government records under the Freedom of Information Act.
Mr. Garry, the Temple's principal attorney, had been filing requests under the freedom of Information Act for a year, and only the Customs Bureau had found any mention of the Temple or Mr. Jones in its files. The bureau refused to release its information since its investigation of alleged gun-running was still under way.
Mr. Lane never filed any Freedom of Information requests or suits on the Temple's behalf. Miss Brown said later that all he had done was encourage the paranoia of Mr. Jones and his followers. "And really," she added, "he didn't do anything constructive to help us out of it."
Mr. Lane's proposals must have seemed attractive to Mr. Jones because a short time later the lawyer was offered, and accepted, what he subsequently referred to as a "small fee" —$20 000 — to work full-time for the next three months to determine the origins of the "campaign against the People's Temple."
Mr. Lane received a $10,000 cashier's check last Oct. 16. Mr. Lane acknowledges that most of that money is unspent, but he said last week that he planned to keep it and bill the Temple for the rest. He also said be might use the money on the Temple's behalf.
The initial element in Mr. Lane's intelligence-gathering campaign proved to be an unsuccessful attempt to win over Joseph A. Mazor, a San. Francisco-based private investigator who became a vocal critic of Jonestown after he was hired by relatives of some Temple members to investigate conditions there.
In early October, Mr. Lane took Mr. Mazor to lunch with two reporters, Robert Levering of The San Francisco Bay Guardian and Hal Jacques of The National Enquirer, telling them he thought, Mr. Mazor would give them the story of the plot against the Temple.
Mr. Levering recalled, however, that Mr. Lane seemed to be trying to push Mr. Mazor "farther than he wanted to go," and Mr. Jacques added that, when Mr. Mazor began speaking negatively about Jim Jones, Mr. Lane quickly said Mr. Mazor was a former convict and could not be trusted entirely.
Asked recently about the source for his allegations of C.I.A. efforts to destroy Jonestown, Mr. Lane said: "A large part came from Joe Mazor. I don't know whether to believe him or not."
On Oct. 2, the day before the news conference, Mr. Lane traveled to Ukiah, Calif., where the People's Temple had been based before moving to San Francisco, to interview two other critics of the Temple, Kathy Hunter, a local newspaper reporter, and Dr. Steven Katsaris, a psychiatrist whose daughter, Maria, had become Mr. Jones's mistress.
Dr. Katsaris said Mr. Lane did not identify himself as a lawyer but rather as "a journalist working on an article to be printed in Esquire magazine."
"I asked him why his name was familiar," Dr. Katsaris recalled, "and he said maybe it was from something he had written." Mr. Lane proceeded to question him not only about his daughter, Dr. Katsaris said, but also about a lawsuit he had brought against the Temple.
Clay Felker, the editor of Esquire, said his magazine had never assigned Mr. Lane to write an article on the People's Temple or anything else. The lawyer's code of professional responsibility mandates that "in his representation of a client, a lawyer shall not knowingly make a false statement of law or fact."
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________________________________________________________________
Q 689 Telephone call between Carol McCoy and Joe Mazor (probably 1978)
Carol McCoy, who eventually died in Jonestown, calls Joe Mazor, the detective hired by the Concerned Relatives to assist apostates in getting their relatives returned to them, and asks about his services. She says she has children in Jonestown, and wants to know how to get them back. Mazor replies cautiously, and asks her what she wants him to do. "Well, that's kinda what I wanted to know, what I wanted you to tell me," McCoy replies...
Keywords: Jonestown; Peoples Temple; Jim Jones; Religion
Downloads: 64
http://archive.org/search.php?query=subject%3A%22peoples%20temple%22
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The Peoples Almanac, by David Wallechinsky and Irving Wallace, Doubleday & Co., Garden City, 1975. Article by Vaughan Young.
jFA TOR "JOSEPH MAZOR IS A SPECIAL AGENT FOR INTERPOL ... a ,WHO IS THIS MAN, jOSEPH MAZOR? He is a ... as a respectable private investigator.
I, JOSEPH A. MAZOR, depose and state: That I am a Private Investigator, duly licensed in accordance with and, pursuant to the Business and Professional.
President Jimmy Carter
The White House
Washington, D.C.
The White House
Washington, D.C.
Dear Mr. President:
Last fall, a story broke in the local press which shed a good deal of light on these media attacks. Joseph A. Mazor, a man with a 75-page criminal record for various bogus checks and fraud charges in several states, was discovered to be the coordinator of the attacks. Somehow Mr. Mazor managed to obtain a state investigator’s license after being released from prison in 1976. Yet a confidential 16-page report of the California Adult Authority on this individual, written in 1970 states of Mazor: "key is a smooth 'con man' with an insatiable desire to get ahead. He is bright, well-educated, and so well-first in the law that he had five attorneys in the Pomona area convinced that he had a law degree. It is felt that the subject is a menace to the community."
Mazor admits to being employed to investigate Peoples Temple from November 1976 off, but refuses to say who pays him. He also says he is currently employed by "several ex-members, including Elmer and Deanna Mertle." His function is not only to investigate, this paper learned, but he has also been responsible for coordinating the press campaign through the use of one of the largest, most expensive public relations firms in San Francisco: Lowry, Russom and Leeper. An executive from the firm confirmed working with Mazor “on the People's Temple Project, showing him how to handle the media." Other sources from the firm stated that the executive was specifically sending out letters to selected journalists, offering them – through Mazor – “exclusive material of an incriminating nature against Peoples Temple." The campaign is known to have resulted in at least one article in a major news daily charging fraud, complete with a lawsuit!
We know that these conspirators decided on using the media to try and convict the temple only will legal legitimate channels were determined to be ineffective, due to the lack of evidence! It is equally remarkable the people bringing these kinds of "suits" – like the Mertles, and the Williams – knowing we are honest and law-abiding people, threw up threats of this kind of suit to us earlier; they vowed to trump this up for PR purposes!!
Now we see this also coordinated with other false accusations brought to IRS to whip up an investigation against Peoples Temple. THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT TIM STOEN THREATENED HE WOULD HAVE DONE.
Our government is being used, Mr. President. We have never believed or said that this is a conspiracy of people in politics, but rather that agencies and government are being used. We have no option but to appeal to your Office to put a stop to this. When criminals are calling the shots, against some 1,500 citizens who are steadily at work to build goodwill between nations, this is horrendous and intolerable.
Ask the IRS to have them produce their lying witnesses! They have simply filed a harassment suits for publicity value which Stoen bragged he would have done!
We ourselves took the initiative of checking with the IRS, under the Freedom of Information Act, when we learned of Stoen's threats. We asked if they had issue with us, which of course they did not – we have always been very careful, and meticulously honest. Now we have suddenly received a notice of investigation. We can provide further convincing documentation on the use of agencies; we also know of, aside from Joseph Mazor's long criminal record, his connection with Interpol. And indeed, some of the attacks coordinated internationally look remarkably similar to what we have seen here in San Francisco. Even with no further documentation at all, the parallels with the blatant.
Respectfully years,
L.J. Johnston
cc: All Members of Congress
Members of the U.S. State Dept.
Members of the U.S. State Dept.
Raven: The Untold Story of the Rev. Jim Jones and His People By Tim Reiterman. page 436,
____________________________________________________________________________
February 4, 1979, New York Times, page 1, Mark Lane and People's Temple: Cult's Defender Now Attacks It, by John Crewdson,
Praise for Jonestown
Mr. Lane praised Mr. Jones and described Jonestown as an unarmed, peaceful, socialist-agrarian community whose success made it an embarrassment to the United States. Mr. Lane also said that no
one was being held there against his will.
In his memo Mr. Lane recommended that the Temple retain him to conduct "a full-scale investigation," principally by filing requests for Government records under the Freedom of Information Act.
Mr. Garry, the Temple's principal attorney, had been filing requests under the freedom of Information Act for a year, and only the Customs Bureau had found any mention of the Temple or Mr. Jones in its files. The bureau refused to release its information since its investigation of alleged gun-running was still under way.
Mr. Lane never filed any Freedom of Information requests or suits on the Temple's behalf. Miss Brown said later that all he had done was encourage the paranoia of Mr. Jones and his followers. "And really," she added, "he didn't do anything constructive to help us out of it."
Mr. Lane's proposals must have seemed attractive to Mr. Jones because a short time later the lawyer was offered, and accepted, what he subsequently referred to as a "small fee" —$20 000 — to work full-time for the next three months to determine the origins of the "campaign against the People's Temple."
Mr. Lane received a $10,000 cashier's check last Oct. 16. Mr. Lane acknowledges that most of that money is unspent, but he said last week that he planned to keep it and bill the Temple for the rest. He also said be might use the money on the Temple's behalf.
The initial element in Mr. Lane's intelligence-gathering campaign proved to be an unsuccessful attempt to win over Joseph A. Mazor, a San. Francisco-based private investigator who became a vocal critic of Jonestown after he was hired by relatives of some Temple members to investigate conditions there.
In early October, Mr. Lane took Mr. Mazor to lunch with two reporters, Robert Levering of The San Francisco Bay Guardian and Hal Jacques of The National Enquirer, telling them he thought, Mr. Mazor would give them the story of the plot against the Temple.
Mr. Levering recalled, however, that Mr. Lane seemed to be trying to push Mr. Mazor "farther than he wanted to go," and Mr. Jacques added that, when Mr. Mazor began speaking negatively about Jim Jones, Mr. Lane quickly said Mr. Mazor was a former convict and could not be trusted entirely.
Asked recently about the source for his allegations of C.I.A. efforts to destroy Jonestown, Mr. Lane said: "A large part came from Joe Mazor. I don't know whether to believe him or not."
On Oct. 2, the day before the news conference, Mr. Lane traveled to Ukiah, Calif., where the People's Temple had been based before moving to San Francisco, to interview two other critics of the Temple, Kathy Hunter, a local newspaper reporter, and Dr. Steven Katsaris, a psychiatrist whose daughter, Maria, had become Mr. Jones's mistress.
Dr. Katsaris said Mr. Lane did not identify himself as a lawyer but rather as "a journalist working on an article to be printed in Esquire magazine."
"I asked him why his name was familiar," Dr. Katsaris recalled, "and he said maybe it was from something he had written." Mr. Lane proceeded to question him not only about his daughter, Dr. Katsaris said, but also about a lawsuit he had brought against the Temple.
Clay Felker, the editor of Esquire, said his magazine had never assigned Mr. Lane to write an article on the People's Temple or anything else. The lawyer's code of professional responsibility mandates that "in his representation of a client, a lawyer shall not knowingly make a false statement of law or fact."
_____________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________
Q 689 Telephone call between Carol McCoy and Joe Mazor (probably 1978)
Carol McCoy, who eventually died in Jonestown, calls Joe Mazor, the detective hired by the Concerned Relatives to assist apostates in getting their relatives returned to them, and asks about his services. She says she has children in Jonestown, and wants to know how to get them back. Mazor replies cautiously, and asks her what she wants him to do. "Well, that's kinda what I wanted to know, what I wanted you to tell me," McCoy replies...
Keywords: Jonestown; Peoples Temple; Jim Jones; Religion
Downloads: 64
http://archive.org/search.php?query=subject%3A%22peoples%20temple%22
_______________________________________________________________________________
The Peoples Almanac, by David Wallechinsky and Irving Wallace, Doubleday & Co., Garden City, 1975. Article by Vaughan Young.
(The little snippet about the mafia at the top of page 37 is far more interesting than Interpol.)
Categories( click to retract ) - The Vault - FBI
vault.fbi.gov/jonestown/jonestown-part-168-of-288
You visited this page on 9/19/13.
Categories( click to retract ) - The Vault
vault.fbi.gov/jonestown/jonestown-part-166-of-288
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