http://www.gaudiya-repercussions.com/in ... &pid=48222 Yes, there are links between the brotherhood and Iskcon and must have been made at least when Iskcon was established in Laguna Beach. How could any ashram in Laguna at the time, in 1969, have not had members who involved in the brotherhood who were established there? Bhakta dasa in his memoirs of his time in Laguna Beach and later LA, mentions how he first came across a devotee at Mystic Arts World. This place, a shop cum meditation room and meeting place, was one of the brotherhood’s main centres. Bhakta dasa also mentions how there was a picture above the shop front door of Prabhupada.
Rishabadev das was also linked to them, according to Nori Muster’s
Betrayal of the Spirit, where I first found out about Iskcon-brotherhood links. He was involved with the independent latter day member of the brotherhood, Alexander Kulik. Unfortunately by this time the brotherhood had become corrupted as the counter culture in general had, with heavier drugs and violence. This link between Iskcon LA and Laguna Beach with Kulik was exposed in the press in 1977, the year Prabhupada pased on. It was in the LA media. Maybe you can obtain these articles through your library over there in the states. I’ve tried over here but without more money to hire researchers it is not possible.
Of course if the brotherhood became involved with Iskcon management structure covertly at all, any instance of devotee drug smuggling would be a likely candidate to link up with them, as big hash dealers were inevitably involved with them, especially in California. Nori also mentions that Jayatirtha dasa was a member too. He certainly later on espoused the use of psychedelics with Krishna consciousness and called them the same name as the brotherhood, sacraments.
Here's a short synopsis of Nori’s account she had derived from various newspapers and not to mention also her time in Iskcon PR in LA during Rameshvara dasa’s mIskcon-management.
According to her account brotherhood connection is centered around ISKCON'S Laguna Beach temple president Rishabdev das who had been the chief preacher and organiser of the large cash donations donated by the Laguna Beach congregation to the Bhaktivedanta Book Trust (BBT), of which one large slice of the regular donations was the brotherhoods illegal patronage. Under his temple presidency Laguna Beach became the watering hole of various devotee's private projects where there was an abundance of money.
Nori does not go into detail of what these private projects were but she presents Rishabdev as the brotherhood's link to ISKCON and vice versa. Thus she reveals him as a devotee who recruited various ISKCON individuals who wanted to smuggle for the brotherhood as part of their service to Krishna with the other devotee Dridha-vrata das as the ring leader of this roving band of Krishna hash dealers. On the brotherhood's side, it was Alexander Kulik, who had been the brotherhood member to bring in ISKCON to the brotherhood's pantheon of teachers. Thus he also brought along trade routes for hash oil from Pakistan, not the usual Afghanistan, and this was brought through Islamic customs in hollow plastic typewriter cases to be bottled in baby bottles, each bottle selling for $11,000, making a profit of $10,000 for each one. Private estate was thus bought, expensive customised cars and six figure donations were turned over to the BBT.
The money laundering fronts for some of this money she reveals as the ISKCON restaurant in Laguna Beach called Govindas as well as Prasadam Distribution, Inc (prasadam is the sacred vegetarian food that has been prepared for Krishna and offered on an altar first before being distributed) or PDI. The prasadam PDI sold was bionic bits, a snack food bar, as well as Hawaiian fruit juice. There was also money pumped through various bought and yet faltering companies. But besides this various not so spiritual criminals were used to launder the money too and in 1977 things went wrong as it was doing generally for the brotherhood and its ideal generally. Various Italians were hired to enforce themselves on those embezzling money from the PDI.
Unfortunately what was not known was that these so called criminal debt collectors, like many criminals, also had a deal as grasses for the federal witness program there, and had made a deal to infiltrate on the federal witness program's behalf the PDI. In the shenanigans of these criminals allied with the law, an ‘employee' from PDI and a congregational devotee, Stephen Bovan was shot by two of the Italians outside of a Newport Beach restaurant because he had owed them money they needed for some fronted cocaine they had obtained from other criminals working for the feds for cash. This shooting came to the attention of the local law enforcement officials. Devotees were cleared from murder charges by the help of high and powerful attorneys because two protected and notorious witnesses disappeared before the trial.
The press latched onto this murder and uncovering of drug smuggling by focusing on ISKCON as the main culprit and thus provoked ISKCON's leaders to defend the movement. The temple president Rishabdev was removed, and another from Trinidad who had been serving ISKCON New York, Agni dev das put in his place. ISKCON dissassociated itself away from the smuggling and the murder claiming Rishabdev as introducing novel ideas into ISKCON different from it’s real purpose. Apparently the other devotees involved in the hash oil ring were ousted from the quarters of Laguna Beach temple and they moved outside, but still dressed as devotees and came to the temple’s Sunday feasts.
Rishabdev, whilst still a devotee was later on involved in 1979 with another hash smuggling enterprise along with Kulik, which was also busted and made the press headlines again. Rishabdev although originally seen as implicated in the murder of Bovan, was exonerated finally but he was charged with the brainwashing of Robin George, a young female devotee who had run away from home to live in the temple and was accepted by Rishabdev there. He was later charged for brainwashing when she ran away from the temple and her and her family sued ISKCON for a large slice of it's money. The ISKCON v Robin George case was a big case indeed and went on for years, eventually settling up later for a much lesser amount than the George's had desired. In 1982 Rishabdev was busted for another attempt at ISKCON dealing and spent a year in prison. In prison Nori describes him as planning how he could raise money for ISKCON and how that organizations leaders at the time, it's gurus (who had usurped the guru position by intrigue) could recieve his donations and yet make a show of denying him in public.
Nori mentions various articles in the various presses of America in regards to this Laguna murder and drug bust and a later one in 1979;
1) The Daily Pilot's Krishna's Disavow Link to Newport Beach Slaying. (1977)
2) Los Angeles Times, Hare Krishna Officials Deny Link to Four. (1977)
3) New York Times, California Slaying Case Involves Ex Mafia Figures and Krishnas. (1977)
4) Los Angeles Times, Mystics and Mobsters: Focus on a Curious Alliance. (1977)
5) Orange County, Krishna Hash Bust: Eleven Indicted in Orange County Crackdown. (1979)
6) Los Angeles Times, unspecified by author but just commented on as having similar headlines as the above number 5.
7)The Register, unspecified by author but commented on how it presented the ISKCON brotherhood pipeline as being one of the largest in the history of south California (at the time though?).
There are no doubt other newspaper articles but these are the main ones.
Nori gives the impression that it was through Rishabadev dasa that the brotherhood became involved with Iskcon. But the Rainbow Bridge film reveals an earlier connection, in my opinion, if one can read between the lines of the cryptic counter cultural symbolism in it. This connection between Iskcon and the brotherhood would appear to be right there in 1969, when the devotees established themselves in Laguna Beach. Rainbow Bridge is without a doubt, a film made by individuals well connected to the brotherhood who had a branch in Maui. The brotherhood were into Yogananda as their statement of purposes they had drafted in 1966 clearly reveals.
The gurus of the Yogananda lineage are definitely portrayed in the film, and the Self Realisation Fellowship temple is in the film as well where a bus is seen to break down on it. It is that self same bus which the person travelling on it spies out the devotees street chanting down the street, possibly Laguna Street (I do not know). The film is about psychedelic surfers who live in an occult research centre hosting gigs of which Hendrix is the one here. The brotherhood are surfers. And the only eastern and popular spiritual movement which is revealed in the film besides Yogananda’s is Iskcon. Devotees are filmed chanting in the street, and in a curious piece of film symbolism we see a black African devotee stood with mrdanga looking puzzled whilst the police harass someone who we cannot see, presumably another devotee. Why include this? There are other bits of oblique references to Hare Krishna in the film.
Kathy Etchingman was one of Hendrix’s main lovers. She left Hendrix to marry, Nick Page, who had studied medicine at Cambridge, and after leaving the junior anaesthetic and intensive care post at the hospital, later went to work at the Royal Marsden Hospital. His family had royalty connections and his father was linked to an order of Knights connected to the City guidhalls of Chester. Kathy had met him through her flatmate, Dawn, whose cousin was a flatmate of Nick’s. Nick had been involved with the counterculture in that he had imported from the middle east, where his parents had brought him up, embroidered clothes and various accessories, carpets, silk scarves, jewellery and wall hangings, which he sold to the hip shops of Portobello Road and King’s Road area.
He had links also with Turkish smugglers in Hatay who were dodging the Syrian army roadblocks in 1967. The boutiques he brought his goods to, Hendrix and Brian Jones bought from them too. Kathy after leaving Hendrix for a certain stability with this guy, which didn’t work out in the end, ended up marrying a Roy, who along with Howard Marks and the Brotherhood of Eternal Love’s Ernie Combs and associates, smuggled hash into America by the aid of a particular band’s musical equipment. She finally left him because of the instability this life caused, especially when he was busted and had to flee to Hawaii for protection by the Brotherhood over there, who according to Etchingham in her book about Hendrix and herself, were armed. Kathy herself in her book gives the impression that Jefferies only really fell out with Hendrix over management issues that encroached upon Hendrix’s creativity, and that all the suggestions that Jefferies was more sinister than he actually was, and was somehow involved with Hendrix’s passing were absurd exaggerations of people who like to sensationalize.
Hendrix called the summer of love the summer of acid. He considered the LSD of San Fransisco to be superior to the LSD he had taken in London. He also came later to believe that he had took too much and started to get carried away with feeling he was specially chosen to be able to handle it. He later saw himself as using it as a great escape. Him and Mike Jefferies, his manager had one thing in common and that was their involvement with LSD and thus indirectly with the brotherhood who were its main suppliers.
Jimi with his American Indian roots appreciated the Shamanic experience of LSD. He would have known, like the brotherhood, that an affront to LSD is also indirectly an affront to Shamanism. He said of LSD that it can be used properly or improperly and that one should control it rather than let it take control over ones self in an addictive and greedy mentality. Thus like the brotherhood had other things besides LSD to enhance its effect like yoga, meditation, surfing, nature mysticism and vegetarian diet, Hendrix had his guitar, his music. Hendrix had a lot of LSD experiences. He ultimately seen it as positive but admitted from his own experience that it could also be used in a negative way.
Hendrix loved Hawaii and was into the Rainbow Bridge concept at least in essence. In fact it is said that Mike Jefferies tried to pull Hendrix away from Hawaii back to the tour circus against Hendrix’s desire to stay there with new friends and new community and environment.
According to Melinda Merryweather, who was one of the leading characters in the Rainbow Bridge film, he was happy there. He may have wanted a break from there to eat some meat after eating the vegetarian meals there as the others said, escaping to go downtown to a bar to watch a musician playing he was into. Nevertheless he did at least eat the vegetarian food there for a week with the folks there. He could have got meat earlier if he had wanted to. Some say Hendrix thought the food weird and that he found all the topics discussed there as being hippy waffle and drivel. But Hendrix himself seems to talk in such a ‘hippy drivel’ way that those Hendrix admirers who emphasise Hendrix’s hatred of hippy drivel, are in danger of turning eventually and also accusing Hendrix’s lyrics as hippy waffle too, if they later become known to them that is. Case rested.
According to some, Hendrix had said that he wanted to retire to Hawaii. Critics may criticise the ‘nasal drone’ and ‘cosmic waffle’ in the film, but the fact is that Hendrix believed in very much the same stuff. Hendrix had took with him there, a book called The Book of Urantia which is an alternative Bible that mixed the Bible with a certain kind of UFOlogy. Wein gave Hendrix The Tibetan Book of the Dead a book popular with the brotherhood as well as another book called Secret Places of the Lion: Alien Influences on Earth’s Destiny which was about alien involvement in human civilization, something that Hendrix himself believed in. And judging by his book Urantia, which he took with him everywhere and told people that he learned a lot from it, we see a kindred Hendrix interest in that reflected in the Rainbow Bridge theme. Jimi is also said to have found Hawaii a kind of cleansing experience where he could take pot and acid without the presence of heroin, which wasn’t around the scene there. And which was promoted by those whose tried to destroy the rock revolution. He needed to get away from heroin, which he had recently started to dabble in, thus he was not a hopeless junkie as some allege.
He was seeing Hawaii as some kind of purifying retreat. Someone there suggested that they fly Devon Wilson over but Hendrix wanted her not to come with the influence she had over him (the song Dolly Dagger is about her) which included the heroin influence, he felt he needed to make a break from her here. This minor heroin dabbling coupled with his trying to break free from his ‘Dolly Dagger’ not to mention the pressures of law suits, touring, management, and the fact that someone was claiming their daughter as Hendrix’s (which he accepted as his). All this, as well as his feelings of guilt that he should do more for this daughter (even though he felt he wasn’t ready to settle) and sort his relationship out with his father- all this added up to the clouds of depression that would break through this Hawaian sunshine. It was a sunshine he was positively basking in however, but according to others he wasn’t. Mood swings between depression and contentment thus took place here, in this brotherhood Hawai-an paradise. Maybe these swings could account for the conflicting reports that Hendrix was into the Rainbow Bridge theme and those that he wasn’t. Jimi also jokingly told Pat Hartley and Chuck Wein, who are main characters in the film, that the world was in such a state that perhaps all three of them should commit suicide right there and then. Shortly after this his mood changed. Mood swings.
The gig was at an energy point, at the edge of a crater and was free. It was named the Rainbow Bridge Vibratory Color/ Sound Experiment. It was advertised on Lahaina’s main street and was attended by natives, surfers, hippies amongst them even Hare Krishna devotees, not to mention brotherhood members. The audience was also divided into various camps, which corresponded to each’s zodiac sign. The band also did another gig in Honolulu two days after, which some say was a better gig than the one next to the crater but others say that at this Honolulu gig Hendrix appeared distracted. Furthermore Hendrix’s bassist at the time, Billy Cox, said that Hendrix loved the previous gig next to the crater as it was a highly charged energy spot.
After this Honolulu gig Hendrix returned to Maui and the band members returned home. Jimi got to stay back because he had cut his foot on the beach and by deceit he made the cut out to be worse having it bandaged up twenty times than what it should have been for a minor cut. And they took pictures of him thus looking more seriously injured than he in fact was. It worked and Hendrix to his relief took an extended vacation there for a further two weeks. If this is so, he clearly wanted to be there. Hendrix rented a house there and got into the LSD turbo-charged world of Maui. He wrote an emotive mystical letter to his father there talking about Angels, Gods, Holy spirits, God, eternal light, themes that appear in the frameworks of his last wave of music, which was moving in a more spiritual direction. Here he must have befriended the brotherhood more closely, and one woman in particular there he befriended talking to her about his grandmother and his native American roots amongst the worries about his father and other things. He wrote a long song for this new found female friend who linked with the brotherhood and who was one of the major characters in the film Rainbow Bridge, and called this song Scorpio Woman after her birthsign. He expressed a desire not to go back to the tour machine and to also change his wildman side, but in the end he had to go back and face it. He thus reluctantly left Hawaii saying goodbye to his new found Scorpio Woman friend and the brotherhood, back to the region of Dolly Dagger. He is said to have thought them the lucky ones as they got to stay, whilst he had to descend into the hell of New York and the tour machine which was grinding him more and more down. He never got to return and retire in Hawaii, he rather returned to Seattle in a box, exactly as he had predicted to some, according to some, when in Maui. He had also mentioned to Scorpio woman how he was going to die soon.
Hendrix’s manager was wrapped up in the money laundering scheme of banking. His respect for brotherhood ideals may have been limited to their offshore banking scams, rather than to their spirituality, of which he may have made a show of interest. Whatever his relationship to Hendrix was, it was to a certain degree unethical. Jeffries was certainly lusty after the Hendrix fortune and benefited greatly from it. Perhaps he was a brotherhood laundering link in the red octopus side of the brotherhood.
Jeffrey had siphoned off Hendrix's money for himself, behind Hendrix's back through Yameta and co, a subsidary of the Bank of New Providence and also with the Chemical Bank, a bank involved with laundering drug money. Another sink for stolen Hendrix Experience money was through the Naussau branch of the Bank of Novia Scotia, with it's dodgy connections with the Bank of Commerce and Credit International (BCCI) which in turn had dodgy links with international terrorism through Libya, Syria and the PLO, as well as the CIA, the Pentagon and the Vatican. The usual customers in the dodgy banking networks. Jeffrey was also said to have had both mobster and CIA links too, which is not surprising as many in the rock n roll business have to deal with this incursion into the domain of rebellion. In fact old Jeffrey seems to be almost like the brotherhood’s later money launderer Ronald Stark.
Perhaps what Stark was to the brotherhood ideal Jeffrey was to the Hendrix Electric Lady Land and it's ideal and what shady Iskcon mangers were to the Krishna conscious ideal. In this world of shady banking scams there must have been links. It was that self same banking network which the brotherhood were involved in, also the Hendrix machine, and quite possibly Iskcon. The brotherhood were also involved with the shady financial dealings of Bernie Cornfield, who was the popular dodgy banker for various countercultural figure heads.
Ernie Combes, a member of the later brotherhood, is said by Howard Marks to have had a great spacious aprtment on Coconut Grove in Florida, Miami. The Hare Krishna temple of Florida was based on Coconut Grove at one point. In fact Mr Nice mentions how the upper-echelon of cannabis dealers have apartments in Miami and New York. Mark’s mentions meeting a Alan Schwarz through Ernie Coombs. Alan was Ernie's Marijuana wholesaler in New York and when Marks and his wife settled in NY for a while in an apartment, through this Alan they got to meet the cogniscenti of the cool and the hip of NY. John Lennon and Mick Jagger even graced their apartment at one time there as they were living in the same neighborhood- Upper East Side. Marks remembers Alan’s twenty first at a place called Regine's and Bernie Cornfield himself turning up.
The banking schemes of Cornfield were used by Hitchcock, the earlier brotherhood banker and the person who provided Tim Leary a house for his LSD sessions, named Millbrook. Other gliterati who visited Marks and his wife in their plush apartment were Lady Antonia Fraser’s daughter Rebecca, Jane Bonham-Carter, the Guiness sisters Sabrina, Miranda and Anita. It was a scene which also even the Grateful Dead stumbled on into. Thus through Ernie and Alan, he got to the top clique of New York’s cannabis dealing, and here we see John Sinclair of MC5 fame and the White Panthers, along with the Soma friendly and Iskcon friendly Lennon amongst others. Others such as Mick Jagger and also an unconventional banking brain of the brotherhood’s bahamian tax shelter, Cornfield, all hanging in this same upper countercultural clique, which Marks had accessed due to his brotherhood link. It thus seems that Cornfield and the brotherhood were in similar social orbits, even after they had parted ways due to Cornfield’s final bust.
It could well be, in my opinion, that Iskcon’s top notch managers were crossing over into these scenes too, through their brotherhood links. This could well explain the context of certain kinds of Iskcon ‘corruption’. The rest may be due to the systematic destruction of this countercultural sector by the American Intelligence departments, who are not only concerned about laundered money and drugs (in some cases are actually involved with them) but also about loyalty to their system, which the counterculture was obviously not. They infiltrate and destroy anything they see as a threat to their powerful and wealthy cliqsters, including Iskcon and the psychedelic movement, which may well share more in common than one would think. The psychedelic revolution needs non pychotropic means to attain enlightenment as a safety net to support the psychedelic revolution it would seem.
Iskcon could thus have, due to its involvement with the brotherhood, gained big American bully enemies. The John Birch society had apparently burned down Mystic Arts world, the brotherhoods centre in Laguna. Perhaps similar forces to these wrecked havoc in Iskcon, especially after Prabhupada had left. If the brotherhood entered Iskcon so would have the brotherhood’s enemies. The abuse of gurukula kids seems to be purposely against the mission of Prabhupada’s ideal of gurukula, and it seems possible it was conducted to f--k up the first generation of Hare Krishna’s and make them less effective. Iskcon simultaneously saw the culling of its man power in various ways and now what is left of a once vibrant movement, which has had to flee from mainland America to eastern Europe and Russia, where similar dodgy things will happen. Thus, Iskcon, another slice of the counterculture sliced and diced by the forces of good old American law and order? No more massive ecstatic street chanting on a large scale going on anymore. Iskcon’s branch of the Chaitanya’s mission thwarted in other words and its first generation of kids fucked up. Thanks whoever you are. Prabhupada was right in other words, there are demons and they are against Krishna conciousness, in fact against any consciousness for that matter whether psychedelic, hip, beat or what ever. They don’t want spiritual loving sex and celibacy, drugs and sweet rock and roll of peace and love, they want violent sex, heavy drugs and dumbed down rock n roll so they can control those who rebel against them. Of course the big question is who are they? Even if we cant pin them down for sure, for they are well hid, we can see their results and what it is they are against, and thus what they are into which is certainly not psychedelic revolution, love power and Krishna consciousness and the sacraments which are even used as such in the Bible.
They would have been against Iskcon and against the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. Another view is that they created Iskcon and the brotherhood in the first place, which I feel is an over excessive conspiracy theory directing away from the real conspiracy as many conspiracy theories are.
by American Dream » Tue Apr 30, 2013 8:58 pm 
