Word: bhagwan
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...holy man, it was a world of trouble. There, in a third-floor medical cell of the Mecklenburg County jail in Charlotte, N.C., sat Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh last week, facing 35 counts of conspiring to violate immigration laws. Back home in Rajneeshpuram, Ore., where he ran a 1,300-member commune that espouses free love and the good life, the Bhagwan (Revered One) was accustomed to more deferential treatment, not to mention a more elegant life- style that offered, among other amenities, no fewer than 90 Rolls-Royces...
Apparently tipped off that immigration charges against him had been secretly handed up by a federal grand jury in Portland, the Bhagwan departed forthwith from Rajneeshpuram. The guru and six disciples chartered two Learjets and took off so quickly that their pilots had to obtain final clearances while aloft. As the Bhagwan's retinue tried to arrange a flight to Bermuda, Federal Aviation Administration controllers tracked the planes. When Rajneesh's touched down at 2 a.m. at Charlotte-Douglas International Airport, authorities arrested...
...reported frail health from diabetes, assorted allergies and back ailments, the Bhagwan was incarcerated in the prison infirmary. Rajneesh's need for back surgery was the purported reason for his coming to the U.S. from Poona, India, in June 1981. The surgery was never performed, and Immigration and Naturalization Service officials have charged him with lying about it. The Government also charged the guru and seven of his aides with arranging sham marriages so that foreign disciples could move to the U.S. as spouses...
...Sheela was responsible for the scheme to recruit about 3,500 homeless people for the commune last fall, in what observers believe was an attempt to load the voting rolls against longer-term residents of Wasco County. However, many of the transients later departed. Sheela's latest plan, the bhagwan said, was to build a housing complex for AIDS victims in Rajneesh. His reaction was less than charitable: "I said this is not right. You would be putting the whole of Oregon in danger. I had to stop it." After Sheela and her followers fled, said the guru, "sannyasins started...
Given the sect's penchant for put-ons, as well as its reportedly declining membership and lawsuits concerning the takeover of Antelope, outsiders did not know what to make of the bhagwan's statements. Neither, evidently, did the six different groups of lawmen that jointly began examining the guru's charges last week: the Oregon state police, the FBI, the Wasco County sheriff, the Dalles police, the state attorney general's office and the U.S. Attorney's office. Wasco County District Attorney Bernard L. Smith said at week's end that his office will coordinate an investigation of the situation...