Word: sects
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...case of Steven Bryant, who was found shot dead in his van in Los Angeles last May, might have slipped into oblivion were it not for the victim's reputation. Bryant, 33, was widely known as a longtime Hare Krishna who had turned against the sect in recent years. A bit of a crank, he bounced between West Virginia and California telling lawmen that the ever chanting, saffron- robed, pig-tailed, panhandling sect had turned corrupt...
...Hare Krishna hit list -- until he was murdered. Now authorities are reconsidering some of Bryant's tales. California police have charged Thomas Dresher, 37, a former Krishna devotee from New Vrindaban, with Bryant's slaying. Meanwhile, police in West Virginia have uncovered evidence to charge Dresher and an ex-sect member, Daniel Reid, 31, with murder in connection with the 1983 disappearance of yet another Krishna, Charles St. Denis...
Suspicions about the sect have circulated since 1979, when California Temple Leader Alexander Kulik was convicted of distributing heroin. He was also accused, with others, of laundering drug money through an investment company, Prasadam Distributors, controlled by sect members. The new questions could hardly have come at a worse time for the Hare Krishna movement in the U.S. (membership: about 3,000). Since the death in 1977 of Founder Srila Prabhupada, the sect has split into mutually hostile factions. The internal trouble was dramatized publicly last fall when a disillusioned devotee bludgeoned the leader of the West Virginia temple, Kirtanananda...
Bhaktipada, 48, who was left partly deaf and slightly lame by the bludgeoning, dismisses the West Virginia investigations as "absurd." He claims that Bryant began attacking the sect because he thought it had caused his wife to leave him. "He was vindictive," says Bhaktipada. Is there dissension within the Krishna temples? The guru concedes, "We have differences of opinion...
...Like any other country, we expel illegal aliens." So said Yitzhak Agassi, an official in Israel's Interior Ministry, of the ministry's plan to kick out 46 American-born members of the Black Hebrew sect for overstaying their visas...