StevenWarRan: Joseph Allen Mazor

When trying to center and crop this very nice picture of the Rev. Jim Jones with a smiling Huey Newton in Havana, I realized the caption below it, which references a photo to the left, contained an almost complete verification for a point I wanted to make, but whose source document eluded me.

Lt. Governor Dymally, who visited the Temple’s agricultural mission in Guyana, South America, was impressed by the successful rehabilitation of 133 youth there, who were formerly involved in crime, drugs, and various forms of serious anti-social behavior. He was also impressed at how Temple-ites had integrated with local people, and were not typical paternalistic missionaries. The Prime Minister subsequently proposed that Peoples Temple establish an industrial training school for youth in Grenada—an idea which was happily accepted by Temple members.

I am convinced that at one time I saw a cover of the Peoples Temple in-house organ, the Peoples Forum, with a big bold headline bleating that the Temple was then servicing 150 at-risk youth down at their Guyanese work farm. These could be any variation on the concept of "state-funded foster-care child," which had been a part of the Temple program since the early 1950's in Indiana, and if the reverend had any reason to relocate to California it was for their more liberal welfare payments and not nuclear security.

He took this show to Guyana for the same reason that Special-Ops, Black Watch, and C.I.A. frogmen do---it is one of last refuges of privacy in the world--like the Muslim-dominated islands of Basilan and Sulu in the Philippines--where active men can act out their primeval urges without oversight. The so-called Socialist government and population of Guyana remains almost unconsciously beholden to the Imperial boot on their necks and the cocaine trafficking is as profitable as the heroin trade out of Afghanistan is.

Furthermore, the Temple's acquiescing to the suggestion that for their next project they open an "industrial school for youth" in Grenada, is the first forward-looking (if Dickensian) proposition I've seen planted in the media. They certainly weren't going to grow enough food to feed themselves at Jonestown, let alone be beneficent agri-missionaries to the locals. Dymally's visit to Jonestown came in December 1976, according to the Roller journals, so Jones' enthusiasm for propagating scams on government social services hadn't left him yet.

That change came about after Jones was driven southward following his arrest for homosexual solicitation at a matinee in a seedy Los Angeles movie house. Jones told Herb Caen that he was afraid the Temple would lose its tax-exempt status if the public found out he had fathered a child out of wedlock, but the real scandal threatened to leave him with nothing to tax in the first place. One report has it that Rep. Ryan had paperwork on the arrest with him when he visited Jonestown. In a climate where even a massage on amphetamines with a homosexual hustler can lose a man his megachurch, Jones' pretense of being a waylaid bisexual was at risk of getting rammed good.

These rather wonderful collaged pages are the work of Laurie Efrein, and they look like a Facebook DreamBoard before the advent of computers---you can almost smell the rubber cement, and hear Mae Brussell barking in the background. I'm grateful for the salvaged bits and pieces of the record, although Efrein's central thesis, on the "private investigator" Joseph Allen Mazor, doesn't go anywhere for me. One mashup page is called: "Before: Pre-Planning the Frame," which should be followed by "After: & Mid Pre-Planning..." but isn't.

Some of her ideas are preposterous, such as Mazor's firing guns into the Jonestown compound from out in the jungle for several day's running. First off, Jim Jones had a history of such false-flag attacks on himself to elicit support and sympathy, including being "shot" outside his church in Redwood Valley, from which, he miraculously arose on the seventh minute. Secondly, it's logistically impossible given the jungle set up, and thirdly, why? Why him?

It is all sandiwara to me. That's Indonesian; a word I bet they drop at Sandhurst. It has several meanings, all around drama, theatrics and manufactured reality. It can be used in compound forms, like kepandaian sandiwara, for stagecraft, and the indispensable sandiwara sensasi, for melodrama, or as I like to put it: over-acting.

Jim Jones fabricated his sense of attack, and Joseph Mazor just loomed about--all according to script. What was he threatening to do that needed an investigator's license? It seems the job he was called to do involved public perception, not a bunch of hush-hush, chop-chop.

April 26, 1974, paroled
January 15, 1976, "discharged"
April 12, 1977, Application for Investigator License
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