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From Tel Aviv, I made more than a few long-distance calls to my shrink in which I accused
him of being a cult leader, of trapping people with the promise of psychic or spiritual freedom
just so he could rob them of their money. He was pretty silent on the other end of the line.
The truth is, shrinks don‟t like being called cult leaders. Anyway, I felt better. I felt righteous.
I would never, ever, give a single penny to another human being in exchange for a good
feeling.
This was a major mind-kerflooey moment. At some point, you eschew all your past ties--fire
your shrink or your family or your church or your friends--and wipe the slate clean, making
sure your snoozing old brain has no chance of waking up.
Many people who are getting drawn into cults make desperate calls to their loved ones,
maybe without even knowing why they‟re calling and maybe saying stupid things. If you‟re
lucky, you call someone who knows the signs and will call you back. If you‟re really lucky, you
call someone who knows how to awaken your old brain. It will be like someone slapping you
and waking you out of a nightmare.
You will say “Whew.” You will say “What happened to me?” Like everyone else, you will be
stunned and amazed and 100 percent dumbfounded when you realize that you, too, are
vulnerable to the seduction of a cult.
No one wakes up in the morning, looks in the mirror and says “Hey, I think I‟ll join a cult
today.” It doesn‟t work that way at all.
Ambush happens.
***
I flew home from Tel Aviv, got my brain unwashed, made some calls and then headed for
Scottsdale, the CBJ Mecca.
To help gain some perspective, I met up with Rick Ross, a cult deprogrammer. I visited him at
his Phoenix condo. He did not try to hug me. It was a relief. He explained that he specializes
in Bible-based cults --most notably (and formerly) the Branch Davidians of Waco, Texas --
but he also happens to be an expert on CBJ, since it is right there in his backyard.
We sat in the living room, and he popped a tape into the VCR. “When deprogramming,” he
said, “I use this one for comic relief.” He clicked the remote, and there on the TV appeared
Chuckbernieandjim, trinity of coordinated outfits. They were talking about cells and
intercourse and penetration and immortality. “People coming out of cults usually feel kind of
humiliated and depressed about what they got sucked into,” Rick said, “And then they see
this and they go “Oh, that would be even worse!..” And they crack up, laughing.” He said CBJ
is fun to study because “it‟s a good example of how ridiculous a cult can be.”
I did hear of a more ridiculous cult. It was affectionately termed “the Two-Dollar Haircut Cult-
-by a lawyer I met. Some lady in the Midwest goes around pronouncing that she can teach
you how to perfectly cut a head of hair in two minutes. If you charge $2 for the haircut and
work full-time at this, you can, she claims, become a zillionaire. So you pay your money and
go to her seminar, ostensibly to learn how to cut hair. Once in, you learn that you have to
free your mind before you can achieve the knowledge of the $2 haircut. Can‟t free your mind?
Come to the next seminar, and the next. Before you know it, you‟re two years into seminars
and she still hasn‟t gotten around to talking about hair. But it doesn‟t matter--you‟ve long
forgotten your original purpose for attending.
It reminded me of CBJ. “Charles Paul Brown, BernaDeane and James Russell Strole are like all
the other cult leaders,” Rick said emphatically. “They‟re feeding off of their followers, taking
advantage of them, luring them with the promise of eternal life and then turning that into a
way to suck them into the group and exploit them, take their money, take their time, take

Cultic Studies Journal, Vol. 11, No. 1, 1994, Page 31
their commitment, turn it around for recruitment of other victims, and on and on it goes, like
some kind of pyramid scheme with the leaders at the top benefiting constantly financially.”
He showed me his file on CBJ, which basically consisted of little phone-message slips from
people saying “Help!” These were from the families of folks who had gotten involved with CBJ,
and the mood states of the callers seemed to range from the terrified to the furious. That
wasn‟t funny. It also wasn‟t funny to think of the cancer victims and the HIV-positive people
who had gotten sucked into CBJ as a last hope.
Rick‟s phone rang a lot. All the calls that day were from frantic people with questions about
Waco. Nobody, of course, knew that the Branch Davidian compound was soon to go up in
flames. Nobody knew that the innocent people inside would soon meet their death due to the
facts that (a) like humans everywhere, they were susceptible to a cult and (b) Really Big Law-
Enforcement Agencies and Important People, including the president of our own United States
of America, are astoundingly ignorant as to the insidious nature and fundamental workings of
the more than 1,500 cults in this country. Authorities should definitely think about getting
educated before they go after other people with guns and tear gas and extremely loud
recordings of the screams of animals being slaughtered.
Rick showed me the checklist of criteria used to discern if a group‟s leaders are employing
mind-control techniques (a list developed by psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, a sort of guru for
cult deprogrammers), and you could see CBJ line up ever so perfectly. We talked about milieu
control and pseudoscience and “love-bombing” and repetition. “They hammer the message
over and over and over again,” Rick said. “Again and again and again and again. Constantly.
It‟s reinforced that‟s the program: „You cannot be separate from us, you must be with us,
you must have contact with us or you will lose your life, you‟ll start dying ...‟ So there‟s this
fear coercing these people to stay in the group.”
He said CBJ is a con job, a moneymaking machine, a scam. “We‟re talking about three people
who found a hustle from which they can make more money than anything else that they‟ve
ever done in their lives. And they are ...I mean, what‟s their background? Hype, sales, selling
people. Entertaining people, pulling people in, persuasion techniques. They‟ve simply put what
they‟ve learned over the years together into their current road show, which is “CBJ Presents.”
***
I visited Charles, BernaDeane and James at their home in the Pinnacle Peak Estates, in north
Scottsdale. Their house is pale pink. Their Cadillac is bright white. Their Harley-Davidson is
sort of a deep salmon. We stepped outside onto the patio overlooking the pool and the Jacuzzi
and a golf course with golfers on it.
We made small talk, which is pretty big talk when you are making it with an Immortal. We
talked about how CBJ wants to make physical immortality available to all people on the
planet, and we talked about why people can‟t just be physically immortal all by themselves.
BernaDeane did not join in the discussion. BernaDeane went inside and retrieved her
manicure set. She did her nails and then leaned back in the sun and took a nap. Meantime,
Chuck likened human beings to the molecules in a laser beam: It takes a lot of them to fall
into phase, and only then can they pierce the shield of death that for all time has imprisoned
life.
“But what about money?” I said and asked them to tell me how much money, exactly, they
make.
The question, first of all, woke BernaDeane up. The question caused an apparent revocation
of my own personal invitation to any future cellular intercourses. The question did not go over
well at all.