From the beginning of the article: "Like many Sixties children, I learned of the Hare Krishnas when they accosted me on the streets and tried to “give” me colorful books of Hindu sacred literature that they said had been printed with donations from George Harrison, the Beatles’s guitarist. Harrison had swooned over Srila Prabhupada, the sect’s founder, and put out a double album in the Seventies titled “Living In The Material World.” The record, that featured a Kirlian palmprint as its cover art, was a Krishna-flavored testament of gently-weeping guitars that colored the commercial airwaves with a special brand of made-for-pop-radio renunciation. Conditioned to think kindly of the Krishnas by this musical endorsement, I developed a tolerant view of them as a rather dotty, fundamentally harmless sect of burnouts devoted to eating Indian food and dancing in the streets with white stripes painted down their foreheads, and heads shaved but for a top-knot ponytail. In other words, just plain folks. That all changed when I read "Monkey On A Stick -- Murder, Madness, and the Hare Krishnas" by John Hubner and Lindsey Gruson, published in 1989. I discovered the book on a paperback rack in 1999 while standing in an A&P grocery store killing time one evening in Daytona, Florida. Initially captivated by the almost-unbelievable tale of how a gang of pedophile vegetarians ran an international sex and drug ring under the guise of a charity and service, I returned to the story several times, and have now produced an up-to-date telling of how one more hippie dream went horrendously sour with the help of this kooky little thing called “Eastern religion.” This article is separated into two parts, a summary of some of the most lurid stories that appear in Monkey On A Stick, and the legal story, drawn primarily from legal documents and news reports about the aftermath of the IKSCON pedophilia scandal, including the class action lawsuit by Texas lawyer Windle Turley on behalf of nearly five-hundred abused children that was resolved in a massive bankruptcy settlement in November 2008." Written by a former prosecutor, Oregon criminal defense attorney and California civil litigator with 22 years of courtroom experience, this factual account is stuffed with scary facts and reads quickly. (Length: 4,500+ words)
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