Of all of the ways to GRADUATE from 3HO, getting arrested for a felony should be the lowest on your list. Sure, the newspaper and television spots can be exciting, and when your children go swimming at the local pool other kids will say “Isn’t that your Dad on tv?”
For many years, my status in my 3HO community was that of a very good Sikh and son of Guru Gobind Singh. My wife and I had been in charge of 3HO Ashrams in the Hawaiian Islands and in Los Angeles. We believed that we were spiritual teachers and we led by example. We were honored at the largest Sikh Holiday in Los Angeles, Baisakhi Day, with the privilege to be the Guru’s Servants, Sevadars, and sit behind the Siri Guru Granth Sahib ji in front of the Sangat that had gathered from around the world. Through the years I had received many letters from my spiritual teacher Yogi Bhajan. He once remarked that he could not find the end to the depth of my heart and that he was very proud to call me his son.
Then this happened…
It was a Friday in downtown Monterey. It was before lunch, and my wife Gur Siri and I were catching up on our work in anticipation of the weekend. I glanced up to see a face flash into and then out of the doorway. That was strange. Then, four police officers and two District Attorney investigators barged into the office, blocking any escape path and limiting any personal space. They told Gur Siri to “step away from the computer, NOW!” and then they pushed her to the back of the office next to me. We were both scared to death and totally confused. “You know why we’re here and you’re not going to get away with it!” investigator Stryker barked as she ordered my arrest and I was hand cuffed and paraded through the building and into a waiting police squad car.
As I was being walked to the squad car, I heard the telephone ringing and the police stopping just long enough to listen – they wouldn’t let me answer the phone; they wanted to let the answering machine get it. It was Kirpal Singh calling from Los Angeles, and boy was he mad. Kirpal was completely unaware that he had an audience of police and DA investigators listening intently and hanging on every word he said. For some reason it was so still and quiet that you could have heard a pin drop. Kirpal was agitated and upset because he hadn’t received the mail that I was supposed to forward to him that day. This announcement sure caught the attention of the public servants. Four now stayed behind in my office while two drove me to the station.
After I was booked at the police station, I was led down a hallway that must have had twenty coats of paint on the walls. A steel door shut behind me and my escort. Our footsteps echoed as we walked on the concrete floor. When we arrived at my assigned cell, I was told to stand still as the handcuffs were removed from my wrists. The guard motioned to me to go inside the cell. I heard the cold steel door shut behind me.
I sat down on the bench in my cell, alone. I had never been in jail before. This was an experience I believed I could do without. I had plenty of time to think about how it was that I came to be in the Monterey, CA. city jail. It was just minutes ago that I was working in my downtown office. I went over all the morning’s events in my mind, and I really didn’t have a clue as to why I was there.
As I was sitting in the silence of my cell, I heard footsteps approaching and the rattle of keys. The guard asked me if I knew why I was there. I looked him in the eye, shook my head and told him that I had thought about it and I didn’t have a clue. I was hoping that perhaps he would let me know why I was there, but he just opened the door and told me to stand. I was free to go for now; Gur Siri had secured my bail. I saw her standing in the hallway and we embraced. We were very confused as to the events that had occurred over the last six hours. We drove home, stunned and in silence as our minds grasped to understand. Scared and unsure, we opened our front door and instinctively called to our children to make sure that they were ok. We told them that dad had been arrested and taken to and released from jail and now we were all confused. Gur Siri turned on the television to catch the evening news – nothing. My attorney (Mr. Rosen) called and asked if we had any idea as to why I was arrested because he didn’t have a clue. We told him that we were also without a clue.
Saturday morning came after a long sleepless night. After our morning routine, Gur Siri made some breakfast and turned on the television. There was a breaking local news story. The caption read that the kingpin of an international telemarketing fraud ring had been arrested, and then my picture appeared on the television screen. Suddenly we were all sitting down for this. I was being billed as the head guy, “kingpin,” in an international telemarketing fraud ring? This came as a shock to my family and the community. We were all stunned.
We all tell attorney jokes until we need one. That morning, I had an appointment with my defense attorney, Mr. Rosen. As my wife and I walked into his office, he asked me directly if I had any knowledge as to why I was under arrest. I answered “Only what I saw on TV today.” Mr. Rosen told me that he had also seen the tv news and that that was all he knew too. Then he asked me if I had any knowledge of or association with a man named Guru Jot Singh Khalsa. I answered that I knew of a Guru Jot Singh Khalsa and that he was Yogi Bhajan’s Foreign Secretary and Head of all East Coast Operations and took orders from and answered only to Yogi Bhajan, and that the reason I knew him by sight was because when he was around Yogi Bhajan, he was never more than six feet from his side. Guru Jot Singh was a secretive man of few words, almost mafia-like in his behavior.
Mr. Rosen then spun his computer screen around for me and my wife to see, and there on that screen was a shocking story: “UNITED STATES OF AMERICA V. GURU JOT SINGH KHALSA, United States District Court, Eastern District of Virginia” for importing into the United States 45 tons of marijuana, grenade launchers, and firearms with silencers, in addition to other serious counts including but not limited to money laundering.
My wife and I were in shock. We had more questions than answers. What had we stumbled into and where did this fit into what was going on in our lives now? This news came as a blow to our beliefs. We were sure that Yogi Bhajan would be embarrassed of such behavior and public embarrassment. Wow, what the hell is going on? This was a really bad experience getting worse. We left our attorney’s office and drove back to our house. Nothing like this had ever happened to us before.
The next morning, we went back to the office. Sometime during the morning, Gur Siri picked up the office telephone to make a call. She expected to hear a dial tone, but instead she heard a man’s voice talking to another man, saying, “You want to make sure that you connect the green and red pair of wires when you make your connection.” Our office phone was being tapped and our conversations were being monitored and recorded! We wondered what else they might be doing. We drove home knowing that our home phones were probably being tapped also. We didn’t sleep. We expected the SWAT team to crash through our windows in the middle of the night. We couldn’t watch any tv shows about crime because we thought that we would be invaded by law enforcement at any time just like on tv. We were traumatized.
In my eighteen years in the 3HO organization I had come to be respected in and out of the organization. But after my arrest, Yogi Bhajan distanced himself and turned his back to me. I received telephone calls from members who had known me for years and they insulted me on the phone. I called Yogi Bhajan, NOT AVAILABLE. I sent Yogi Bhajan a telegram, NOT AVAILABLE. I talked to his immediate personal secretary, NOT AVAILABLE. Then I started getting calls from RDSK, Yogi Bhajan’s personal attorney in Los Angeles. He told me that due to the current situation I would not be able to talk to Yogi Bhajan and that it was Yogi Bhajan’s personal request that I stay calm and report any and everything to RDSK, who then began calling me daily for information.
Well, that wasn’t going to work. I had an attorney and by this time I was trying to figure out who exactly I could trust and it was becoming clear who I COULDN’T trust. This was scary and getting scarier. Yogi Bhajan didn’t want to talk to me but he wanted me to be his eyes and ears into the District Attorney’s investigation of HIM!
Yogi Bhajan announced to the crowd at Summer Solstice 1991 that 3HO was under attack and that some of us were being tested and if we passed the test we would be rewarded with position and status within his sacred coveted inner circle. Oh boy, I could be just like Guru Jot Singh! I started to conduct my own investigation. Was I in a cult after all? Was my spiritual teacher really a crook! Everything he taught me and I believed in was being shattered.
One month before my trial I got a call from my attorney. The District Attorney wanted to sit down and have a talk, and after this talk there was a great possibility that all charges against me would be dropped. Scared to death, I met my attorney at his office. He drove me down to the DA’s office. I’ll never forget that day:
I’ll bet there were ten people sitting at that big table and all eyes were on me. The District Attorney told me that the Mafia had nothing over 3HO and then proceeded to lay it all out for me from A to Z. Did I hear murder? What was that! Murder!! Oh, my God I need some help here.
I was scared to death – my throat was dry, my ears were ringing, and my heart was pounding. My head was spinning; I wasn’t breathing. Was this a bad dream? Surely this wasn’t happening. Surely my ears were hearing things wrong. This was wrong. My heart wanted to scream. I felt the biggest betrayal I had ever known. I felt betrayed in the name of God & Guru.
I was shocked and horrified. The thought “Oh my God, what is Yogi Bhajan going to say when he hears all of this is going on? He’s going to be really pissed!” raced through my mind. And then the District Attorney meticulously traced the players in this crime wave to within one ‘hand shake’ of The Master Mind – Yogi Bhajan. All they wanted at that moment was to close the gap and they wanted to know if I was the man to do it.
Sue Stryker had figured out that I really had no idea in what I had gotten myself mixed up in. She knew that I was being used as a safety guy. I had been held out at arms-length by Kirpal Singh just to see if the cops were watching. Kirpal was practicing what Yogi Bhajan had taught him. Boy was I stupid!
Now the same judge who had been told that I was an international gangster was asked to dismiss ALL charges against me in the best interest of justice. The judge’s jaw dropped. He asked Susan Stryker to repeat what she had just said. She repeated it, the gavel dropped, and I was once again a free man. Free to go home and figure out what just happened. That was the best day of my life.
The DA’s staff were utterly stunned and confused to hear first-hand from a member of the cult that I had no prior knowledge that these crimes had been committed, that I was involved in the personal spiritual development afforded by the cult, and that Yogi Bhajan was successful in keeping the cult members in the dark as to his dastardly deeds. Did I say that I had been in a sheltered environment? If all you do is go to work, classes, lectures, and Gurudwara on Preuss Rd. then there’s no time left to view the darkness – Oh, I get it, that was the plan all along, wasn’t it!
My attorney had already told me about the 40-ton marijuana smuggling operation headed up by Guru Jot Singh, Yogi Bhajan’s lieutenant and the east coast head of 3HO. Now Ms. Stryker was telling me about a 3HO man who was found in the trunk of a rental car in the Eugene Airport, dead from a small caliber bullet to the third eye, execution style. She told me of a 3HO man found dead in Los Angeles. She told me something about a brief case. She also said there had been crimes of sexual misconduct with Yogi Bhajan and his secretaries.
She asked me if I knew a man named HJSK.
Yea, of course I knew this guy. He was the west coast equivalent of Guru Jot. He probably spent more time with Yogi Bhajan than Yogi Bhajan’s own wife did. This guy was nicknamed “The Shadow.” Yogi Bhajan didn’t do anything without this guy. Ms. Stryker told me that investigating HJSK utterly disgusted her. She followed a money trail in which he embezzled all of his living mother’s money, bled his own mother dry, and left her to struggle. She told me all of this because her entire investigation stopped one hand-off away from Yogi Bhajan. All roads, paths, trails, money etc. stopped one hand from Yogi Bhajan.
Ms. Stryker was throwing out bits and pieces of organized crime activities that had occurred within this “organized spiritual mafia” to see if I had any memories. She wanted someone to close the gap between Yogi Bhajan and all of that crime. She was hoping that I could be that link for her. I explained to her that in 18 years I had no association with the “family businesses,” I was a guy who taught yoga, worked by the sweat of my brow, and shared what I had with others. I was involved in being a Sikh, in the religious aspect only.
Disappointed, she let me go.
After all this, my family went through several years of therapy. Therapists were completely shocked when we told them our stories, and we were treated for Post Traumatic Disorder. I began to dig deeper into the hidden dark closet of Yogi Bhajan’s world of 3HO, Sikh Dharma Brotherhood, Siri Singh Sahib Corporation, and the many business organizations that were under his immediate control.
One night an old friend and ex-member of 3HO dropped by our house. It was good to see him. Our history went back fourteen years to our time together in the early 3HO years in Hawaii. We reminisced about Hawaii and Los Angeles, the good old days. I told him of my arrest and how we had come to leave the cult. And then he started to cry. Yes, he was glad to see us, but he was carrying a big burden in his heart. He told me why he left the cult. He was not involved, but he personally knew the women who were raped, held down for Yogi Bhajan’s pleasure, and urinated on in sexual domination. He couldn’t stand it, and it horrified him that this man who claimed to be his spiritual teacher felt that it was all right to behave this way.
My Limited Involvement with the Canadian Lottery Scam:
At one point, my attorney, Mr. Rosen, asked me if I knew a Kirpal Singh. Yes, I did. Kirpal Singh was a 3HO businessman living in a nice home with his wife and child in very close proximity to Yogi Bhajan and the offices of the “Inner circle”. (Yogi Bhajan had a very tight, small group of trusted individuals whom he kept close to his vest – they had a mystique around them and they were extremely secretive about their operations. After all – they were Yogi Bhajan’s chosen ones. And Kirpal Singh was one of these men.)
Whenever my wife and I visited Los Angeles, Kirpal Singh and his wife were our hosts and they were gracious ones at that. While we were visiting, Kirpal told me that he was involved in a separate project under the direct daily guidance by Yogi Bhajan and no other. Kirpal asked me if I wanted to go for a ride in his new Lexus Sedan that he had purchased in New Mexico. (Mind you Lexus had just arrived on the automobile scene and was quite the car.) On that visit, we socialized and went to Gurudwara together.
On my third visit to Los Angeles for a Sikh holiday and while a guest at Kirpal Singh’s house, he asked me for a favor. He was engaged in a business that had headquarters in Canada, and he needed to reorganize it and move it to Los Angeles. He had a lot going on and wondered if I might be able to help him out for a week or two: would I be able to receive his mail, gather it up, and forward it to him? He reiterated that job would be for no more than two weeks. I was familiar of how hard it is to get anything done in Los Angeles and especially in a timely manner, so I agreed to help him. It sounded harmless enough.
When I told my attorney about my temporary job with Kirpal Singh, it caught his attention. He asked me, “Just exactly what is in the mail that you receive and forward to Kirpal in Los Angeles?” I told him there were thank you letters and personal checks from individuals that sounded pretty darn happy. That REALLY caught my attorney’s attention.
It turned out that Kirpal Singh was running a lottery scam in Canada. He would contact elderly citizens of Canada to notify them that they were Millionaire Winners in the Canadian Lottery. People were told that just as soon as he (Kirpal) received the US taxable amount that they were being assessed for their winnings, then they would receive their Canadian Lottery winning check.
As the District Attorney’s office was preparing a case against Kirpal, they discovered that he and his accomplices had bilked hundreds of elderly victims. Some of those elderly victims had sent their entire life savings to Kirpal. Others had Alzheimer’s Disease and couldn’t recall anything. Two DIED from heart attacks after being told they had been swindled and had lost everything.
After my arrest, while I was in jail and the DA’s staff were in my office, the phone rang. It was Kirpal Singh calling from Los Angeles. Two voices met for the first time on the telephone that fateful day. They would soon meet in person. They went to Kirpal’s house but just missed him, so they arrested his business partner. Stryker followed the money, which took her to a bank in Beverly Hills. Kirpal was in that bank but he didn’t have a turban on and he was in civilian clothes. He was sitting down with his back to the door. He had just cleared out his savings deposit boxes and had called for an armed escort out of the bank. Unknown to each other, Ms. Stryker entered the bank and asked the manager if he knew of a Kirpal Singh who had an account there.
The manager was glad to help and let her know that, as a matter of fact, Mr. Khalsa was sitting at a table across from her with his back to her. Needless to say, the Monterey District Attorneys and the US Marshalls gave Kirpal Singh that armed escort out of the bank that he wanted. They just didn’t let him take the shoebox with $350,000 in cash with him. Papers found on him indicated that he was fleeing immediately to Yogi Bhajan’s Ranch in New Mexico to hand the shoe box to Yogi Bhajan. He was also going to NM to be protected by GTSK, legal counsel to Yogi Bhajan, who was strategically employed in the New Mexico Attorney General’s office.
While in Los Angeles, Sue Stryker and team confiscated every file cabinet of every business associated with Yogi Bhajan. Yogi Bhajan ordered all members of the inner circle to evacuate the scene immediately and seek refuge in New Mexico. Get the hell out of town and don’t talk to anyone, come straight here. You’ve never seen people move so fast in your life. Sikhs were throwing boxes of records into their cars and leaving town immediately as ordered. They thought they were under attack and in a way they were.
Letters poured in to the District Attorney’s office from cult members, informing the District Attorney of Kirpal Singh’s fine upstanding character.
At one point, I asked Kirpal what he thought about all of this. He told me he got the idea from the Los Angeles Times Sunday edition, which ran a full feature article describing in detail how to do it. Kirpal thought it sounded like a feasible idea, so he ran it by Yogi Bhajan, who said: “I have here in my hand a dollar bill. If you snatch or grab this bill from my hand it is wrong. If I give you the dollar bill, then you have it fair and square. If you can talk me out of the dollar bill, then you can have it and you have earned it.”
In other words, if I use sleight of hand and you get swindled, it’s just too bad. Well, you should have known better! Maybe next time you’ll know better!
I was furious! I have grandparents and parents! These victims had children and grandchildren. I was embarrassed and ashamed to be remotely associated with people who conducted themselves this way. I was hurt and confused. Part of me just couldn’t understand it. I was a Sikh! This was my teacher. This was the man who taught me all about God & Guru. This was the man whom I protected with my life!
GurSiri’s Experience (GurBir’s wife)
My experiences in 3ho were many and varied. GurBir and I were married in Hawaii and lived there for our first six years in 3ho – from 1975-1981. Yogi Bhajan would come to Hawaii about three to four times a year at least. My relationship with him was “close” in the sense that I related to him as a father figure. When I married my husband he told me, “From this day forward I am your father. I will always see to it that you and your children are provided for. I will always protect you and take care of you.” Being young and naive, I believed him. I only thought of him as a “spiritual father,” nothing else.
However, once while visiting him in L.A., Yogi Bhajan called his secretaries into the room with us and said to them, ” She can see me whenever she likes. She does not need an appointment and you are to let her see me when she asks to.” As a result, there was never a time that I called LA or visited there, that I wasn’t given full access to him on a moment’s notice. Then, that changed big time when GurBir was falsely accused of being involved in the telemarketing scam that Kirpal Sing and Yogi Bhajan supposedly were involved in. I went from full access to not being able to even leave a message, literally overnight.!!! That is when I finally woke up!!
Now, looking back, I feel totally protected by a higher power. I only related to him as “my teacher” and only once can I remember feeling as if he was projecting some sort of inappropriate energy toward me.
I have many theories as to why Yogi Bhajan never tried anything with me sexually or otherwise. I can say that I witnessed a number of strange situations which at the time I rationalized. Looking back, these incidents validate his corruption and misconduct. At the time I could not or would not see it. Denial is a great protection until we are capable of handling the truth.
A few weeks before the telemarketing scam was exposed, Yogi Bhajan invited me personally to accompany him to HJSK’s house in LA after an evening lecture. That evening, I sat with him as he opened the gift I had presented to him. It was a statue of Kwan Yin, the Goddess of Mercy. This caught him off guard. He could no longer look at me and did not relate to me the rest of the evening. Now I know he thought I had busted him!! Really, he was being busted by the universe!!
GurBir and I made several attempts after the telemarketing scam to communicate with Yogi Bhajan, and each time we were told that we were no longer allowed to speak with him. Nirinjan Kaur told me she was worried I would yell at him and because of that she wasn’t going to let me see him. She said it was her job to protect him. GurBir and I have never seen or heard from him since. Overnight we went from full and complete access to him to being completely ostracized.