Behind the Bastards - Part One: The Moonies Are So Much Worse Than You Could Possibly Imagine

Episode Date: March 8, 2022

Mia Wong is joined by Robert Evans to discuss the many crimes of Reverend Sun Myung Moon and his family. FOOTNOTES: https://u1lib.org/book/5533978/0e7f3c https://u1lib.org/book/683849/cb6752 https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.chicagotribune.com%2Finvestigations%2Fchi-0604sushi-1-story-story.html http://www.tparents.org/Library/Unification/Publications/Smm-Org/works_communism.html http://www.tparents.org/Library/Unification/Books/Messiah2/Messiah-2.pdf https://newrepublic.com/article/115512/unification-church-profile-fall-house-moon#footnote-115512-3 https://www.minnpost.com/politics-policy/2012/09/remembering-former-rep-don-frasers-battle-moonies/ https://www.irishtimes.com/news/moonies-accused-of-involvement-in-drugs-1.1161827 https://u1lib.org/book/2483311/694fff https://www.businessinsider.com/donald-trump-speaks-at-moonies-911-event-praises-unification-church-2021-9 https://freedomofmind.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/fraserport.pdf https://www.nytimes.com/1998/05/02/business/worldbusiness/IHT-reverend-moons-group-wants-to-talk-investment.html https://www.nytimes.com/1999/11/28/world/suspicion-following-sun-myung-moon-to-brazil.html https://www.deseret.com/1999/11/28/19477721/moon-sees-a-new-garden-of-eden-in-brazil-br-but-unification-founder-s-proposal-spurs-opposition https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/heartbreak-and-rage-ten-years-under-sun-myung-moon_k-gordon-neufeld/1821376/#edition=3308299&idiq=35159710 https://culteducation.com/group/1277-unification-church/23755-rev-moon-son-made-gun-.html https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/03/01/589808670/ar-15s-are-biblical-rod-of-iron-at-pennsylvania-church https://www.nytimes.com/1990/04/19/style/chronicle-983090.html https://foreignpolicy.com/2012/09/04/the-strange-life-of-reverend-sun-myung-moon/ https://www.npr.org/2012/09/02/159032325/rev-moon-a-savior-to-some-lived-a-big-dream%20%20 https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2005/washington-times-editor-and-wife-promote-radical-right-agenda https://www.npr.org/2010/02/17/123805954/unification-church-woos-a-second-generation https://books.google.com/books?id=AabywLOknbsC&pg=PA59&dq=fraser+kcia#v=onepage&q=fraser%20kcia&f=false https://www.nytimes.com/1976/12/29/archives/sun-myung-moon-is-criticized-by-religious-leaders-jewish-patrons.html https://u1lib.org/book/656675/0cceef http://content.time.com/time/   Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What is it? It's behind the bastards. That's what it is. So what are you complaining about? Come on. Come on inside behind the bastards' town and hear about bad people. I'm Robert Evans. This is my podcast. How did this become a town? What are you doing?

It's always been a town. What are you doing? It's always been a town. What are you doing? It's like Waco. I knew it. I knew it. I knew it. A nice safe little town where the ATF never rambles by. All right. Well, I feel like that's all the work I should do today. Sophie, do you have any way for me to not do anything but us to have a show this week?

Do you have any ideas? I don't have a way for you to not do anything, but I do trust... Dan, put in a door opening sound effect here. No. Oh my gosh, Chris. Hello. Me. I'm here. I'm here to make sure you don't have to do any work by cooing the podcast once again. Thank God. Yeah.

Because let me tell you, I'm lazy. All right. Let's get started. Robert, how do you... What are we going to learn about today? How do you feel about the Thompson submachine gun? Oh my gosh. Of the submachine guns. It's a pretty good one. If I was going to fire into a bunch of gangsters at close range in like a parking garage, or if I was going to shoot into a bunch of Nazis in a trench at close range, Thompson submachine gun would be high up on my list of things to do that with.

Yeah. Unfortunately, you can't make the Thompson submachine gun really in the U.S. anymore, but there's a semi-automatic variant. You could... Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The semi-automatic variant is the rights to produce this is owned by a company called Car Arms. It sure are. Yeah. Car. They make a lot of lady branded guns, like little pink carry guns and stuff too. I didn't realize they were the ones who owned the only Thompson submachine gun semi-pad. Yep. They also...

They famously also made a gun called the Car MK-40 semi-automatic pocket rocket, which I'm mostly talking about because the pocket rocket just seems like an incredible name for a gun to me. Yeah. Yeah. This is a weapon. They make this pivot in the 90s when you start seeing some gun control regulations. And one of the things they do is they make this gun and it becomes... It's a compact 9mm handgun. Well, the MK-40 is a 40mm handgun.

A 40 of Smith & Wesson. Is it? Okay. This is where me not knowing guns. Maybe there are other versions, but yeah, the one I'm looking at right now is a 40. Yeah, that's true. It's called the MK-40. 40 Smith & Wesson is a large caliber for such a small gun because it's a tiny little piece. They have ankle hold keys for it. Well, the NYPD just loves this gun. This is their favorite gun.

The police department allows them to use it on duty. And they call the Car MK-40 the Mooney gun because it was designed by one Justin Moon, the son of one Reverend Sun Young Moon. And that is who we're talking about today. Oh boy. Sun Young Moon and his many, many, many, many... And I can't emphasize enough, she has like 20 of them sons and also daughters. Great. And one of them's making...

What I'm guessing is a really high caliber handgun for scared middle class moms who don't want to carry something heavy but want to be able to shoot what they imagine to be a six and a half foot tall mugger with a big bullet. Yeah, it's great. And we are in the next part of this episode. We are going to find out a lot more about the guy who makes this gun and who owns this company right now. And it is not good. It is very bad. Fucking dope.

And yeah, I just looked it up, those of you at home. If you're finding... It certainly seems like all of the semi-automatic Thompson submachine guns I'm able to find right now are made by Auto Ordnance, which was bought out in 1999 by Salo Enterprises, Inc., which is the parent company of Car Arms. And welcome to another theme of this episode, which is there are approximately one trillion front organizations and sub-organizations. Sure, yeah.

And they are founded by a man named Sun Yong Moon, who was born on January 6th, 1920. And hold the date January 6th in your mind. We will be coming back to that next episode. I've never heard of anything important happening on January 6th. That's bizarre, Chris. Now you freak me out. Yeah, remember, it's the Messiah's birthday. This is the day Messiah was born.

It's like it would be like something significant happening on the day after September 10th. I just can't get it in my head. But okay. So put a pin in this thought. Right now, it is 1920, it is... Okay, I apologize to the Korean people for what I'm about to do to their language. Pyongyang Pukdo. Oh boy.

He's born in a village. Yeah, a small village in what is now North Korea. And this... It's okay, Chris, as angry as the Koreans are. I don't think their yelling will get louder than the yelling of English people. Pists that I can never get any of their street names. Correct. The problem is though that I have respect for the Korean people.

I have no respect for the Anglos. And the Anglos can find me on Twitter at I write okay. Yep, that's exactly your Twitter account. And I will explain how it should be pronounced like Esther. But anyway, continue, Chris. Now, Moon is from a pretty middle-class family in this sort of rural farming village. And, you know, but what middle-class means is that he doesn't starve very much. But this is...

That's good. This is still a terrible place to grow up. Because, you know, 1920 Korea, and for out of childhood, this place is occupied by Japan. People are being like enslaved and dragged off to go fight in the wars. There's this mass campaign to force everyone to speak Japanese and so on and so forth. So it's not a great place to grow up. And... Yeah, it's a rough time to be in Korea.

Yeah, it's pretty bad. Now, Moon is a weird kid. He's incredibly stubborn. And I'm just going to read how he describes himself in his book as a peace-loving global citizen. When I was a child, I had the nickname Day Cryer. I earned this nickname because once I started to cry, I wouldn't stop for the entire day. When I cried, it was so loud that people would think something terrible had happened. People sleeping in bed would come out to see what was going on.

Also, I didn't just cry sitting still. I would jump around the room, injuring myself and creating an uproar. Sometimes I would bleed. I had this intense personality even when I was young. So this is a weird kid. So definitely like some parents who are pretty sleep deprived. I think we can... Yeah, and I think, you know, one of the sort of things with this early childhood is that

it's very hard to find information that isn't from the church. And I think part of why he's writing this is that a lot of his sort of early history has been sort of propagandized to sort of fall in line with church doctrine. And I think this is one of those things that I thought was also just like the fact that he's calling himself Day Cryer. It's very weird, but you know, one of the sort of church sacraments of the unification churches he's going to found in a little bit is, you know, crying, dreaming prayer. And you can see this sort of like he's already like he's projecting himself back into the story.

And part of the other, like how this plays out is that when he's 10 years old, his family converts to Presbyterianism and they are... Then what had they been before? I couldn't find any records of it. My guess is they were doing some kind of like local Korean religion because there's a lot of... Yeah, I don't know much about that. But not Christian probably. As best I can tell, not Christian though.

There's not really records of it. But when they convert to Christianity, they go hard. This family is very religious. Moon is incredibly religious. And six years later on Easter morning, Moon claims that Jesus showed up to have a chat with him. Now, Jesus tells him that Jesus had in fact failed to save humanity because people didn't believe in him. And that Moon had to go finish the work that Jesus started.

Wow, it's like a reverse Luke Skywalker. Yeah, it's pretty wild. And you know, unlike Luke, Moon is like, no. Like, no, I will not do this. Like, this is no. And so Jesus spends a significant amount of time just like wearing him down over like the course of days. Wow, that's quite an ego when you're like, yeah, Jesus wanted me for this thing. Like, you know, my I had work was really heavy this week and like I hadn't been able to get to the gym.

So I didn't want to put that off anymore. And like, wow. Wow, what a what an in-demand dude. It's pretty impressive. You know, there's some question here as to like whether this is something that Moon wouldn't believe when he was 16 or if he's created it later. And I'm not really sure. My guess is that he is he's back protecting this because he stays in the Presbyterian church for like another decade, even though Jesus has showed up to him and like proclaimed in the Messiah.

What we do know is that Moon went to Seoul to study electrical engineering, where he and his followers claim that he joins the Korean independence movement and gets arrested for it. And this is another one of those things where like almost every source will repeat it, but they're all going off of his church. So it's sort of unclear. I will say, though, Moon is very, very good at getting people pissed off at him and getting arrested. So it is entirely possible he managed to do this because he's going to get arrested like six more times. And you know, so after this, he spent some time in college in Japan during the war.

And while he's doing this, he decides he doesn't want to do electrical engineering. He wants to become a missionary. But he runs into a roadblock, which is that the Presbyterian church expels him for heresy in 1946 because, you know, he's going around claiming he's the Messiah, which is. And man, it's not the easiest thing to get kicked out of the Presbyterian church for heresy. Like one of the harder churches to be heretical against, I would suggest. Based on my knowledge of Presbyterianism. I mean, I will say the.

Not a lot of heresy goes on within the Presbyterian church. I will say the. I think the Korean branch is like slightly like Korean, Korean like Presbyterianism, I think is somewhat more intense than like American Presbyterianism. But like, yeah, it's, you know, you have to go around claiming that you are the Messiah, basically for them to be like, I mean, yeah. And if you are, if your whole thing is Jesus, some guy being like, oh, yeah, that's me, basically is going to folks might have an issue with that.

I get it. I get it. You know, I understand the concerns they have. Okay. So he makes a decision that is somewhat baffling to me, which is, okay, so he decides he's going to, you know, he's going to, he's going to go find his own church. But in order to do this, he goes to Pyongyang, North Korea, which is by this point under communist control. Is that easier? Then I'm guessing it's easier because like now you would have to like,

smuggle yourself, right? You would have to break a number of laws in both countries to get in. I mean, this is like right after the war, everything sort of, it's much easier than it's going to be. But, you know, he does this and. But also still probably not like a normal decision. And the communists immediately look at this like weird Christian cult preacher who shows up and are, they immediately go, this guy's a South Korean spy.

And according to Moon, they like torture him and leave him for dead in the prison yard. Now the funny part about this is that this is the only part of Moon's entire career, which he is not a South Korean spy. Oh, okay. So they suspect him for being a spy for the only period of time. Yeah, that's fun. That's funny. It's sort of amazing.

And, you know, and he, this is another thing. So he, he claims that he's tortured in prison like a lot and it's possible. I don't know. I mean, North Korean prisons are not great, but he. Yeah. South Korean ones probably aren't either then at that point. Yeah. About half of the story is about how just like an absolute like a horrifying

basic his military dictatorship South Korea is for like this entire period. Yeah. For a lot for a decent chunk of the post war period, you're doing better if you're when you are down south. Now, so, so, you know, his story about this is that like his followers like come get him and like nursing back to health. And I have no idea if that's true. What I do know is that like two years later, he gets arrested again for quotes,

advocating chaos in society and gets sent to a North Korean prison camp. That is a dope thing to get arrested for. That is, that is a sick thing to get arrested for. And I would brag about that fucking rap sheet. That's the coolest thing you can you can do time. It's pretty sweet. I will say the person to get sent to like sucks, like they're they're filling fertilizer bags, but like, you know, they're they're they're they're handling a bunch of just like

raw ammonium nitrate. And that that's a bad time. But luckily, instead of serving at his five years, he's bailed out when UN forces took control of the president 1950 during the Korean War. And so they release him and he flees on foot with some of his followers to push on ahead of the communist advance in 1951. And this is where in a tiny shack, he begins he begins to write the well, OK, sorry, I should make this clear.

OK, he begins to write Divine Principle. There is another book called The Divine Principle, which is a separate thing. They are not the same thing. This is a source of enormous confusion. Now, Divine Principle is it's called the Bible of the Unification Church. It's slightly more complicated than that. I mean, so the Unification Church, which is which is founding in this period, it's like they have the regular Bible and they have their own interpretations of it.

And then they have Divine Principle, which is the thing that he wrote. That's like they're like higher holy texts. But then there's also a bunch of other holy texts. But this is this is sort of the main one. He starts writing it. And there's there was an amazing story about the writing of this from a later church preacher named Kevin McCarthy. Even God said no to Father three times when he presented the Divine Principle.

Father told God bullshit. God knew he was right. OK, wow. So this this guy is this is something new. You know, I've done a lot of people who talked to God or Jesus. This is the first cult leader I've heard of who's having like a back and forth where he's like given as good as he's getting. He's like, wait, no, that doesn't make any sense.

You fucking crazy? No, sir. No, no, that's not how this is going to work. He's basically ordering God around. He's ordering God around because like, look, we stand an employee who's who's not afraid to talk back to management, you know, this is this is the finally humans are unionizing against God. It's incredible.

And you know, so in 1954, he finally was able to get the soul and he starts this new church, which is called the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World War II. And this is this is what's known today as the Unification Church or it's the cult called the Mooneys. Now, what's interesting about this church, though, is in the 1950s, it is a very different cult than it is in the 60s or 70s. And the way it's different is that there's a bunch of extremely weird sex rituals

where Moon has these like orgies to like purify the women in the cult because they're like the he has this whole sort of theological thing about sin that will get into a second. But basically this thing is like, well, because you have sin from Eve and demons and you can only be purified by like having sex with me. And Moone starts forcing, you know, people to do this. And one of these people is named Annie Choi, who joins the cult in the 1950s. Now, Moone starts to force her to join these rituals when she is 17. And Oh Boy is burying 15 to 17 year olds a huge theme of this episode.

It's not great. Oh boy. Big, big pedophiles. Now, Annie got pregnant from Moone's abuse, but the second most important member of Moone's operation, a guy named Bohi Park, who is a Colonel. Well, I think at this point he's a Lieutenant Colonel, but he's going to become a Colonel in the Korean Army, covers up the pregnancy. And then literally once Annie has the kid, Bohi Park literally steals the baby from her

arms and then it raises the child as his own, passing it off as like his own child because they don't want it, you know, they don't want to get out that Moone, you know, had this kid. So he's doing a little bit of an El Ron Hubbard there. He's Hubbard-ing a bit. That's good. That's good. Now, Annie describes how Bohi Park's wife like brings her some seaweed soup after

again, they steal her baby and his wife's just like, yeah, here's some soup. And Annie, you know. Well, it's better than not giving her soup and stealing her baby. Like on the moral chart of the universe, stealing baby, no soup, worse than stealing baby, but soup. It's still pretty bad. Well, yeah. I mean, they're stealing the baby.

Yeah. And Annie's description of it was that she couldn't eat it and she quote, she said, I just sat there crying with my tears falling in the pot. Now, Annie, yeah. That's the downside of soup as a gift after a baby is after. Now, Annie follows Park to the U.S. to stay near her son, Sam. And when Sam is 13, Annie tells him the truth that, you know, Sam is actually Annie and Moon's son.

And the Moon family like does not take this well. Moom's oldest son, Steve, who, well, okay, so oldest legitimate son, Steve, we're gonna be talking a lot about later, points a gun at Sam and threatens to rape and kill Annie. So. Oh. Yeah. This is going great. Yeah, Steve is a real, real bad guy.

We will get into more of his shit later because it's bad. And, you know, and the sort of consequence of this for the Moon cult is that Moon decides to just retool it because this whole sex cult thing is not working and it's not working because, you know, okay, well, there's all these kids now that, you know, you have to have your lieutenant steal from the mother, like the arms of the mother and so it's like, okay, so this, this is bad for me. Yeah, that's not great. Where'd he get the gun?

Is it easy in South Korea to get a gun? Well, I saw, but this is later on and by this point, they're in the US. Yeah. And I will say, though, like Moom's people, like they have a look into this more than a second, but they have a lot of correct connections with the Korean army, like Bohi Park is in the army. So they have like a much easier time getting weapons than like a normal person would just because they're so heavily connected to the army.

Yeah, that's great. So a major part of this cult's belief is that Jesus had been sent by God to create a new Adam and Eve family. And so Moom sets out to find a, quote, true mother to finish what Jesus started. And he finds that true mother after an exhaustive search by his followers in the form of the 17-year-old daughter of his cook, Haq Jahan. Oops. That's not great.

He immediately marries and keep in mind Moom is 40 when he's marrying the 17-year-old. Yeah. It's... Yeah. Yeah. And this is the... Yeah. It's also not great that my first thought when you said 17 was like, well, that is on the

older side for cult leaders. Yeah. Yeah. So at this point, this is where the unification church stops being the sort of weird, sex cult thing that was before. And it starts looking like the modern unification church. And this is when Moom conducts the first of the mass wedding ceremonies that the church becomes famous for, in which Moom will just marry off sometimes thousands of couples

How many folks are there in this cult at this time? Do we have any idea? It's hard to track, especially in the early period. I think in 1960, there's like a few thousands, although the numbers of this are going to be extremely elusive all the time, partially just because like... So its biggest branch is going to be in Japan. And the numbers on that is no one has any idea, basically. So yeah, this is a constant source of contention, just like how many people are in it.

A little bit of a black box, gotcha. Now, this wedding ceremony, these sort of mass weddings that they're doing are very weird. And to get into why they're so weird, we need to talk a bit about what the unification church actually believes. Now, the church is a mixture of essentially, it's mostly based on Christianity. But it has this sort of mixture of Buddhists, like Confucian, Taoists, and also sort of like local shamanic, Korean religious traditions that are all sort of mixed into it.

And the main difference from Christianity, other than Jesus being betrayed and not completing God's plan, is that they believe that Eve cheated on Adam with Lucifer before they could be married, and that this is what the story of the fall is. And it's really funny too, because they have these weird interpretations, the Bible will... They'll say things like, okay, they'll do this like hyper-scientific literalism, well, they'll be like, okay, so it is in fact impossible for the Garden of Eden story to have happened because snakes can't talk. And they're like, so clearly this is a metaphor, right?

Because the snake can't talk. Oh, wow. That's an interesting line to draw. Like, well, yeah, there's a god with angels who's got magical powers, and there's a holy ghost and stuff. But like, talking snakes, come on. It's an incredible line to have. It's like believing Star Wars as a documentary, except for when you see a rookie, and you're

like, well, that couldn't happen. A big hairy man. Yeah, it's pretty incredible. And now one of the sort of consequences of this story about the fall is that, you know, so the fall is basically about like having sex before marriage, and you know, the consequence of this is that humans all now live outside of God's law and live in the quote, unprincipled realm with a certain Satan. And this gives the church a incredible laser-like focus on the traditional family and defeating

what Moon calls free sex or sex outside of marriage. And it's weird. Cool. It's a weirdly straight-laced cult, especially for something that like literally started as a sex cult. It turns into this thing where there's no drugs, there's no sex, there's no alcohol, except there's one exception to this, which is the church has a sacrament that you drink at like weddings and some events, it's a bunch of alcohol mixed together.

And it may or may not- Ew. What alcohols? I don't know. See, there's a whole debate about this, because this thing might have Moon's blood in it. And yeah, so the actual composition of this is a secret. Like high-level members of the church don't actually know whether or not there's blood in it.

Like they have different opinions, and like sometimes they contradict each other. Moon has both said that it literally is his blood, and then also that there's not his blood in it. So there's a whole running debate as to what is in this. That's rad. You know what, that critical support, that's cool, that's, among the cult leader flexes I've come across, that's one of the better ones. So yeah.

I'm not gonna tell you if you're drinking my blood. You might be. Yeah, we've got- What's important is you drink whatever I tell you to. That's what's critical. So yeah, we have Schrodinger's vampirism. But the other thing about this is that this is a very conservative sort of Christian cult, but there's also this like new edge thing to it, a new edge, like sort of edge to it.

And you know, for example, they call God's existence in the universe the universe, the prime universal force. And I'm gonna read a passage from the divine principles not to be confused with divine principle. These are two separate things. The Moody's won't get extremely mad if you confuse them, even though they have basically the same. Eh, okay.

So in this golden age, the highly advanced scientific achievement of the Occident will serve to make the eternal life of the new world convenient and pleasant. And the highly advanced religious and metaphysical achievement of the Orient will provide the philosophy of the new age. Thus, the new age will see perfect harmony between the cultures of East and West. The one unified world will be fulfilled horizontally between the Occident and the Orient and also vertically between the spiritual and physical worlds. In this unified world, all nations will live in harmonious association with all others

and share a common religious philosophy under God's direct guidance. This new age will no longer be regarded as the Christian era and said it will be known as the cosmic era with the adoption of a cosmic calendar. Okay. And you know, this is, yeah, but I think this is, you know, like, this is like one of Moon's strokes of genius because it lets him play both sides of the religious aisle for, you know, for when they're trying to convert Christians, they play up the sort of Christian family value side.

And this lets them get in with the sort of the Christian, the sort of Christian family values. When they're dealing with hippies, they play up the sort of new age-y stuff. It's genius. It's this, they've synthesized sort of by accident, but they've synthesized basically all of the sort of political and cultural trends of like the 60s all the way through the 80s. And yeah, the other sort of important aspects of this faith is that everyone is born with

like sin from a bunch of sources. I mean, there's a lot of different like things that give you sin. One of which is like, you know, you have Eve's sin. And so in order to get rid of Eve's sin for, you know, like doing the fall, during your wedding ceremony, the wife and the groom take terms like beating each other with a giant stick, which what, what is this? What kind of what is this? I don't know.

It's just a stick. And it's like, it's just, it's just a stick. Stenny stick. Yeah. It's kind of, I think it's kind of baseball bat-esque. It's great. They beat each other with this. And Robert, do you know who else will be, will beat you with a baseball bat?

Um, I mean, the Texas State Juvenile Justice System, they could sponsor us. That's the thing that might happen. Yeah. That could happen. Fingers crossed. God willing, you know, if Christ is with us as he is with Reverend Moon, that will happen. And yeah, we will have products and services eternally. Amen.

During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations, and you know what, they were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Next season, we'll take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse.

And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good and bad ass way, he's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC.

What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost.

This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science.

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus?

It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ah, yeah. We're back. We're being whacked by seal sticks. We've been a bad influence on them. Honestly, most of the weddings I've been to would have been improved if the bride and

groom had to hit each other with a bat. I'm just going to say it, that would make most weddings better. For the spectators at least. What? No. Especially if you can hit the priest too. Yeah, unfortunately you don't get to do that. What?

It's just you hit your wife and your wife hits you. Oh. Well, okay. Unfortunately, the sin stuff gets less fun from here because you also have to pay like Judas' sin, which means that in order to get married, you have to pay $120 to the church because you have to repay 30-fold Judas' sin of the 30 coins. Rich, are you kidding me? Are you kidding me?

That's what makes it okay. That's what God is like. I'm so pissed about this thing that I set up an engineer to knew was going to happen. Centuries before I ever did it. To be fair. I'm so angry about it that you got to pay me. To be fair, in their version of the Judas Betrayal, God's plan is not for Jesus to die.

God's plan is for Jesus to like found a family and then what happens is that he gets betrayed and that that's the origin of that sin. All right. So it makes slightly more sense. You know what? That makes more sense. That does make more sense. Good on you guys.

The $120 price, it's also 120 yen, it's also 100, it's just 120 of whatever the denomination of currency is. Yeah, whatever currency it is. They're also converting it from like gold, Roman gold coins, it's like, it's great. Well yeah, it was 30 pieces of like silver or was it gold? Yeah. Because I'm going to guess 30 silver coins, whatever size they were back then, is probably like a couple grand today.

I always had the feeling in the Bible that like that wasn't nothing, you know, that was like a pretty good, pretty good pay for giving Jesus up. Yeah. So you have that sin and there's also other sin. So there's demonic influence in your like historical bloodline, right? And you know what? They're not far off. According to a random Wikipedia page on 30 pieces of silver, depending on the size of

coin and the value, the type of silver and whatnot that went into it, approximately 91 to $441. Well, you're not paying for a 30-fold then, though. Someone else said 90 and 3,000. I don't think anyone knows, Chris. I don't think anybody has any idea how much. Yeah. Okay.

Please continue. So you also have this demonic sin and with the demonic sin, you have to pay the church $1,400 per generation of your family to purge the bloodline from sin. That's, it's nice that they went with the flat rate because like some families, like I'm Italian, my family has a lot. You go back a couple of generations. It's way more sins than the present generations, especially British people. What a deal the British are getting.

If your fucking grandpa was with the East India Company or whatever, you're like, holy shit, $1,400 ain't bad. You know, the thing is, you joke about this, one of the things that they do is like they get Japanese women to like, like pay the church like enormous amounts of indulgences as like a like payment for the comfort women in Korea. So like they legitimately doing this. Oh, that's, that's messed. I mean, yeah, that's a really complicated kind of horrible too.

Like you really have to sit down and think out the permutations of how that's a bad fit. It's worse than even sounds now for reasons that we will get into in a bit. Yeah. I don't like that very much. The more you look at this, the more the church starts to look like a pyramid scheme, right? Because in order to get married, you have to be part of the church for three years, convert three people to join the church, pay them money, and then moon or like later, originally it's just moon will pick who you marry.

But later on, like there's like, there's like church committees that will select who you're going to marry. And you know, you see how this process works, right? In order to get married, you have to bring more people into the church. And then in order to, you know, so that's the first process you bring in your new marks and then your new marks start paying the church. So what you have in order to get married, you know, the whole thing of this, the church's whole ideologies, you have to get married and that like, if you're not married, you

can't see the kingdom of God and you can't have sex. So this whole cult is designed as a sort of pyramid scheme to like, just bring more people in and pay them more money. And so, you know, that's one way they bring people in. The other way is through, you know, sort of like classic cult recruitment stuff. So they have hundreds of front groups and, you know, they'll have like a farm and they'll be like, hey, come to this farm, it'll be a chill time. And so, you know, they do these things where they make everyone chant constantly and they

constantly move everyone back and forth between activities and suddenly there's this like enormous pressure to conform. And you know, when you try to leave, they'll be like, oh, well, we don't have any buses that can take you back to the city right now. So it's really inconvenient for us when you stay for like a couple more days and they'll, you know, they sort of, they, they, they a lot of times like, so they, the way it usually works is they'll assign like a member of the cult that's like your person and they follow you around all the time and you like to become friends with them.

Yeah. That's a pretty common kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah. And then when you try to leave like your friend, like emotionally blackmills you into stay late into staying and more, more, more of the, more of the hits, they're playing the hits now, the old, the best, the top 40 of being a cult. This is pretty classic cult stuff, but the scale, the scale here is incredible.

Now Reverend Moon or father, father Moon, as they call him, claims to be the literal Messiah bringing about heaven on earth and he is trying to take over the world like that. That is the goal of the cult. And it's, it's what Moon, and he's very consistent about this. It is what Moon and the, all of his organizations are dedicated to him taking over the world. The goal is to crush communism, reunify North, reunify Korea with Moon as its ruler. And then after, after he's defeated communism and crushed North Korea and you know, there's there's one Korea, the US will like fall into subservience in like, in deference to the

superior Korean state and then they will take over the rest of the world. That seems optimistic. I'm going to be honest. That seems optimistic. He was never close to doing this, but he gets much closer to this than like anyone should ever be able to do. To having the United States bow to Korea's sovereignty? Yes.

Yes. This, he gets closer to this than anyone ever reasonably should. I'm going to read a quote about what his goal is here, quote, the whole world is in my hand. I will conquer and subjugate the world when we are in battle against the, against the whole of the nation of the US. If you truly are in love with the nation and if you truly love this nation more than anything else, this nation will come into God's possession and Satan will have nothing to do with it.

With that as a bullet, we can smash the whole world. He just says stuff like this because he's trying to take over the US because he realizes that if he takes over the US and Korea and a few other, and like Japan and a few other countries, he can just, he can seize control of the entire world. And the other aspect of this is that he has the spiritual power that allows him to sort of walk in the spirit world with Lee and some of those powerful followers can do this too. And so he finds and gets, you know, he'll find world leaders in the spirit world and get testimonies from them.

So here's some of what they have to say. This is part of Moon's message of endorsement from John F. Kennedy, which takes the form of a letter to United Nations. Those of you at the United Nations, I am John Kennedy. I want you to clear an extremely important thing to you. The fact that Kennedy is sending a message from the spiritual world to the United Nations is something that cannot be imagined in your world, and it is very significant news. Through attending lectures of the new truth, divine principle and unification thought here

in the spirit world, I have understood the direction and the goal that the world must take today. I want to let the UN know the following. Reverend Sung Myung Moon is the Messiah, the Savior, and the true parents of humankind. All humankind in the UN have to understand the ideology and works of Reverend Sung Myung Moon and they have to accept his leadership and guidance. So that's spirit world JFK giving their endorsement to Reverend Myung Moon. That's good.

I mean, that is very honestly very nice of him because you know it takes a lot. You have to have a lot of ego to be the president and to really just bow down to this guy in Korea. Yeah. Good on you. That JFK. 36 presidents. Give him his endorsement.

Wow. Well, you know, that's turning marriage on this guy. It's actually worse, so 36 presidents endorse him while dead. Like five presidents have endorsed him while, four presidents have endorsed him while they were alive. So yep. Really? Yeah.

Well, endorse him in one way. Gone on tours with him with his organizations and said that he like, or given speeches for him and said that he was doing good work. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay. That makes sense.

Not endorsing Korean sovereignty over the United States, but like, yeah, this dude's a cool guy because he's paying me. Nice. That makes sense. That sounds like one of them was Clinton, wasn't it? Amazingly no. Wow. Good for you, Bill.

Yes, stunningly. Good for you. Good for you. Clinton, no. George W. Bush, though, yes. Yeah. What about Carter? Carter seems to have not liked him, which is, which is good.

So, good on Carter. Okay. That's good. It doesn't have the best history with Korea, Carter, but at least he's got that right. Yeah. So, there's a lot of these sort of expositions to the spirit realm and in one of them, like one of his followers is this guy named Lee and so Lee goes to spirit world and he finds Marx.

Yes, he has to wander for like a many days and he finds Marx in this like, like this like incredibly shabby town yelling communist stuff at a bedraggled mass and Lee spends two days arguing with him. Is Engels there? No, apparently it's just to go to heaven. There's no mention. Maybe Engels got tired of it. I don't know.

Yeah. But Lee spends like two days arguing with him and it's like, yeah, I made a serious dent in him. Like Marx was incredibly embarrassed at the fact that I disproven him. Oh, wow. He finds Stalin who's like barricaded in this like mud hut. He's like, he was barricaded in a house and there's like mud huts all around it and we try to go find Stalin.

Stalin has his guard beat him up so he ever gets to see Stalin. You know what? That does sound a little like Stalin. Yeah. Mussolini. He did love to have guards do things. Mussolini is reduced to a pathetic drifter. Yeah.

That also sounds like Mussolini, to be honest. I mean, a lot of this is tracking. Yeah. Tojo is like living alone in a house that he created where he has like a Shinto shrine to himself also tracks. Again, that does kind of sound like Tojo. Okay. When he meets Lee, he cries and recants after hearing about Reverend Moon's teachings.

So, and then gets forgiven. No, that does not sound like Tojo. That does not sound like Tojo. So, Moon meets Jesus at one point and Jesus is incredibly grateful that Moon like hasn't been married to some spirit and then he says that like he says that he doesn't like Jesus is like, yeah, I don't deserve Moon's love, but he's incredibly mad that people are focusing on the crucifixion. Wow.

It gets better. It gets better. God, that is so bold. That is so bold. He's mad that people are focusing on the crucifixion and not the Washington Times, which is actually the most important thing that God's doing on earth because the Washington Times is Moon's outlet. Jesus.

Stop. Stop with the crucifixion. The crucifixion doesn't matter. Guys, stop talking about my brutal murder by the state and start talking about this fucking tabloid. Incredible. It does. I would love it if Christ came back and did so primarily to sell subscriptions to the

New York examiner or like the fucking, what do you call it, the, what's the, what's the, what's the fake newspaper? The famous one. Shit. This would have been funnier if I had to remember the name. Newsmax. Yeah, whatever. That wasn't the one in my mind.

National Enquirer. Yeah. Okay. Well, I botched it. Please continue. So the last person that he finds, he finds a lot of people, but he finds Hitler and Hitler is tied. Oh, wow.

Okay. Good. I was wondering. Hitler is tied, eagle spread to a tree with a sign pinned to his chest that says King of the Nazis and all the Jews that he killed are throwing bricks at him. Now. See, that doesn't sound like a great afterlife for all the Jews that he killed. So Moon sees this and is like, no, stop this.

He's like, well, okay. These Jews can't like move on with their lives, right, because of the Holocaust and because of Hitler. I mean, that does sound like a bad situation is kind of messed up for him to imagine that for them. His solution to this is forgiving Hitler so that quote a Jewish version can go to heaven. And yeah, yes. What?

He forgives Hitler. What? Because Hitler is a spiritual drain in the sink preventing all the Jews from going to heaven. And this is where I should mention this Moon and like, like the unification church is like, like structurally anti-Semitic, like on a level. That sounds pretty anti-Semitic to me, Chris. Yeah, Moon has said multiple times in multiple places that that Jews are responsible for the Holocaust because they killed Jesus, which is like literally the oldest anti-Semitic

attack. I thought it wasn't as big a deal as the Washington Times. Apparently it is. It's okay. It's enough of a deal that yeah, it's he's blaming the Jews for the Holocaust because they killed Jesus and then yeah, he, you know, he says this a lot and he also, he has a lot of things that he said that are just like really bad. Like he says that gay people are done eating dogs will be exterminated by God.

So yeah, there's a lot, there's a lot of like stuff like this. He's also, you know, so, so in his actual cult, he has one of the big things he does is he has all of his followers like spend 18 hours a day selling flowers for him and you know, okay, so there's there's enormous pressure, you know, this is all your normal cult stuff. Right. You have your knowledge, especially not to leave. You have your like labor exploitation.

You have your like you're stuck in this cult. You have your marriage stuff. And so this is this is the story, you know, and then, you know, they have their battle with the deep program in the 70s. When I was writing this episode, this is what I thought this episode was going to be about. But it turns out that while all of this stuff is real and it's happening and it's important, this is not the real story of some young Moon. That story, the story of how a Korean CIA influence operation and the fascist wing of

the yakuza helped turn a minor Korean cult into a world-class anti-communist political organization that funded desk wads in 12 countries and built a modern religious right started, starts with a coup in 1961. Oh, boy, howdy. That was a lot. Yeah. It's taking a turn and we'll get through all of it. So in 1960, an uprising by Korean students and workers finally overthrew the horrific

dictatorship of Segment Rhee. Now, their heroic struggle gets them exactly one year, actually, I think it's less than a year of democracy before Park Chung-hee, an incredibly fascist military officer, like Nobusuke Kishi met Park Chung-hee after Park Chung-hee took power. And even Kishi was like, hey, you can't say that fascist stuff anymore. Like, he's so fascist that Kishi, like the arch-Japanese fascist war criminal was like, dude, you got to tone it down. And so he takes power in this coup.

And this coup is masterminded in large part by an army officer and politician named Kim Jung-pil. Pil? His name is Kim Jung-pil. Kim Jung-pil. That does sound like a joke we would have made if Kim Jung-pil had gotten addicted to oxy. He's one of the worst people in Korean history.

He's famous for... So he leads a political party after there's the revolution, you get democracy back. And he manages to get himself installed as prime minister through a bunch of backroom dealing, even though he had a 4% approval rating. So... That sounds like all you need. Yeah, he's incredibly widely hated. Now by 1961, Moon's church is firmly embedded in the army.

Bohi Park, Lassien stealing a baby from his mother's arms and raising him as his own son, has the same rank in the army as Kim Jung-pil. Another Moony is Kim Jung-pil's close lieutenant and translator and assistant. And several other Moonies also become translators for Kim Jung-pil. Now it's unclear to me whether Moon knew this coup was happening. There's no direct evidence that he did, but it seems kind of likely because there's so many people who are in Moon's inner circle, who are also in the inner circle of the coup plotters in the army, that there's a pretty good chance that he knew that this coup was

going to happen. What we do know for certain is that Kim Jung-pil founded the Korean CIA, which is like... It's like the regular American CIA, except they're also the internal secret police, which is they roll the regular CIA normally delegates to the FBI, but they hunt down dissidents. They kill them. They're extremely bad. And several very high-profile Moonies get jobs in the new military dictatorship. That seems like a bad call.

I'm just going to predict that right now, not going to go well. It's not great. In 1962, Kim Jung-pil has a meeting with Bohi Park, where he decides to use the Moonies, who by this point have spread to the US as a way to run influence operations on American politicians. Now, the result of this alliance is that the Unification Church gets legal status and recognition as a religion in Korea in 1962, and a whole bunch of Moonies wind up in the Korean embassy staff in the US.

So this is going great. Yeah. This is... I mean, there's a level to which it is kind of nice, because we talk so much on this show about influence operations that the United States ran in other countries to fuck with their government and their media. And now people talk about Russia doing that, but this is good. I've never heard much about Korean influence operations in the United States.

Robert, do you know who else is running an influence operation on the United States? Is it the Washington State Highway Patrol? Yes, it is the Washington State Highway Patrol. That scans. Yeah, it is. But it's also the products and services that support this show, of which the Washington State Patrol is one. Really our main sponsor, yeah.

During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations, and you know what, they were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI, sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse.

And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good and bad ass way, he's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called InSync.

What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left offending the Union's last outpost.

This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science.

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus?

It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. And the recognition of the Unification Church as a religion in Korea to start getting legal recognition in the U.S. And once they established themselves in the U.S., they found something, Moon in particular is directly involved in this. They found something called the Korean Cultural and Freedom Foundation, or the KCFF.

The first of, well, I don't know if it's the first, but it's the first American version of the many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many insufferable numbers of Unification Church friend groups. Now the KCFF does two things. It acts as a slush fund and a front group for the Unification Church, and it runs a Korean dance group called the Little Angels. Oh boy, this is going to go a really bad place, isn't it? Okay, so it's probably not as bad as what you think it's going to go, but it's not,

it's weirder and not good either. Now a lot of the people in this Korean Cultural Foundation, they don't understand that it's a church front group, which is a common thing. There's a lot of people in church front groups who don't understand what's happening. And with the KCFF, some of these people actually find out in the 70s, and they all get purged. But in the 1960s, this seems like an innocuous Korean cultural group running a Korean traditional dance group. And for people who follow cults, this is basically the Falun Gong Shen Yu 40 years earlier,

but there's two important differences. The Falun Gong is the cult that is responsible for all of those billboards in cities that are like China before communism and it shows some lady dancing. Yeah, it's a weird right-wing cult. We'll get into them one day. This is like the OG version of this, except there's two differences. And one of them is that the little angels are directly sponsored by the Korean government. So it's like the blue angels, but little girls instead of aircraft.

And the second difference is that Bohipok is using the little angels to smuggle money from Korea and Japan into the US by stuffing the kids socks full of cash. Just like the blue angels. She said go blue angel flown by a child, just moving wads and wads of $100 bills across the world. It's great. So the cash of the little angels are smuggling come from two important sources. One is Moon's chaebol.

Chaebols are these Korean super conglomerates that basically dominate the Korean economy. And she just has one. He has one of these conglomerates because Moon, he's able to set one up in 1963, presumably with help from his like allies in the military dictatorship. And this is the start of a massive economic empire that gets built up in Korea. They have a pharmaceutical company, a stone company, an anti-titanium company. They make M16s for the Korean army. They make bulk and bulk and mini guns.

They make the M79 grenade launcher. Oh, that is a good one. And they also make air guns that are used by Korean children from military training. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because this is, yeah. Well, I mean, if you're going to train kids with guns, give them an air gun first.

You know, don't go right to a... Yeah. They make those. And this is just the, that's just the early stuff in Korea. Moon has literally hundreds of businesses across the world that bring in hundreds of billions of dollars a year, hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Now the other important source of funding is the rapidly expanding church in Japan, which is the financial empire of the cult.

And there's a lot of ways that they do fundraising in Japan. One of the big ones is they run the seance scam. So they have a bunch of lawyers and they target people who just got life insurance payouts and that they have all these mystics around the country and the mystics pretend to be able to channel their loved ones who like inevitably say that like, no, the only way I can find pieces if you give money to this mystic or like the church or one of the front groups. And they make like hundreds of...

Like they'll take an entire life insurance payout. They'll make hundreds of thousands of dollars off of just individual ones of these scams. And yeah, the other source of funding is actually an old friend of the show. But before we can get to him, we need to talk about the world. The world anti-communist league. But yeah, they're one of the worst organizations in human history. The world anti-communist league was founded in 1966 out of the fusion of two other anti-communist groups.

The Asian People's Anti-communist League and the Anti-Bulshovic League of Nations, a block of nations. So the anti-bulshovic block of nations is basically an alliance of like the Romanian Iron Guard, the Croatian Dostoece and then like a bunch of other Nazi collaborators and like people who do genocides in Eastern Europe. Oh, these wholesome dudes. Yeah. There's a quote from the leader of the Ustazi who's like a true member of the Ustazi is

the man who can carve a child out of a mother's womb with a bayonet. So these are great people. Yeah. Yeah. The Ustazi is like of the Nazis, one of the worst kinds. Yeah. People say people say this a lot about Nazis, but it's like, like, these are the guys that even the SS looked at them and were like, this is a bit much.

I mean, it's like, it consistently happens. Whatever's going on when it gets out to the Balkans, that's when it finds its most like its ultimate form. By the time anything makes cigarettes, fascism, by the time they hit the Balkans, they are the best version of themselves. So that's one of the two groups. The Asian People's Anti-Communist League is basically like a creation of the intelligence services of the military dictatorship of Taiwan and South Korea.

And in 1966, they do a fusion dance and the World Anti-Communist League is born. Now in 1967, Moon has a meeting with two old friends of the pod for my Nobu Tsukikishi episode, Yohei Sasakawa, the Yakuza boss who created the Japanese black shirt ripoff and then visited in Mussolini before getting off in his war crimes tribunal and becoming the self-described, quote, richest fascist alive through his control of the underworld and monopoly on speedboat gambling. Oh boy. So the guy is Yoshio Kodama, the Yakuza boss who escaped his own war crime tribunal, defund

the liberal democratic party, Akishi's rise to power, and then also notably survived a kamikaze attack on his house in 1970. Jesus. Quite a rogue scalerish. This episode is like the Bastard's Pod reunion episode, like everyone who's ever been on this show is going to be here. So together with these two fascists, Moon creates the International Federation for Victory over Communism and its Japanese branch, Shoko Rengo, which basically means victory over

Communism. Now, Shoko Rengo is basically a combination of unification church members and dudes from the Yakuza with Sasakawa as its head and Kodama as an advisor. And this alliance between the church and the Yakuza provides the church with enforcers for its Japanese operation. It's also how they're able to do all these scams in Japan because normally, if you're running scams that are like, you're taking $100,000 for someone, right? You have to have Yakuza permission, and this is how they get Yakuza permission to run

crime in Japan. And they also get access to Sasakawa's enormous stores of money. And on the other hand, Sasakawa gets legitimacy on the political stage for his role as an anti-communist politician. Now, Shoko Rengo almost immediately becomes the Japanese branch of the World Anti-Communist League, and they hold the next one of the league's meetings at Sasakawa's boat racing range in Kyoto with full Moody's support. Now, the Moonies move into a new office in Japan on land that they bought from one Nobu

Tsukeshi who also openly support Shoko Rengo and is the guy, I think this is like the last thing we said in our episode about him is he integrates the unification church into the Liberal Democratic Party. So they're just like a part of the Japanese establishment now. It's great. It's a good time. That's wonderful. Cool.

Well, this is good. It's only going to get worse. Sounds fun. Glad we're doing this. I really just want to keep mentioning this, that this organization's goal is Reverend Moon taking over the world and establishing a global theocracy with him as the head of it. That's what this thing is, and they keep getting integrated into the ruling class of the political

parties that run major industrialized nations. It's very cool and good. Now, with these powerful backers and sophisticated organizational capacity, the Mooneys spread like wildfire. Moving into 1970s, Moone gives like probably my favorite Moone quote about his operations. I really keep the FBI busy trying to keep track of me. After the Washington Monument Rally, their biggest question was what in the world I would do next.

Even Satan is saying, what is Reverend Moone's next move? Where should I take my big guns? But most important is even God is asking, where are you going next? My plan is clear and simple. I am inexorably moving towards the absolute center of the universe. This guy's got a little bit of an ego. He's not just doing like the Beatles were bigger than Jesus off-handed thing. He's like, no, let me explain to you the ways in which God is impressed and baffled

by me. It's really incredible. No, the center, the inexorable center, the absolute center of the universe turns out to be the US, where Moone moves to an 18-acre estate called East Garden in the Hudson River Valley. Now, this place is nuts. Here's a description of it from the New Republic. His wife and children, who now numbered 13, had run of East Garden in its lavish manner,

one of which contained a bowling alley, six pizza ovens, and a waterfall in the dining room. While in the US, Moone starts running influence operations for the Korean CIA. One of those operations, it turns out, is funding the Heritage Foundation. Yep. Yep. Good. The Heritage Foundation's co-founder writes for one of Moone's newsletters in the 70s.

The foundation, at the very beginning of its existence, gets $2.2 million of KCAA money through one of Moone's front groups. It rules. Maybe this guy is the center of the universe. Yeah. Moone begins to develop just like an incredibly sophisticated network of allies in the new conservative rights. One of those figures is the infamously racist, Strom Thurman, who solves one of Moone's...

Oh, baby. That's great. Yeah. He solves one of Moone's visa issues. Moone's about to be kicked out of the country in 1974 because his visa's up. Strom Thurman, who had become a Moone supporter through a meeting in the World Anticombinous League, is just like, no, I'll just fix this for you. He's able to stay in the US.

Man. Yeah. So, Strom Thurman... Thanks, Strom. Yeah. For one time, you're not racist. Nope. It's this.

No. No, Strom Thurman becomes Moone's one of his first allies on Capitol Hill. But Moone... Moone is not content with one senator helping him out. With Watergate breaking, Moone sees his chance to get Richard Nixon on his side. So, in 1973, Moone creates the National Prayer and Fast Committee to support Nixon and Dream Watergate in stage protests, and they bought a bunch of ads. Yeah.

They do this pro-Nixon thing, and they have this protest. That's always where it starts with these right-wing ghouls, too. That was the first time they did the thing that they had been doing for a while and actually faced consequences, and they were like, well, we got to re-engineer the entire world so that that never happens again. Yeah. So, they hold this protest outside of the White House, and Nixon's giving a speech, and they storm the barricades and interrupt the speech to shout support for him.

This gets Moone in meeting with Nixon in 1974, which makes Nixon one of six presidents to either meet with or support Moone and his organizations, which, and again, I cannot emphasize this enough, is dedicated to taking over the world and crowning Moone as a theocratic god-king. It's great, six presidents, most of whom are still alive. The church also started running another series of KCA operations, including staging protests to support the interests of the South Korean dictatorship, and a wide-ranging operation to bribe hundreds of congressmen and infiltrate their offices by having pretty young women hang around their offices until they get a job, and this, like, finally, like, at the

point where they're literally running intelligence operations on members of congress is, like, finally where the government gets involved. Okay. Well, it's good to know there's a line. It's great. So, Donald M. Frazier, who's the representative from Minnesota, launches an investigation into the KCA operations in the U.S. through the Subcommittee on International Organizations. Now, Frazier discovers just an enormous tangle of Moone and KCA money moving through front

groups. He finds an attempt to buy out a bank and do money laundering, a bunch of people just like stuffing wads of cash in the briefcases, three senators' offices infiltrated, a massive task evasion, and a plan by Moone to use his businesses and church to conquer the U.S. Now, this scandal becomes known as Korea Gates, and despite multiple requests by Frazier and the committee, and, you know, and this is the thing is this is a bipartisan committee, right? Like, and both the Democrats and the Republicans on it are like, hey, you need to do something

about this guy, and nothing happens because, you know, South Korea, by this point, is too important of an American ally for them to, for the U.S. to do literally anything about it running influence operations in the U.S. Yeah. I mean, what are you going to do? They're all wrapped around our domestic politics, too. Like, what do you, what do you, what would you actually do? I don't know.

Well, I mean, they could have put it in. Don't let people make colts anywhere, but that's not clearly not a reasonable thing to watch. But what does actually happen as a result of this is that Moon declares that Frazier is a communist and spends an enormous amount of money to defeat Frazier and has run for Senate, which Frazier winds up losing by a few votes. Now, a few nights later, someone tries to burn down his house. No one's ever caught for this.

Sounds good. Yeah, it's great. That the only thing that happens. I'm sure it's unrelated. The Senate investigation. Yeah. So, meanwhile, Moon is searching the entire world for investment opportunities and begins a massive rush into Latin America.

He poured over a hundred million dollars into Uruguay between 1977 and 1979, which resulted in Uruguay's military dictatorship signing a massive arms deal with South Korea. And lo and behold, Moon's companies in South Korea get a bunch of the contracts. Now, it's fun. We've talked about what the Uruguayan military dictatorship did in your entrepreneur episode, so we're going to skip over that. But Moon is a close ally of the dictatorship, a pattern that is so regular that you can literally track which countries have military dictatorships by when Moon starts getting

close to the government. Like I have done this while researching episodes, probably like when those dictatorships start and I have mood written down going there. I was like, oh, okay. I know when this happened now. Yeah. And some of it sees influence in the situation. Some of it sees a smart motherfucker and he's like, well, you look like you might be about

to take over. I should probably get in good with your ass. We'll get into more of that next episode. But right now, we need to talk about something extremely important, fish. Yes. Now, like the band that I've followed for seven years during my youth. In the sea that swim. I'm not familiar with the concept.

Please continue. Something you are familiar with that you are well aware of is that all great cult leaders hear the call of the sea. Yes. That is true. And in 1980, Moon gives a speech called The Way of the Tuna, which I'm going to read a bit of. Oh, hell yes.

Oh, this is, this sounds good. This is sounding good. The entire system worked out starting with boat building. After we build the boats, we catch the fish and process them for markets and then have a distribution network. This is not just on a drawing board. I have already done it. In the same speech, Moon calls himself the king of the ocean and dope, dope, dope.

I mean, you know, I, I, he's going to have to go pretty hard to beat the, the, the current owner of that title, our buddy L Ron Hubbard, but I'm willing to listen. So this is the beginning by 1980, it's already going, but this is, this is sort of the origin point of Moon's attempt to build an enormous fleet of boats, take over the American fishing industry. So he buys a boat company. Ah, see, I do, I have to give him, I'm going to take points away for having such crash finance, crash financial ins L Ron Hubbard didn't take to the sea and build a Navy to

make money. He took to the sea and made a Navy in order to get 20 year olds to search for gold he buried in a past life that he knew wasn't there. Moons like state of justification for this is that he wants to feed the entire world by getting a bunch of fish. I think, I think it is a lesser fishing expedition than Hubbard's, but it's still, I think incredibly impressive. Um, that, that, that does show an amazing like amount of faith in the oceans ability to keep

making fish. It's pretty incredible. Well, we'll get into a bit of what happens there. So this, so he buys like, he just like buys a boat company and then uses the boat company to make boats for this fleet and he puts a million dollars into it. And this operation is the beginning of the great moody fleet and it's called the true world group. And you know, in classic cult fashion, his founders like sleep in these communal apartments

and they, you know, they work horrendous hours for like this fishing dream. And it works. Uh, you know, here's from the Chicago Tribune. True world is so ubiquitous that 14 of 17 prominent Chicago sushi restaurants surveyed by the Tribune said they were supplied by the company. Now, because this is a capitalist enterprise and a cult, they immediately start doing crimes. Uh, they're Alaska branch gets convicted of a felony for going like enormously over the boats carrying boats carrying capacity and endangering the crew by having a boat that

is like enormously too heavy to, to, to float. I gotta say, I respect though, we're not just going to endanger the ability of the ocean to continue to support life. We're going to endanger our fishermen too. You know what? You know what? Not only that, they are also going to endanger everyone who eats this fish. So when, when, when pot alumni is the food and drug administration tried to inspect a

warehouse in Detroit in 2005, they found, quote, gross and unsanitary conditions. Now the manager tries to keep the inspectors out and says that his supervisor is, quote, a great man, that he was part of a new religion. And if we took advantage of him, then God help you, uh, from the Tribune again. Later, according to that FBI report, an employee wearing a ski mask approached one female inspector, put his thumb and forefinger in the shape of a gun, pointed at her and said, pow, you're out of uniform. Oh, cool.

It's amazing. They're just threatening the FDA. Oh, it's, it's great. I mean, I think most of what we know about the FDA is that they're probably going to just take it. Exactly, no, so, you know, the, the FDA, that's good for them. Good for them. Good for you.

FDA has done like an enormous number of terrible crimes, but they are not on the pig, the payroll of big fish. So they, they try to come back to inspect this facility again. They think they get a court order and they're like, okay, we're going to come inspect this facility and the booties are just like, okay, we'll just shut it down instead of dealing with this because they're doing so many crimes that they were like, yeah, okay, we will lose this entire facility rather than have the FDA inspect it one time. Now the, the, the other part of the scheme is that they're, they're basically attempting

to use, you know, those mass wedding ceremonies, they're trying to use them to get the Japanese members of the church who are like the most committed members of the church citizenship so they can bypass American fishing restrictions about who can fish in American waters. Now this is kind of a problem because for a long time, like moons, weddings weren't considered legally binding weddings. That makes sense. Cause he's just a guy. And like mass weddings that might not be recognized by like law cause maybe the law's like, well,

you have to, you know, there's like papers and stuff. I think eventually they start getting considered actual marriages, but like this, this plan doesn't really work. Yeah. It seems like there'd have to be a process you would go through. The problem is that even without the sort of like the influx of Japanese fishermen, this works. Um, and you know, you have this interesting mix of the, so some people who are working

for the, this fishing company are like in the cult. Some of them aren't. And you know, there's this whole thing inside the company where like the people who are in the cult get promoted fast and the people who aren't in the cult kind of get like subtly or like, Hey, take this like propaganda thing. But this, like this fishing group takes over the fishing industry. Like in, in, in, in 2005 alone, the true world group made $250 million. Yeah.

Wow. That's not bad. And again, like like 15 of 19 sushi restaurants that's Chicago Tribune interviewed. We're like, yeah, no, we buy our fish from the Mooneys. It's like, yeah, I mean, that is Chicago's sushi, right? So they have operations in all 50 States and it's very similar in everywhere else because they've, they've seized control of the American fishing industry. That on, on, on, on this somewhat happy note, uh, with, with, you know, the great Mooney

fleet thriving and Moone's call to the sea fulfilled, uh, we're going to leave it today and we're going to come back next time to see Moone fund a horrific series of war crimes in the name of world peace. Well, I got to say, Chris, it takes a lot for me to be impressed by a cult leader. Um, but this, this guy, this guy is pretty good cult leader got, got to give it to him. You haven't seen shit from Moone yet. Like this, this, this, this is the warm up intro to the actual stuff. He's laying the bones.

He's putting down the foundation so he can, he can really, really do some crimes. Oh baby. Yeah. Yeah, this is my favorite part when the cult leaders at the top of the fucking roller coaster and you just know they're about to go zero G baby. Oh, oh, Chris. Thank you. Do you have anything to plug?

Who, what do you do? Who are you? Yeah. So I work, I work for Sophie. Uh, I work on it could happen here. I use some other stuff. I'm on Twitter at it me CHR three. I do, I do that.

Yeah. Robert, do you have anything to plug? I have a novel. You can pre-order it now if you Google after the revolution on AK Press. You can, you can go buy it and then you will have a signed copy of my novel that's printed on paper. Wow. Wow.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your

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