From: stark@dwovax.enet.dec.com (Todd I. Stark)
Subject: Example of a martial arts cult 
Summary: Be careful, know what to look for.  
Organization: Digital Equipment Corporation
Date:  9 NOV 92 09:56:47    


Source: October 26 issue of the Boston Phoenix
Author: Rie Kahn
Summary: Watch for the classic warning signs of cult extremism in this
		well known case study.
	----------------------------------------------

			CHUNG MOONIES?

	Critics call martial-arts club a cult of violence and greed

			By Rie Kahn

	When John quit the Chung Moo Quan school in Stoneham after six 
months, he says, school officials bothered him at home and harangued him 
at work.  "You have to come back.  You have to do it for yourself, for your 
mind, for your body.  This isn't just a martial art.  This is life.  You 
have to do this.  We're not going to let you go.  We know your address, 
your phone number.  we have your license plate."
	But big John, a blue collar guy in his thirties who lives north of 
Boston, wouldn't be bullied.
	He'd signed on in 1987 because he wanted a place to work out 
during the day, and the Stoneham storefront was near his home.  At the time,
he says, he was emotionally drained.  He was working two jobs.  His father 
had just passed away.  According to the profile painted by ex-members of 
the national Chung Moo Quan organization, John was perfect bait.
	They filled his head with prime talk: "You have to do this for 
yourself.  This is the most important thing in your life."  But everything 
seemed to revolve around the prime rate.  "They emphasized staying healthy", 
says John, "but each class they'd pressure you for money."
	When one of the young students didn't have his money, John saw them 
jump all over his case.  "What's wrong with you?"  If you paid your money, 
he says, you were heaped with praise, no matter how poorly you performed.
	John says he ponied up $1500 during his time there.  Cold cash.  No 
receipts.  When he asked for some documentation of payment, he says, he was 
told; "It's all trust here."
	John says, "In the back of my head, I said 'IRS.'"
	
	So have lots of other people.  In fact, the organization -- skilled 
enough at the public relations game for its Newton school to cop a citation 
for community service from Governor William Weld last spring -- has come 
under increasing scrutiny for the way it handles its money and its members.
Consider:
	o Chung Moo Doe, a/k/a Chung Moo Quan, has been the target of an 
	  investigation by IRS agents in Chicago and Houston.  In the summer
	  of 1990, agents seized records and other evidence during raids on
	  seven schools, an apartment, a farm in Illinois, and a ranch in 
	  Texas.  Though government officials refused to discuss any aspect
	  of the probe, sources say in centered on whether Chung Moo 
 	  reported its cash transactions.  William Rivkin, public-affairs
	  specialist for the IRS in Chicago, says, "We can't confirm or 
	  deny an ongoing investigation."

	o Chung Moo may also be under investigation by another arm of the 
	  feds, the FBI.  Echoing Rivkin, Agent Bob Long, spokesman for the 
	  Chicago FBI office, says, "We can neither confirm or deny an active 
	  investigation."

	o The Illinois attorney general's office has filed suit against 
	  Master John C Kim and his employees seeking to shut down his 
	  schools, charging consumer fraud and coercion.

	o According to a TV report, the Texas attorney general may be 
	  investigating the Chung Moo organization.  When contacted by the 
	  Phoenix, a spokesman for the AG would say only, "We're aware of 
	  them."

	The Phoenix made repeated, unsuccessful attempts to obtain a 
statement from the Chung Moo national organization and to contact lawyers 
who've represented John C. Kim.
	Ex-members and mind-control experts claim Chung Moo Doe, which 
pushes the virtues of a strong body and balanced mind, is in fact a 
powerful and destructive cult that employs beatings and thought control 
techniques to break their members' will -- and their piggy banks.
Capitalizing on physical fitness faddism, former members say, Chung Moo Doe 
sucks newcomers into an upwardly swirling spiral of outrageously expensive 
courses and tests that have cost some students as much as $50,000 in 
greenbacks.  (According to ex-members, Chung Moo Doe traffics in cash only, 
please -- supposedly out of respect for Master Kim, as this is how business 
is conducted in Asia.)  Chung Moo Doe instructors are said to push students 
to the point of hypnotic exhaustion through intensive workouts and a 
regimen of repetitive movements.  Once in this vulnerable state, members 
are pressured to sell their prized possessions to pay off their burgeoning 
bills and to sign up for the next course on the way up the high-priced 
Chung Moo ladder.
	But even more than picking their pockets, ex-members say, Chung Moo 
Doe had fleeced their souls.  The group was so subservient to Master Kim, 
they say, that members were forced to converse with higher ups in the 
broken English of their Korean superleader.  The male dominated martial 
arts group, they say, controlled the essence of their lives, everything 
from making love -- only once a week per order of Master, lest the evil 
spirits of women seep inside you and make you weak -- to making war: 
loyalty, says one ex-member, was tested through the challenge "Higher belts 
would take a bullet for Master.  Would you?"
	"you become a robot, brainwashed, "says one ex-member who was in 
the group for almost 10 years.  "You become a Chung Moonie."


	"By providing the means for our citizens to understand the 
importance of a strong mind and body, the ultimate goal of ... this 
Constitution can be realized," reads the "Provisional Chung Moo Doe 
Constitution", the handbook of the movement.  "This goal is to see the 
others learn and understand right justice.  As their minds and bodies 
improve with proper training, the right judgment they learn can benefit 
their families, businesses, and living conditions.  As whole communities 
begin to benefit, it will lead to a better standard of living for all, and 
ultimately, a stronger United States."
	Chung Moo Doe purports to be a 1500 year old royal line of martial 
arts, eight different practices rolled into one.  In an investigative 
series aired in 1989 by the CBS affiliate in Chicago, Pam Zekman reported 
the Chung Moo schools were founded in the Windy City in the late 70's by 
John C. Kim, whom she identified as a former maintenance worker.  The group 
reportedly operates in Minnesota, Illinois, Texas, and Massachusetts, among 
other states, with Greater Boston storefronts in Arlington, Burlington, 
Newton, Dedham, Stoneham, and Braintree.  Ex-members say instructors 
shuttle back and forth between cities, indoctrinating students with the 
message of Master Kim.
	"From my experience, it fulfills all the criteria of a destructive 
cult," says Steven Hassan, an ex-Moonie from Boston who'd an exit counselor 
and the author of "Combating Cult Mind Control".  He rattles them off: a 
pyramid structure, a leader who has complete power and who claims 
paranormal abilities, the use of deception and mind control.
	"People are induced into altered states of consciousness through a 
variety of means," says Hassan, who's talked with ex-members.  "sleep 
deprivation, dietary manipulation, long repetitive, monotonous exercises 
that induce a state of trance.  Phobia indoctrination, by painting the 
outside world to be even more malevolent than it already is."
	"Based on what former members say, I consider them a destructive 
cult," says Cynthia Kisser, executive director of the Chicago-based Cult 
Awareness Network, who reports receiving at least a dozen complaints about 
the organization over the last year.
	To me it's a business cult," says Joe Szimhart, a cult-information 
specialist and exit counselor from New Mexico who's worked with former 
Chung Moo followers and has heard tales of physical, verbal, and 
psychological abuse.  "Kim has devised a system which uses undue influence 
to bring instructors ... and students ... up the ranks at high prices."
	"I think they're dangerous because they have a hidden agenda: to 
drain people's bank accounts and control their lives," says Szimhart.
	In her Chicago TV report, Pam Zekman cited what an unrighteous rip-
off Chung Moo appeared to be: $$10,000 to $15,000 for a black belt course; 
$15,000 to $20,000 for an Olympic course; and $20,000 to $30,000 for an 
instructors course.
	By comparison, Pat Worley, who owns the U.S. Karate schools in the 
Minneapolis-St. Paul area, told the Phoenix that a typical black belt 
program ought to run between $1500 and $3000.  The most he's ever heard 
anyone outside Chung Moo Doe charging for a martial-arts deal was about 
$5000 for a lifetime membership.
	In 1989, after receiving complaints from students, the Illinois 
attorney general hit Kim and his Chung Moo minions with a consumer-fraud 
action.  In her 1991 amended complaint, which is still pending, Assistant 
Attorney General Lynn Worley alleged that Chung Moo agents failed to 
disclose to students their total financial obligation; refused to provide 
copies of contracts; and charged in excess of $2500 per year for services --
all in violation of the state's Physical Fitness Act.
	In an interview, Worley said the course prices seemed to vary 
depending upon how deep the student's pockets were.  "it was just a 
question of how much they could get out of you," she said.  "One guy paid 
off $18,000 for an instructor's course and they still wouldn't give him his 
first-degree black belt.  They'd given it to him on probation -- they 
wanted him to bring in more money."
	Furthermore, in her complaint, Worley alleges that "defendants, 
their agents and employees used coercion and coercive sale techniques, 
including but not limited to, yelling at students, punching and kicking 
students."
	Chung Moo strong-arming also appears to be a local menace.  In May 
1988, according to a 1989 civil suit filed in Cambridge District Court, 
Will Smith-Vaniz, of Waltham, enrolled in a $5000 "Olympic" course at the 
Chung Moo Quan school in Arlington (now Chung Moo Doe).  According to his 
complaint, Smith-Vaniz ;plunked down $5000 in cash and within a month 
another $250 as part of his $250 as part of his $250-a-month-for-16-months 
payment schedule.  He said he got no receipt.  No copy of his contract.
	Prior to the Olympic course, he said, he'd already been on track 
for the one-half black-belt course, for which he'd put down a $500 deposit 
plus $200 a month.  But he said the school told him he could slide through 
the black belt course and move on to Olympic.
	Then, Smith-Vaniz said in his complaint, the school wanted him to 
pump up his monthly payments from $250 to $500 and to get them in earlier 
than stipulated in his contract.  In July 1988, he said he asked the 
school's instructor for a copy of his contract.  The instructor apparently 
didn't gently hand one over.  According to Smith-Vaniz, the instructor 
responded by grabbing his windpipe and asking: "How would you like to die 
right now?"
	In court papers, the school denied the charges.
	The lawsuit, which sought monies owed and damages, was reportedly 
settled out of court last year.  Attorneys involved in the case declined to 
discuss it when contacted by the Phoenix.


	It was more than the flow of money out of his wallet, and the fact 
that the school seemed to be waving him on to the next course for a fee, 
when he felt he;d hardly mastered the previous one, that was bothering Big 
John.  "It was terrible," he says now.  "Lies. Intimidation. Constant 
pressure ... I knew i had to get the hell out of there.  It was getting 
spooky."
	There was the ritualistic passing of the cash, bowing and holding 
it between the palms.  There was the Pidgin English.  "Right to pay money?" 
Or, "Right to ask question?"

	Steve Hassan calls it loaded language, on of the signs of a cult in 
action.  "Words are the tools we use to think," he says.  "If you can 
control the words, you can control the way people think."
	John, an ex-Marine, simply calls it "brainwashing."
	There were also the banquets, social gatherings for Chung Moo 
students, family members, and friends, for which members were expected to 
bring to food and fork over an admission fee.  With all the hoopla 
surrounding Master John C. Kim, Big John was disappointed the guy didn't 
even show at his own party.
	Some members could be forgiven if they half-expected Kim to fly in --
sans airplane.  After all, many said they;d been told of how Master could 
jump off a seven-story building and float to the ground, part of the 
messianic portrait of Kim promulgated by the Chung Moo movement.  Or about 
the time he'd walked on water.  Or that he was the retired martial arts 
champion of all Asia, a title critics doubt even exists.  Or that Bruce Lee 
had been a Chung Moo member but was assassinated by a Kim minion -- a long-
distance psychic hit, to be precise -- for divulging secrets.  Or that Kim 
had once died and come back to Earth.  That he had a psychic third eye, 
could read minds.  That he had tremendous healing powers and could even 
cure AIDS.
	Yet Master Kim apparently never lifted a finger to help out one of 
his young followers in Minneapolis, Russell Johnson.
	Russell Johnson almost died under the influence of Chung Moo Quan.  
He'd joined back in 1980 as a 16 year-old all pumped up after watching a 
Chuck Norris movie.  He left in 1983, came back in '85.  And when he 
returned, he says, they successfully sold him a $10,000 black belt course: 
$500 down and $200 a month.
	Johnson by then had a good factory job and a sweet maroon Trans Am, 
with a red crushed-velvet interior and all the options.  Johnson says the 
Chung Moo Higher belts started working on him, suggesting he sell the car 
so he could pay off his contract faster.  That one day he'd be an 
instructor making so much money he could afford as many Trans Ams as he 
wanted.
	Johnson had looked up the school's instructor.  He could move like 
on one he'd ever seen before.  And he'd helped him get away from drugs.  "I 
wanted to be like him," he says now.  "Nice clothes.  The appearance that 
life is totally together."
	Johnson owed too much on the Trans Am.  So the bank repo'd it and 
he shoveled the money back to the school.
	Next, he says, he sold off his $1300 stereo to pay for test fees.  
Every time you move up in rank, he says, you have to take a test and pay a 
fee.  The instructor continued to work on his head, he says, telling him 
that when they were at his level they didn't have anything but a couple 
pairs of jeans.
	Like other students, he says, he was fed a variegated diet of praise 
and pulverization.  There was the carrot: feeding him stories about how one 
day he'd run his own show.  And the stick: a bamboo one, he says, that an 
instructor whacked him with while telling him how weak he was and why 
didn't he quit right then and there.  After hours of workouts, practicing 
the same forms over and over, he says, he'd be brought into the office and 
lectured about how he needed to improve himself by bringing more money and 
by practicing hard.
	Johnson says when he and his Chung Moo roommate were told that 
another student whom they both despised was moving in with them, he obliged.
"You didn't question your higher belt," he says.
	When Kim's birthday and Christmas rolled around, he says, you were 
expected to ante up cash, $100 minimum.  Like a sect of superstition freaks, 
you were expected to abide by the Chung Moo rituals.  Like, he says, "never 
walk in front of your higher belt" and "never hand something over a corner 
of a desk" and "always sleep east-west"  One time, says Johnson, he was 
awakened at 3 a.m. by an instructor who told him his bed was facing the 
wrong direction and that evil spirits from the north would enter his mind.  
Johnson drained his water bed and moved it around.
	By 1987, as a first degree assistant instructor, Johnson was 
learning how to run a school.  He says the head instructor would have him 
conduct "sideways conversations" with new students, reporting back to him 
on how much money they had in the bank and what kind of car they drove.
	On a Friday night in May of 1987, Johnson was left in charge of a 
Chung Moo Quan school in Minneapolis.  The head instructor had left him a 
note of things to do.  But the note was facing away from the desk, and 
Johnson felt the note was personal and not for his eyes.  H believed he was 
strictly obeying Chung Moo rules by not going to the instructors side of 
the desk.
	On Monday, he says, the instructor ordered him to drop down and do 
100 circular motion knuckle push-ups and 25 minutes of blocks and attacks.  
Then he called him into the office. After hearing his explanation, Johnson 
says, he was told he handled things correctly.
	But that night, he couldn't sleep.  His arms had swelled like hot 
dogs.  The next day at school, his arms hurt so badly he had to lay his 
food out on the table and move his head down to eat it.  That night, no 
sleep again.  His arms grew pale and felt like they were about to explode.  
The next day at school, they tried accupressure without luck and told him to 
hang in there until a national instructor could see him two days later.
	That night, unable to sleep, and with his kidneys aching like a 
pounding anvil, he decided to go to the hospital to get some sleeping pills 
and muscle-relaxers to hold him over until the national instructor could 
see him.
	But the doctors wouldn't let him leave.  They said so much blood 
had been pumped into his arms that it was trapped there and had stopped 
flowing.  If he waited until Friday he could suffer permanent kidney damage.
If his kidneys shut down completely, he'd die.
	The docs wanted to do an emergency operation. But Johnson says he 
was so into Chung Moo Quan, which preached the dangers of mainstream 
medicine, that he wouldn't sign the release form until his school okayed it.
He figured maybe they'd come and rescue him.  But sensing trouble, he says,
the school gave the go-ahead for the medical work.
	After 16 days in the hospital, and surgery that left his arms 
scarred, Johnson was released on Saturday and returned to school on Monday. 
Incredibly, it wasn't to quit -- he wanted to go back to work.  Chung Moo, 
says Johnson, had for years been breeding within him an inside-versus-
outside mentality.  "I was afraid I couldn't handle a normal lifestyle," he 
says.
	But over the next year, the abnormalities of the Chung Moo movement 
began to filter into his consciousness.  He heard the stories about the 
wuss with the arm problems who went to the hospital for help instead of the 
school.  He was working two jobs to pay off his courses, which he says had 
a cumulative price tag of $15,000 to $20,000. And he's been working at the 
school for five, six hours a day without pay.  And now some instructor, a 
kid he'd grown up with, was jerking him around because he could only post 
75 instead of his usual 150 Chung Moo flyers during his regular Saturday 
free-labor stint.
	After the guy made him do 30 pushups when he'd been led to believe 
Master Kim had decreed he'd no longer have to do them, Johnson went home 
and boiled over.
	The next day, he called the school from work. "Be all right to ask 
if there is anything I can do for school?" he inquired in the regulation 
Pidgin English.  "Be all right to ask if yourself care for anything?  Be 
all right to step into school right now?"
	After the instructor told him it was okay to come in, Johnson 
slammed down the phone.  In a split second, like a dark shade suddenly 
snapping open, he began to see the light.  "I can't have the people lead my 
life." he said to himself.  "They controlled my emotions like a dog."
	He never stepped foot in that school again.
	Today Russell Johnson's arms still burn from time to time.  But his 
psyche aches even more when he thinks about the severe case of what he 
calls "toxic faith" that manifested itself during his unholy hospital stay.
	"I was willing to die for those people," Russell Johnson says now.  
"I thought [in the hospital] that if they [Chung Moo instructors] do take 
me out of there, and it doesn't work out and I do die ... maybe they'll 
bury me in my uniform."
+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Todd I. Stark				  stark@dwovax.enet.dec.com |
| Digital Equipment Corporation		             (215) 354-1273 |
| Philadelphia, Pa. USA                                             |
|    'Reason is no substitute for Passion, nor Passion for Reason.' |
+-------------------------------------------------------------------+