Trader Joe's stopped selling Tribal Trading beeswax candles, but was unaware of the Twelve Tribes connection. In the group, children obey parents, blacks obey whites, women obey men - and everyone obeys Yoneq. They're psychologically beaten up - there's no room for flexibility. You do what you're told. Cult members give up their possessions and money to the group and get room and board in exchange for work in the group's cottage industries.
Members usually live together in one large house.
Spriggs, meanwhile, jets between homes in Brazil, France and the United States, checking on the flock that finances his heavenly crusade. Twelve Tribes has black members, some of whom are elders or leaders, but former members say those members are expected to respect Yoneq's teaching that they are subservient. Spriggs' success was based, almost from the start, on free labor. On a recent schoolday afternoon in Coxsackie, young boys milled around with their fathers at the Common Wealth furniture factory at the end of a block of old riverfront buildings bought by Twelve Tribes in 1998. In Cambridge, children as young as 5 would cart boxes or hand materials to their parents working the Origins assembly line and teenagers worked alongside adults, according to a former worker, one of three sources who witnessed kids in that factory on separate occasions.