Trouble From Denmark (part 1)

Wacky Danish cult leader Mogens Amdi Petersen was a guest on tony Fisher Island until recently; now he's staying with the State of California

MiamiNewTimes.com/March 21, 2002
By Rebecca Wakefield

 

On a typically sweltering subtropical day in October, two pale-faced men just shy of 40 years old step off a plane at an eerily empty Miami International Airport. They note this to each other in a language unusual even in this crossroads of the world as they stroll ever so casually toward the baggage claim, and then over to the counter to rent a car. The rental agent is delighted, as Miami's tourist industry has been dealt a severe blow by the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington exactly three weeks prior. The two men, Jakob and Michael, ease the car out of its preassigned parking space, consulting a map of Miami's twisting, unfamiliar terrain. Their destination: Miami Beach.

 

The men watch as the strip malls, warehouses, and general destitution of the inner city give way to the breathtaking views of blue Biscayne Bay and the palm trees on the Julia Tuttle Causeway. Up ahead, they can see the island chain that forms the eastern edge of the bay, striking with its gleaming glass-and-steel condos and pleasure hotels.

 

The car follows the road almost to the ocean, turning left to prowl along Collins Avenue in the direction of a pre-Renaissance Beach charmingly stuck in the downhill phase of its Fifties and Sixties heyday. The car stops in the dead zone halfway between the fabulousness of the Eden Roc/Fontainebleau stretch and Little Buenos Aires, the section of the Beach named for its new and vibrant population of young Argentines.

 

The hotel Jakob and Michael have chosen as their base of operations is the innocuous Comfort Inn, strategically located just a few blocks south of the Sterling, a luxury condo on 67th Street where they hope to catch the man they've traveled secretly from Copenhagen to find -- a man who most definitely does not want to be caught.

 

The man is Mogens Amdi Petersen, the mysterious and wealthy leader of a global network of companies operating under the cover of a charity organization some have called a dangerous cult. The Petersen empire includes schools for troubled youth in Denmark; used-clothing shops and volunteer-recruitment centers (for aid projects in Africa and Central America) in Europe and the U.S.; plantations in Belize, Brazil, and Malaysia; real estate and shipping companies in the Caribbean and Florida; a satellite television station; and a wild-animal ranch in Zimbabwe. There is also a 130-foot luxury yacht (once docked in Palm Beach) named after the woman who played Scarlett's maid in "Gone with the Wind" -- Butterfly McQueen.

 

Mogens hasn't been seen by the public in 22 years, going underground in 1979 after Denmark and other countries began to sniff him out. And for almost that long government officials, journalists, and police in several nations have been searching for the man behind an organization called Tvind ("Twin" in old Danish, with folkloric associations to the occult), so named for the Denmark farm where Petersen's followers built their first school in the early Seventies. In August 2001 Danish police cracked the security code on computers seized in a raid on several Tvind buildings months earlier, convinced it would provide the evidence they needed to charge Petersen and a small circle of his top aides with embezzling millions of dollars meant for charity purposes. Tvind's utopian dream of the Sixties counterculture devolved into a twisted, brave new corporate world.

 

Over the years horror stories have emerged in numerous media reports about young, idealistic college students from England, France, Scandinavia, and the United States lured to questionable Tvind "humanitarian aid" projects in Africa and Central and South America. Story after story recounted the travails of students who were injured or abused, contracted tropical diseases, or were stranded in strange countries and left to find their own way home. Some students, who nevertheless found these experiences positively life-changing, were indoctrinated to become part of Tvind, working as teachers of future students and turning control of their wages and lives over to the collective. Here is Alex Casteel, a former volunteer and four-year veteran of Tvind (he worked on child aid in Guatemala): "People like me agree to join the teachers' group because we believe in doing humanitarian work," the British resident explains. "We agree that our salary should go into a pooled account believing this money [would] be used to fund new projects. Then the reality appears."

 

"[Tvind volunteers are] a lot of young people who are in a transitional phase in their life," adds Zahara Heckscher, a former volunteer who in the late 1980s went to Africa with a Tvind organization as a 22-year-old world-beater fresh out of college. "People who are drifting a little bit. They are idealistic, not very skilled or experienced." Heckscher quickly became disillusioned with the motives and methods of the Danish leaders of the project and quit her group (an offshoot in Massachusetts called the Institute for International Cooperation and Development).

 

It is only in the past couple of years, through the efforts of law enforcement and an international jumble of journalists, that people in many countries have begun to see the sheer scope of the Tvind enterprise, disguised as myriad, seemingly unrelated companies and charities. With his luxury lifestyle, hidden global reach, and loyal cadre of "mistresses," the charismatic Petersen is almost mythic -- David Koresh minus the armed-to-the-teeth compound, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh absent the cool robes and bioterrorism, or Reverend Sun Myung Moon, sans loony religious pretensions. (Maybe even Charlie Manson without the lethal girlfriends.)

 

So where do you go when the whole world is looking for you? Why, Miami, of course. The instant city where anyone can hide in plain sight. "It's sunny and it's on the sea and these Danes, being basically Vikings, they love the sea," quips Michael Durham, a British journalist who has been writing about Tvind for seven years.

 

The Search

For Jakob Rubin and Michael Ulveman, investigative journalists for Jyllands-Posten, Denmark's largest newspaper, this was the story of a lifetime. They spent months preparing, following up tips from confidential sources who assured them Miami was where they had the best chance of finding Petersen. Their mission was so secret that only they and their editors knew what they were up to when they suddenly disappeared from Denmark.

 

So here they were, holed up in a hotel room, on a strict budget and with a whole strange town to search. And they knew that other reporters had come here and failed before them. "We knew for years that Tvind was having some kind of central place in Miami because they have a lot of activities [including aid projects and plantations] in South and Central America and the Caribbean," divulges Rubin. "And the bosses from these would come back to Miami to report [to Petersen]. But Danish journalists waited outside the Tvind apartments for half a year." To no avail. Mogens and his globe-trotting Danes were never spotted.

 

Rubin and Ulveman knew they had to be smarter and more daring if they were going to get their man. They spent a few days staking out the condo units in the Sterling and La Gorce Palace down the street, purchased by Petersen's aides through a Tvind company called Chilton Intervest Corp. One of the difficult aspects of tracking Mogens and his business dealings is that he never signs anything and officially owns nothing. Everything is accomplished through a boggling array of companies headed by a handful of the Tvind inner circle, those who've been with Petersen since his days as a sort of socialist education guru, leading students on long journeys to the Middle East and Africa back in the Beatles' era.

 

In their hotel, Rubin says, the reporters hit the same wall that had stopped many other journalists. "We were deciding how to attack the situation. We realized we had to get on Fisher Island," where Petersen was believed to occupy two penthouse apartments with two female associates. That was going to be a challenge, especially on a budget. Dubbed "an international Martha's Vineyard with warmer waters" by Florida Travel magazine, Fisher Island is an exclusive 216-acre playground for the rich and reclusive. It can be reached only by ferrying across Biscayne Bay or by helicopter. The island's expensive hotel, converted from William Vanderbilt's old winter home, seemed out of reach. And at first it was. "The price for a night was so high that our newspaper could not afford [it] unless we could guarantee the story," Rubin recounts.

 

But the persistent journalists were helped by the devastated post-September 11 tourist economy that left most Miami hotels empty. "The third time we called, they told us there was a possibility of getting a [steep] discount," Rubin recalls. And so the real undercover work began.

 

Posing as wealthy tourists, Rubin and Ulveman tried to look the part. They bought obnoxious Hawaiian shirts and wore them over shorts and sandals. They carried cameras but were forced to hide them because island residents, a collection of superstars (at one time Oprah Winfrey, Boris Becker, and Mel Brooks), business moguls (former Hebrew National hot dog CEO Isidore "Skip" Pines, retired Rockefeller Group CEO Richard Voell, and former Cigarette Racing Team owner Robert Torter), and folks with connections to major crime, are a bit camera-shy. Once checked into the hotel, the pair commissioned a golf cart to take a tour: "We were driving around in our Hawaii equipment with tennis rackets and pretending we were naive millionaires," Rubin laughs.

 

The journalists spent five days on the island, casing the joint, so to speak. The goal was to meet Petersen, but in the meantime, they attempted to learn something about the man from Fisher Island Club employees and other island residents. With their garish outfits and peculiar habits, the duo must have appeared odd. But they benefited from the strict rules on the freakishly private island that prevent employees from becoming too curious about residents or guests. "We were definitely behaving strangely," Rubin confesses. "We were driving around his house 20 or 30 times a day. The security people never stopped us because they were afraid we might be somebody's [eccentric, powerful] sons."

 

That see-no-evil latitude gave them license to discover two Mercedes parked in the garage in the spots reserved for Petersen's flat, and to learn that the second apartment had been purchased to accommodate Petersen's two Leonberger dogs. (The building allows only one dog per apartment.) They also learned Petersen's habit of jogging along a pathway near the water with the large canines. From confidential sources the journalists were able to get their hands on pictures of the interior of Petersen's penthouse, and to talk to people who'd been inside. There were marble floors, a grand piano, fireplace, five bathrooms, a fitness room, and a personal spa. The bedroom held a four-poster bed and teak dressers. But few they talked to could say they'd seen Petersen himself, or the middle-aged women who were often with him.

 

One resident who lives in the same building as Amdi remembers receiving a strange call one afternoon in October as he napped, recovering from South Beach excess. "I thought it was a prank call," says the 33-year-old mortgage company owner (who asked that his name not be revealed). "[The Danish journalists] said they wanted to meet me at the bar and show me some pictures and articles. I figured if it was the real thing, I would have heard from the FBI." (Local FBI sources confirm that Danish police had in fact been in contact with them regarding a cooperative investigation.) Rubin and Ulveman also spoke briefly with Petersen's personal trainer, Oscar Carucci. Carucci described Mogens as a charismatic, inspirational guy, a sort of Tony Robbins type who told him, "If you have a dream, follow it."

 

The journalists carried with them a miniature photograph copied from a Petersen identification card that had fallen (Rubin declined to reveal how) into their hands. The only recent photograph known to exist, it shows an almost skeletally thin man who appears much older than his 63 years. The picture doesn't show his height, but he is nearly six and a half feet tall. His hard countenance and thin lips, "like a Nazi criminal," remind Rubin of European fugitives of another age. Looking at this picture, few people on the island could say they knew the man. Some were able to provide small assistance, both on and off the record. "It wasn't difficult to get people to cooperate," Rubin says. "We just showed them the [scandalous] articles about him."

 

In the end, Rubin and Ulveman never met Petersen. He may have been tipped off that they were lying in wait on Fisher Island, or he may simply have been ensconced in one of his many other international hideouts, as indifferent as an old lion. Soon after the reporters left, the apartments that had provided an anonymous haven to the Petersen crew for ten years were put up for sale. The Danes returned home to write, with the help of colleague Orla Borg, a huge, splashy story that took up eight pages of Jyllands-Posten's October 28 issue. "The story was ruling the media for several weeks in Denmark," Rubin proclaims proudly.

 

Like other journalists in other countries to whom New Times spoke for this story, Rubin has spent a great deal of time contemplating the mystery that surrounds Petersen and his followers. And like them he expresses a mixture of fascination and horror with the man. "You need a real crazy genius to [exploit] the idea of helping the world -- to make himself and a select few rich," Rubin muses. "He must be so disciplined, being so far away and maintaining control over everything. It's extraordinary."

 

Rubin pauses, and you can almost hear him shaking his head across the phone line all the way from Copenhagen. "None of the [top echelon] insiders ever betrayed him," he says. "That's amazing. The loyalty -- combined with fear -- is beyond normal." Steen Thomsen, a former Tvind teacher who joined the organization in 1972 and left in 1998, calling it a "cult," accounts for this endless loyalty in a 1998 report he sent to the Danish Ministry of Education. Tvind members were bound financially -- some members were forced to sign papers making them responsible for large loans or property. They were bound psychologically by being forced to cut all ties to the past and to regard the outside world as the "enemy." Members were broken down through isolation, group pressure, even hunger and sleep deprivation -- to the point where they would respond to the most capricious, unreasonable requests. Thomsen tells of the day he and another man, Lars Peter Pendrup, a Tvind school principal, were walking slowly by Petersen when he suddenly shouted at Lars to hurry his pace. "Just for once, Lars Peter, could you move? Can you run there!" Thomsen remembers Petersen saying while pointing to a distant destination. "And there! (pointing to another)." "Like this, he [commanded] the then 40-year-old principal to run the gauntlet of teachers' group comrades [who were hanging around]," Thomsen wrote.

 

Part 2