Trouble From Denmark (part 2)

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

 

The Tentacles of TVIND

"In the times of atrocious apartheid, in the times of the Cold War, in the times of the belligerent ideologies, the prevailing images were in black and white. It was that simple. Either for or against.

... The basic ideological battle between fascism, capitalism and communism finally fought to a decisive end, with a multitude of versions of parliamentary democracy, connected to the free marketplace as every nation's understanding of its economy. Humanists deliberated while they saw it happen. Now it has happened. The world will for a long time have to develop within the framework of ... parliamentary democracy with a free marketplace. This charter thus accepts these conditions as the framework within which the activities of HUMANA PEOPLE TO PEOPLE shall unfold."

 

Although this sounds like the kind of pedagogical nonsense a bright teenager, high on Ginsberg and caffeine, might read to his friends at 2:00 a.m. in some Denny's smoking section, it's actually part of the "charter" of Humana People to People, one of the more well-known nonprofit groups run by Tvind. Its headquarters is in Zimbabwe, where Tvind helped president Robert Mugabe gain power in the Seventies and continues to support him today. In the United States, another prominent Tvind spinoff is Planet Aid, which according to its Website collects used clothing from hundreds of yellow boxes in states including Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine, Rhode Island, New York, and Pennsylvania. Still another, according to Danish police, is called U'SAgain. They sell the clothes and the money supposedly goes to development projects in poor countries.

 

Zahara Heckscher, the former volunteer, remembers one of those projects. It inspired her later to cowrite a book, "How to Live Your Dream of Volunteering Overseas," about the many legitimate volunteer organizations, with a warning chapter on a Tvind group. Heckscher was one of the first Americans to be recruited by the Institute for International Cooperation and Development in Massachusetts. The students were to create a fruit tree orchard for local farmers in Zambia, study, travel to other African nations, and spend a couple of months traveling the U.S. to talk about their experiences. "It sounded so perfect on paper," Heckscher recalls. "I had worked in the anti-apartheid movement and I wanted to volunteer in Africa." They each paid several thousand dollars for the privilege of volunteering.

 

In Zambia, the group of about a dozen young students was based in the small farming town of Mkushi. Heckscher says a major sign that something was wrong came when they met their first Zambian farmers. "They said, "Do you know this land was stolen from us? We cleared it and the government took it away from us and gave it to [Tvind].' We thought the idea was to help poor farmers grow food for their families and to maintain independence from South Africa."

 

The Americans and 150 Zambians created a model orchard of thousands of fruit trees. But Heckscher became increasingly uncomfortable with the way the Danish-led team was accomplishing its goal. First the trees were planted in the dry season, so Zambians were hired to walk down to the river to get buckets of water. Then they used pesticides on the trees. The workers weren't trained, nor did they have masks. "It was sort of this European model that didn't really work there," Heckscher says. "It just got worse and worse. They started building houses in a row pattern instead of the usual [Zambian] circle. It turned out [the group leaders] made them tear down their homes and rebuild in this grid [like a European village]. One of the directors said to me, "We need to make them think like us.' I found that shocking."

 

Economic imperialism disguised as environmental charity and poverty relief? Oh yes, as Heckscher later realized. She describes the project leader, a man named Rudy, as a strange, contradictory character who spent most of his time cozying up to Zambian government officials. "He had a certain charm and charisma and also a streak of racism, a complete disrespect for the Africans and their culture," she laments. When a Danish woman, a top Tvind leader, visited the project, Heckscher was equally dismayed. "She was so dreadful," she says. "She kept talking about their plantation in Belize where all these happy little workers were. She sounded like an imperialist capitalist coming in with all these projects that were making a lot of money while masquerading as aid projects." Worse, she displayed the relentless optimism of the cultist. In the end, the orchard failed, and the Zambians were fired, turned off their former land.

 

As Heckscher looks back, she sees the warning signs she'd ignored. How the group had tried to control every waking moment with exhausting schedules and inadequate food. How the volunteers were isolated from the outside world and encouraged not to question what they were told. "If you look at the things that cults do -- sleep deprivation, the charismatic leader, humiliation, isolation ... [Tvind has] it all," she acknowledges. "They don't have a religion, but they do have an obscure political theory that no one can clearly articulate."

 

She continues. "There are a lot of good volunteer projects out there. This is the only one we found that was completely illegitimate. What I see is a bunch of projects designed to make money. Volunteers pay $5000 [initiation], then raise another $5000 on the street, selling postcards. The used-clothing business [consists of donated] clothes being sold overseas, and Tvind gets free labor. What a great deal!"

 

Christoffer Holmsteen was fourteen in the early Eighties when his parents put him in a Tvind "travel school" in Denmark; he was bored with regular school and wanted to learn to sail. The travel part he liked, but Holmsteen says the school itself was creepy. In the mornings the students would learn social theory and a much-revised version of history. In the afternoon they would take apart buses for scrap metal to pay for their trips to Morocco and Algeria.

 

Holmsteen remembers being required to read a book written by a Tvind leader named Mikael Norling (now the head of Planet Aid's office in New York), praising the genocidal Cambodian Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge. "[The book] talks about how wonderful they [Khmer] are and absolutely nothing about the several million people they killed," he recollects. "Then the next year I saw The Killing Fields and realized [Norling] was all propaganda." Holmsteen also viewed a number of North Korean propaganda films while at the school. (Norling once hosted a party in Denmark commemorating the birthday of North Korea's despotic founding father, Kim II Sung, according to Boston magazine.)

 

Marianna Maver, a former teacher at a Tvind school in Virginia in the mid-Eighties, has similar memories. The Tvind group had contracted with the state to run a small facility for juvenile delinquents. Maver initially thought the Danes were "just really into saving the world. My impression was it was sort of an Outward Bound, a travel experience school, and I was all for that," she sighs. "I found out that they just tell you what you want to hear."

 

Maver (now a massage therapist in Michigan) became uncomfortable almost immediately with what was going on. "The agenda was to teach this sort of Maoist propaganda," she claims. "There were no textbooks and few materials. They hired me with no questions and I didn't have a teaching degree." Then things got even weirder. "They were pushing me to move on campus," Maver shudders. "They said, "All of us are turning our [paychecks] over to the school. You can live with us and we'll take care of your needs.' They got grumpy when I refused."

 

Maver soon quit and reported the school to state authorities, who shut it down in 1985 because of numerous complaints from state social workers (security and safety infractions, neglect, students attacking other students, etc.). She also reported the group to the FBI, which she says did nothing. "They probably just put me on their kook list," she chortles. "What could be crazier than a Danish-European communist cult? No wonder the FBI didn't believe me. It's nuts."

 

The English Connection

The very nuttiness of the notion that such an ominous organization on the scale of Tvind could exist helped it operate under the radar of most media and government authorities for decades, according to English journalist Michael Durham. "It all seems so unlikely," he admits. After many years of negative publicity in Denmark, where Tvind began, the group has little credibility in its home country and is being hounded by Danish police, who are trying to prove Petersen's flunkies embezzled most of the tax-free money donated to humanitarian projects it took in. The police further charge that many of those projects were phony, created out of thin air to capture grant money. Some of Tvind's fraudulent organizations and schools have also been closed down in England, Spain, and France.

 

But Tvind companies, like the AIDS retrovirus, simply metamorphosed, changed names and moved to new locations, where populaces were unsuspecting. And it would often take years before a nosy reporter or concerned official would notice that something was dramatically wrong. That changed in 1999, when Durham, a contributor to newspapers such as The Observer and The Times of London, designed a Website (www.tvindalert.org.uk) to aid journalists around the world in investigating Tvind activities. (The Website has also become a gathering place for former members of Tvind organizations and for parents looking for help in rescuing their kids.)

 

Durham has been investigating Tvind schools and charities operating in England since 1995. His website was originally just a collection of newspaper articles and a dossier, full of tantalizing leads he'd never had time to follow. He felt a website might generate new sources. "Before I knew it the messages were just pouring in from people all over the world saying, "This is what happened to me.'"

 

His first glimpse into the international scope of Tvind came when he spoke with Steen Thomsen, a former headmaster of a Tvind school in Britain, who had recently become disillusioned. "He told me a story of this huge, multinational organization that was corrupt top to toe and run by one powerful, shady figure," Durham recounts. "It was run rather along the lines of organized crime in that it was compartmentalized and highly structured. It was all very cleverly done, but it was touching the lives of thousands of young people. [Thomsen] called it a cult."

 

So is Mogens Amdi Petersen a cult leader? And if so, how did he transform from being an idealistic, passionate young teacher in Denmark in the mid-Sixties into a corrupt old mindfucker?

 

It all began as the Age of Idealism broke into pieces with hard drugs, the assassinations of great world leaders, total consumer permissiveness, and what appears, with hindsight, to be a general decline in standards in the West. Petersen, sensing a wanderlust among disaffected youth, created a traveling school for young adults designed to teach them the ways of the world by actually taking them into it. As charismatic as an actor, he led groups on long treks into Turkey and other exotic places and put them to work building schools in Denmark. As part of a trendy anti-nuclear kick in the Seventies, they built a huge windmill at the first Tvind school. Later they put the rest of their Third World "development" apparatus together.

 

But from the beginning there was trouble. To maximize Tvind profit, the forfeiture-of-wages policy was introduced. "Teachers" were expected to contribute all of their time and energy to the cause, and were systematically isolated from the outside world: "Late in the Seventies all of us members [were sent] home ... where our old documents, private letters, and family pictures were stored, to burn it all," Thomsen wrote in 1998. "... Amdi Petersen will use all means necessary to ensure his followers say farewell to their history, enabling them to stand naked in front of Him, their big Leader."

 

Petersen was also paranoid. Thomsen says he required rooms to be scanned for electronic bugs before he entered them, would only contact members via cell phones, and urged members to fear letter and car bombs. He further claims that marriage and children were heavily discouraged and that some female members were pushed toward sterilization. Why would people allow this to happen to them? "They are in complete awe of him," Durham marvels. "He's like a god. [If] Amdi says, "Pack your bags for Tibet and leave the wife tomorrow,' you do it."

 

It was when these negative aspects began to surface in public, marring the carefully cultivated Good Samaritan image Tvind used as a front (and perhaps Petersen had twisted into a pathological rationale for his own behavior), that Petersen and his followers became even more secretive. He completely withdrew in 1979, signaling a possible emotional crisis. And the international hunt of the journalists began in earnest. "There has been a sense of a game between us, the journalists and [Tvind], sort of a little hunt," Durham says, with relish.

 

Nuri Kino is a Swedish journalist who went undercover at a Swedish clothing factory to expose it as a moneymaking scam for Tvind. He says his own fascination with Petersen occasionally borders on obsession. "He's an asshole, a fucking fascist," the hyper-expressive Kino spits. "Because they are hurting a lot of people. And I can't help being fascinated -- to get in their brain and understand the motivation. Amdi must have one of the most incredible brains in the world."

 

Durham agrees. "The [compelling] question is, all of the people who are in it, do they know what they are doing? Are they evil, or is the wool being pulled over their eyes, too? It's a question that's never been resolved." Jakob Rubin, the Danish reporter, is equally puzzled. "We don't yet understand what the purpose of Tvind is," he acknowledges. "Yes, Mr. Petersen is trying to collect millions, but that [simple answer] is not satisfying. We believe they were trying to create an alternative economic world order."

 

Durham is convinced that the Jyllands-Posten story describing in detail the lifestyle Petersen and his cronies enjoyed in Miami was important because it fleshed out the rumors that had haunted Tvind since Petersen's disappearance more than twenty years ago. "For the first time, the Danish people were presented with the evidence," he exults. "They were suddenly asking themselves, "Is that where all our money went?' It really tipped the mood in Scandinavia."

 

This was the story Durham had been waiting for ever since Steen Thomsen told him that Miami, with its easy-access international ports, was being used as the headquarters of Tvind's expansion into Central and South America. Thomsen recounted a summit meeting held in 1997 in one of the Tvind Miami condos. "He described enormous, luxurious condominiums and said that although [it wasn't known then], that's one of Tvind's world headquarters. It sounded like the plot of a James Bond movie. They all sat around and Amdi said, "Okay, I want you to go to Fiji or Brazil,' or whatever. That is why Tvind is now establishing itself in all these areas. This is the office where they are carving up the world!'"

 

They may have been carving up the world from a condo off Miami Beach, but Tvind kept a low profile in town. New Times phoned Anne-Lise Gustafson, the longtime Danish consul in Miami. She knew the Tvind story well from the European newspapers but had never, to her knowledge, encountered Petersen or his cronies. Once, however, back in the early Eighties, she did meet a Tvind sailing ship at the Port of Miami. The captain had asked her, as consul, to greet the students traveling onboard. It was not a pleasant experience. Gustafson describes the ship as barely seaworthy, full of juvenile delinquents that the captain told her kept trying to escape. "It was Tvind," she says, trying to reconstruct the memory. "They would take [troubled students] out on a ship and straighten them out [while teaching them to sail]. My husband, who was in the navy for many years, said it was irresponsible to take anyone out on that [unsafe] boat."

 

But was Amdi always a monster, or did something happen to him along the way? That is the personal agony of Steen Thomsen, a man who gave 26 years of his life for his belief in Petersen's social revolution. "What is the aim [of Tvind]?" Thomsen wrote. "Surely, once it was a Chinese-inspired revolution when it all took its beginnings in the late Sixties and early Seventies. Amdi Petersen was for most of us a revolutionary hero on level with Chairman Mao, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and others."

 

The Bust!

And then suddenly it happened. February 17, 2002, in the wee hours of Sunday morning, Mogens Amdi Petersen flew into Los Angeles airport from Africa, en route to Mexico. He presented his passport at customs as usual, expecting the usual perfunctory stamp. But after September 11, airport security had been tightened. An INS officer checked his name against a list of people wanted by federal law enforcement. Turned out the FBI had agreed to arrest Petersen on sight and hold him for the Danish government, which wants him and several of his inner circle for massive tax fraud and embezzlement of roughly $11 million (and this from only one of his charities -- Danish police case summary notes include Citibank accounts in Miami).

 

Petersen was unceremoniously dumped into a cell in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Los Angeles. Danish authorities immediately requested extradition. The U.S. Attorney's Office in L.A., which teamed with Danish prosecutors to argue against releasing Petersen on bond before U.S. Magistrate Stephen Hillman, was besieged by the Danish press. "I've got about a million Danish reporters I have to deal with today," complained a harried Thom Mrozek, public affairs officer for the Attorney's Office. "They are all over this shit. It's amazing. There's about ten or twelve of them who flew in from Copenhagen for this!"

 

Petersen, in a move considered unusual by observers aware of his generally secretive nature, hired high-profile attorney Robert Shapiro (one of O.J. Simpson's murder trial "Dream Team" lawyers). Shapiro, a situational ethicist who found grave fault with Simpson defense tactics only when that trial was won, immediately began portraying his client as a "philanthropist." Nevertheless, he lost his bid to get Mogens bonded out when the judge declared him "a serious flight risk." Danish newspapers and the Los Angeles Times reported he had recently applied for both Brazilian and Zimbabwean citizenship, and Danish cops believed he was preparing to hide out somewhere in South America since his Fisher Island hideout had been blown.

 

In a Los Angeles courtroom, the orange-jumpsuited Petersen has looked tired and despondent. This is a picture journalists like Jakob Rubin savor:

"Now in the detention center is this very tall guy, very skinny and old," he imagines. "He's there and he's definitely not liking it because he's used to the best of everything. He's breaking down very fast ..."

 

But maybe not. Nuri Kino in Sweden puts a darker spin on Petersen's impending court trial: "I hope they can put him in jail, but my fear is that that will make [his followers] even more tight, and will make [Tvind] grow, because it's them against the whole world."

Kino's voice drops: "Like he's their martyr."