The Family by Sharlet Jeff

Author:Sharlet, Jeff [Sharlet, Jeff]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
Published: 2008-05-19T16:00:00+00:00

9.

JESUS + 0 = X

IN 2003, I PUBLISHED a portion of the account of Ivanwald with which I begin this book in Harper’s magazine. I might have left it at that, were it not for a series of phone calls. In June of that year, I received an e-mail from a man named Greg Unumb, who wrote that he’d read my article and wanted to talk to me. “I grew up with the Coe family, went to school with their sons (that is, from elementary school to through college), and was a part of the original group at Ivanwald; however, I had a falling-out with them a number of years ago.” Greg thought I was correct in “some of [my] conclusions, but certainly not on all of them.” He wanted to offer me “insight.”

Greg was finance manager for Pride Foramer’s operation in oil-rich Angola. Pride Foramer is a division of Pride International, which drills in or off the coasts of more than thirty nations. The Pride Foramer division took care of business in five countries besides Angola: Brazil, Indonesia, India, South Africa, and Ivory Coast. All six, as it happens, have long been of special interest to the Family. But Greg didn’t want to talk about any of that. It was hard to tell what he did want to talk about. When I reached him on the phone in Angola (ask for “Mr. Greg,” he wrote, “not Mr. Unumb”), he did not seem to recall any “falling-out.” In fact, he was more interested in me. Such a fascinating subject, he said—was I writing a book? Where did I live? How much had I been paid for the article? How had I gotten in to Ivanwald? Who recommended me?

At the time, I lived on top of a hill in rural upstate New York. As I talked to Greg, I sat in a lawn chair, looking out across miles of farmland, shooing bees away from my ankles. Ivanwald, the Family, its intrigues—beneath the bright summer sun, it all seemed hard to take seriously.

Greg wasn’t the only one who got in touch. There was a corporate lawyer from Seattle, who claimed to have no connection to the Family but asked the same questions Greg had; I discovered that he had worked with several of the Family’s visible fronts. End of conversation.

There were many devout Christians who contacted me. There was a Presbyterian pastor named Ben Daniel, a former member of the Family who’d quit after his first National Prayer Breakfast, where he was horrified to encounter the very same Central American death squad politicos he’d been reading about in the papers. There was an old, well-connected Republican lawyer named Clif Gosney, who on his visits to New York has introduced me to some of the city’s most beautiful churches. After years of high-level service to the Family as a liaison to Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi of the Zulu nation, he started drifting out in the early 1990s. When he asked Coe why almost no

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