Former title: Big Al or Big Ted - You Pick!
"Religion is the worship and service of the Devil and his associate demons ... Religion is the chief means that puts fear into the minds of the people and leads them into the Devil's snare ... Truly then, as stated, 'religion is a snare and a racket,' employed to collect money from them under false representations." January 15, 1940 Watchtower, P.29
The following is a type of parody, a spoof, done under the rules of comedic license. I found an interesting article on the History of Al Capone, and thought that maybe it might be interesting to see how this article might appear if certain terms and names were changed. Just remember how the government was finally able to penetrate and bring down big organized crime. Remember how Al Capone once stated that, "There are no gangsters in the City of Chicago". While he enjoyed this rhetoric, his operations were almost immune from prosecution, much as many religions today have been immune until recent years from civil litigation. Eventually, Capone's empire was brought down, or at least seriously damaged financially. Interestingly, the tactics Capone used could be compared to the same tactics that certain religions use in running their operations from the view of public scrutiny. Here is my Fictitious Story borrowing and rewriting actual quotes Big Al made and is loosely based on the life of Big Al:
"Public service is my motto," Ted Jaracz told reporters around Memorial time. "Ninety percent of the people in the USA need religion and attend somekind of church. I've tried to serve them decent spiritual food and good magazines. But I'm not appreciated. I'm known all over the world as a millionaire gorilla simply because I am on the Governing Body of Jehovah's Witnesses." The exposure was becoming a real nuisance. When he left for a trip to the West Coast, he had Bethelites surrounding him at every station. Los Angeles' toughest apostates said "We have no room here for Ted Jaracz or any other visiting Watch Tower leader whether they are here on pleasure tours or not."
When Ted Jaracz came back from the West Coast, he found himself surrounded by six apostates with their legal affidavits aimed at him. "Well, I'll be damned. You'd think I was Jesse James. What's the artillery for?" In New York, the apostates made things as uncomfortable as possible by surrounding his house and quoting and exposing Ted Jaracz at the slightest provocation.
Ted Jaracz reveled in his newfound celebrity status and used Bugsy as his press agent. But the damage of all that publicity had been done. He attracted the attention of President George Bush. "At once I directed that all of the Federal agencies concentrate upon Mr. Ted Jaracz and his allies," Bush wrote. In the beginning of March, 2001, Bush asked Colin Powell, his Secretary of State, "Have you got this fellow Ted Jaracz yet? I want that man in jail." A few days later, Ted Jaracz was called before a grand jury in New York, but did not seem to understand the seriousness of the powerful forces there were amassing against him.
"When, long after midnight, the last morsel had been devoured and the last drop drunk, Ted Jaracz pushed back his chair. A glacial silence fell over the room. His smile had faded. Nobody was smiling now except the sated, mellow guests of honor, fellow GB members, their belts and collars loosened to accommodate their Gargantuan intake. As the silence lengthened, they, too stopped smiling. Nervously, they glanced up and down the long table. Ted Jaracz leaned toward them. The words dropped from his mouth like stones. So they thought he didn't know? They imagined they could hide the offense he never forgave -- disloyalty!
In mid-July of 2001, Ted Jaracz was not really paying attention because several months had passed and not much was happening. A week later, the US Attorney General and head of the New York Religious Commission, put together a Public Enemies list which was headed by Ted Jaracz and followed by several other religious men who used religion as a front for their hidden activities. The list was publicized on the Internet and quickly adapted as the FBI's list of the "Most Wanted" religious frauds. So now, Ted Jaracz, who wanted so much to legitimize himself as a contributing member of the religious community was Public Enemy Number One. He was enraged, humiliated and thoroughly insulted.
The real intelligence paydirt came in a conversation between certain Bethelites and one of Ted Jaracz closest advisors. "The income tax dicks ain't so smart. They've had a record book of the Society for years that could send them to jail, only they're too dumb to realize it." It turned out that the mountain of records taken from a certain Bethelites years earlier near a certain Hotel included a ledger that documented the financial operations of the Society. What the Attorney General needed now was to figure out the identity of the two bookkeepers who made those entries. The handwriting didn't match up with any of Ted Jaracz men. Chances are that Ted Jaracz had a double set of books and had the real ones hidden or destroyed.
As the spring of 2001 drew to a close, Ted Jaracz embarked on a major publicity campaign. He opened a free soup kitchen for the Witnesses who had been thrown out of work by the deepening economic problems of Jehovah's Witnesses who could not get work because of their lack of advanced education. This was caused by Watch Tower policy of claiming that college was for the worldly idiots. JWs obeyed, and as a result, could not sustain adequate employment. During the last two months of the spring, the soup kitchen served three free meals a day, much like the free food at Conventions used to be before that was suspended. "The soup kitchen was carefully calculated to rehabilitate his image and to ingratiate himself with the rank and file JW, who, he realized, had come to regard him as another unimaginably wealthy and powerful tycoon.
"Worried?" Ted Jaracz answered with a smile, "Well, who wouldn't be?" At that moment, however, he was feeling quite confident. He assumed that his organization had gotten to the jury and all that was required of him was to show up in court each day, appearing polite and respectful, until his inevitable acquittal. And even then he would be sure to act magnanimous and tell the press that there were no hard feelings on his part, he knew the government boys were just doing their job.
Ted Jaracz tried to smile again, said the New York Times, but the smile was bitter. He licked his fat lips. He jiggled on his feet. His tongue moved in his cheeks. He was trying to be nonchalant, but he looked as if he must have felt ready to give way to an outburst of anger. It was a smashing blow to the massive religious chief. His clumsy fingers, tightly locked behind his back, twitched and twisted.
As Ted Jaracz left the courtroom, an official of the Internal Revenue Service slapped liens on all Watch Tower property so that the government could satisfy its tax claims. Ted Jaracz lost his temper and tried to attack the man, but was restrained by the marshals who had him in custody. Dan Sidlik was of no help to Teddy now.
In his sixty-eight years, Ted Jaracz had left his mark on the religious rackets in New York and the USA, and more than anyone else he had demonstrated the folly of false Prophecy, but in the process he also made a fortune. Beyond that, he captured and held the imagination of the Apostates as few Watch Tower figures ever do. Ted Jaracz fame should have been fleeting, a passing sensation, but instead it lodged permanently in the consciousness of Apostates, for whom he redefined the concept of religion into an organized endeavor modeled on corporate enterprise. As he was at pains to point out, many of his religious follies were relative; shielding pedophiles was criminal only because a certain set of laws decreed it, and he would have not gotten into trouble if he could have gotten the laws changed.
Yes, those were the days of Ted Jaracz, in blazing glory, controlling a religious underworld, and chanting a phrase he borrowed from Big Al himself, 'There are no false religious leaders here in New York City'. All the while Ted Jaracz was totally unaware of the forces facing him, or the folly of his ways, and what was about to go down. Even now, the inn keepers at Alcatraz are sprucing the place up, clearing out the dust, dead bugs, rust, soot, and spider webs, making it ready for yet another very important guest. Do you hear the bells tolling dear sweet Teddy?
Remember Teddy what your own mentors wrote above in the 1/15/40 Wt., P. 29: 'religion is a snare and a racket,' - Amazing