cover image Brother Love: Murder, Money, and a Messiah

Brother Love: Murder, Money, and a Messiah

Sydney P. Freedberg. Pantheon Books, $24 (0pp) ISBN 978-0-679-42015-6

In an amazing feat of investigative reporting, Freedberg relates the bizarre saga of the Temple of Love (aka the Hebrew Israelites), a Miami-based sect founded in the late 1970s by Oklahoma-born evangelist-messiah Hulon Mitchell Jr., whose followers proclaimed him the savior of black people. To his supporters, Mitchell-now in prison on a 1992 conspiracy conviction; he will be released in 2001 and eligible for parole earlier-is a positive force who taught African Americans self-empowerment. But media and police accounts link his organization to a series of brutal murders, and testimony at his dramatic trial (which deadlocked on a racketeering charge of murder, arson and extortion) portrayed a cruel cult rife with mind control, assaults and slave labor. Mitchell, who calls himself Yahweh Ben Yahweh (``God, Son of God'') also beat three murder raps when Florida state attorney Janet Reno (now U.S. Attorney General) lost one death-row case against him and dropped charges on two other homicides. Freedberg, who won a 1991 Pulitzer Prize for her coverage of this story for the Miami Herald, tells a searing cautionary tale of a man who used race and religion as a shield to exploit people and amass power and wealth. Photos. (Nov.)