Tower:17. The Money

I probably know the same basics of the money situation as everyone else. I know Angelo never payed for anything for himself. Other people made all of his meals for him (and his helpers). Part of the meal service was taking care of the money-end of it as well. He didn’t pay for it. I know that because I made the cakes and cookies, and it was on us to either pay for it ourselves or arrange financing any way we could. If he needed something, someone was “allowed” to buy it for him. Vidal bought all his beauty products. People bought or made all his clothes for him. He had fresh flowers each week and money for that was collected in class each week (everyone was asked to give $5 so that was around $600/week… expensive freakin’ flowers if you ask me.) I don’t actually know who covered the house rent or utilities. But I do know that he saw people every day for cleansing. 7 days a week. An average of 6 people a day. Each person paid at least $50 (although some people paid more.) So he was bringing in roughly $110K/year from cleansings alone (Just considering the 15 years in Austin, that’s over $1.5 million.) Each person also paid $30/month to attend class so that’s another $43K/year. Out of class money, some might have gone toward renting the facility (it was $100/month to rent the room) although I think he had people doing “service” and paying money toward that. Each person in the ballet class paid $5 or $10 per class to take it and that supposedly went toward renting the studio. When I took the class, there were around 15 of us. For a while, we were seeing videos on Friday nights instead of going to movies, and everyone would pay $5 at the door ($600/week) I think that money went toward ballet costumes. Even when he would decide to give someone a gift, he would “allow” someone else to buy it for him so he could give it to that person. Except for once. I remember because it was a big deal when he went to Hawaii or somewhere and he bought a necklace for a number of the girls because when it was whispered about, it was emphasized that “he used his own money to buy it”… acknowledging that it was a really big deal. That was 15 years ago though and that was the only time I heard that he did that. Before we moved to Austin, he used to go to Hawaii every year on someone else’s dime. I know very little about that. They were very careful about the money trail to Angelo. Everything was cash and nothing could be tied to him. Or very little. Probably some of it can be though, because I remember hearing that in the late 90’s he was declaring $14K as his income. I remember being surprised when I heard that. Not because of the amount, but because I heard it from one of the fringe people and I was surprised they knew that. I did find it funny that people were surprised to find his mattress full of money when they were packing his stuff to leave Austin. I guess I wasn’t surprised because I knew he had money stored in various places. They installed a safe in the floor of my house to store some of his cash. I know he had several caches like that. I never even knew the combination to the safe in my house. They just installed the safe in the concrete slab of my house, filled it with money and I never heard anything about it again. I never cared about any of the money stuff. Church leaders get a salary, so why not other spiritual leaders? I guess if you really wanted to know what he has, you’d have to dig up his back yard, go thru his mattress and then look for any safety deposit boxes under the names of the people around him (I know Hisminia kept safety deposit boxes for him at one point.) But if you’re looking for something official or a way to tie him to the money… don’t bother. You’ll never find that. It doesn’t exist.

I was one of the members of the group that were allowed to work. Someone in the Buddha Field had to, and usually it was the more unattractive ones that he didn’t care to have clustered around him at all times. The more attractive people weren’t really expected to work because he wanted them at his house, cleaning his yard and stuff in the mornings and that interfered with having a job. But I got to be one of the ones that would work, and consequently I had cleansings once a week for about 5 minutes (My cleansings were always quick. Until the end. When I started trying to get my money’s worth out of it.)