The Moonies and the Sharks

How a Unification Church pastor went fishing for converts and snagged an indictment as America’s most prolific poacher of baby leopard sharks.

Fishing was fundamental to Reverend Kevin Thompson’s ministry, but he kept catching the wrong kind. The easy part was luring young people to the shimmering waters of San Francisco Bay. Thompson and a few of his followers would load the teens onto the church’s boat, pull out the angling gear, and start talking about God and committing oneself to the Reverend Sun Myung Moon. “In the context of our church, we try to use boats as a training place for young people,” Thompson later explained to authorities. But the reverend said he and the hundreds of teens he took fishing over the years kept snagging fish they didn’t want. “We’d catch these sharks,” he said.

Leopard sharks, also known as tiger or cat sharks, are plentiful in the bay, and at some point in the early 1990s, Thompson and one of his followers realized they could make a lot of money if they stopped throwing them back in the water. Thompson learned that baby leopard sharks were a prized commodity on the black market. Pet dealers would pay handsomely for the exotic and beautiful fish, then sell them to people for their home aquariums.

Over the next decade, Thompson and a few of his fellow Unification Church members hauled at least six thousand of the sharks from the bay, according to an account one of his followers gave to federal investigators. Thompson admitted he sold the animals to wholesale pet dealers, who shipped them around the world. Earlier this year, authorities estimated the street value of the church’s operation at more than $1.2 million, making it the biggest baby-leopard-shark poaching ring environmentalists and federal investigators had ever encountered. […]

Thompson’s fishing ministry, known as the “Ocean Church,” clearly enjoyed the blessing of his superiors. Since the 1970s, Reverend Moon, a self-styled Messiah, has repeatedly extolled the virtues of fishing and has referred to himself as “King of the Ocean.” In the past three decades, his followers have responded zealously, turning the Unification Church into a major player in the domestic fishing industry — the sushi trade in particular. A giant distributor of raw fish controlled by church members now supplies more than six thousand restaurants nationwide, including some of the East Bay’s premier sushi bars.

Moon’s seafood empire is part of an ongoing effort by the church to enter mainstream American life and close the door on its cult reputation from the 1970s and early ’80s. Back then, its members were widely known as “Moonies,” a term the church hierarchy views as derogatory. People who track the Unification Church say profits from its legitimate enterprises, such as the sushi trade, finance money-losing endeavors that further Moon’s religious and political agendas. Among them is the conservative newspaper The Washington Times — the Fox News of the print media. Moon apparently doesn’t care that the Times loses tens of millions of dollars a year, presumably because the paper allows him to curry favor with Republican politicians by providing both him and them with a national soapbox to voice their right-wing views.

Whether Moon and his inner circle had a hand in Thompson’s illegal shark trade is an open question. The Unification Church has a long history of disguising its motives, and Moon is no stranger to lawbreaking — he served thirteen months in prison in the 1980s for federal tax evasion and obstruction of justice. […]

When members of Moon’s flock first arrived in the East Bay in the late 1960s, they set out to convert college students. In 1969, the church established its recruitment headquarters on the south side of the UC Berkeley campus in a house it bought near the intersection of Ashby and Claremont avenues. In the decades since, the two-story stucco house at 2955 Ashby has served as the local offices of CARP (Collegiate Association for the Research of Principles), a church-linked nonprofit with outposts in college towns nationwide.

In 1973, Moon’s followers purchased their second Berkeley property — this time just across from the north side of campus. The white-columned historic building at 2717 Hearst Avenue became the offices of New Education Development Systems, another nonprofit whose name provides no indication of its church connection. Recruiters would lure Cal students to the building for a free meal, then engage them with talk of “community,” “love,” and “self-sacrifice,” over a vegetarian dinner. After group singing and holding hands, the recruiters would tell their prospective converts that they belonged to the “Creative Community Project” and strongly urged them to board buses waiting outside. The buses would take them to the “farm” — a communelike piece of property in Boonville in Mendocino County that served as the church’s indoctrination facility.

It’s not surprising that Unification Church recruiters trolling such a liberal campus would keep Moon’s beliefs and politics hidden. Reverend Moon was an unwavering Nixon supporter, and continued to be so post-Watergate. He has a strong aversion to communism, which he has equated with Satanism. And, like other right-wing Christian leaders, Moon has been an unfailing advocate of abstinence until marriage, has crusaded against abortion, and has angrily denounced gays and lesbians — in a 1997 speech, he called gays “dung-eating dogs.”

But all that was kept from the college students — not to mention that the Korean-born Moon touts himself as more important than Jesus Christ. […]

It wasn’t until the 1980s that the church’s recruiting tactics were fully exposed. In a landmark legal case filed in San Francisco, two former Moonies sued the church, alleging they were victims of fraud and brainwashing at the farm. Marin County attorney Ford Greene, himself an ex-Moonie who spent time on the farm in the mid-1970s, represented the former church members. In a recent interview, Greene said that after he “escaped” from the church, he helped “deprogram” more than 130 members and then obtained a law degree so that he could battle Moon’s minions in court.

But before Greene’s case made it to trial, Moon’s lawyers tried to quash it on First Amendment freedom-of-religion grounds. Moon lost that bid in 1989 when the state Supreme Court ruled that his church could be sued for fraud because of its practice of disguising its identity to recruits. “There’s no question that they’re a cult,” Greene said.

Moon’s followers see themselves as enlightened Christians, and consider it the ultimate measure of faith to marry a spouse chosen directly by Moon. The reverend is perhaps best known for orchestrating mass marriages, including a 1982 ceremony at New York’s Madison Square Garden in which he wed more than eight thousand couples simultaneously. Many of these arranged marriages, conducted over the past three decades, have been between Korean and Japanese church members and Americans. The couples are urged to live in the United States and have lots of children — a not-so-subtle attempt to expand church membership here. Moon also has matched Japanese fishermen with American wives as a way to grow his church-connected fishing industry. […]

In a series of speeches in the 1970s and early ’80s, Moon outlined his dream of dominating the US fishing industry with a vast enterprise that would fund his church and feed the world. Church members then quietly began to purchase boat-building plants and establish fishing industries in Hawaii, Alaska, Louisiana, and the classic American fishing town of Gloucester, Massachusetts.

This was just part of Moon’s grandiose empire-building activities. Over the years, he reportedly has become a billionaire thanks to the thousands of private businesses and nonprofits his followers have launched nationwide. According to Bromley and others who follow the church’s business dealings, its members’ private companies have helped fund nonprofit organizations such as the Pure Love Alliance, a pro-chastity, anti-abortion, anti-gay group. “He has created an international corporate empire that in essence is used to fund the religious outreach,” Bromley said.

The church’s domestic fishing businesses are controlled by True World Foods. (Moon’s followers call him “True Father,” his wife, Hak Ja Han Moon, is “True Mother,” and, along with their children, they are the “True Family.”) True World Foods is owned and run by high-ranking Japanese-American church members. It has made significant inroads in the US shrimp and lobster industries, but its main moneymaker is sushi. The New Jersey-based company has warehouses around the country. Its Bay Area distribution center was established in 1978 in San Leandro, less than two miles from Moon’s only remaining East Bay church — the Bay Area Family Church — where Reverend Kevin Thompson has been pastor for fourteen years.

True World has earned a reputation over the years for dealing in high-quality fish. It supplies some of the East Bay’s more popular sushi restaurants, including Berkeley’s Kirala, Alameda’s Angelfish Japanese Restaurant, and Tachibana Sushi Bar and Grill in Oakland. Representatives from all three restaurants said they were aware True World is controlled by Unification Church members but were unconcerned. “They have good-quality fish,” explained Kimiko Bosset, a Kirala partner. “And business is business.”

And a profitable business it is. According to an April Chicago Tribune report, True World officials said they reaped $250 million in revenues last year. The company’s growth over the past two decades has been fueled by a nationwide sushi craze, especially among upscale urban dwellers in the Bay Area, New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. In other words, sushi-loving liberals coast to coast have for years unwittingly helped fund a right-wing Christian empire.

As the sushi business grew, Moon forged substantial ties with the Bush family and other Republicans. In the mid-1990s, former President George H.W. Bush delivered a series of speeches to Moon-connected groups in Japan. The Houston Chronicle reported in June that Moon’s Washington Times Foundation had given $1 million to a Houston nonprofit, which in turn donated more than $2 million to the elder Bush’s presidential library. Moon also has plenty of friends in Congress. In March 2004, at least a dozen congressman and senators, mostly Republicans, according to news reports, were on hand at the Dirksen Senate Office Building in DC for a fawning event held to coronate Moon as “The King of Peace.”

Moon’s East Bay disciple, meanwhile, was the king of sharks, even if the aquarium buffs who ended up with his pups never knew it. […]

If attempts by Thompson and his cohorts to disguise their activities are any indication, it’s clear they knew for years that they were breaking the law. […] it was easy for Thompson’s ring to escape detection while shipping baby sharks as small as eight inches. According to court documents, the reverend and his helpers would simply mark the boxes “live tropical fish.” […]

Thompson did, however, talk extensively with federal investigators. He told them it was 1990 or 1991 when he and fellow church member John Newberry discovered they could make money selling leopard-shark pups. […]

For the next thirteen years, Thompson, Newberry, and at least two other church members who were also fishermen secretly ran their leopard-shark business. […]

Torres, who declined to comment for this story, has been a federal environmental law enforcement officer for fifteen years. […]

It wasn’t until mid-May of 2004 that Torres got his first clue that he was investigating Unification Church members. While staking out a San Leandro home listed as Thompson’s address in public records, he noticed a small flag in the window. The flag, depicting a family on a yellow background, is the emblem of the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification — Moon’s new preferred name for his church. At another house listed as one of Thompson’s previous addresses, Torres watched a man in the driveway pour water from white buckets into plastic bags. The man tied the bags with rubber bands and placed them in cardboard boxes. Torres later tracked the man to the church’s Hearst Avenue property.

Over the next several weeks, Torres continued to stake out San Leandro houses that commercial database records associated with Thompson. At one, he saw a man who matched the reverend’s DMV photo get into a car. That home and another had the same yellow flag. Then, on June 7, Torres received troubling news. Thompson and his cohorts had learned of his investigation; he would have no hope of catching them in the act. […]

Evidence in hand, Torres was able to get confessions from Thompson, Newberry, and Ng. […]

But the most damning details, as far the Unification Church was concerned, came from Newberry, who was eighteen when he started shark fishing with Thompson. For decades, Moon and his top disciples have prided themselves in keeping church-connected businesses legally separate from church activities. When questioned, they have repeatedly maintained that even though church members own and operate the businesses, there are no formal ties to the church. But Newberry pierced that veil when he revealed that he and Thompson stowed their fishing poles, line, hooks, and bait, along with three of the church’s shark boats, at the San Leandro sushi warehouse owned by True World Foods. Newberry also disclosed that at the rear of the True World property was a large shack where they kept their live baby leopard sharks. […]

Professor Bromley, the Unification Church expert, thinks the shark ring was probably too small to have been sanctioned or even noticed by church officials. “In Moon’s budget, it just isn’t a lot of money,” Bromley explained — indeed, the ring at best pulled in a little more than $200,000 for Thompson and his congregants. It’s more likely, Bromley said, that Thompson was just following Moon’s fishing dictates and was trying to impress his superiors with his entrepreneurship. “You’ve got these junior executives,” he explained, “who think they need to do what they think the boss wants.”

But two former church members, along with an East Coast private investigator who has closely tracked Moon’s many businesses, disagree with Bromley. They all point to Moon’s reputation for running an operation in which little escapes the attention of his top disciples. “Local reverends rarely operate independently from the church hierarchy,” said Louis Desloge, who said he was a member of the church for twenty years and was married by Moon at Madison Square Garden. Larry Zilliox, a private investigator who has identified more than two thousand church-connected enterprises over the years, added: “I would think a number of people above the local level would have known about the shark ring.” For his part, Marin attorney Greene, the ex-Moonie who defeated the church at the state Supreme Court, said bluntly: “You don’t do anything in that organization without the okay from your superiors. You don’t fart without permission.”

This is a summary extract from the full article as it appeared in East Bay Express, Jul. 12, 2006
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