Adam Victor Brandizzi

Paul Morantz knew Synanon would try to kill him. He just didn't know how or when.

You probably don't know the name Paul Morantz. That's a shame. And if you know about Morantz at all it's likely because of what was done to him rather than what he accomplished in his career as a cult-busting lawyer; in the autum of 1978, he was nearly killed when members of the Synanon cult placed a rattlesnake (with the rattle removed) in his mailbox.

Much like Morantz himself, the rehab facility-cum-cult known as Synanon is largely forgotten today. But throughout the second half of the 20th century, it was one of most dangerous and violent cults America had ever seen, led by a larger than life character named Charles Dederich.

Paul Morantz helped bring Synanon down, the cost of which was a bizarre assassination attempt that very nearly succeeded. And I felt like I'd done a great disservice to readers by not going to meet with the largely housebound Morantz before publishing my brief history of Synanon's rise and fall back in April. I recently remedied that bout of laziness by driving up the Pacific Coast Highway to pay Morantz a visit.

Paul Morantz, 69, at his Pacific Palisades home in August 2014 by Matt Novak

Untold Stories in the Cult Capital of the World

"I like your Mickey Mouse collection," I half-shout to Paul Morantz from the living room of his home in the Pacific Palisades. He has an enormous display case filled with antique figurines and toys. Mostly Disney, and mostly Mickey Mouse.

"Yeah, a lot of them are from the 1930s," he replies from the kitchen as he makes us both some tea in the microwave.

Morantz moves slowly and is almost immediately apologetic about his appearance. For much of his life, he could boast of looking much younger than he actually was. Now, at 69, and in failing health, he's very clearly uncomfortable that he's not the athletic, dashing man seen on the back cover of his book, Escape: My Lifelong War Against Cults.

I spent about five hours talking with Morantz at his home in the Pacific Palisades, a community just north of Los Angeles proper. He calls L.A. the cult capital of the world, and I learn about his "double life" as the quintessential Angeleno, juggling beach bum sports and quirky hobbies with professional success and idealistic causes. And I learn about Morantz the optimist, the man looking for his own personal version of utopia.

Morantz is an incredibly driven man, whose professional passions (journalism and law) both required a kind of deep obsession. Once on a case, whether it was Synanon, or later against groups like est, the Moonies, Scientology, or psychotherapists abusing their patients, it consumed his life entirely.

I couldn't help but think of the obvious parallels to Charles Dederich, the founder of Synanon and Morantz's longtime adversary. It's a similar kind of obsession that drives people to create experimental communities like Synanon; a fixation on perfection, the quest to build a more fantastic world with like-minded people. And the desire for control. If not of other people's lives, then at least the control of your own.

Morantz's first true love was journalism, and he was determined to make a lucrative career out of telling untold stories. But he was encouraged by his father to pursue law, and seeing it as a kind of back-up, he went to law school and passed the bar exam.

Perhaps if he hadn't pursued law he would've continued writing freelance articles for local newspapers and the odd Rolling Stone profile here and there, as he had in the early 70s. But as a series of events would unfold during the mid-1970s, there was no question that Morantz had fallen into a niche for which he was particularly adept: busting people out of cults. It just happened to be a specialty that ran a particularly high risk of getting oneself killed.

Paul Morantz in the 1970s, photo supplied by Paul Morantz

From Skid Row to Synanon

Morantz's foray into advocacy for the powerless started in 1974, when he took on the case of Skid Row alcoholics who had been picked up off the street in downtown L.A. and effectively sold to mental institutions. They were kept drugged up to the point of incoherence so that the facilities could fraudulently bill Medicare. He spent over two years building his case, and ultimately won a tidy settlement for the victims.

At the same time, Morantz was also building his career as a writer and had no real intention of continuing to be a crusader for the vulnerable. But another case would come along just a couple of years later that he simply couldn't turn down.

In 1977, a woman in Venice, California who we'll call Terry (not her real name) was struggling with some very serious mental health issues. Suffering severe bouts of depression and paranoia, she went to a family planning clinic in search of a tranquilizer to calm herself down. Since it was just a family planning facility, they couldn't really help her, but one of the women working there had some experience with a group called Synanon and referred her to them. Terry took a taxi up from the Venice clinic to Synanon's Santa Monica compound.

When Terry arrived, the Synanites asked her three questions. First, if she'd ever used drugs before. Since she'd smoked marijuana in the past, Terry replied yes. Next, if she wanted their help. She again replied yes. And lastly, they asked if she would obey Synanon's rules. She said yes.

With that, Synanon considered Terry its latest recruit.

"They shaved off all her hair and then took her by the wrist and put her in an apartment building under lock and key across the street," Morantz tells me. From the beginning of Synanon in 1958, new male recruits to the drug rehab program would get very short haircuts as punishment. By the 1960s, some Synanites were shaving their heads voluntarily as a sign of solidarity. By the mid-70s it was mandatory—as were the vasectomies, abortions, and forced divorces imposed upon members after the death of Dederich's wife in 1977.

After learning where she'd gone, Terry's husband Ted traveled to the Santa Monica facility to find her, only to be told by Synanon members that he wasn't allowed to see or speak with her. He returned the next morning and discovered that she'd already been placed on a bus heading for a different Synanon compound north of San Francisco. He went to the local police, who said there was nothing they could do since she was an adult who had seemingly entered Synanon under her own free will.

Ted tried to see his wife again after making a trip to Synanon's Marin County compound but was again denied the right to see her. All the while, Terry was being told by Synanon that her husband didn't want to see her anymore, and that she was better off with Synanon. In turn, her captors told Ted that Terry didn't want anything to do with him.

Ted, desperate to get his wife back, began writing letters to local politicians, police, anybody in a position of power who he thought might be able to help. None of them did. And then, by chance, Ted met a guy who had been neighbor of Paul Morantz in Culver City, back when he had freed the Skid Row alcoholics from their nursing home prisons. This neighbor thought that maybe Morantz could help.

"At this time, I felt I had done my two and a half years of public service on the nursing home case," Morantz tells me. "I was engaged to be married, I had gotten a law office, I had sold a TV movie of the week that had gone into production. I thought that I was actually going to leave law and go full time into writing which was my number one love, and that I would never do some crusade like that again."

But this particular case that required some amount of experience with the politics and legalese of coercion and control, something for which Morantz was uniquely qualified. A distraught Ted told Morantz as much while crying over the phone. "I'll get her back," Morantz told him. "I promise you I'll get her back."

Morantz assumed that it would take little more than a phone call to the health department to get Terry released from Synanon's facilities. He was surprised to find, instead, that not only was Synanon not licensed to operate as a mental health or drug rehab facility, but that all attempts that had been made for government inspection had been rebuffed. Apparently no agency had really pushed the matter, and Synanon simply operated as it pleased without any state or local oversight of its methods.

"When I hung up, I just knew something was really wrong," Morantz said. "I didn't know what, but I knew something was really wrong. And I just had the sense that everything in my 31 years up until that point had happened for this moment... and that this was my moment."

Morantz pauses for maybe 10 seconds, clearly reflecting on some non-existent alternate timeline of his own path, "And that was the end of the life that I thought I was going to live."

Former Synanon HQ in Santa Monica (now a hotel) photographed in 2014 by Matt Novak

Screams Echoing Through Santa Monica

As it turns out, Morantz had already encountered Synanon over a decade earlier.

"My first memory [of Synanon] was my high school graduate party in '63 and we happened to be on the beach behind what was the National Guard Armory, which they were in. I got rip roaring drunk and I wandered off and got near the building. There was this large screaming coming from the building and I sort of stopped in my tracks," Morantz says.

Synanon had purchased the Santa Monica building in 1963 and was using it as their L.A. headquarters. What Morantz heard that night was probably the beating of a Synanite in the basement for some unknown infraction of the cult's code. Morantz recalls that a friend had explained at the time, "That's Syananon. They cure drug addicts."

"And I think I said 'good' but I was just scared," Morantz tells me, clearly still shaken by the sound of the screams he'd heard half a century ago. Untold numbers of people were beaten and abused in the basement of that building, now a swanky beachfront hotel. "I don't think I heard the word Synanon again until 1977," Morantz tells me.

Synanon promotional pamphlet photographed by Matt Novak

The Bait and Switch Rescue Mission

"Terry had gone completely psychotic," Morantz tells me about his rescue mission in 1977. "One of the reasons I was able to get her out was that they really didn't want her anymore." The cult had gotten really good at separating new recruits from their money. But it was in no way equipped to deal with real mental illness. By the late 1970s, Synanon was only interested in die-hard devotees who could actively contribute to their warped community in some way.

Synanon was ready to rid itself of Terry, but didn't want to be held accountable for any damages, should Terry or her husband sue. So the group demanded assurances in writing before she would be released. Morantz offered to write up the waiver, but pulled a clever bait and switch.

"What I [wrote in the waiver] was that it released them of all liability… for taking her out," Morantz says with a chuckle. All parties signed it, and Terry was released. "And this really pissed Dederich off."

Morantz sued Synanon on behalf of Terry and Ted and won $300,000 for them. Aside from the financial blow, Morantz's tactics had embarrassed the organization at a time when they were already becoming infamous in the press for physical violence against their neighbors. More importantly for Morantz was the earned reputation that he was the guy who could get things done, especially when it came to cults. He also earned an enemy for life.

Dangerous Opposition

In one of the worst attacks on an outsider, Synanon members viciously beat a trucker in Badger, California on November 11, 1977 after a benign road rage incident where the trucker supposedly cut off a car full of Synanites on the highway. Dederich reportedly shamed the four Synanon men involved for not physically attacking the trucker in retaliation. They remedied the situation by roaming the town with guns looking for the man, who turned out to be a guy named Ron Eidsen.

Once they found Eidsen, the group pistol-whipped him to a pulp in his own front yard, screaming that they were going to kill him. Eidsen's wife and five children could only watch on in horror. The Synanite thugs threatened to come back for his family if he ever messed with the cult again. Morantz knew that Synanon would not be above coming after him.

"[Dederich] was so much on the Wire [Synanon's internal radio system] about me that when people left they came to see me. So I was getting stories right off the bat," Morantz tells me. These communications were often recorded so that devotees could listen to them later, but this naturally came back to bite the organization in future litigation.

"I'll never forget the first person who came in and told me about the Imperial Marines and everything. When she left, I went to the head of the office and told them 'boy they've really got some nuts in there. You should hear the tale I was just told,'" brushing off the threats on his physical safety as outlandish, probably as a kind of coping mechanism. The Imperial Marines was Synanon's private fighting force, trained inside the organization and heavily armed.

"But it wasn't too long before I knew it was true," Morantz says. He had outsmarted Synanon and its team of lawyers. And Synanon, which is to say Dederich, was not happy about being made to look foolish.

Aerial view of one Synanon compound circa 1978 via Synanon.org

Stepping Up The Heat

The following months, Synanon would escalate its intimidation and reign of assaults on people outside of their organization. The group had always manipulated and abused many members inside, but by the 1970s they were circling the wagons for a full scale attack on outsiders. They had purchased a large cache of weapons; over $300,000 worth, by the FBI's 1978 estimates. And they had periodically beaten ranchers in Marin County with property adjacent to their headquarters.

Amazingly, this entire time, children were being sent to Synanon by local courts that believed Synanon was just the kind of tough love camp that at-risk youth needed. When kids would escape to the houses of neighbors on local ranches, the abuse inside was made pretty clear. But too often those kids would simply be returned to Synanon, to be abused again and again.

One woman, Doris Gambonini, who comforted Synanon refugees passed away earlier this month at the age of 80. Her husband Alvin was viciously attacked by Synanites in 1975. His crime in Dederich's eyes? Alerting authorities to the stories of abused teenagers and buying the kids bus tickets home when he could.

(It should be noted that I've reached out to people who were members of the organization in the 1970s and critical of my first blog post on Synanon. If you had experience with Synanon and would like to tell about your experiences, please email me.)

The Point Reyes Light, a weekly local newspaper composed of crusading journalists punching well above their weight, took up the cause of exposing Synanon's violence. Their story is told in the fascinating book The Light on Synanon (1980) by Dave Mitchell, Cathy Mitchell and Richard Ofshe. The Light would eventually win a Pulitzer for its coverage of Synanon, but just as Morantz's warnings about the organization were being ignored in southern California, so too were The Light's warnings to the north.

But maybe "ignored" isn't the right word. Some of the local police in Marin County were corrupt, and at least two deputies were Synanon members. Down in L.A., politicians had embraced Synanon early on in the 1960s, and once the 1970s rolled around they often refused to believe that there was anything shady going on. The Light's Pulitzer and Morantz's near-death experience would help make Synanon a national issue, but not before a lot more people were injured and a lot more people's lives were ruined.

One of those casualties was Phil Ritter, a former member who tried to get his young daughter out of the cult and engaged in a custody battle with his wife, who remained in the organization and fled to Detroit. Ritter sued, arguing that the cult was not a safe place for the child. So on September 19, 1978, members of Synanon tried to murder Phil Ritter in his own driveway. He spent a week in a coma and doctors thought he might not survive. Ritter eventually recovered, but no one was ever charged for the attempt on his life.

"When they did Phil Ritter, I knew that it was inevitable that they were coming for me. That was the hardest two weeks of my life," Morantz tells me.

An Unlikely Attempt

When the attempt on Morantz's life did come, the method was a complete surprise. On October 10, 1978, the anti-cult crusader opened his mailbox and stuck his hand inside, believing that what he couldn't quite see inside was a package of some sort. It was, in fact, a rattlesnake. The snake bit him. He ran shouting to his neighbors for help.

A rattlesnake seems like a difficult thing to hide, but two men had removed the rattle from a snake before placing it inside Morantz's mailbox. Neighbors later reported seeing a car circling the block, but had believed it to be police checking up on Morantz's house; he had recently warned his neighbors to look out for anything suspicious, and earlier that day had met with the police department to ask for special protection because he felt his life was in danger.

The two men who planted the snake, 20-year-old Lance Kenton and 28-year-old Joseph Musico, each received jail time. Dederich, who had called for the attempt on Morantz's life, escaped with just five years probation.

Paul Morantz in his hospital bed during a press conference after the snake attack (1978)

Interestingly, Morantz dedicates his Synanon book to Dederich because of his decision to use Synanon's Imperial Marines in the attempt on his life. You see, Dederich was too cheap to hire a proper hitman. When confronted with the $10,000 price tag for a professional killer, Dederich reportedly wondered aloud why they needed to hire someone at all when they had such competent men amongst their ranks. They had assembled and trained their own militia, the Imperial Marines, for just such missions.

Morantz says that Dederich being a "cheap bastard" saved his life. "You don't survive a hitman, so…" he trails off.

Recording Everything On the Wire

Morantz shows me a box of cassette tapes of Dederich's recordings. They're largely off-the-cuff ramblings of a narcissist commanding his flock. But some contain the screams of people being beaten—a warning for all Synanites to hear. Others directly call for violence against outsiders like Morantz, even giving out his address in the Pacific Palisades. And these are just the recordings that have survived.

Morantz has listened to nearly all of the tapes. I ask about what it's like to hear someone like that making threats against you and the people you love.

"I definitely have PTSD," Morantz says. "And in writing the book, when I got to the point of the violence, or I get to the point when my ex-fiancee comes to the hospital, I usually break out in tears."

But it's not just in the recordings nor in the newspaper clippings that he has to confront the emotional and physical terrorism that was thrust upon him by a sadistic cult. Hollywood has borrowed from and co-opted his story in so many ways throughout the years, recycling some of the most painful memories of his life for popular entertainment.

"There was a stupid Bruce Willis movie called Color of Night, and he opens his mailbox and a rattlesnake jumps out," Morantz says. Unfamiliar with the movie, I assume that he's talking about some distant memory from the 80s or 90s, but Morantz explains that he saw the movie on TV just two nights ago. The flick originally came out in 1994.

"The Player did it too," he said to my disbelief. The 1992 Robert Altman movie starring Tim Robbins (and nearly all of Hollywood's who's who in the early 90s making cameos) features a scene where someone tries to kill a Hollywood producer by placing a rattlesnake in his car. I'm slightly embarrassed that I'd forgotten that scene entirely, but even though it doesn't have a mailbox, it's clearly borrowing from Morantz's horrifying experience.

Aside from Hollywood's borrowing of the snake in a mailbox story (an episode of ABC's Lost was even called "Rattlesnake in a Mailbox") there have been several aborted attempts at making TV movies about Synanon. One of the first was a movie intended for ABC in 1982, but Synanon scared that project off with threats of litigation following some rather unflattering news reports. There was also a Showtime movie that was stuck in development hell for years and never got produced.

So far, Synanon's story hasn't been told properly on TV in documentary or fictionalized form. But it's not hard to imagine using the cult and its strange evolution from rehab facility to violent cult as the basis for a series. That is, if history doesn't forget it altogether.

Screenshot from the 1992 Robert Altman film The Player

His Voice Inside My Head

"I listened to so many of his tape recordings that I had a hard time getting his voice out of my head," Morantz says. "Sometimes I found myself thinking like him, and I would sort of have to catch myself."

The only time that Morantz found himself in the same room with Dederich was when he took his deposition for the civil trial over the attempt on Morantz's life. Morantz represented himself in his civil suit, putting him face-to-face with the cult leader who had called for his death.

"It was strange taking his deposition," Morantz says. They were marathon sessions, with Morantz setting traps for Dederich to contradict himself. Dederich was a cunning sociopath, but Morantz would catch him in moments claiming that he had absolutely no control over what a few bad apples in the organization might do, while just earlier claiming that nothing done in Synanon would happen without his approval.

"Dederich was an unusual circumstance in that he wanted to tell me everything," Morantz says. "He wanted me to know, yet he had to do it in a way that he couldn't create liability, but he did."

"The sum total of his testimony was: nothing happened in Synanon unless I approved it. What did I approve? I really don't remember."

"It was strange. I don't know how many people have deposed somebody who've ordered you murdered. It was a unique experience," Morantz says.

What's perhaps so strange about the violence at Synanon was that most of the proof that showed up in court didn't come from police reports. Most of the evidence of violence within Synanon was from their own internal memos and recordings.

One of the recordings that would come back to haunt Synanon was labeled "New Religious Posture — Don't Fuck With Synanon." On that tape was Dederich's booming voice saying, "Don't mess with us. You can get killed dead. Physically dead." Not much nuance there, of course.

Left: Santa Monica Synanites in 1975 with shaved hair; Right: Charles Dederich in 1979

Mr. Dederich Punches His Way to Washington

For all that he did to undermine Synanon, Morantz ended up watching its rapid downfall from the sidelines as he moved on to other cases. While the attempts on the lives of its enemies in 1977 and 1978 contributed to its unraveling, perhaps the group's biggest misstep wouldn't come until it tried to make a name for itself in Washington, D.C.

It started innocently enough, with Synanon making friends with Jimmy Carter's sister and other people close to political power. The group then leased office space in the nation's capital, planning to set up full-scale lobbying efforts. But Dederich had grown arrogant. And out of this arrogance came sloppiness. Unlike California in the 1960s and 70s, where alternative living communities and their strange ways had a deeper history, the establishment forces in the East didn't have time for hippy dippy bullshit. Especially hippy dippy bullshit that came with a side of thuggishness.

Once Synanon secured office space in D.C., it brought along its Wild West mentality and assumed that they could simply intimidate other tenants out of the building, making more room for themselves. This worked in a handful of cases, but caught the attention of the local press.

Whereas Synanon only had to deal with the local small town weekly newspapers in Marin County, they were about to learn what the D.C. press was capable of in a post-Nixon world. Reporters came knocking on Synanon's D.C. doors and Dederich himself, along with other top Synanites, attacked a photographer. Instead of standing to face charges, Dederich fled to Italy, where he reportedly started drinking again.

Dederich and his thugs, understanding that they would do best to just stay on the Left Coast where the national media largely regarded Synanon's transgressions as a local story, agreed to leave D.C. But being the "greedy bastard" he was, Dederich wanted his deposit back from the property rental company. The company declined, and they went to court. This was a huge miscalculation.

While demands had previously been made by Morantz and others to produce the tapes from the Wire, it was the D.C. court that finally procured them. What Synanon handed over was clearly heavily edited material, the cult claiming that most of the tapes had been recycled. Just as in the Nixon case, there were large gaps in some of the recordings. However, there was enough there to prove that Dederich knew what was going on within Synanon, and that the group was indeed terrorizing anyone who dared get near them.

"The courts said this was a fraud upon the court conducted by Synanon's legal department and that the remedy is that Synanon loses the case," Morantz tells me. This ruling essentially called Synanon a terrorist organization for its intimidation of other building tenants, and brought to light the destruction of evidence.

Every piece of litigation involving Synanon going forward was able to cite this ruling, Morantz explains to me as he drinks his tea. I clearly see the excitement build inside him as he recalls this sense of vindication.

And slowly but surely, the cases started rolling in during the 1980s. But even more devastatingly to Synanon's utopian community of horror and abuse, the tax man now wanted his cut. Coincidentally, the IRS case was overseen by Judge Charles Richey, the same judge who oversaw the Nixon Watergate break-in case.

Richey's 1984 ruling against Synanon didn't mince words, warning that the evidence presented raised, "serious questions concerning Synanon's financial operations and create a chilling portrait of an organization that advocates terror and violence."

Synanon could no longer claim tax-exempt status as a non-profit, but its for-profit business was still raking in enough to keep the IRS at bay and pay their back taxes. The bigger problem though? It continued to sell itself as a non-profit drug rehab group to large corporations, producing promotional items (lighters, paper weights, branded pens, etc) and saying that it was simply rehabilitating drug addicts. This presentation of a for-profit business as a charity was clearly fraudulent.

Meanwhile, Dederich and a small army at the very top of the organization were getting paid handsomely, with the organization still pulling in an estimated $30 million per year well into the 1980s. It wasn't until Forbes magazine more or less exposed the true nature of the for-profit scheme that huge companies like IBM and Heinz were shamed into cutting ties with Synanon, effectively a financial death sentence.

"After that, Visalia [the central California compound] essentially became a ghost town. It was falling apart. There was only a small group of fanatical people left," Morantz tells me. "Then the IRS took what was remaining and it closed."

Out of money by 1991, Synanon was done, disappearing not with some climactic shoot-out between the heroes and the baddies, but with a whimper of unpaid tax bills, property seizures, and diminished funds. But that fade out helped Morantz in small ways. Investigators invited Morantz to visit the Visalia compound after it was seized and he appreciated getting to look inside, if only as a way to maybe find some semblance of closure on that aspect of his life.

"It wasn't really a big news story when it closed in 1991. I remember my son was six years old then. I remember this sort of feeling that I guess I can kind of exhale now. I guess that he's safe and I guess I'm safe… and…" he says, trailing off thinking perhaps about the emotional trauma that he and the people in his life had endured.

Underside of a ceramic pot created by Synanon now in Paul Morantz's house

Regrets and the Course of History

When I ask Morantz if he has any regrets, he says that nearly everything is a double-edged sword. Sure, he never became the writer he dreamt of being, but he almost certainly served a greater purpose with his life as a lawyer rescusing people out of cults, even if it meant some drastic personal sacrifices.

He recalls a time that he was watching TV with his then-fiancee Trudy. It was not long before the snake attack, and Dederich was on TV making thinly veiled threats against reporters and lawyers who had crossed Synanon. In that moment, sitting in the glow of the TV, he knew the love of his life was going to leave. He also knew that however much it hurt, it was the best thing for her safety.

"I thought that I had the woman that I was going to marry, and I was never able to accept another woman," he says choking up. "On the other hand, if I could go back and do it over again it's not even a thought, because my son would not have been born."

Morantz would later marry another woman with whom he had one child. He's very proud of his son, speaking in glowing terms about his work at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory helping to get the Curiosity Rover on Mars. Morantz and his wife would later divorce.

"And in one sense, I'm very proud of what I did, so it's a mixed bag," he says. "I know I did something important and I know I saved a lot of people's lives — people we'll never even know because in some ways I changed the course of history."

His phrasing in this way may seem shockingly immodest, but it's true. And Morantz isn't one for false modesty. He understands what he did to help change the course of history. And he's the first to tell you that he didn't do it alone. But when you're one of the first to wage battle with an organization like Synanon and you feel like nobody's listening to you, it can be quite alienating. When he finally got a call from U.S. Department of Justice investigators he reportedly replied, "Where in the fuck have you guys been?"

Ultimately, Morantz isn't looking for sympathy. He explains that he lived a full life—a "double life" as he called it—where he was able to run to the beach and play volleyball one minute or commiserate with his group of fellow border collie owners, and yet still go back to the courtroom and fight the good fight, with neither world knowing anything about the other.

But he pauses again to reflect on the one that got away. "If I had my choice, my choice would've been Trudy. That hurt me the most."

Morantz speaks of personal pain, but it's rooted in this fear that human nature will never allow for the comfort or happiness that we so desperately work towards when trying to build our perfect worlds.

"That's the sad part of it," Morantz says. "It's always been a great dream, but I believe that Orwell, Lord of the Flies, Synanon, Jim Jones, Animal Farm, — every attempt at utopia — Cuba... how about this one, United States of America," he laughs. "....human nature just won't allow it."

Morantz understood the struggles of those who had joined Synanon looking for a better life. In fact, he became close friends with many Synanites after they left the cult. As the years have gone on, they've died off as older people do, leaving Morantz struggling to find others who understand what he endured.

"For a period of time, all my close friends were ex-Synanon members," he tells me. "It was really like they were the only ones who could understand what I'd been through. And there was a sort of need to talk the language."

For all the mental and physical anguish that he dealt with, Morantz may as well have been a prisoner of Synanon himself. Dederich joked with Morantz at his deposition that he always thought the lawyer would eventually join the Synanon cause. By helping to bring it down, he had to virtually become as much a Synanite as anyone else—and ultimately pay the awful price that comes along with that.

Davy Crockett lampshade and Synanon ceramic bowl sit on a desk in Paul Morantz's home photographed by Matt Novak (2014)

Publish or Perish

In 2007, doctors told Morantz that he didn't have much time left to live. By 2009, after having shopped around a screenplay about Davy Crockett, Morantz realized that the story he really needed tell was his own, and that a website would be the most effective way to bring it to a mass audience. There was an entire generation of people who had no idea what Synanon was, nor how dangerous they were. So he put aside his Davy Crockett script and started working on a book about his life, publishing large stories from it online as he finished different chapters.

"Even when I was famous, it was 'you were the guy who got bit by the rattlesnake.' It wasn't like they knew what I did," Morantz says of the late 1970s and early 1980s. This frustration for only being known as the guy who'd been attacked by a rattlesnake spurred him to tell the full story.

His first book was published by his alma mater—the University of Southern California, where he'd been the sports editor of the college newspaper—but his book was print-on-demand. They published just fifteen copies at a time to be placed in stores. He released a second edition through a self-publishing site, and became frustrated by the entire experience.

"It makes me want to puke," Morantz says of the self-publishing industry. "I'm still searching to find some company with any integrity."

More recently, Morantz just finished a new book that focuses solely on Synanon, but he has again struggled to find a reputable publishing home for his 600-plus page comprehensive history on the cult.

Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard in 1959 via Getty Images

Scientology, Christianity, and The Future of Utopia

You can see the legacy of Synanon in the "tough love" youth boot camps of the 1980s and 90s. Some still operate today, the most egregious of which are physically abusive and practice things like gay conversion therapy. But aside from the residue of Synanon's methods, there's still the danger that more traditional cults can rise to manipulate people in horrific and abusive ways.

"Historically, cults have risen at times of unrest," Morantz says. He believes that the last decade was a more fertile ground for totalist movements than our own. He saw the economic instability, second Gulf War, and marches on Wall Street as worrying signs that people may become attracted to follow any charismatic guy who stands on a soapbox. "But things have calmed," he argues. But to be honest, I'm not so sure I agree.

Fascinatingly, Paul Morantz doesn't believe that cults with a history of violence can't necessarily morph into something more benign. He cites the violent origins of the Mormons and Christians, and even proposes that Scientology could one day be a much more respected organization on the world stage.

"Sometimes when the founder [of a cult] dies off you have a better chance to mutate and evolve," Morantz says. "But in Scientology's case, from Hubbard to Miscavige they may have gone from the frying pan to the fire."

Morantz is, of course, talking about the history of mental and physical abuse that was rampant in the organization during L. Ron Hubbard's reign until his death in 1986. In fact, the FBI file on Synanon makes comparisons to Scientology. And it's hard not to see the similarities. Synanon, unlike Scientology, didn't weather the storm brought on by the IRS. And by the realities of the information age.

"Scientology, it used to be like Synanon, that if you breathe this name, you were slapped with 48 lawsuits. And it controlled its enemies. But now so many books have been written, there's so much information, it's just a lost cause [for Scientology to sue everybody]."

"I was in court trying to get the truth out about their theories, that they were claiming were copyrighted. And I was saying the public has a right to know before they join about the volcanoes and the H-bomb and all that kind of stuff," Morantz says.

He's talking about Scientology's creation myth involving the intergalactic warlord Xenu capturing souls and dropping them in volcanoes here on Earth. Morantz believes that people have every right to join whatever group they like, as long as they know what they're getting into and maintain the freedoms guaranteed to them by U.S. law. By withholding the origin stories of Scientology, Morantz saw their dealings as outright fraud.

In 2005, Morantz's son showed him the infamous South Park episode " Trapped In The Closet," which pokes fun at Scientology by revealing its creation story to the world. These stories were considered (and still are considered) top secret by the church of Scientology. "And then finally one day my son sticks a cartoon show in and I'm watching it all on a cartoon!"

"I can't believe this!" Morantz remembers saying. Here was all of the top secret church information that Morantz had argued decades earlier that people had a right to know. And suddenly, in the mid-2000s the church had less power to intimidate outsiders as they had so often in the past. The flood of information was simply too overwhelming. "Scientology's main power for harassing was lawsuits, so that's kind of taken away. There's already a significant change."

In fact, Morantz sees hope for even the most extreme organizations, especially since many of our modern institutions have uncomfortably similar roots. "The Mormons, Christianity, they all went through in their early days stages like that," Morantz says. "So if its leadership dies off it could morph into something more mainstream. And then just because maybe it was a fraud to a lot of people who ran it doesn't mean that it's not a good faith belief to people thirty years later who join it."

This kind of shocks me, coming from a man who nearly died because of a violent cult. But he's absolutely right.

"I'm not saying it's going to change, I'm just saying that it could. Even Synanon, if it had survived Dederich's death, it could have morphed," Morantz concedes before reminding himself of the group's manipulative therapeutic tactics, which would have presented a tougher hurdle than he initially thought.

Palm trees in West Hollywood by Matt Novak

Last Stand in Shangri-La

Morantz recounts to me his last visit to the law offices where he once waged battles against not only Synanon, but the other cults that would convince their followers that theirs was the only way—the only path to redemption—and take advantage of that trust through abuse and manipulation.

He tells me that he sat on a stone bench outside those offices and did his best to remember what he had lived through; to remember what it had all been for. His voice trembles as he tells me about that day, when he could do nothing but cry over the battles that had been lost to history.

"I cried for myself, I cried for my staff," he says. "But most of all I cried because I knew that there'd never be a Camelot, Shangri-La, or Utopia."

I leave Morantz's house a bit shaken; his stories rattling inside my head. He is, very clearly, a man who has lived a full life. But his frustrations become my frustrations. What's the point? Did Morantz succeed, even if his legacy is that of a story largely left untold? What does success look like?

The personal and occupational sacrifices we make in life follow us everywhere. No one gets to "have it all," as the tired cliche goes, either individually or as part of a larger whole. Morantz struggles with that, as we all do. Ask him whether it was all worth it, and you're bound to get a different response on any given day.

After enough time, history eventually forgets us all. And despite his best efforts, Morantz will probably continue to be remembered simply as "that lawyer" (or even just "that guy") who was attacked by a snake. But while he never found his own utopia, he saved countless people from the pain of Synanon's abusive dystopia. His own life's lack of perfection, weighed against saving countless of other lives from despair. In the end, that has to be enough.

Image by Jim Cooke

The browser is a hostile development environment and supporting a wide range of desktop browsers can be tough work.

One of the immediate challenges we discovered when we first started the responsive news prototype was the large range of devices that we would have to support. It terrified us. This article is about a solution we use to alleviate this problem.

Stats and market evolution

Looking at mobile devices that are accessing our service in the early stages of our project highlighted the challenge. We have ~80 significant browsers / operating system combinations regularly using our application across the globe and a long tail of hundreds more. In the four months since we first gathered the statistics there’s been many more releases and updates - Amazon’s Fire, Apple’s new iPad, Ice Cream Sandwich, Microsoft’s Mango.

To support everything on desktop we typically have to test a dozen different browsers with a multitude of different configurations and subtle differences between major and minor version numbers across three operating systems. But developers are used to this, we have coping strategies - multi-browser installs, virtual and remote environments - and it’s a fairly well trodden ground.

Responsive development stretches the problem further by introducing a more fragmented market across more axes. We have no multi-browser VMs available, we can’t remotely test a tactile UI, testing how your interface reacts when a phone enters a 3g network black spot is tricky.

To that extent creating complex UI for the number of devices that significantly trend, say, user agents with a greater than 0.5% share of our audience, of bbc.co.uk/news is impossible. IMPOSSIBLE! There’s just too many of them.

Another factor that makes developing for responsive design hard is the rate with which mobile users update their phones and browsers.

In the developed world the typical contract length for a smart phone is between 18 months and 2 years so there’s a fairly quick upgrade cycle from year to year. A good proportion of the market that will always be using the latest technology and expect the latest/greatest experience. Conversely, the other half of our audience are using low-end devices, some developing economies appear to be using exclusively Nokia phones (usually running Opera or the native s40 browser), a trip to your local phone shop will highlight that manufactures are still pushing a vastly different set of phones to their customers.

So this is the conundrum of our project from a technical perspective. How do we continue to support the vast number of older and less capable devices while delivering to our brief of creating a world class news experience tailored to smart phones and larger resolutions?

The answer for us is a two-tiered responsive solution.

Creating a core experience

We make this manageable in the same you and everyone else in the industry does it: by having a lowest common denominator and developing towards that. So we’ve taken the decision to split the entire browser market into two, which we are currently calling “feature browsers” and “smart browsers”.

Someone on the team started referring to them as “HTML4 browsers” and “HTML5 browsers”, which we find is easier to communicate the sentiment to non-technical people.

1. Comparison of the two states of the front page. On the left a simple ‘HTML4’ experience, on the right, an progressively enhanced UI. Click the image for a higher resolution graphic.

The first tier of support we call the core experience. This works on everything. I’ve seen it work on a Nokia E65, a Blackberry OS4, Kindle 1, a HTC Touch 2 running Win Mobile 6.5, a Samsung U900 Soul, a Commodore Vic20, my nan’s slipper and a toaster just selotaped to a TV. Likewise, GoogleBot, text-browsers like Lynx, folks that disable JavaScript and so on are all assured a good level of service.

The USP of the core experience is its speed. Our front page makes 1 request for the HTML document, a request graphic associated with the first story, then 2 CSS requests, a stats web bug (a GIF) and 2 branding images - 7 request in total, at approximately 21kb. Everyone gets this initial payload.

By comparison, our current wide-screen targetted desktop site currently measures in at ~500kb and 77 requests without javascript and ~700kb and 113 requests with javascript.

On top of this we layer our JavaScript application. Each page has a block of inline JavaScript that checks the capabilities of the browser before deciding whether to kick start the enhanced experience. Progressive enhancement, really, at heart. The JavaScript will include curl.js into the page and then AMD modules will load additional functionality into the page (our drop-down section navigation for example). The USP of this UI is that it provide a news service that tailored to new hardware/software.

Mustard

In previous projects across the BBC this split has been phrased in user agent terms. We pick IE6 as the minimum entry point and coerce, hack and shoehorn our code to fit that requirement. But these days, with such a long tail of user agents now accessing the site, this becomes a fruitless exercise. Feature detection is the obvious solution.

The single line of JavaScript that decides whether or not the browser is HTML4 or HTML5 is this:-

if('querySelector' in document
     && 'localStorage' in window
     && 'addEventListener' in window) {
     // bootstrap the javascript application
     }

As the application loads we earmark incapable browsers with the above code and exclude the bulk of the Javascript powered UI from them, leaving them with clean, concise, core experience.

Here’s the justification for each condition:-

• document.querySelector - A large part of any JS library is its DOM selector. If the browser has native CSS selecting then it removes the need for a DOM selector. QuerySelector has been available in Firefox since 3.5 at least and has been working in webkit for ages. It also works in IE9.

• window.localStorage - Although we are not using it yet, we are planning on making considerable use of it. Imagine that if you first came to the mobile site we downloaded all the stories straight away and stored them in localStorage. They’d then be available to use while you are going through an areas of sketchy bandwidth.

• window.addEventListener - Another large part of any JS library is event support. Every browser made in the last 6 years (except IE8) supports DOM level 2 events. If the browser supports this then we know it has better standards support than IE8.

So what do you think of this? Mocking me is possible via the comment form at the bottom of the page. This hopefully isn’t too controversial, Lanyrd’s recently launched mobile product does a very similar thing. This test effectively breaks the web browser market into these two groups:-

HTML5 browsers:-

• IE9+
• Firefox 3.5+
• Opera 9+ (and probably further back)
• Safari 4+
• Chrome 1+ (I think)
• iPhone and iPad iOS1+
• Android phone and tablets 2.1+
• Blackberry OS6+
• Windows 7.5+ (new Mango version)
• Mobile Firefox (all the versions we tested)
• Opera Mobile (all the versions we tested)

HTML4 browsers:-

• IE8-
• Blackberry OS5-
• Nokia S60 v6-
• Nokia S40 (all versions)
• All other Symbian variants
• Windows 7 phone (pre-Mango)
• …and many more that are too numerous to mention

I call the test that determines what group a browser belongs to cutting the mustard.

Brave new world

As a web developer “cutting the mustard” provides me with an opportunity to wipe the client-side development slate clean and start afresh. Over the last few years I feel that our industry has gotten lazy because of the crazy download speeds that broadband has given us. Everyone stopped worrying about how large their web pages were and added a ton of JS libraries, CSS files and massive images into the DOM. This has continued on to mobile platforms that don’t always have broadband speeds or hardware capacity to render complex code.

With our mustard test we can now develop JavaScript solutions that use native implementations of features that we have grown accustomed to using without having to download polyfilling libraries.

The increasing popularity of mobile web browsing, and the availability of responsive web design has forced my team to refactor how we think a modern webpage should be built.

Our product is the future of BBC News online. It’s responsive, works on everything, looks great and is very fast.

The sound made by the Krakatoa volcanic eruption in 1883 was so loud it ruptured eardrums of people 40 miles away, travelled around the world four times, and was clearly heard 3,000 miles away.

Think, for a moment, just how crazy this is. If you're in Boston and someone tells you that they heard a sound coming from New York City, you're probably going to give them a funny look. But Boston is a mere 200 miles from New York. What we're talking about here is like being in Boston and clearly hearing a noise coming from Dublin, Ireland. Travelling at the speed of sound (766 miles or 1,233 kilometers per hour), it takes a noise about 4 hours to cover that distance. This is the most distant sound that has ever been heard in recorded history.

A much much smaller eruption occurred recently in Papua New Guinea. From the video, you can get a tiny sense of the sonic damage unleashed by Krakatoa:

Holy smoking Toledos indeed. On Reddit, a user details how loud a Saturn V rocket is and what the effects would be at different distances. At very close range, the sound from the Saturn V measures an incredible 220 db, loud enough to melt concrete just from the sound.

At 500 meters, 155 db you would experience painful, violent shaking in your entire body, you would feel compressed, as though deep underwater. Your vision would blur, breathing would be very difficult, your eardrums are obviously a lost cause, even with advanced active noise cancelling protection you could experience permanent damage. This is the sort of sound level aircraft mechanics sometimes experience for short periods of time. Almost twice as "loud" as putting your ear up to the exhaust of a formula 1 car. The air temperature would drop significantly, perhaps 10-25 degrees F, becoming suddenly cold because of the air being so violently stretched and moved.

Even at three miles away, the sound is loud enough to cause permanent hearing damage. But that's nothing compared to the Krakatoa sound. The Saturn V sound is ~170 db at 100 meters away while the Krakatoa explosion was that loud 100 miles away! What happens at 170 db?

...you would be unable to breathe or likely see at all from the sound pressure, glass would shatter, fog would be generated as the water in the air dropped out of suspension in the pressure waves, your house at this distance would have a roughly 50% chance of being torn apart from sound pressure alone. Military stun grenades reach this volume for a split second... if they are placed up to your face. Survival chance from sound alone, minimal, you would certainly experience permanent deafness but probably also organ damage.

The word "loud" is inadequate to describe how loud that is. (thx, david)

Já pensou no quanto uma pequena porção de massa, feita com borracha de silicone, pode fazer por você? Está na hora de pensar – Sugru é o nome do produto, uma massinha colorida feita para moldar, colar e consertar coisas em sua casa – qualquer coisa na sua casa, segundo os fabricantes.

Tem um cabo ou fio de carregador quase rompendo? Um cabide quebrado? Um tênis de corrida furado? Nada disso é problema para o Sugru. Essa massa, que já chega a mais de 138 países e que está tendo um sucesso repentino, se gruda e se adapta ao objeto. Depois é só deixar secar e ela acaba servindo de proteção, graças à textura e resistência ( já que ela é ao mesmo tempo dura e flexível).

A revista americana Time considera esta a melhor invenção desde a fita adesiva. A criadora do produto, que levou meses de estudo e melhorias, a irlandesa Jane Ní Dhulchaointigh, diz que tudo começou com um pensamento: “eu não quero comprar coisas novas o tempo todo. Eu quero consertar as coisas que eu já tenho, de forma a que isso funcione melhor para mim”.

Veja alguns vídeos e imagens sobre a utilidade do Sugru e, quem sabe, se não se torna mais um dos cerca de 285 mil utilizadores do produto.

A história e os protagonistas:

A pencil-and-paper round of SHA-256

The mining process

A cryptographic hash function takes a block of input data and creates a smaller, unpredictable output. The hash function is designed so there's no "short cut" to get the desired output - you just have to keep hashing blocks until you find one by brute force that works. For Bitcoin, the hash function is a function called SHA-256. To provide additional security, Bitcoin applies the SHA-256 function twice, a process known as double-SHA-256.

In Bitcoin, a successful hash is one that starts with enough zeros.[1] Just as it is rare to find a phone number or license plate ending in multiple zeros, it is rare to find a hash starting with multiple zeros. But Bitcoin is exponentially harder. Currently, a successful hash must start with approximately 17 zeros, so only one out of 1.4x10²⁰ hashes will be successful. In other words, finding a successful hash is harder than finding a particular grain of sand out of all the grains of sand on Earth.

The following diagram shows a block in the Bitcoin blockchain along with its hash. The yellow bytes are hashed to generate the block hash. In this case, the resulting hash starts with enough zeros so mining was successful. However, the hash will almost always be unsuccessful. In that case, the miner changes the nonce value or other block contents and tries again.

Structure of a Bitcoin block

The SHA-256 hash algorithm used by Bitcoin

The blue boxes mix up the values in non-linear ways that are hard to analyze cryptographically. Since the algorithm uses several different functions, discovering an attack is harder. (If you could figure out a mathematical shortcut to generate successful hashes, you could take over Bitcoin mining.)

The Ma majority box looks at the bits of A, B, and C. For each position, if the majority of the bits are 0, it outputs 0. Otherwise it outputs 1. That is, for each position in A, B, and C, look at the number of 1 bits. If it is zero or one, output 0. If it is two or three, output 1.

The Σ0 box rotates the bits of A to form three rotated versions, and then sums them together modulo 2. In other words, if the number of 1 bits is odd, the sum is 1; otherwise, it is 0. The three values in the sum are A rotated right by 2 bits, 13 bits, and 22 bits.

The Ch "choose" box chooses output bits based on the value of input E. If a bit of E is 1, the output bit is the corresponding bit of F. If a bit of E is 0, the output bit is the corresponding bit of G. In this way, the bits of F and G are shuffled together based on the value of E.

The next box Σ1 rotates and sums the bits of E, similar to Σ0 except the shifts are 6, 11, and 25 bits.

The red boxes perform 32-bit addition, generating new values for A and E. The input W_t is based on the input data, slightly processed. (This is where the input block gets fed into the algorithm.) The input K_t is a constant defined for each round.[2]

As can be seen from the diagram above, only A and E are changed in a round. The other values pass through unchanged, with the old A value becoming the new B value, the old B value becoming the new C value and so forth. Although each round of SHA-256 doesn't change the data much, after 64 rounds the input data will be completely scrambled.[3]

Manual mining

To explain what's on the paper: I've written each block A through H in hex on a separate row and put the binary value below. The maj operation appears below C, and the shifts and Σ0 appear above row A. Likewise, the choose operation appears below G, and the shifts and Σ1 above E. In the lower right, a bunch of terms are added together, corresponding to the first three red sum boxes. In the upper right, this sum is used to generate the new A value, and in the middle right, this sum is used to generate the new E value. These steps all correspond to the diagram and discussion above.

I also manually performed another hash round, the last round to finish hashing the Bitcoin block. In the image below, the hash result is highlighted in yellow. The zeroes in this hash show that it is a successful hash. Note that the zeroes are at the end of the hash. The reason is that Bitcoin inconveniently reverses all the bytes generated by SHA-256.[4]

Last pencil-and-paper round of SHA-256, showing a successfully-mined Bitcoin block.

What this means for mining hardware

In contrast, Litecoin, Dogecoin, and similar altcoins use the scrypt hash algorithm, which is intentionally designed to be difficult to implement in hardware. It stores 1024 different hash values into memory, and then combines them in unpredictable ways to get the final result. As a result, much more circuitry and memory is required for scrypt than for SHA-256 hashes. You can see the impact by looking at mining hardware, which is thousands of times slower for scrypt (Litecoin, etc) than for SHA-256 (Bitcoin).

Conclusion

A Reddit reader asked about my energy consumption. There's not much physical exertion, so assuming a resting metabolic rate of 1500kcal/day, manual hashing works out to almost 10 megajoules/hash. A typical energy consumption for mining hardware is 1000 megahashes/joule. So I'm less energy efficient by a factor of 10^16, or 10 quadrillion. The next question is the energy cost. A cheap source of food energy is donuts at $0.23 for 200 kcalories. Electricity here is $0.15/kilowatt-hour, which is cheaper by a factor of 6.7 - closer than I expected. Thus my energy cost per hash is about 67 quadrillion times that of mining hardware. It's clear I'm not going to make my fortune off manual mining, and I haven't even included the cost of all the paper and pencils I'll need.

Notes

[2] The source of the constants used in SHA-256 is interesting. The NSA designed the SHA-256 algorithm and picked the values for these constants, so how do you know they didn't pick special values that let them break the hash? To avoid suspicion, the initial hash values come from the square roots of the first 8 primes, and the K_t values come from the cube roots of the first 64 primes. Since these constants come from a simple formula, you can trust that the NSA didn't do anything shady (at least with the constants).

[3] Unfortunately the SHA-256 hash works on a block of 512 bits, but the Bitcoin block header is more than 512 bits. Thus, a second set of 64 SHA-256 hash rounds is required on the second half of the Bitcoin block. Next, Bitcoin uses double-SHA-256, so a second application of SHA-256 (64 rounds) is done to the result. Adding this up, hashing an arbitrary Bitcoin block takes 192 rounds in total. However there is a shortcut. Mining involves hashing the same block over and over, just changing the nonce which appears in the second half of the block. Thus, mining can reuse the result of hashing the first 512 bits, and hashing a Bitcoin block typically only requires 128 rounds.

[4] Obviously I didn't just have incredible good fortune to end up with a successful hash. I started the hashing process with a block that had already been successfully mined. In particular I used the one displayed earlier in this article, #286819.

[5] Another problem with manual mining is new blocks are mined about every 10 minutes, so even if I did succeed in mining a block, it would be totally obsolete (orphaned) by the time I finished.