Amish Confidential (12 page)

But what really got to the Amish wasn’t just the news coverage. It was the merciless jokes, repeated night after night on network TV.

“What was the worst Amish crime until now?” Jay Leno asked an actor dressed as an Amish police chief. “Cow-jacking,” the Amish chief replied to the uproarious laughter of the
Tonight Show
audience.

David Letterman devoted one of his famous Top Ten Lists to “signs your Amish teen is in trouble.” Most of the Amish people in the area didn’t see the show when it aired on CBS on June 24, 1998, any more than they’d caught Jay Leno’s skit. Despite the cracks in Amish isolation, most homes were still not equipped with televisions. But a local newspaper printed Letterman’s whole, painful list of Amish-teen trouble signs.

“In his sock drawer, you find pictures of women without bonnets.”

“When you criticize him, he yells, ‘Thou suck!’ ”

Number five was: “Defiantly says, ‘If I had a radio, I’d listen to rap.’ ”

The list wrapped up with:

“He was recently pulled over for ‘driving under the influence of cottage cheese.’ ”

And “He was wearing his big black hat backwards.”

Soon enough, even local people were joking about the case. You couldn’t go to town without overhearing something. “Did you hear the one about the FBI agents? They’re stopping in at Amish coffee
breaks and making sure the white powder on the doughnuts isn’t cocaine.”

Or “Did you hear they’re filming a sequel to
Witness
? It’s called
Defendant
.”

It wasn’t that the Amish had no sense of humor, they kept telling one another, but couldn’t all the jokesters go pick on someone else?

W
hen the Abners’ case finally got to court, their defense lawyers pleaded addiction and Rumspringa. Those weren’t the official defenses, but they might as well have been. What else could the defense lawyers argue? The police had all the evidence they could possibly have wanted, and both the Amish defendants had confessed. Not only confessed, they’d cooperated with the police investigation of the others. “It was pretty clear” Abner Two had been addicted to cocaine, his lawyer, John Pyfer, said at the men’s arraignment. During Rumspringa, the lawyer argued, Amish youth are expected to “sow their wild oats.” During that time, he said, the young people are expected to drink and drive “bright, gaudy cars” while “their parents are looking the other way.” Snorting cocaine is not an accepted part of that, the lawyer admitted. “We’ve seen plenty of underage drinking cases but a drug case is unheard of,” he said.

Lawyers for the Pagans scoffed at the idea that the Abners were any different from their big, bad, motorcycle-riding alleged codefendants. “They’re making the Amish out to be pristine, untarnished young men, corrupted by the evil Pagans,” said Juke’s lawyer, Hope Leferber. “The truth be known, these kids are the same as any other kids who surrender to the temptations
of youth. They weren’t corrupted. At best, they were willing participants.”

There was no trial. How could there be? The evidence was so overwhelming. Everyone pleaded guilty—the Pagans, the Amish, the hang-arounds. The best they could do, they all decided, was to let their lawyer plead with U.S. District Court judge Clarence Newcomer for mercy at sentencing time.

And the defense lawyers began to do just that.

“It just shows you that the same temptations that are out there for your kids and my kids have found their way into Amish life,” said John Pyfer. “We’re just glad they were able to nip this in the bud.”

Obviously, this particular bud had flowered already.

“I can tell you my client wasn’t driving a Cadillac or living the lifestyle of a drug dealer,” the lawyer added. “Unfortunately, once you get a taste of cocaine, you have to satisfy it.”

Judge Newcomer gave the stiffest sentence, eighty-four months, to Lawrence “Twisted” Mellot, who admitted distributing meth and coke at bars in Chester County. The two men who’d brought the Abners in got off a little lighter. Juke, real name Douglas Hersch, got sixty-three months. “Big Dwayne” Blank received fifty-five months, though his weight, which at sentencing tipped the scales at just over four hundred pounds, would make prison time especially challenging for him. Emory Edward Reed, the chapter president, was now cooperating with the authorities and hoping for a lighter sentence.

When sentencing day finally arrived for the two Abners, it was anything but normal at the federal courthouse in Philadelphia. The Abners and their lawyers and their immediate families were joined by three hundred Pennsylvania Amish, who made the long trip
to the courthouse in a fleet of rented vans. The room was packed with men in black and women in long dresses. A court clerk asked the Amish men to remove their hats. The women all kept their bonnets on.

Before the judge announced the sentences, the federal prosecutors spoke. The two young Amish men, they said, had helped authorities crack the Pagan drug ring. This didn’t absolve the Abners from guilt entirely, the prosecutors said. The young men had, in fact, moved something on the order of $100,000 worth of cocaine.

Then the Abners’ supporters got a chance to speak. For nineteen minutes, people stood and praised both of them and all the good works they’d done since getting arrested. Friends told how the Abners had turned their lives around. An FBI agent said the pair had taken risks to help investigators. “They were scared to death,” Special Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Dominguez said, “but they knew it would certainly make their cooperation all that much more stellar.”

FBI agent Gregory Auld testified that since the Amish men’s arrest, they had spoken at a dozen meetings attended by thousands of young Amish and Mennonites, where the pair warned about the dangers of drug use. “Those meetings were heart-wrenching,” said Agent Auld. “It was genuine, and it had an effect.”

These gatherings were so powerful, prosecutor Dominguez added, that he had even brought his family to one.

Judge Newcomer hadn’t said much yet. He sat at his elevated platform, staring across the courtroom with a stern look on his face. It was time for the Abners to address the judge.

Before he spoke, Abner Two turned to the reporters sitting behind him in the spectator rows. He asked them to pass a message
to young people everywhere. “Drugs won’t do anything but take you down and get you killed,” he said.

Then he stood and spoke directly to the judge.

“When I was a teenager, I got with the wrong crowd,” he said. “Now I’ve changed my life around and gave my heart and soul to God. I apologize deep from the bottom of my heart.”

For his part, Abner One broke down in tears as he tried to speak. He got out only a few words. “I lived a terrible life for a while,” he said. “We want to try to do better.”

Federal sentencing guidelines said the judge should send the Abners to prison for three to four years, but that was just a suggestion. Judge Newcomer had the authority to order more or less punishment.

The judge said he was impressed by all the glowing praise he had heard and by the evidence that both the Abners had begun to turn their lives around. He said he appreciated the way the young Amish cooperated after they were caught. But they did have to get caught first, he noted.

“These defendants,” the judge said, “were responsible for bringing disrepute to themselves, their families and their community.”

In the end, Judge Newcomer proved he was no newcomer to the bench. He spoke one way and sentenced another. He went lighter than the sentencing guidelines suggested, far lighter than most people in the courtroom expected him to.

Abner One and Abner Two each received one year in prison and six months of home confinement. And the prison time, the judge suggested, should be served on work release. If the Federal Bureau of Prisons agreed, neither of the Abners would be doing any hard time.

The prosecutors still sounded satisfied. “Part of the sentence for these two,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Dominguez said, “is that for much of their lives, or at least for the foreseeable future, they’ll be looking over their shoulders”—at monitors human and divine.

He didn’t say that last part. But I’m pretty sure that’s what he was getting at.

CHAPTER 13

THE BARBER OF BERGHOLZ

I
t was almost eleven o’clock at night, far too late for Amish neighbors to come calling, but there was a knock at Myron and Arlene Miller’s back door. Five Amish men were asking for Myron, a bishop with the Mechanicstown Amish church in Carroll County, Ohio.

Though the visitors had awakened him, the bishop pulled himself together and tried to be polite. He opened the door and held out his hand to greet the visitors. Instead of stepping inside, they grabbed him, tugging at his long salt-and-pepper beard, which went halfway down his chest, and struggled to pull him outside.

“I saw the flash of scissors right by my head,” recalled the forty-six-year-old bishop, holding up two fingers that he snipped together, mimicking the blades.

“They finally got him out on the cement out there and took a big pair of scissors and started to cut his beard,” his wife said of the frightening home invasion.

The attack that night and others like it brought huge attention to the Amish of eastern Ohio. Much of it focused on a controversial sixty-six-year-old bishop named Samuel Mullet, who lived with
his followers in an eight-hundred-acre settlement outside Bergholz, nine miles from the Millers’ house.

This wasn’t the first the Amish world had heard of Mullet. There’d been a lot of talk about the fiery bishop, especially about the kinds of punishments he liked to dole out. While many Amish bishops believed in shunning errant church members, few took it to the extraordinary lengths that Mullet did.

Almost anything could set the bishop off—from someone disregarding a minor church rule to someone else having the nerve to leave his church. Some ex-members alleged that he had forced men to sleep in chicken coops as punishment for ogling non-Amish women. There was even talk that he had coerced women to have sex with him to make them better wives. Mullet said it was counseling. His lawyer referred to him as the “Amish Dr. Ruth.”

Amish bishops are generally reluctant to question one another’s authority, but there’d been enough complaints about Sam Mullet that three hundred Amish bishops had gathered in Pennsylvania to discuss what they’d been hearing about him. After a long debate, they eventually decided to do what Amish bishops rarely do. They overruled one of their own. They reversed Mullet’s shunnings. That infuriated him, leading some of his supporters to say that Mullet would certainly get his revenge.

Even in all their head-shaking over the colleague they had just overruled, none of the other bishops imagined that sharp blades would be involved.

Sam Mullet wasn’t at the Millers’ house the night of the scissors assault, but police said two of his sons and three other followers were, and Mullet was the man who had instructed them to go. He’d been especially annoyed, police said, that the Millers had
helped his son Bill leave Mullet’s Bergholz church several years earlier and that they’d also urged the young man to consider shunning his father.

In the father’s view, if there was any shunning to be done in the Mullet family, it would be handed down—not up—the generations.

It was hard to say exactly how many beard attacks occurred. Samuel Mullet held a grudge against quite a few of his fellow Amish. The police said fifteen of Mullet’s followers, at his request, had committed at least five attacks in four Ohio counties between September and November of 2011. But there were likely others too, perhaps quite a few of them—where the victims, in typical Amish fashion, didn’t want to involve the outside authorities.

One reported attack occurred two hours before the visit to the Miller house. Police said the same group of men attacked Raymond Hershberger, a seventy-year-old Amish bishop in nearby Holmes County. The group got into Hershberger’s house by saying they wanted to discuss religious matters. Once inside, they held the bishop down in a chair and used scissors and battery-operated clippers to shear off his long, white beard.

“We’re here for Sam Mullet,” one of the men reportedly stood and said.

In every one of these attacks, the authorities said, Mullet’s supporters had shaved the beards or cut the hair of Amish people, including women, who had displeased him by questioning his authority, disobeying his rules or leaving the group.

Myron and Arlene Miller were well aware of the Amish tradition of solving conflicts through the church, but this was different.

“There’s a lot of lives being messed up down there,” Arlene said. “There’s a lot of people being abused and brainwashed.” It wasn’t
just that her husband had been assaulted. Other people were also at risk, including Mullet’s followers. The Millers swallowed hard and called the police. They couldn’t stomach the idea of others going through what they had.

B
eards are not just facial hair for the Amish. Beards are a symbol of great importance and identity.

But first, forget mustaches. You’ll never see an Amish man with a mustache. Like many things Amish, the reason goes back to the old days in Europe, in this case to generations of elaborately mustachioed German military men. When the Amish lived over there, it was military officers who wore mustaches. Since the Amish didn’t serve in the military and hated being associated with anything military, they made a point of shaving their upper lips. Then Adolf Hitler came along with his little squared-off mustache. Many of the Amish were in America by then. Like most Americans, they loathed Hitler. As committed pacifists and often German Americans, it’s possible they loathed him even more than most Americans did. As far as many Amish were concerned, the Führer
ruined mustaches forever. To this day, virtually all Amish men, regardless of age, marital status, other facial-hair choice or unattractive upper lips, shave that little strip daily.

I have no problem with that. Personally, I think mustaches look kinda weird on anyone, Amish or otherwise. I’ve never had a mustache and never will, but beards are a different matter entirely, and not just because they indicate a man is married. To Amish men, beards mean maturity. They mean solid values and stability. They mean, “I am not vain. I’m not constantly rushing to a barbershop or
making a fuss over my appearance. God gave me this beard, and I’m wearing it without apology.”

For Amish men, growing a beard is right up there with Amish women not wearing jewelry of any kind or not cutting their hair and just wearing it in a bun. It’s all part of not being showy.

Of course, there is plenty of hair talk in the Bible. “It is like the precious ointment upon the head, that ran down upon the beard, even Aaron’s beard: that went down to the skirts of his garments.” Look it up. It’s Psalm 133:2. And for the ladies, in 1 Corinthians 11:15: “But if a woman have long hair, it is a glory to her.” Just don’t be showing it off!

T
he tiny town of Bergholz is about as remote as Ohio gets. Jammed into the northwest corner of Jefferson County, the land is hilly, and the people are spread widely apart.

Fred Abdallah, the Jefferson County sheriff, took a ride to Mullet’s compound outside town to investigate the Millers’ report. “He’s saying that he didn’t do it, but they consulted with him, they had a meeting with him,” the sheriff told local reporters after he got back. “He knew who all the targets were going to be, he sanctioned it and he sure as hell never told them not to go.”

Sheriff Abdallah said one of the other beard-cutting suspects mentioned something about the night of the Miller and Hershberger attacks: “If the clippers didn’t break, we were going to get four more guys.”

In nearby Holmes County, Sheriff Timothy Zimmerly was struck by something else: how rare it was for the Amish to turn to the civil authorities for help.

“We don’t get many Amish coming forward willing to testify,” he said, explaining the local bishops were giving the victims permission not only to provide law enforcement with written statements, but to actually testify in court.

It was enough to bring charges, the sheriff said—and to make them stick.

Sam Mullet was arrested. So were fifteen of his followers, including six women and the five men who had allegedly come to the Miller home. Three of those arrested were Mullet’s sons. They all pled not guilty.

Before the trial began, the case was moved to federal court in Cleveland, allowing the prosecutors to charge Mullet and his followers with committing hate crimes. The prosecutors said the defendants had targeted hair and beards because of their special spiritual significance.

At the trial, no one denied that the beard attacks had occurred, though Mullet insisted he hadn’t ordered them. The Millers testified, describing the night of the attack.

Raymond Hershberger’s son Andy also took the stand. As the men held his father down, the son said, the older man “was shaking all over. He pleaded: ‘Don’t shear me. Don’t shear me.’ ”

A child cried out: “Don’t cut Grandpa’s beard.”

After the attacks, the son said, his aged father was so ashamed of his chopped-off beard that he stopped preaching and refused to go to a family wedding.

But the most emotional testimony of the trial came from the person who had known Sam Mullet the best: his own sister, Barbara Miller.

At first she had refused to even talk to officers from the Trum
bull County sheriff’s office, but the pain and fear eventually won out. She agreed to testify. She arrived in court in a long black dress and a white bonnet.

When asked to describe how her older brother had changed after he’d moved to Bergholz, she said: “He was more about violence, anger and hatred. More of the ‘eye for an eye’ syndrome. If he does it to me, I’ll do it to him.” It was almost like he’d shifted his loyalty from the New Testament to the Old.

The sister also said that her brother had become “angry, angry, very angry, screaming and yelling, and no one could do anything right, and you didn’t know what set him off. He was a dictator.”

In 2007, Barbara and her husband, Martin, and six of their seven children had gone to live in her brother’s community. The couple quickly became uncomfortable with what they saw and left after just three months. “Everybody was like, I don’t know, I can’t say it . . .
zombies
,” she testified. “There was no emotion.”

Still, she said, she never could have imagined what happened four years later on September 6.

It was late, about ten thirty at night, when they heard a loud knock at the door. When she opened the door, outside, in the dark, she saw five of her sons, her daughter, and their spouses.

They came inside and went straight to Barbara and Martin’s bedroom. There, the attackers pulled Martin out of bed by his beard. They grabbed Barbara, held her and forced her to watch as one of the men cut off her husband’s beard with horse mane-cutting shears. One of the Millers’ sons used battery-powered clippers to shave his father’s head.

The terrifying violence wasn’t over, Barbara testified.

Her daughter and daughters-in-law then used the same shears
to slice off two feet of her waist-length hair. Two of the women carried out the attack while holding infants in their arms.

As women in the courtroom wept, the Amish mother, who was related to fourteen of the defendants, said that she had wanted to hug one of her sons, but “they were not [her] boys that night.”

S
ome of the sixteen defendants balked at the rules of the courtroom. They didn’t want to put their hand on a Bible and swear to tell “the whole truth and nothing but the truth.” Instead, they asked the judge that they be allowed simply to affirm the truthfulness of their testimony. The Amish, they said, do not believe in swearing oaths. In the end, none of the Amish defendants testified.

Lawyers for the accused argued that the case didn’t belong in court at all. The beard cuttings were internal church discipline, they said—not a case of anti-Amish bias. “Why did they do this? I know it sounds strange—compassion,” defense attorney Dean Carro told the jurors. “No crime has been committed. These were purely good intentions.”

Other defense lawyers suggested that the beard and hair cutting were meant only to embarrass the men and women so they would reconsider their errant ways.

Mullet’s attorney tried to portray his client as a well-meaning religious leader whose methods might be unconventional but were ultimately not a crime. The other church members knew what they were doing, he said. They weren’t “zombies doing the bidding of Samuel Mullet.”

Said Bryan: “This case represents a clash of civilizations, misunderstandings of a culture that most of us haven’t spent time around,
other than driving around Amish country and buying some fresh-baked pie and bread.”

It wasn’t clear—not at first—how much of this the jury was buying. But the prosecutor pressed ahead. These were crimes, pure and simple, Assistant U.S. Attorney Bridget Brennan said. And one man was behind them all. “Sam Mullet was the beginning and the end of all of these attacks,” the federal prosecutor argued.

Jurors began their deliberations on a Thursday morning, September 13. They returned with a verdict one week later. The jury found all defendants guilty.

Samuel Mullet was convicted of federal hate crimes and of conspiracy for exhorting his followers to forcibly shear the hair and beards of those who opposed him.

Mullet’s three sons, his daughter and eleven others including his nephews and niece were also convicted of hate crimes and conspiracy for participating in the attacks.

The sixty-six-year-old bishop faced life in prison for his crimes. U.S. District Court judge Dan Aaron Polster scheduled sentencing hearings for January 24.

The only question now was who would or wouldn’t apologize and what their sentences would be.

S
am Mullet stood up and pleaded with the judge not to send him to jail. Despite the convictions, he still insisted, he hadn’t done anything wrong.

Standing before the judge, his white beard reaching his chest, Mullet said the whole trial was unfair. “I’m being blamed for being a cult leader,” the sixty-seven-year-old bishop said. “I’m an old man.
I’m not going to live a long time. I’m not going to be here much longer. My goal in life has always been to help the underdog.”