Unholy Communion

Part Three

Unholy Communion

Part Three

If you were raised Catholic, the term “Communion” means something very specific. One has their “First Communion”, which is a big deal.  That indicates the very first time you, as a child of tender years, are introduced to the concept of eating the flesh of Jesus in the form of a communion wafer: a paper thin, circular object that melts on the tongue. God is somehow present in that wafer, and now in your mouth.  If the wafer does not dissolve quickly, that indicates your mouth is dry and implies you are somehow sinful.  At least, that is what we were told.  This is Communion.  You are in communion with God. You have “received Communion.”  It is a form of communication (same root word) but goes further than that, as per the words of the Institution: “Take ye all and eat of this, for this is my Body…”

Yes, it’s weird.  There is an entire complex of ideas, terminology, culture, and psychology mixed up in the idea of Holy Communion, but prominent among them is the culture of Death.  Jesus, knowing he is to be arrested and executed – so the Biblical story goes – conducts what is essentially a Passover seder among his friends, the disciples, but frames the bread and the wine as his own body and blood (not exactly kosher).  Within twenty-four hours he will be dead, crucified, stabbed with a lance, and brought to a burial chamber and left there.  Death, therefore, is at the heart of the Christian experience and especially at the very center of Roman Catholicism.  And not the kind of death where you slip off peacefully in your sleep.  No, that would be too easy and not at all as cinematic as a crucifixion.  No, sorry children, but we need a gory, gruesome slaughter with nails in the flesh of a nearly naked man at the very front of the church, bleeding all over the walls.

As a child, going to church for the first time, I instinctively knew that the Mass was all about death.  Death was inescapable in a Catholic church of the 1950s, starting with the crucifix of course but extending to the Stations of the Cross all around the church and the statues of various saints who all seemed to be bleeding from somewhere.  And then there was the filing of people into the aisles and up to the front of the church to receive Communion, which I interpreted as they were going up to die. The whole experience was so solemn, so serious, and conducted in Latin as well, that only the mysterious concept of Death seemed equal to the scenario I witnessed unfold.

We started this exploration with reference to a film called Communion and, indeed, it takes place in a Catholic school and church in 1961.  It is framed on the idea of the First Communion as backdrop for a series of murders, appropriately enough, and was the director’s revenge against the Church for its persecution of him for daring to include the exterior of a bishop’s residence in a porn film.

Religion, sexuality, and violent death.  Serial murder.

That was the atmosphere in New York City and America in 1970 when I began working for Stardust, and against the backdrop of the Vietnam War and the Draft.  As I mentioned in the previous post, Stardust was owned by the Brandt family and Steven Brandt – the owner’s son and a well-known gossip columnist – had been the best man at the wedding of Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski.  For reasons that were never very clear, Steven was terrified of something or someone after the murders.  He possibly thought he was next on whatever hit list there was, or maybe he knew something that made him a threat. He had talked to the police at the time and later revealed in an article for his column that he had given them some information, although what it was had not been specified. He had tried to kill himself a month earlier, in October, but that attempt had failed, obviously.  He then succeeded with sleeping pills at the Chelsea Hotel in November of 1969, after attending a Rolling Stones concert with the artist and actress Ultra Violet (at that time a member of Andy Warhol’s The Factory).   The offices at Stardust were replete with ghoulish whispers, but the real story was only common knowledge among the administrative staff who were close to the family.  The rest of us would eventually hear things, of course, but there were other fish to fry that year.

One of the employees at Stardust was a tall, beautiful woman who had been a fashion model and who was then a receptionist in the showroom.  She had a weird sense of humor, and we bonded over Dr Strangelove and other Peter Sellers films.  One day she started telling me about her life as a model, and how at one business meeting where she was just supposed to show up and act as a hostess she overheard the assembled guests discussing Howard Hughes.  This story took place in early 1970. And the story she told me raised all sorts of alarms.

According to her (and her informants) Hughes – the head of a vast empire devoted mainly to defense and aviation – had been kidnapped, essentially, by elements of US intelligence because his deteriorating mental and physical condition was a liability for national security. She had details that could be checked out. Names, places. I urged her to go public with the information, but she had second thoughts about having even told me.  She was afraid for her life.  And then, the following year, the Clifford Irving story broke about his being commissioned to write an authorized biography of Hughes and I read the papers with a growing sense of excitement.  Something about all of this started to add up.

As the Hughes story continued, and as Howard Hughes himself made a “virtual” appearance via a speaker phone conference call during which he denied that he knew or ever met Clifford Irving and by the way fired his longtime aide Robert Maheu (who later turns up in some amazing places) I realized that what the model had told me was being verified.  And when a book – Hoax – about the infamous biography of Hughes was published by a team of investigative journalists, there was a postscript at the end revealing that some very powerful and dangerous people “who would stop at nothing … not even murder” had contacted Irving in November 1970 with a proposal worth $500,000 concerning a project about Hughes.  November 1970 was a month earlier than the official account says the hoaxed biography project was conceived.

It was also when the model started talking to me about Hughes.  And CIA.  And even the Hughes Glomar Explorer episode to retrieve a sunken Soviet submarine which took place in the Pacific but which, according to her, had originally targeted a Russian sub in the Caribbean.

While all of this was going on, I was contacted by my old schoolmate (and now Bishop) William Prazsky.  It seemed that he needed my assistance for something. 

We had parted ways on bad terms, but I was intrigued by his proposal.  He was now running a branch of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church but still using the Slavonic Orthodox nomenclature we invented in 1967, having been consecrated by Archbishop Hrihorij, and his father was also a bishop in the same church.  They had picked up a few “monks” of questionable pedigree who were a great resource because they seemed to have an endless supply of rare books.  Prazsky was still interested in occult literature and managed to acquire an impressive collection of books on astrology, palmistry, and the like in a variety of languages and all hundreds of years old.  They came from those two monks, Steven Chapo and Michael Hubiak. They were running some sort of chapel in Jamaica, Queens that was located over a topless bar.  Prazsky wanted to know what they were really up to.  Since they had never met me or even knew I existed, I was asked to go and visit them, size up what they were doing, and report back to him.

It sounded like fun, so I agreed.

I first read up on book printing and book binding.  Prazsky said they were somehow involved in the printing business – that was their cover, it seemed – so he thought I should demonstrate my usefulness to them by talking their language.  That kind of research came naturally to me, so I spent some hours at the New York Public Library studying bookbinding. 

I would not be alone in my endeavor.  He had two other priests involved who would know my connection with Prazsky in advance in case there was any problem, but nothing else about me.  It was all very Moscow Rules.

So, one Sunday morning when the topless bar was quiet, I walked upstairs and attended a service at the chapel.

The service itself was a brief affair in a very small room, nothing like the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom which ordinarily takes hours.  The real entertainment was in the back room, where the “bookbinding” equipment was located.

I was introduced to their operation as if they expected I was a potential co-conspirator.  They showed me how they steamed out the embossed library seal impressions, and how they removed ink seals from the pages.  It was bizarre.  But the last straw for me was listening to them describe how they would remove maps and illustrations from these priceless old books and sell them individually. That, to me, was criminal.

I reported back to Prazsky that week, telling him what I saw and how I was received. He found it a bit amusing at first, but then slowly realized he was dealing with two individuals who were using his church as a cover for their criminal enterprise.  He benefitted from it by acquiring an impressive collection of occult books and one particularly interesting manuscript. He decided to let the scenario play out a little longer.

Eventually, though, the hammer came down.  A potential buyer showed up that the two monks knew personally from a previous church.  This was Father Fox, a mysterious gentleman who worked for various Orthodox churches over the years and who had been trained at Fordham University.  He also had a wife and child at an apartment in the Bronx that he thought no one knew about.  At one point I came into possession of some of Father Fox’s personal effects, and they contained ticket stubs and boarding passes for flights into Saigon.  No one went to Saigon on holiday in 1970. It meant Fox was not who he seemed to be.

In any case, it was Fox who set up the monks.  He once had had a falling out with one of them … over a woman.  To get revenge, he informed on them to the FBI, and it was the FBI who showed up at the meet and busted them.

The arrest made headlines across the country and around the world.  It seems Chapo and Hubiak managed to commit the greatest rare book heist in the nation’s history.  Once they were picked up, however, Prazsky became paranoid and did the unthinkable: he burned the books he had received from them in one of his fancy porcelain stoves, one by one, destroying any evidence that would have linked him to the heist.

Before the arrests, however, Prazsky decided to reward me for my service by consecrating me as bishop.  I thus became the holder of a line of apostolic succession through the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and entered the ranks of actual, not merely wandering, bishops.

Years later, after the fall of the Soviet Union, Prazsky would die mysteriously of arsenic poisoning in his metal-plating workshop.  This happened on the day that the Ukrainian Orthodox Church was holding an important meeting in Bound Brook, New Jersey, to determine its fate in a newly independent Ukraine.  The last thing they needed was a hokey Czech “bishop” who had managed to charm a genuine Archbishop – Hrihorij – into consecrating him and leaving him in nominal charge as his successor to the Ukrainian leadership. 

That did not stop another bishop in Kiev, however, from contacting me a decade later once he discovered my status as a validly consecrated bishop in the Hrihorij line.  He wanted me to come under his “omofor”, meaning, in this case, his ecclesiastical jurisdiction.

I demurred.  By that time, I had been involved in a dozen other weird events and suspect organizations during the thirty years since the rare book heist, and while a sinecure in Kiev might have seemed attractive for a New York minute, it was obvious to me that my abilities and experience were better (or more amusingly) applied elsewhere.

To be continued.