Original subtitles

- Charles Dederich saw himself as a messiah,

a leader that could make people do anything.

- Synanon touted itself as a model for the world.

- This isn't just an experimental community.

This is sinister.

- It reminds me--at least what I think of as a cult.

- They took her and would not let her out.

There was evil going on there.

- Started to get a lot of paranoia about

being attacked by people from the outside.

- Charles Dederich began to advocate

Synanon protecting itself by any means possible.

- This was a first-class opponent.

People were armed with machine guns and AK-47s.

- They would do anything for him,

including kill for him.

[suspenseful music]

♪ ♪

[projector clicks]

- In the '70s, in Los Angeles,

you can see sort of a spiritual movement

start building up.

Especially in Santa Monica, a lot of the craziness

that had gone on in the '60s was kind of mellowing out,

and Americans were turning inward.

I think a lot of them

were just really disillusioned with society.

A lot of people were in the market

for an alternative lifestyle.

♪ ♪

Synanon creates a template for modern drug treatment

in America.

- Synanon started in 1958 as an addiction rehab place.

Its founder, Charles Dederich, was credited with saying,

"Today is the first day of the rest of your life."

The name Synanon comes from "syn",

meaning S-Y-N, coming together,

and then the "non" from Alcoholics Anonymous.

But as time went by,

Synanon members weren't just alcoholics or drug addicts,

but other people who were clean started to join.

To make things better for the world.

Synanon had a good idea at the beginning.

In those days, there were a lot of cult-like communities

being started and failing and falling apart.

They didn't do anything except hang out together

and smoke pot or something.

And Synanon was accomplishing something,

with at least some of the addicts who came there.

We were not just detoxing, but training people

to be useful members of the community.

Synanon touted itself

as becoming a model for the world.

This is the way the world should be.

People should be able to get along,

whatever their differences.

Eventually, that kind of...

kind of trailed off.

- In 1978, I was a reporter for the "Los Angeles Times."

It was around this time

that I had started reporting about these communities.

The very first story I did on Synanon was a weird one.

This guy's wife was walking on the beach in Santa Monica.

Her name was Frances Wynn. She was kind of depressed.

- And she did have a history of psychosis.

- And these people started talking to her,

and she left with them.

Her husband, meanwhile, is going crazy.

He didn't know what happened to her except she went

for a walk on the beach.

And someone said,

"Oh, I think she was talking to some people from Synanon."

And it turns out they took her and would not let her out.

- Pretty soon, Frances Wynn was on a bus

up to northern California.

She had no idea where she was going or what was going on.

- So I started looking into it,

and I had to call Synanon to see,

"Why wouldn't you let this woman go?

Why won't you let her husband talk to her?"

But they didn't want to talk about it.

Her husband went to the police, and they said, "She's an adult.

This is her choice. There's nothing we can do."

And then he went to Paul.

- Paul Morantz made a name for himself

as a tough lawyer suing mental health organizations.

And he told Synanon, "Frances Wynn,

we want her back now or there's gonna be trouble."

At that point, I think,

Paul Morantz went to pick her up.

And Morantz says that when they went to pick her up,

everyone was smiling, and they all had shaved heads.

And he just got goose bumps,

and he knew that something was seriously wrong.

- I was working very closely with Paul,

because he was a great source,

and he was telling me what was coming out of Synanon.

Paul said, "Narda, this is a much bigger story."

I could only imagine how many people

Synanon found wandering on the beach,

who they got into their facility and never let out.

- Paul Morantz got Frances Wynn back,

but he wasn't quite done with Synanon.

- Frances Wynn and her husband sued Synanon

for imprisonment and other charges,

and they won a settlement.

- Morantz won

and got a $300,000 judgment against Synanon.

Dederich was just enraged.

Three weeks after the lawsuit,

Paul Morantz wants to go home

and drink a beer and watch Game One of the World Series.

- It was in October of '78.

It was the Dodgers and the Yankees, I believe,

and he's a huge baseball nut.

- And he's looking forward to it.

He gets home to his house.

♪ ♪

- He had one of these houses

where the mailbox comes right into the house,

and you reach in and get your mail.

- He sees an object in his mailbox.

♪ ♪

- But it's dark inside the mailbox.

- In there, he sees what looks like a weird looking package.

- He didn't think anything of it, and he put his hand in.

And then he had this searing pain.

- And he is bitten by a rattlesnake.

♪ ♪

He ran out of the house screaming,

"Help me. Help me. It's Synanon.

Synanon got me."

- They immediately raced him into the hospital,

and the first thought I had in my mind was,

"I hope he's not dead,"

'cause rattlesnakes are really bad.

The venom can kill you so fast.

♪ ♪

- I went to work, and two Los Angeles police officers

from major crimes told me

that a rattlesnake had been put in a mailbox,

and the occupant of the house had reached in

to get his mail and been bitten.

And I said, "What?"

I was very puzzled by that,

and it was a such an odd way to do anything.

Not a gun, not a baseball bat, but a rattlesnake.

♪ ♪

The Pacific Palisades, where Paul Morantz lived,

was full of rattlesnakes.

Maybe one of the rattlesnakes crawled in the mailbox.

Seemed a little unlikely, but I don't know.

So I asked Dr. Finley Russell,

because he's the world's leading expert

on rattlesnakes.

And he said this rattlesnake that you're showing me pictures

of would never be in the Pacific Palisades

to crawl into the mailbox.

He just look at the scales.

The pattern of the scales is different.

He said that snake was hundreds of miles

further than it could have gone on its own.

So that rattlesnake that was in Paul Morantz's mailbox

was transported.

As I'm hearing him talk, my prosecutor's mind is going,

and I'm thinking, "This is good, good evidence."

This could be an attempt to commit murder.

So now, the question in my mind was,

"Who is responsible for that snake attack?"

Because when the first responder showed up,

Paul Morantz said,

"Synanon, Synanon, Synanon, Synanon."

♪ ♪

I devoted virtually all of my attention to this one case.

Paul Morantz, from word one, was talking Synanon.

There was no doubt in his mind

that Synanon was responsible in some way,

but at the same time,

I didn't know much about the Synanon organization.

So the question was,

if this was an attempt to commit murder,

why would a rehabilitation center try to kill somebody?

- We are an experimental society.

- He saw himself as a sort of messiah.

- They ran that thing like a military operation.

- I don't want to be here anymore.

- We're gonna need to protect each other.

♪ ♪

- It was in October of '78

when Paul was bitten by the rattlesnake.

I thought, "This is really, really bad."

I was crazed that he was gonna die.

♪ ♪

- As a criminal prosecutor,

I knew that Mr. Morantz filed a lawsuit against Synanon,

so the question remained,

did this motivate his attempted murder?

In order to determine this, I needed to learn

virtually everything about the relationship

between Paul Morantz and Charles Dederich,

who was the president and the head of Synanon.

- I don't think Synanon would exist

if it weren't for Charles Dederich.

- There are far more pathetic sights around

than some kid running around on the street

shooting milk sugar into his arm.

- Charles Dederich was a heavy drinker.

Dederich goes to AA,

and he gets invited up to the podium to share.

People listen to him,

and when he's done, they applaud.

And he is hooked,

because Dederich likes to hear himself talk.

- But Charles Dederich

didn't think AA was doing its job properly

of keeping people off their addictions.

He wanted to start his own rehab,

but unlike Alcoholics Anonymous,

it took in drug abusers too.

So Charles Dederich started Synanon in Santa Monica.

It started out being a rehab place,

where people would come to try to be cured

of their addictions.

By 1965, it was very successful.

There was a lot of word of mouth

about the success of this place by the beach,

and then it grew.

They had a facility in Marshall,

they had a facility in Tomales Bay,

and they had one in Tulare County.

They went to parts of California

that were basically isolated.

They needed space.

- By 1968, the organization has 1,100 members.

It's receiving $2.5 million in donations every year.

And then non-addicts start coming to Synanon.

Dederich is just everything to this group.

He's the comic relief, he's the lecturer,

and, of course, he's the ringleader.

- He convinced a great many people like myself

that Synanon was accomplishing something great.

And people trusted him. I trusted him.

- He's deaf in one ear, he's an egomaniac,

but one of the wisest persons

that I've ever met in my life.

♪ ♪

- Synanon revolved around this thing called The Game.

It was a big part of rehabilitation.

- Chuck believed in his method of talk therapy,

one person to another.

- Dederich's group therapy sessions

were heavy on tough love.

[overlapping shouting]

- The subject of The Game would sit

in the middle of the group, people around them,

and they would hurl insults at these people.

- It's primarily for indicting another person,

accusing them of some transgression.

They smelled bad. They were too fat.

They didn't work hard.

It was a little scary, 'cause there was a lot of yelling.

It was difficult, painful,

but it was part of the environment.

It was what we did, and I did it.

It worked for a while.

And when that started to happen,

he was pleased with that.

- Dederich just loves the aggressiveness.

He likes it when people at shouting at each other,

and so they play The Game all the time.

- They did everything they could to break down the person

who was the center of The Game.

They would try to just strip away all of their personality,

who they were,

and that was considered to be therapeutic in some way.

- This was seen as a very kind of hip form of therapy.

So in the early '70s, Dederich makes a conscious decision

to morph into a lifestyle community.

This was sort of a way to retreat from commercialism.

This was a way to drop out of society

while finding spirituality, and that's very popular.

[crowd clamoring]

- We are an experimental society.

♪ ♪

- Synanon really followed the whims of Charles Dederich.

If he decided that he wanted to shave his head,

pretty soon everyone was shaving their head.

And if he started wearing overalls,

everyone else was wearing overalls.

And his wife died, and he re-married,

and pretty soon, everyone was getting divorced

and getting remarried in a very large group wedding.

And it was in many ways a 20-year long game

of Follow the Leader.

♪ ♪

- Chuck began to think about how we should take care

of the children separately from the parents.

So Synanon decided to start a school,

and the children would live in a separate village.

It was called The Hatchery.

- I was four years old.

My mom and dad were not together.

And my mom said, "You're gonna come with me

and we're gonna go to this place called Synanon."

The way that my mom expressed it, it sounded like,

"Oh, I'm gonna take you to Disneyland."

When we got to the dormitory, we walk in

and there's a group of children

who have shaved heads and they're in overalls,

and nobody says anything.

And one of the first things that happens

is a couple of the kids walk over

and they start stroking my hair.

Then this young woman says, "Come with me."

So she takes me down the hallway to this bathroom,

and she says,

"You know, you're very lucky that you get to be here."

And I didn't say anything.

♪ ♪

So she used some clippers and she shaved my head.

♪ ♪

I'm so traumatized at that point.

I look very alien to myself. I couldn't look at myself.

My mom wasn't allowed to talk to me or even look at me.

And it was just really devastating.

I was always wishing that I could leave,

and wondering, "When are we gonna leave?

"I just want to have a normal existence.

I don't want to be here anymore."

♪ ♪

- By 1974, Synanon is completely unrecognizable

from the drug rehabilitation that it used to be.

People are living there full-time, working,

and the money goes to Synanon.

♪ ♪

- I think it was a lawyer who said,

"Why don't we incorporate as a church?"

So they became a church.

Which meant all this money they were making,

they didn't have to pay taxes.

Dederich named them the Church of Synanon.

- And, of course,

Dederich himself was becoming fabulously wealthy,

and lived in a big house.

He was very open about that.

He liked living a certain lifestyle.

- He saw himself as a sort of messiah,

a leader that could make people do anything.

And I think he got a kick out of it,

because he had such power over people.

- I was just beginning to learn the power

that Charles Dederich had over these people,

as I heard the various things

that he could make them do by telling them to do it.

It felt like a very, very dangerous alignment.

One man, great power,

great money, and absolute control.

But I don't have any evidence that connects Mr. Dederich

to the rattlesnake attack on Paul Morantz.

I was gonna have to fall back

and think if he, in some other way,

made himself legally responsible.

We're gonna need a big break in the case.

- The rattlesnake attack was a very dramatic attack

on Paul Morantz.

People pointed to Synanon being responsible for this attack,

but the police had to prove it.

- During the ongoing investigation,

I talked to very many people connected to Synanon.

There were people who left the organization

that spoke to us, and we would hear stories

of things that Charles Dederich

had commanded them to do.

There were rumors about very unusual things

happening in Synanon.

It reminds me--at least what I think of as a cult.

- At one point,

Chuck had been feeling the kids were costing a lot,

to raise us and to take care of us.

So Chuck decided members couldn't have kids anymore,

but the some of the women were already pregnant.

So they were told, "You need to end the pregnancies."

These women that wanted to stay,

they were forced to get these abortions.

- Dederich said, "Having an abortion

is no different than popping a pimple."

I think that shows his opinion of children in general.

♪ ♪

- And then it became mandatory that any man 18 years or older

had to go in and get a vasectomy.

- In my case, I had a vasectomy.

But, you know, many of them didn't,

and many people split because of that.

And Chuck would put a positive spin on it and say,

"Well, they were not committed.

They didn't want to be part of Synanon."

- After the abortion edict, a lot of people started

to think, like, oh, this isn't quite right.

This isn't just an experimental community.

This is something a bit worse than that.

This is sinister.

- Some people left without their kids.

Some people left their kids and their spouse there,

'cause the spouse didn't want to leave.

They tried to get them back.

Paul, by this point,

had learned what Synanon was up to with Frances Wynn,

and he eventually got her out.

She and her husband sued Synanon

for imprisonment and other charges,

and they won a settlement, a judgment.

And then, I started working with Paul on Synanon.

I wrote about how it was unregulated by the state,

because it considered itself a religion.

Being informed by Paul and being informed

and interviewing people who had lived there,

I found it to be a rather horrific thing

that was going on.

Paul never wavered.

He wanted to bring down what Synanon had become

because there was evil going on there.

- Their stories were so wild as to be incredible.

I knew that the relationship between Paul Morantz

and Charles Dederich was contentious,

because Mr. Morantz sued Synanon for kidnapping.

And I thought, "Could this be enough reason

to want to try to kill somebody?"

If Charles Dederich held the power

that he had over these people, could he persuade them

to execute that rattlesnake attack?

♪ ♪

- Before this attack, neighbors had seen a white van

outside Morantz's house.

And actually, I think, one of the neighbors

had written down the license plate number.

- So the police ran the license plating--

the license plate--

and it came back registered to the Synanon Foundation.

After the attack, the same car seen outside

our victim, Paul Morantz's, house was driving

near Pacific Palisades.

And a police officer noticed the license plate,

so he pulled them over.

Real quickly, he found the occupants,

Joe Musico and Lance Kenton, who were members of Synanon.

♪ ♪

These men were at the lowest rank of Synanon,

and in my opinion,

Kenton and Musico were not masterminds.

There was one ruler, and it was Charles Dederich.

If this was Charles Dederich's doing,

I wanted him as a defendant at the defense table

facing these charges, along with Kenton and Musico.

I wasn't allowed to talk to these two men,

because their attorneys made it clear

they were not gonna talk to me.

So I kept gathering information,

and I began to accumulate files

and police reports and documents.

And while this process is going on,

we had now discovered this group

called the Imperial Marines.

- Chuck Dederich started to get a lot of paranoia

and fear about being attacked

by people from the outside who would come in,

maybe even someday by law enforcement.

It was the foundation of his group

called the Imperial Marines.

- The Imperial Marines,

which as basically a paramilitary force

with its own form of martial arts called Syndo.

- There were many violent incidents

involving the Imperial Marines,

and Dederich was controlling them.

- They would do anything for him,

including kill for him.

- We had discovered both Joe Musico and Lance Kenton

were members of the Imperial Marines,

and I believed that Charles Dederich

ordered Kenton and Musico to kill Paul Morantz.

♪ ♪

- Musico and Kenton were interviewed,

and as a result of that,

we had now discovered both Joe Musico and Lance Kenton

were members of the Imperial Marines,

and they were very proud of it.

I knew that Charles Dederich was a very powerful guy,

because of what he could make people in Synanon do

by telling them to do it.

Therefore, I felt that Charles Dederich

having the position of power that he had,

Joe Musico and Lance Kenton

would have to obey him at his every whim.

But I still needed evidence

that Charles Dederich ordered Kenton and Musico

to execute the rattlesnake attack on Paul Morantz.

♪ ♪

We were informed that some of the people

that had left the organization

said Charles Dederich had a sound system

whereby they could all hear him,

and then he would just expound on what he was thinking.

- When a person comes in to Synanon,

we do not have a potentially violent person.

We have a person that is looking for someone

to tell him what to do.

- In Synanon, they broadcast Charles Dederich talking

over the wire,

and the wire was a very big deal for Synanon life.

- Every facility and every public area of Synanon

was wired into a system of leased phone lines.

- It was really the only thing that was connecting

all these different locations.

I mean, people in Tomales Bay

would never have even heard of people down in Santa Monica,

but the wire was that connection.

- The wire helped communicate everything.

Synanon governance.

And Chuck would float his ideas on the Synanon wire.

We had a practice of writing down every word, practically,

that Chuck said, as sort of a Holy Writ.

And they were always recorded on brand-new tapes,

and we had every tape kept track of.

- Chuck Dederich rants about the enemy

that they were having on the outside,

about, you know, "We'll take care of them.

"We're gonna fight back,

and we're gonna fight back on our terms, not on their terms."

- Chuck grew more paranoid and began to advocate

Synanon protecting itself by any means possible.

♪ ♪

- I do remember that Chuck started to sound violent

over a question of this lawyer, Morantz,

who had sued Synanon on behalf of a client who had left,

and Chuck was offended by this.

- Paul Morantz was making some headway

and letting the public know

about what was happening with Synanon,

and Chuck decided that he wanted to do away

with Paul Morantz.

- And he began to rage against all lawyers.

And he began to, you know, rage about,

"We need to get rid of this lawyer.

"I feel like I'd like to rip off his own arm

and beat him to death with it."

He was recorded on tape saying these things.

- His words were thought to be so important

that he was passing on a higher truth.

It reminded me of people saying that, you know,

"God speaks to me, and I'll tell you what he said."

- Until further notice,

no member of the California Department of Corrections

is permitted on Synanon property

unless he has the permission of Charles Dederich,

Chairman of Synanon.

- Apparently, Charles Dederich had expressed

his strongly negative view of attorneys in general,

and Paul Morantz specifically.

If that was true, then I wanted to hear that.

When a person in my role as a prosecutor

hears about tape recordings,

your ears go up,

because you're thinking: evidence.

Permanent.

Tape recordings are pretty hard to dispute.

So when I heard that there's a tape

that expresses his feelings about lawyers in general,

or maybe really, if I got lucky,

Paul Morantz specifically,

that would be something that would be "Exhibit 1."

While maybe Charles Dederich

ordered Kenton and Musico to go do that,

I probably would never know.

But I did think if I got that tape

and it said what those people said it said,

that I would have enough to charge Charles Dederich

with a conspiracy to commit murder.

I thought there was probable cause to believe

that that tape recording might exist

in the Tulare County facility.

The next thing I think of is search warrant.

- This one unit in the police department

sent people to central California

as part of the investigation.

It would have been the equivalent

of a terrorism unit today.

- We need to commit whatever it takes.

This is a first-class opponent.

There were rumors that people were armed,

people with machine guns and AK-47s.

It's a very, very dangerous situation.

They ran that thing like a military operation.

And if there's a firefight,

then we're gonna need to protect each other.

- The month after the rattlesnake attack

on Paul Morantz, a tremendous amount of effort

had gone into the search warrant,

because I want to seize whatever will help demonstrate

the truth of the charges against Charles Dederich.

We had a lot of police officers,

including the LAPD SWAT unit,

because Synanon and Charles Dederich

had the Imperial Marines, and if there's a firefight,

we're gonna need the SWAT unit.

We knocked on the door and said, "Here we are,"

gave them the search warrant.

The search went very peaceably,

and they made sure everybody in Synanon stood back.

They did not interfere.

And a major crimes

investigating detective from LAPD

found the tape that had this particular rant about lawyers

that had the broken arm, broken leg,

cutting the arms off narrative,

and we seized that,

and that became the pivotal piece of evidence.

When we found the tape

and it was played for me for the first time,

I felt a tremendous sense of relief and vindication.

I was sitting there listening to Charles Dederich

soliciting crimes,

including everything that Paul Morantz

had been saying for all this time.

I felt for the very first time that I could go to a court

and convict Chuck of conspiracy to commit murder.

- It was no secret that Charles Dederich wanted

to at least hurt Paul Morantz, if not kill him.

So Lance Kenton and Joe Musico thought up this plan

and they went and found a rattlesnake.

- It was a 4-foot rattlesnake

put into this little, tiny mailbox.

Must have been crazy mad by the time Paul got there.

♪ ♪

He was writhing on the floor. He was in incredible pain.

He knew he was gonna be unconscious,

and he thought that he was gonna die.

♪ ♪

[somber music]

♪ ♪

- When they put me in the ambulance,

I didn't know if I was going to live or die.

I asked the drivers to keep talking to me,

to keep a conversation.

At the same time, I thought that if I died,

that I hoped there was a heaven

and that I would see my father

and all the dogs that I had all my life.

♪ ♪

- Someone called me.

I found out the hospital where you were taken.

I rushed to the hospital,

and I went to the intensive care.

♪ ♪

Paul was in terrible pain,

but I think he thought at the time, this is really

them gone too far.

This is end.

This is the end of the Church of Synanon.

- And I remember the doctor looked at me and she said,

"What is a young, strong boy

like you doing getting bit by a rattlesnake?"

I said, "It was in my mailbox, and it was a murder attempt."

And she looked at me really strange

until she looked behind her

and she saw all the police that were lining up,

guarding the door.

And then she knew that I was telling the truth.

- The rattlesnake attack on Paul--

first of all, it blew away anybody's doubts

about where this organization was headed.

I think nobody believed that Chuck Dederich

had nothing to do with it, which is what he was saying

and what his lawyers were saying.

Paul wanted to expose Synanon for what it really was,

and he worked tirelessly at it, and people trusted him.

- Paul Morantz, he's a hero. There's no question about it.

I had enough to charge Charles Dederich

with conspiracy to commit murder,

but now I needed to arrest him.

We were informed, by somebody leaving Synanon,

they had a place in Lake Havasu, Arizona,

and that Chuck was there.

We went out under the leadership

of the local sheriff to the house.

When we got there I said,

"I want to see Charles Dederich,"

and they said it wouldn't be possible.

He wasn't willing.

And I said, "Well, I have an arrest warrant here,

and I'm gonna see him whether you guys like it or not."

They took me to where he was. He was laying down.

He was responding,

but I couldn't make sense of his words.

He was babbling.

He gave all the appearances of a man

who was very, very drunk.

- When they arrested him, he was so drunk

that he had to be carried out in a stretcher,

and there was a bottle by his side.

And so Dederich, who his life, really,

was premised on sobriety,

had been drinking for some time.

- We flew him to Los Angeles. They booked him into jail,

and they gave him medical treatment.

He needed some sort of a way to detox.

It was time for Charles Dederich to face trial.

People from Synanon were trying to delay everything.

He's too sick, he's too this, he's too that.

And the judge had him examined

by independent medical practitioners,

and they said that he was very, very sick.

It's possible the trial might not continue.

[suspenseful music]

- We were going to start the trial

against Charles Dederich,

and that's when the Synanon people started saying,

"Let's see if we can reach a settlement in this case

without going to trial."

Synanon doctors presented records of how sick he was,

and how he probably wouldn't live until the sun went down.

I went back to Paul Morantz to get his opinion.

♪ ♪

- Dederich really belonged in prison

for the rest of his life.

He had all these doctor reports on his heart

saying that he would die quickly in prison.

And I could not willfully make a choice

that would result in a man's death,

and so I allowed the deal.

♪ ♪

- When Lance Kenton and Joe Musico

came up for sentencing,

Paul asked for leniency from the judge,

because Paul had learned what cults do to people.

♪ ♪

- My principal goal was that the truth be known,

and I felt that, by this stage, the truth was known.

Their reputation had turned,

and the general public thought of them as a cult

capable of very serious criminal activity,

and that really was the end of them.

♪ ♪

- They were forced to pay $17 million in back taxes.

It actually bankrupted them in the end.

♪ ♪

- For me, by that time,

you couldn't ever had persuaded me to stay.

And I bought a car and got the kids and I said,

"We're going back to Virginia."

I liked being at Synanon, really did.

I had a good time there.

I didn't think of it as a cult until the very last bit.

And then I got fearful of the paranoia

and the dangers I saw coming down the pike.

- I was a young girl when I left Synanon with my mom.

For the most part, I feel like a lot of that is behind me,

but there's something inside of me

that will maybe always be there.

Because of what happened at Synanon,

I've been situations where I should have been scared,

but instead I've been really angry,

and I just want to fight.

I'm not a violent person,

but I feel like if I'm pushed to a certain limit,

that I could be.

- Paul and I grew very close because we had the same goal,

which was to expose Synanon for what it really was.

It was a great pleasure of mine in my journalism career.

[somber music]

You actually opened the floodgates for my reporting.

- Narda, you're leaving out-- - What?

- You're leaving out

the most important thing that happened that day.

- What's that? What?

- That after you got in to see me

and you got the lone exclusive

as to what happened that day from me,

you reached down, and you kissed me on my cheek.

The moment in our relationship that, to me,

is the most special.

- Maybe that's why you had the big smile on your face.

- It probably was. It probably was.

- That was the beginning of Paul's lifelong illness

where he needs blood transfusions every other week.

It's somehow related to the venom

that's in his system that will always be there.

♪ ♪

- It's a good thing that Synanon was disassembled,

because it had become capable of evil.

The public memory is very short.

If you told me that another organization just like that

was forming now behind another guy

who was just like Charles Dederich,

I wouldn't be the least bit surprised.

- I think Synanon certainly proved that power corrupts,

and that when you center an organization like this

around a cult of personality, it will inevitably go haywire.

♪ ♪

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