Mike Kropveld, le Montréalais qui sait tout sur les sectes
WHEN MIKE KROPVELD was twenty-eight, he helped plan a mission to rescue his friend, a teacher named Benji Carroll, from an international cult. Kropveld remembers hosting a meeting with Carroll’s parents and several distraught friends in his cramped Montreal living room. “His parents bought Danishes, but nobody ate them,” he says. On a trip to Berkeley, California, Carroll was recruited by members of a branch of the Unification Church, a religious order popularly known as the Moonies. It was 1977, and thanks to the Manson Family and the People’s Temple, terms such as mind control andbrainwashing had entered the lexicon. At the time, the Bay Area city was a hotbed for unconventional beliefs. “People called it Berzerkeley,” Kropveld says.