"They smile in your face..."

"They smile in your face..."

Pat Haley, a reporter from Detroit's Fifth Estate, gathered national headlines last August by welcoming the Maharaj Ji's smiling face to Detroit with a whipped cream pie (see photo sequence). A week later Haley was hospitalized in serious condition, and the Guru was still smiling.

Following the pie caper, Haley was approached by two men — 55 year old Juteswar Misra and 25 year old Richard Fletcher — who'suckered him with the story that they were prepared to finger their former master as a charlatan. Taken to the reporter's apartment, they assaulted him blindside and left him lying in a pool of blood. Haley suffered numerous head lacerations and contusions, and will henceforth carry a little reminder of the incident: a plastic plate covering the section of his skull that was shattered.

The license plate of the car the two assailants escaped in was traced to the Divine Light Mission, where the Guru made assurances that the two divine zombies were not acting on his behalf and had been turned over to local authorities in Denver. A felony warrant for the two still stands iri Detroit, though no extradition proceedings have been initiated. But as of this writing, both are still functioning members of the guru's army. Misra, in fact, is a mahatma — one ot the select tew empowered to give Knowledge (the process by which a normal human being is transformed into a follower of Maharaj Ji) — and is right now carrying on his high-level proselytizing in Europe.