RUN TO PARADISE

‘God had said Adelaide would turn against him and portray him as an evil master.’

—Lawyer for cult dissidents

IT IS the future and all is not well. A cruel and manipulative government is using fears of terrorism to erode the civil liberties of its citizens and build its own power. The leaders have a wicked plan to implant everyone with microchips containing their personal information. Anyone who refuses is put into camps and either killed with gas or beheaded. But even those who consent to be chipped are doomed—they can be killed at the press of a button that releases a poison from within the microchip. It is a nightmarish vision but all is not lost. Out of the shadows steps a figure to lead the resistance. He is a charismatic pastor with the guts and gusto to shepherd his flock away from the tyrannical government to the safety of ‘The Island’—a sanctuary somewhere in the South Pacific.

This was not a Hollywood plot but the gospel according to Rocco Leo: a bizarre action-packed vision of the future professed from behind a pulpit in Rocco’s ‘House of God’ in the quiet Adelaide suburb of Oakden. Rocco’s cult was called the Agape Ministries of God. The Agape leadership team included Rocco’s right-hand man, a finance broker named John Mouhalos, and senior members Mari Antoinette Veneziano and her brother Joe Veneziano. Mari Antoinette was Rocco’s girlfriend—although Rocco also had a wife, Assunta, the mother of his six children. Rocco Leo started his Adelaide church group in the 1980s. He claimed to have done his religious training in Queensland, but he had other interests of a kind not traditionally considered pit stops on the path of righteousness. In the same decade he was supposedly in training, Rocco received a criminal record for running a brothel and for dishonesty offences related to thieving. To those who knew of his pimping-and-pilfering past, Rocco would claim to have found God in his jail cell. But Rocco’s brother Rino, a former stonemason, had a more sanitised family spiritual history. He told how their ‘prayer warrior’ father Biagio had passed on to both boys the flame of faith. Rino said his father took on an intense personal life of prayer after becoming dissatisfied with his own conventional church.

Writing himself into his brother’s script somewhat, Rino said: ‘Seventeen years later Jesus appeared to [Biagio] and he told him that he has a message for him … So my father asked him “What is it? What do you want to tell me?” He said “I’ve appointed two of your children, Rocco and Rino … they will be like Moses and Aaron, his brother. Miracles, signs and wonders will follow them anywhere they go”’. According to Rino, the Agape Ministries obtained their headquarters after Jesus advised them to find a place of worship. The cult bought the sweeping Oakden property for $450 000 in 1998. Rocco did it up with chandeliers and marble benches but the credibility of the property’s residents had not improved much on its previous tenants—the building had been home to the Hillcrest Mental Hospital. The signs and wonders Rino had spoken of soon followed. In 2000, the group won tax breaks from the Australian Tax Office which it would exploit for a decade on the basis it was a religious charity organisation.

BROAD-shouldered, lantern-jawed and moustachioed Rocco Leo made for a charismatic figure. As he entered his fifties and his chiselled jawline softened, he took to combining his trademark mo with a goatee. He need not have bothered. To his dewy-eyed devotees he had lost little of his magnetism from his younger days. The church’s followers were forbidden from swearing or engaging in pre-marital sex. Even sex between married partners was regarded as dirty and shameful if it was not for procreation. Of course, as is usual with cults, there was one rule for the shepherd and another for the flock. One member said Rocco would preach ‘there is no Jesus, there is no God, there are no saints and there are no angels … There is just the Lord and Brother Roc who is the anointed Man of God’. Rocco told his flock he had drowned when he was four and been stone dead for four hours. He said his mother had held his small corpse up to God and the Almighty had reanimated him. From that moment, Rocco said, he had divine powers. Rocco preached that he and the other Agape elders were immortal and even said he knew a man who was 189 years old (which no one apparently thought a strange boast for an immortal to make).

Rocco’s theological pronouncements were not complicated or hard to access. In fact they were dramatically clear and urgent. Rocco preached that the apocalypse would come in 2012. Only those who had faith in Rocco would be saved from the impending Armageddon. Rocco was not the first self-appointed seer to latch on to 2012 as a date of doom. Some believe that the fact that the Aztecs, Mayans and Incas all used calendars that ended on December 2012 meant that was the date of the end of the world. Modern seers had crafted their own doomsday scenarios around the date—author of The Bible Code, Michael Drosnin, predicted a comet would hit Earth in 2012, wiping out all life. But, for sheer terrifying drama, Rocco’s prognostications of murderous microchipping made Drosnin’s apocalypse comet look like amateur hour.

Among those who fell into Rocco’s thrall was Silvia Melchiorre, a wheelchair-bound, profoundly disabled woman. Ms Melchiorre had limited capacity to read and communicate due to strokes resulting from a brain tumour. She said Rocco promised he would keep her safe on ‘The Island’—somewhere in the South Pacific—and there in the tropics he would heal her and save her from death. Rocco told her The Island had healing waters that would make her walk again. Unfortunately, she bought the false hope, sold her house and donated $420 000 to Agape Ministries. Either Rocco derived his conclusions about mystery islands having healing powers for wheelchair-bound patients from watching too many episodes of Lost, or it was just a decidedly low hustle. As Ms Melchiorre’s lawyer David Riggall said when his client later sued: ‘What the affidavit says is that she was given both carrot and stick. The carrot is the promise of being healed—she’d walk again on the white sands of a Pacific island—and the stick was the threat that the world order was changing, there would be concentration camps, and it was a sort of classic pincer action’. Lawyers for the Agape leaders denied Ms Melchiorre was defrauded into giving a small fortune to Rocco’s church, saying any money was a gift from her, but they offered to ‘refund’ a $290 000 ‘donation’ she had made.

Another who came to regret his involvement with Rocco Leo’s church was Adelaide businessman Martin Penney. Mr Penney was a member of the sect for fourteen years. Once he became disillusioned he sued to recoup what he claimed was $820 000 he had handed over in cash, $132 000 in equipment and $250 000 in free labour. His court documents transcend the usual cold legal language to reveal the bizarre nature of the sect’s teachings. They claimed Mr Penney was defrauded by the apocalyptic threats that only his money could save him from poisons, microchips and death. The documents claimed Rocco Leo told Mr Penney: ‘Whilst it would not be compulsory to have the chip inserted, those who chose not to would be branded by the government as terrorists and … be rounded up by the government and confined to concentration camps where ultimately they would be exterminated. [Those with the chip] would be poisoned as a consequence of the said chip containing poisons that would be released from it and cause cancerous boils to appear on the skin resulting in death’.

The size of the Agape flock fluctuated between hundreds and a smaller, ultra-devoted core of about sixty followers. Many in the congregation were successful businesspeople headhunted by Rocco, it was claimed by some, precisely because of their wealth. All were asked to give the church a tithe (10 per cent) of their income. The size of the cult’s congregation fluctuated but the size of its coffers did not. They were simply big and getting bigger. Assets connected to the cult spanned ten bank accounts, three South Australian properties (including the must-have accessory for a charismatic cult leader—an inner-city coffee shop called Butterflies Cafe), five Victorian properties, and a fleet of thirteen vehicles including Mercedes, vans, a furniture truck, a tip truck and a front-end loader. Rocco told his selfless devotees their donations were needed to buy a South Pacific island. The senior ranks of the cult whispered of Vanuatu as their ultimate island destination.

AGAPE members said initially the Oakden church seemed serene and peaceful—a ‘beautiful, perfect’ place. At services Rocco would play videos full of testimonials from people who said they had experienced Rocco’s miracles and he would promise to perform miracles for others. As the years passed, the leaders started watching and broadcasting right-wing conspiracy theory videos and introducing stricter rules. The church gates started being locked at all times except for thirty minutes before services, and latecomers were excluded from entry altogether. Neighbours said four snarling German shepherds trained to attack on command patrolled the church’s perimeter.

As the dreaded year of 2012 approached the starkness became more apparent. Talk in the cult became more apocalyptic and members were encouraged to start selling their possessions, including their homes. Some veteran members did not like the new direction of the church and started leaving. Others stayed but mostly because they were ‘scared, paralysed’, insiders said. In January 2010, Rocco Leo closed the Oakden church permanently. Rocco’s version of all this, told later, was that he had to shut down his house of worship for the safety of his followers and himself. He said he was visited by a stranger named Charlie who claimed to have a haul of weapons in his car. ‘After that,’ Rocco said, ‘I had to close the church to the public and put, shall we say, security guards on the church.’

ROCCO Leo’s vision of a government plot to microchip humanity like an overly officious council dealing with wayward labradors had a few holes in it. It was unclear what would be gained for the surviving overlords by wiping out the human race, aside from perhaps an absence of queues. But those sorts of details appeared unimportant for Rocco’s credulous followers. It was enough that there was a virtuous ‘us’ and an evil ‘them’. There were also disincentives for overly curious followers. Even the slightest questioning of the charismatic leader could get a member described as ‘possessed’ by the devil. One former member said, ‘You ask one question you’re dead or you go to hell. That’s how bad he was’.

Rocco’s previous incarnations had been quite different from his role as God’s earthly wingman and solo saviour of the human race. And despite all the talk of white sands, healing waters and divine benevolence, the cult’s rough underbelly occasionally came into clear view. Rocco’s right-hand man, John Mouhalos, got himself into hot water when in 2007 he assaulted a man he claimed owed him money. Mouhalos accused the assault victim of owing him $50 000 and threatening to ‘get the Colombians’ onto him. It didn’t help Mouhalos’s case when police searched his car and found the senior Agape Ministries member in possession of two pistols.

The first person to speak out against Agape Ministries and decry it as a cult was Philip Arbon. His estranged wife and two of his children were Agape members and he was determined to publicly reveal Rocco Leo’s true nature. It was a quest that would lead to another alleged violent incident. ‘I’d gone to Adelaide Airport and I was taking photos of Leo to give to the authorities,’ Mr Arbon said. ‘Eventually he [Rocco Leo] ripped a backpack off my shoulder and smashed my camera onto the floor.’ Members would sometimes attend the cult’s compound at Mount Magnificent, a ninety-minute drive south of Adelaide. The secluded property nestled in the hills and surrounded by hobby farms was referred to by the cult as ‘The Promised Land’. Their neighbours were an abandoned house on one side and a slaughterhouse with just two employees on the other. Followers of all nationalities—adults and children—would descend on the property en masse to feed the property’s animals and work on the land. At the end of a hard day’s labour, up to thirty members would cook, eat and sleep communally. They would sleep on beanbags and in sleeping-bags shoulder-to-shoulder on the dining room floor of the farm’s kitchen building. Country life was a little more comfortable for the cult’s leaders, who would relax watching television in the warmer and more spacious surrounds of the ‘leaders only’ house.

According to an insider the Mount Magnificent property contained a secret underground bunker that Rocco named ‘The Holy Land Hideout’, a doomsday survival chamber that measured 50 metres long by 30 metres wide and contained food supplies. The farm also served another purpose—it provided the cult with a hidden shooting range where members could fire off a few rounds and familiarise themselves with the weapons they would need to defend themselves against their oppressors in the looming End Times.

One former member claimed children as young as six were trained in weapons and marksmanship. Their potential targets included interfering police who might try to invade their stronghold in the hills. If the guns weren’t fired on members of the South Australia Police they might still then have been used on the current inhabitants of their soon-to-be island sanctuary. The ex-member said he, with his wife and children, had been Agape disciples for years. His interest had first been piqued when he heard Rocco Leo had a ‘direct contact with God’. The family attended the church weekly but alarm bells started ringing for the man when Rocco began proclaiming he was actually God and openly started gathering guns. ‘Rocco actually put out his feelers through the congregation to get some firearms—as much as they could get, whatever they could get,’ the former member said. Rocco explained that the dramatic approach was necessary, the man said, so ‘if the police ever took anyone—congregation members—captive, they would attack and get them out’.

The ex-member explained the shooting range was put on the backburner after Rocco realised the guns might have posed more of a threat to his own people than his enemies. ‘I know a guy who was practising nearly shot himself in the foot, so I think they scaled down after that.’ Following this incident, followers ‘were told by Roc to go and start learning how to use a gun and learn how to shoot. This is when the farm became obsolete and the island came into play’. And this is when their knowledge of firearms would really be applied. According to the ex-cult member, when oblique references were made to ‘The Island’ cult leaders were actually referring to Vanuatu. ‘We were told to go learn how to shoot because if the natives that are there [on Vanuatu] uprise, we were to defend ourselves. The main thing was just to wipe them out and take over the whole island—that’s why the weapons were there.’

In early 2010 a Mount Magnificent neighbour noticed that the sound of gunfire on the cult’s property was becoming much more frequent. ‘I know what a .22 for general farm use sounds like,’ the woman said. ‘But these were different guns.’ Around the same time, senior cult figure Mouhalos was being sentenced for assault and possession of firearms; the concerns of ex-members were also, finally, reaching the ears of police. A quick look at Rocco’s rap sheet would have added to the mounting concern and in the end it was enough to spark decisive action on the part of the authorities.

ON THURSDAY 20 May 2010, ninety heavily armed officers swooped on a dozen properties in Adelaide and south of the city owned by the sect. They found an alarming cache of fifteen guns, 35 000 rounds of ammunition, extendable batons and explosive devices. At the cult’s mountain compound, officers found detonators and fuses in a shipping container. Two men in their forties were arrested and another two were reported for firearms offences. In the end, all four were charged—but the cult’s enigmatic leader, Brother Roc, along with his right-hand man, were nowhere to be found. Also missing, and worryingly so for police, were several automatic and semi-automatic firearms that police knew the sect possessed but couldn’t locate.

The next day, as raids continued, police found another shipping container dumped behind a suburban Adelaide business. In it were metal bed frames concealing more high-powered ammunition. Before the arsenals were discovered, the Agape Ministries had been a quirky Adelaide joke. But uncovering the high-powered ammunition and explosives made the worst fears of the authorities concrete. This was not simply an unusual-but-benign sect, but a group that, if everything went badly, could have triggered an Australian Waco, or a mass murder or suicide of members like a Jonestown or a Heaven’s Gate.

Waco was the Texas location of a deadly confrontation between US authorities and the Branch Davidian cult led by David Koresh. When US agents tried to execute an unsigned search warrant on the Branch Davidian compound, a two-hour shootout erupted, killing people on both sides. A siege involving the FBI followed, which lasted for fifty days and ended only when another assault was made on the compound, followed by a blaze engulfing the building. When the smoke settled, four FBI agents were dead, along with seventy-five Branch Davidians—including cult leader Koresh, pregnant women and up to twenty-one children. The Branch Davidian cult’s arsenal had included a .50 calibre cannon, machine guns and more than a million rounds of ammunition. Back in Adelaide, ex-Agape members claimed Rocco told them their stockpile of weapons was to fight off enemies, which could include police. Detective Superintendent Jim Jeffery, in charge of the Agape Ministries investigation, would not dismiss the Waco comparison. ‘With the amount of weapons and ammunition we recovered, we have managed to defuse a high-risk situation,’ he said. ‘Whether that could have escalated into a Waco-type situation is speculative but it is certainly a bizarre circumstance that we have here.’

For authorities and dissident members, time was of the essence to freeze the cult’s assets before they were turned into untraceable suitcases of cash. There was some success doing this during the month of the raid. However, one of the Victorian properties linked to the sect was somehow liquidated weeks later for $1.6 million. An exception to the big freeze was made for Rocco’s wife, Assunta, who had been left behind by her quick-to-disappear husband (who had vanished with his girlfriend Mari Antoinette). Assunta was to remain with all the children in her big house in the Adelaide suburb of Campbelltown, just one suburb south of Paradise. The court allowed her to withdraw a thousand dollars a week from one of the frozen cult accounts for living expenses.

The police raids, the media attention and the suddenly missing Messiah had a polarising effect on cult members. Some ugly allegations emerged, like the claim Rocco had told cult members suffering from terminal cancer not to seek medical treatment. Others told how, as things got stranger and more intense in the last few months, a high-ranking member known as ‘The Enforcer’ had issued death threats against members who had tried to leave the cult. But some devotees still kept the faith. As the lawyer for some of the cult dissidents said: ‘People … incredibly despite all the publicity and media attention, are not fazed by the reports because Leo told them God had said Adelaide would turn against him and portray him as an evil master. What those people are seeing in the media is confirmation to them that Mr Leo is a teller of truth’.

RAPHAEL Azariah—his adopted surname meaning ‘the Lord is my helper’— remained a true believer. He fronted the media to defend the Agape Ministries against ‘malicious lies’ and what he saw as ‘a load of hogwash.’ In his speech, Mr Azariah said ‘Agape Ministries has never been a doomsday cult [and] it has never been preached in our church that the world is going to end’. However, he did concede that microchipping had been ‘discussed in Bible study class’. One of the critics Mr Azariah was trying to rebut was his own mother. She had claimed her young granddaughters had been promised in marriage to elders in the cult. Mr Azariah’s mother, Lesley Baligod, claimed Raphael and his wife Patricia had ‘betrothed’ their daughters, aged six and eight years old, to older men in the cult.

Another couple who escaped the cult echoed the concerns of Ms Baligod that young girls were being earmarked for marriage to older members. The pair said they felt chills when an elder at a barbecue for cult members referred to a very young girl as one of his ‘little brides’. The woman said ‘They stake claims on little children.She would be eight that little girl and he would be close to fifty and [he] says that when she is of legal age she will be one of my wives’.When Raphael fronted the media to spruik for Rocco, the footage made his mum, Ms Baligod, and Raphael’s brother even more concerned for his wellbeing. They publicly pleaded for him to leave the cult and rejoin their family. ‘I watched the video and thought my son looked very, very sick. I don’t know how far down he has to go before he hits rock bottom, but his life is clearly in tatters,’ Ms Baligod said. ‘As far as I know, he and all the inner circle of Agape Ministries are still completely under the control of Rocco Leo.’ The barrister for the two members charged over firearms was also fighting for the cult’s reputation. ‘If you go back, the police have investigated them, various other organisations have investigated them and nothing has come up,’ barrister Craig Caldicott said. ‘So what they have found are some minor firearms charges, which is a bit like saying if a couple of people in the Church of England have firearms charges the entire Church of England is a doomsday cult.’

Rocco’s previous overseas ventures and his island plan made Fiji and Vanuatu the most highly suspected locations for the fugitive cult figure. Rocco Leo had preached in villages in Vanuatu just a year earlier in 2009 and villagers told how he had stayed in rural Luganville accompanied by a man and a woman. They said he had been hoping villagers would donate to him ‘land for free’ to build a church. ‘Pastor Roc’ had even boasted to villagers of having a prayer vigil with the Vanuatu prime minister in 2009. He used his charm and charisma to recruit the locals and one villager said Rocco ‘claimed to be a spiritual leader who healed people [and he] … knew how to get through to the villagers’. There were concerns the villagers could have been conned into parting with their money or land. One described Rocco as ‘a charismatic leader who had the ability to sway the mind’. The man said Rocco had gone around praying with the needy, including a plantation worker from Matevulu who had then supposedly recovered from a disability. He said he suspected Rocco had obtained a plot of land near a local college free of charge from the villagers. Fijian immigration officials and the Vanuatu Christian Council were keeping their eyes peeled for the fugitive but to no avail. Fiji’s Immigration Director Nemani Vuniwaqa confirmed suspicions that Rocco may have slipped into the country unnoticed, and said ‘We are trying to verify when and how he got into the country. I have already assigned a team to conduct the investigations as we were not aware about him being in the country’.

ON THE surface it seemed Rocco was just spinning his amazing tale to fleece a few dupes out of their life savings. After all, before becoming God’s man on the ground in Adelaide, Rocco Leo was a thief and a pimp. He wouldn’t be the first crim-turned-cult-leader cynically using tall tales and conspiracy theories to cultivate a flock of dupes and access untaxed money, sex and power.

But, as we saw with the Hamilton-Byrne ‘Family’ cult there is another kind of cult leader who is actually the much more dangerous variety: they are the fantasists who come to believe their own fictions. The conspiracy videos and the cult’s significant arsenal suggest Rocco may have been one of these types. Whatever the case, Rocco in exile still appeared to be spruiking for his and the cult’s reputation. Adelaide’s Advertiser newspaper received a lengthy email (later looked at by the police) sent by a ‘Reverend Pastor Rocco Leo’. The email explained he was not on the lam or in hiding. But rather he was overseas for ‘scheduled government international aid project talks’. He blamed all the cult’s bad press and claims of doomsday beliefs on dissident ex-members. ‘[One man] increased his undermining tactics with most congregation members by lying to them and instilling fear in them about some sinister doomsday cult with illegal activities,’ he wrote. ‘Meanwhile to me he would present an agreeable disposition yet constantly [be] inciting congregation volunteers.’

His email was silent on the mysterious island but mentioned in passing the members packing shipping containers ‘for departure’. As for the cult’s arsenal, which was busted by police, according to Rocco’s email that was all for fox shooting. The 52-year-old missing Messiah signed off with a patriotic lament that the systematic attack on his charity organisation ‘cuts to the very heart of the spirit of Australia. I hereby declare that I and the Agape Ministries Inc organisation have been witch-hunted and framed by [ex-cult members] in order to attempt to discredit our reputation … I pray that justice be served swiftly’.

The Agape raids echoed in the political chambers of the nation’s capital where there was a call for laws similar to those in France where ‘mental manipulation’ is a crime attracting up to five years’ jail. The French laws empower judges to ban cults from advertising and recruiting near schools, hospitals and retirement homes—ripe hunting grounds for innocents and the vulnerable. Independent Senator Nick Xenophon, who had unsuccessfully lobbied for an inquiry into some allegedly abusive practices of Scientology, leapt on the Agape revelations to further argue for action against cults. ‘Ninety police, thirteen premises raided, thousands of rounds of ammunition—what more do we need to say that we need a national debate about whether people are being protected,’ the senator said. ‘I mean if this isn’t a wake-up call, what is? Do we have to wait until someone is hurt or killed as a result of some of these cults before we do anything? When people lose their life savings, when they are suicidal because of harassment and stalking, the priority has to be how do you give protection to people against behaviour where the criminal law and civil law is not adequate.’

OTHER former cult members, themselves at one point in line to be island-bound, simply breathed a sigh of relief that they had dodged a bullet. One Adelaide couple, who would not be named, fell into the cult after the woman was struck by a mysterious illness that had baffled doctors. She sought out one of the Agape elders who claimed to have healing powers. ‘We were at our worst, we were vulnerable, we were desperate,’ the man said. ‘At that point I would have cut my legs off for this to go away.’

Under instructions from the church the woman stopped taking her medication and would repeat chants from the group’s Bible. Within a fortnight all the woman’s debilitating symptoms stopped, but the couple said their doubts about the church started creeping in as Rocco’s doomsday talk got increasingly unhinged. ‘He kept saying “We are going to run out of time because all the people in the world are going to have these chips”,’ the man said.

The man would debate the members of the church who swallowed this line but got nowhere. ‘I said to them “Why out of a cajillion people in the world is the Lord only going to save a couple of hundred people from Oakden in little old Adelaide?”’ he said. ‘And the answer was “because he is” and that’s when it got to the point when I started to disbelieve. One night I took [another potential member] aside and I said: “Go on the internet and look up Waco”. That’s what I thought was going to happen. He’s going to get them all on this farm and poison them all or make them commit suicide. Which is how you are going to be with the Lord—by taking this.’

SO WHERE in the world was Rocco Leo? Perhaps he was wan-dering aimlessly with another memory failure like the one he purported to suffer when he fronted Mouhalos’s assault hearing to defend the character of his right-hand man. On that occasion, after refusing to swear on the Bible, Rocco was asked if he’d had any dealings with police, to which he replied ‘no’. Rocco’s lengthy criminal history, dating back to 1975, was then read to the court. It included multiple suspended sentences for larceny, receiving stolen goods, false pretences and driving offences. But the cult leader would not budge even in the face of objective evidence. ‘Forgive me, but I do not remember … sincerely, I do not remember,’ Rocco said on the stand. Mouhalos must have been thinking: with character witnesses like that, who needs prosecutors? The judge convicted Mouhalos and described Rocco as an ‘unbelievable’ witness.

The plan had been for Rocco and his devoted followers to arrive in Vanuatu, rip up their passports, throw away their mobile phones and cut off all contact with friends and family back home. Insiders were told that they would then be committed to The Island for life—no attempt to leave would be tolerated. Island life would not be all coconuts, hammocks and thinking about Jesus, one ex-member told. A ‘three strikes and you’re out’ rule would lead to the biblical punishment of being stoned to death if members repeatedly broke church rules. They would be stuck, in short, between a Rocco and a hard place.

In the end it was only Rocco, his girlfriend Mari Antoinette, her brother Joe and a handful of cultists who made it to The Island—or at least an island—Fiji. (Some ex-cult members would rather have seen them on islands like Rikers or Alcatraz.) With $900 000, Agape’s international money man, Lorenzo Lettieri, bought a defunct resort property with a private beach in Pacific Harbour, about 35 kilometres south-west of the capital Suva. Lettieri told the vendor he was acting on behalf of a famous television wrestler who wanted the property as a family retreat. The fugitives’ hideaway was nestled among mangroves and the only track in, off the main road, terminated at a large, locked, green gate. The only other access was by boat. Several shipping containers were dotted around the property. The End Times were quite luxurious for Rocco. By day he and his mistress would go island-hopping on their 15-metre yacht the Morning Star or lounge by one of the resort’s pools. Then at night they would venture out for dinner.

BACK in Adelaide, criminal and civil cases against Rocco and his sect continued their slow march through the courts. Agape Ministries was stripped of its legal status as a religion, lost its tax exemptions and was being pursued by the tax office for four million dollars in unpaid taxes for the last year alone. Rocco was being sued by ex-cult members and authorities were chasing him on charges arising from the smashed-camera incident with Philip Arbon. Police were also working on a brief involving more than a hundred fraud charges to be laid against Rocco.

In November 2010, when the cult leader had been missing for six months, his lawyers promised a court he would show up, as required, the following January. When that date rolled around, he was still a no-show. His continued absence prompted Ms Baligod to speculate: ‘We believe Rocco Leo has finally found himself an island, or manipulated someone somewhere into allowing him what he wants’. Then in June 2011, when Rocco and Co. had been on the run for more than a year, their heavenly hideaway was finally uncovered.

It was after sunrise on a Sunday morning when a team of Fijian police and immigration officers came by sea and raided the Pacific Harbour compound. Rocco was lounging with his mistress poolside when the officers landed. Raiding officers would not say who tipped them off, only that it was information from ‘overseas’. They said when they landed there were six others in the compound, including two on the yacht and two boys. Rocco and Mari Antoinette came quietly. The pair were arrested and detained for expired visas. Joe evaded the sting but handed himself in two days later.

‘They didn’t expect us to come,’ said Detective Tomasi Kororua, who led the raid. ‘We went in by boat and he was just relaxing at his pool wearing a black T-shirt and brown shorts. [Mari Antoinette]Veneziano was wearing a white sleeveless top and brown shorts. He appeared resigned to his fate when he saw us,’ Detective Kororua said. ‘He didn’t say anything. We just gave him the warrant for his arrest and he admitted he was on the run. Those people who were there said that he was their Jesus, so I told them, “Today, you’re going to see your Jesus”.’ One cult member SA Police had been hoping to find when Rocco’s hideaway was raided was the cult’s old right-hand man. John Mouhalos had vanished more than a year earlier and had been registered as a missing person. He had not touched his bank accounts nor been seen by family or friends since March 2010. Mouhalos was not found at the Fiji hideaway and at the time of writing he had still not turned up. ‘We do have concerns for his welfare based on these facts,’ Superintendent Jeffery of the SA Police said.

AS ROCCO and his associates lingered in immigration detention in Fiji, the cult figure must have imagined his sojourn in paradise was all but over—that soon he would be dragged home and confronted with some hard time in an Adelaide jail cell. What he hadn’t counted on was the bungling of the Australian authorities. Cult victims and others who had taken an interest in the case just assumed local authorities had been beavering away behind the scenes to bring the cult leader back to Australia. This illusion was shattered when Fijian Immigration Director Major Nemani Vuniwaqa said there was no reason to deport the cult leader unless Australia requested it—and then revealed Australia had not requested it. ‘There has been no response from Australia so far,’ Major Vuniwaqa told the Fiji Sun. ‘This means that they do not want him.’

It then emerged that Fijian Prime Minister Josaia Voreqe Bainimarama offered to assist in repatriating Rocco, who by then was wanted on a further 100 criminal charges for fraud. Fiji, however, was awaiting a request from the Australian Attorney-General’s Department, which in turn needed a request from police or the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions. Prime Minister Bainimarama, in a letter answering an inquiry by Senator Xenophon, said Fijian officials would ‘assist’ any application to extradite Rocco if they received a request from Australia but ‘to date, we have received no such request from the Australia Attorney-General’. The Fijian official’s comments set in chain a clumsy round of blame and buck-passing that revealed just how unprepared—and even unwilling—Australian authorities were to bring the fugitive cult leader back to face justice.

The federal government said it was their understanding it was ‘currently not the intention of the South Australian authorities to seek the extradition of Mr Leo’. Senator Xenophon slammed SA Police’s failure to lodge an extradition request as ‘Keystone Kops stuff’. ‘What the hell are South Australian authorities doing on this?’ the senator said. Police said they were waiting on prosecutors. Prosecutors said they had not been given all the documents they needed on Rocco’s fraud charges from police. When the prosecutors got what they needed they advised that the fraud charges would not stick. That left Rocco facing just the charges arising from the smashed camera incident. Senator Xenophon again chimed up: ‘I think Mr Leo would be having a big laugh under his coconut tree after hearing of this decision’. South Australia Police Assistant Commissioner Grant Stevens said the fraud probe had been hobbled by ex-Agape members’ reticence to speak out against Rocco. The top cop was left looking powerless and without direction. ‘If he were to come back to South Australia we would be very keen to talk to him about these matters,’ Stevens said.

Just when it seemed all the internal bloodletting was over, there was a new revelation. The Director of Public Prosecutions Steve Pallaras, in defending his part in the debacle, lobbed a grenade, perhaps inadvertently, back at the police. He revealed the DPP had not been asked to consider a case for extraditing Rocco on charges relating to all the weapons found on cult properties in the May raids. ‘I can’t charge anyone based on what the media is saying about him—all I can do is decide on what police bring to me,’ Pallaras said. ‘We haven’t been asked to [review firearms offences]and we haven’t been given any material relating to that.’ Rocco was in Fijian custody but no investigators from the SA Police had interviewed him to make any sort of criminal case on which to bring him home. It fell to the editorial writers at Adelaide’s Advertiser newspaper to speak sense amid all the folly:

It appears Mr Pallaras and senior South Australian police have become more focused on blaming each other rather than concentrating on the real issue—how to bring [Rocco] Leo to trial, regardless of the result.

Now that he has been located—and remains in custody pending deportation—it would seem logical for those detectives to travel to Fiji to interview Leo about the fraud allegations and the firearms.

At the very least, it may help ease public anxiety and confusion over how Leo, a man who supposedly stole hundreds of thousands of dollars from gullible followers and stashed enough firepower to start a small war, has seemingly escaped justice.

WHILE Australian officials bickered, the fugitive cult figure set about making himself legal by applying for a visa to live in Fiji free of custody. At the time of writing Rocco was still in Fiji, his lifestyle improving by the day. For a man who preached that governments wanted to microchip and murder their citizens, Rocco must have felt the authorities were being awfully nice to him. The only existential risk officials were posing to Australia’s would-be David Koresh was pampering him to death. Faced with Australia’s indecision and ineptitude, the Fijian authorities allowed Rocco to be released with his girlfriend to ‘home detention’ back at their Pacific Harbour heavenly hideaway. ‘Detention’, that is, with ocean views, a private beach, multiple swimming pools and a 15-metre yacht. The sort of custody most Australians save for years just to visit. Rocco’s father had spoken of ‘miracles, signs and wonders’ following Rocco anywhere he went. Perhaps the eccentric old geezer was right all along.