Salt Lake City, USA - A federal investigation into a polygamist community in the 1980s concluded leaders of the sect on the Utah-Arizona state line were doing nothing worth prosecuting.
The FBI focused on two leaders of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints while investigating whether civil rights were being violated, according to a story published Saturday in the Salt Lake Tribune.
The Tribune obtained documents through a Freedom of Information request. According to the records, the FBI investigated in 1985 whether FLDS leaders were committing mail and wire fraud while evicting people from their homes. The records make only passing references to polygamy and the investigation was not focused on allegations of sexual abuse like the ones that triggered a massive raid on a polygamist compound in Texas in April.
Former U.S. Attorney Brent D. Ward requested the federal investigation in 1985 after at least six evicted members met with Ward in Salt Lake City. According to notes from the meeting, they shared their stories and provided documentation of their evictions.
"They were using law enforcement to intimidate the people they wanted out," said Ben Bistline, who was evicted. "That's the biggest complaint I had at the time.... If you didn't do what they said, they kicked you out."
Former members have alleged that boys and young men are banished for minor offenses and that church leader Warren Jeffs, who exercised authority to arrange marriages and reassign partners. Jeffs is now serving up to life in prison for being an accomplice to rape, charges he was convicted of last fall.
The 1985 investigation focused on Rulon T. Jeffs, Warren's father, and LeRoy S. Johnson, the FLDS church's president at the time. Ward wanted the FBI to look into whether the FLDS committed civil rights violations by evicting people for religious purposes or without due process or whether they committed wire or mail fraud when they gained control of properties.
FLDS leaders evicted dozens of people from their homes in Colorado City and Hildale in the early to mid-1980s. Former residents claimed in court affidavits and in statements to the FBI that men, including local law enforcement agents, arrived at their homes and said Johnson or Jeffs had ordered them off the property.
The U.S. Department of Justice closed the case without filing charges.