Elected Through Terror

Labrousse, now 70, began his lengthy career in law enforcement in 1970 as a reserve officer with The Dalles Police Department. He hired on as a full-time officer and worked his way up through the ranks, serving for almost 14 years.

In 1984, he decided to run for county sheriff. Labrousse beat the incumbent, Bob Brown, and began what would turn out to be a 12-year run as Wasco County’s sheriff, serving until 1997.

Just three years before Labrousse was elected sheriff, Oregon had been invaded — literally — by members of a religious sect known as the Rajneeshees. The Rajneeshees had purchased a 64,000-acre property — called the “Big Muddy Ranch” — in southeast Wasco County, about 20 miles from tiny, rustic Antelope, Ore. In 1980, Antelope was a town of about 40 people, and the Rajneeshees set out to conquer it.

This September, Labrousse published a book about the Rajneesh phenomenon. Its title describes the devastating impact the Rajneeshees had on the local community: “Elected Through Terror: The Rajneesh Through the Eyes of a Local Sheriff.”

Labrousse, who has lived in The Dalles for 51 years, said he wrote the book because he is often asked about his experiences with the Rajneeshees.

“I’ve been telling these stories for years, and people have been telling me I’ve got to write a book,” he explained. “So I started putting it in writing.”

The Rajneeshees were so-named because they were followers of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, a spiritual leader who left India allegedly because he and his followers felt they were being harassed by Indian officials. Rajneesh and numerous followers came to Oregon, they said, for farming, but their real intention was to build a commune where they could worship their guru.

They brought in enough followers that their numbers soon overwhelmed the local community members, who were mostly farmers and ranchers. One of the group’s most controversial moves was to vote to rename the town of Antelope to “Rajneesh.” And certainly the sight of the Rajneesh security team carrying semi-automatic weapons around their compound did not reassure local residents that the group was there to farm or to pray, Labrousse said.

It got worse from there, he added, with Rajneesh followers going so far as to contaminate 10 salad bars at restaurants in The Dalles, sickening hundreds of people.

Allegedly this was planned as a way to “incapacitate” local voters so the Rajneeshees could get their candidates a win in the Wasco County elections in 1984.

Labrousse was one of the candidates the Rajneeshees hoped to defeat.

“I was an unknown,” Labrousse pointed out. “But I was supported by people who wanted to see the Rajneeshees driven out of the county. [Then sheriff] Bob Brown was a great guy, but he was seen as a little more amenable to what the Rajneeshees wanted to do, so the Rajneeshees attempted all they could to sway that election.

“I was voted in by people who hated them and wanted them out of the county. But I never did anything to make them think I wanted them out of there — I just wanted them to follow the law.”

In his book, Labrousse doesn’t try to sugarcoat what he saw happening.

On the Amazon.com site that displays his new book, he describes its theme: “Refugees flooding small communities. Religious extremists demanding special treatment and exception from inconvenient laws. Bullying and terrorism when their demands are not met. Sound familiar? Welcome to Oregon 1980.”

With his vivid writing style, Labrousse captures the anxiety of the time, as in this passage from the foreword of Elected Through Terror: “These people [residents of the Antelope area] had good reason to be concerned about the Rajneesh’s activities. They committed the first documented germ warfare against American citizens by poisoning salad bars, water sources, and other public spaces. Hundreds of people became ill. Some are still suffering from the effects of that poisoning today, both physically and mentally. The Rajneesh also developed and tried other tactics to poison or physically attack citizens across all of Oregon, going as far as growing biological weapons on their compound.”

Labrousse said he has encountered those who think the Rajneesh era should simply be forgotten.

“Some people say it’s been 30 years, and it’s time to forget all that,” he said. “No, it isn’t. They hijacked a town and were trying to hijack the county.

“If they hadn’t destroyed themselves from the inside, they could have taken over the county.

“They harassed people, they committed crimes. History tells us what can happen if we don’t stick to the law,” he explained.

Labrousse said almost all of those who flocked to the commune at Rajneesh Peram were decent people.

“About 95 or 99 percent of the people just wanted to be there and worship Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and listen to him,” he said. “A few individuals took over the religion.”

The nightmare didn’t end until October 1985, when Rajneesh and a key ringleader, Ma Anand Sheela, fled Oregon. They were were later arrested, and Rajneesh pleaded guilty to two counts of making false statements to immigration officials and was deported. Rajneesh died in 1990 in India, at the age of 58.

Sheela was convicted on multiple charges, including attempted murder, and spent 29 months in prison before also being deported.

Labrousse said it had been difficult to find out much about what was going on at Rajneesh, or the dismantling of the commune might have happened sooner.

“We felt there were problems there, but it was a closed community. We were stonewalled everywhere we went. There was not a lot of cooperation,” he said.

He also pointed out that until late in the process, county officials felt they were not being supported, and the coverage by some media outlets seemed to imply county officials or the county’s residents were the real problem, not the commune.

“We weren’t getting support by the state at all,” he said. “No one understood there was a problem. They thought we were biased and bigoted.”

After the commune fell apart, Labrousse said he had mixed feelings.

“It was not so much satisfaction, but we felt vindicated somewhat,” he said. “For us as a department, and for the citizens who had been going through so much over the past four years, there was a sense of vindication.”

Labrousse said he started putting stories together for the book over the past couple of years, and ended up with a 65,000-word document, but he thought it was too disjointed to work. His son and daughter-in-law, Steven and Celinda Labrousse, then assisted in preparing the manuscript and organizing it chronologically, and that made all the difference, he said.

“They did a fantastic job, and helped me get it on Amazon,” he said, adding that he figures he worked on the book for 30 years, and it probably took two years to get it print-ready.

According to Labrousse, a takeover similar to what the Rajneeshees attempted could occur again, and he sees echoes of it in the migration of Muslims to Western nations.

“Look at what’s happening in Europe,” he said. “Muslims have the right to worship and believe what they want to, but what bothers me is when they try to change existing laws to benefit themselves and want Sharia to be the law of the land. A mayor of a town of 3,000 in a Midwestern state said, ‘bring them in; it’ll be good for our businesses.’ I thought, ‘man, how little that mayor knows.’”

Labrousse’s book is available at Klindt’s Booksellers in The Dalles and on Amazon.com.