Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.Įveryone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). The author wisely focuses significant sections of the narrative on the victims.Īn excruciatingly detailed, nightmarish saga demonstrating the sometimes inexplicable power of human evil. No matter what the verdicts in cases filed against Jeffs, he and his followers, numbering in the tens of thousands, have damaged countless lives. Brower documents how the seemingly all-powerful Jeffs has deteriorated physically and mentally while in prison.
CITE PROPHETS PREY TRIAL
The next trial is scheduled to occur in Texas on felony child-abuse charges. As Brower completed his manuscript during early 2011, the ultimate legal fate of Jeffs remained uncertain. Jeffs lost his liberty after a rape-related trial in a Utah courtroom, but an appellate court overturned his conviction on technical grounds. Partly because of the author’s moral outrage and shoe-leather doggedness, law-enforcement agencies in Utah, Arizona and Texas, among other locales, began criminal investigations. Furthermore, Brower learned about financial irregularities that, in his opinion, qualified the FLDS as an ongoing criminal enterprise as objectionable as the storied Mafia. The author concluded that no religious doctrine could justify what looked like rape and incest.
Instead, he became engaged far beyond helping his original client due to the dominance of the fundamentalist leaders over the women, including girls who had not reached adulthood. Brower, however, did not develop his investigation around the multiple-marriage culture. The fundamentalists, led by a supposedly divine prophet named Warren Jeffs, illegally practiced polygamy. But he knew almost nothing about the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints until stumbling on their practices after accepting a seemingly routine case as part of his private-investigator business based in Cedar City, Utah. A private investigator exposes the horrors of a fundamentalist Mormon sect.įirst-time author Brower knows the Mormon faith better than most because of his heritage.
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