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International
Feb. 21, 2002
Runaway Dane Surfaces With O.J. Attorney
LOS ANGELES - A Danish hippie-turned-fugitive who allegedly embezzled millions of dollars through what some describe as an international, cultlike empire has surfaced in Los Angeles federal court - more than 20 years after his mysterious disappearance.
The case has attracted a gaggle of Danish journalists, who got their first glimpse of 63-year-old Mogens Amdi Petersen on Tuesday in U.S. District Court, where he intends to fight extradition to Denmark with the help of attorney Robert L. Shapiro. Petersen was arrested Sunday at Los Angeles International airport on an Interpol warrant, charged by the Danish government with embezzlement and tax evasion.
Magistrate Judge Stephen J. Hillman set a bail hearing for Friday.
"He's been in hiding for 22 years," Danish reporter Dan Andersen of TV2/Denmark said of the tall, lean Scandinavian fugitive. "We didn't even have a picture of him until now."
The Danish government contends Petersen swindled people, businesses and governments out of millions of dollars under the guise of running Tvind, an international educational institution also known as Humana and decried by some as a cult.
In court Tuesday, Shapiro defended his new client.
"His life as a teacher and a humanitarian is well-documented around the world," he said. "No crime has been recorded. He's a pacifist, a humanist, an anti-war advocate. He's put thousands of dollars into emerging nations of Africa and South America for education, teacher training, HIV education and AIDS awareness.
"He's not a fugitive but a philanthropist."
Petersen began building his multimillion-dollar enterprise in the late 1960s with a series of alternative, traveling high schools that the Danish government agreed to fund, according to news accounts. He hired teachers who kicked in 80 percent of their salary to the cause, and many of his schools still operate in Denmark, Andersen, the reporter, said.
As part of the curriculum, Petersen took students in buses to Third World countries and impoverished areas to see how less fortunate people lived. Over the years, he collected more funding from large corporations as well as the Danish government.
While the organization became more secretive over the years, Petersen's philosophy of spreading the wealth fit right into the anti-establishment era of the 1960s and 1970s. After Petersen published his own manifesto in 1979, the Danish government launched an investigation.
Petersen slipped out of sight, but Tvind grew, sprouting its schools and charitable organizations from Africa to South America and even the United States. News reports likened the organization to a cult that lured people in and forced them to turn over their assets, which then were distributed to the leaders to fuel a lavish lifestyle.
But there was no sign of the mastermind himself.
Rumors abounded that Petersen was dead, mentally ill or hidden away by Tvind members who had seized control.
Meanwhile, cases of businesses that charged Petersen and Tvind with embezzling millions of dollars from them began landing in Danish courts. Danish investigators seized computers from the Tvind schools in an attempt to locate the elusive Petersen, but they were unable to break the encrypted codes.
The Danish Parliament even tried to create a law banning the creation of organizations such as Tvind in the future, but it was struck down in the courts as unconstitutional.
Then, last year, a Web site dedicated to alerting people of the dangers of Tvind posted a news account from Denmark that said Petersen had been located on Fisher Island, where he apparently had been hiding out for the past 10 years in a $10 million condominium.
His posh existence on the private island off the South Florida coast, peopled by world-famous artists and multibillionaires, was being paid for by the proceeds from the charitable organization he was running, according to news reports.
FBI agents arrested Petersen early on Sunday, when he got off a plane at LAX.
Esben Kjaer, New York bureau chief for Berlingske Tidende, Denmark's leading newspaper, likened Petersen's spider-web charitable organization to a "nonprofit version of Enron, if you will."
"This is a really, really interesting and fascinating case," Shapiro, a partner at Christensen Miller Fink Jacobs Glaser Weil & Shapiro in Los Angeles, said. "Many issues will be of first impression."
Those issues, Shapiro said, apply to extradition matters as well as to the case in general.
Shapiro said Petersen's friends contacted him because of his expertise in extradition matters in another international case - that of the founder of Zhong Gong, a highly popular meditative discipline in China.
While Petersen is no household name in the United States, his notoriety in Denmark has reached mythic proportions.
"His tentacles are all over Denmark," Kjaer said. "But no one has seen him in 22 years, so the very fact that we now get to see the guy is very big."
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Susan Mcraen
Daily Journal Staff Writer
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