Discussing Gabriel of Urantia on Arizona Radio
Controversial spiritual leader leaves a troubled legacy
I was recently interviewed by Sam Dingman on The Show on KJZZ 91.5 in Phoenix following the death of Gabriel of Urantia, the controversial spiritual leader I wrote about in my book New Age Grifter: The True Story of Gabriel of Urantia and his Cosmic Family.
During our conversation, I discussed what life was like inside Gabriel's compound, which eventually became known as Avalon Organic Gardens & Eco Village in Tubac. We covered some of the more shocking details of life in the sect, including allegations of sexual abuse.
A brief excerpt from our conversation is included below. You can listen to the full interview on KJZZ's website.
DINGMAN: One of the things that really sticks out to me in looking into this and in looking at the various websites for all their various holdings — which we’ve only talked about a fraction of in this conversation — is they also seemed to have a tremendous amount of money.
FLATLEY: It’s quite easy to accumulate money when people are working for free. They have one business, it’s called Soulistic Hospice, and it’s a hospice business, which I believe is like half-staffed by volunteers from the community. So, you know, free cult labor. And that seems to be their big moneymaker.
But they do have a couple businesses that are earning significant amounts of money. And when you’re not paying people, you can hold on to that money for yourself.
DINGMAN: So I know that one of the things that was part of this sort of octopus-like organization that he was running was that he had a radio station called KVAN.fm, and he had this music — I don’t know if it’s a company or what — called CosmoPop, and that a lot of what aired on KVAN and a lot of the music that came out of CosmoPop was was his music, correct?
FLATLEY: His vision always included creating music. And, you know, cynically, you look at it and it’s just like, this is a cult leader who really wants to be a rockstar. And, I really can’t say that that’s too far off the mark.
His music was always tied into the belief system that it was going to somehow change humanity. And conversely, if he never got famous, it was because humanity screwed up. They didn’t know what this great gift was they had been given.