CRIMES COMMITTED AT DETROIT ZEN CENTER
I am a former resident of Detroit Zen Center (from the last week of April, 2012 until mid-July, 2012), and while I lived at the Center I was the victim of several crimes committed by Center Abbot Lundquist and/or Director Moga. Neither of these Center managers were arrested or convicted of these crimes, although they ought to have been.
Before I arrived at the center by air from California, Director Moga explained to me on the phone that there was an optional collective food purchasing arrangement (which I’ll call the “food plan”) for Center tenants. After arriving, Moga made a great effort to sign me up for the food plan, claiming that the diet based on the food purchased under the food plan could cure almost any illness. I didn’t like the food they purchased, so I elected not to go on their food plan. This turned out to cause great annoyance to Abbot Lundquist and Director Moga, not because they missed a chance to benefit me through a better diet, but because they missed a chance to make more money.
Money, and work (in the Center’s kale products business) obtained for little (in the form of room and board in the case of fulltime workers) or, more often, for no payment at all, is what the Detroit Zen Center is all about. Lundquist and Moga had almost no interest in the people who came to the Center aside from the work they could get out of them. People came to Lundquist almost entirely for economic reasons–they could get room and board in exchange for work. The value of the room and board they received was far less than the value of the work performed, calculated at minimum wage, but with the scarcity of jobs and the large number of poor people in the Detroit area, Abbot Lundquist was able to find people to work for him without much trouble. By pretending to run a religious center and calling work a form of religious “practice,” he was able to avoid paying the minimum wage to these workers. His primary interest was not in getting people to come to the Center to meditate, but rather to work, and in fact he charged everyone for meditating at the Center the same amount of work as the amount they had meditated, thus making the Center one of the most expensive zen centers in the United States. (The vast majority of zen centers in the US do not charge anything just to attend regularly scheduled meditations, but only to attend special programs, such as lengthy, multi-day meditation programs that involve meditating for eight or more hours per day and eating and sometimes sleeping at the center.) That is, if you meditated for one hour at the Center, then you were required to work for one hour, which is equivalent to paying $7.40, because that is the minimum wage for one hour of work in Michigan. Those fulltime workers who stayed at the Center were housed in “rooms” in the meditation hall which didn’t have walls reaching to the ceiling, or even close to the ceiling, so that there was very little privacy and a worker’s sleeping arrangement was essentially like living in a large, collective room with several people, rather than like a private room. The food he fed them resulted in some of them becoming seriously underweight–a condition which is probably less unhealthy than being seriously overweight, but is unhealthy nonetheless. Contrary to Lundquist’s claims, I doubt very much that people on his food plan would live longer than average. In fact, they were at risk for infertility (if female), anemia, osteoporosis, immune system deficiencies, and other health problems.
Evidently, Lundquist and Moga decided they weren’t making enough money from me due to my failure to participate in the optional food plan–they had repeatedly expressed their unhappiness that I hadn’t participated in their food plan–and hence they decided to evict me. As it happens, Lundquist and Moga had been repeatedly violating the Michigan landlord-tenant laws for years. They had been throwing tenants out without giving them the required 30-day notice. Their practice was quite different from that of the temporary guest housing at, for example, the Zen Center of Los Angeles, where tenants are allowed to move in only for a fixed term of residency, such as one month, which could be renewed. Lundquist and Moga, on the other hand, were admitting tenants such as myself on an indefinite arrangement with monthly rent payments–an arrangement that requires, by law, a 30-day notice prior to requiring tenants to move out. However, they had been violating the 30-day notice requirement routinely. In fact, Moga herself stated that she had been evicted by Lundquist (illegally, because without 30-day notice) on ten occasions. As the Detroit Zen Center attracts mostly poorly educated tenants who were as unaware of their legal rights as they were of Buddhist principles (thus allowing Center managers to treat them like dirt without questioning whether the managers were in fact following Buddhist precepts), Lundquist had been getting away with his illegal evictions for years. He and Moga were therefore quite taken aback when I pointed out on July 1, 2012 (the day Lundquist asked me to leave within two days), that I was legally entitled to 30-days advance notice. The idea that their tenants had any legal rights whatsoever was anathema to them, and they couldn’t accept it. They had utter contempt for the law, are were willing to commit crimes to force tenants to vacate their rooms. Thus, though I continued to pay for my room and Moga accepted my rent, on July 16, after having confirmed with me just a few hours earlier that I would vacate my room at the end of July, Moga, in her typical self-contradictory manner, flew into a terrible, unprovoked rage at the fact that I had not waived my legal right to 30-days advance notice and vacated my room two weeks earlier. She then announced, in a tone of tremendous hatred and hostility, and at a high volume (typical of her manner of communication with tenants) that she was a “Buddhist monk” and would show me how a Buddhist monk behaves. She then embarked on a series of crimes which showed, among other things, her complete unfitness for Buddhist monastic life or Buddhist practice. Indeed, her ordination as a monk is a great affront to anyone who has any respect for Buddhist teaching.
First, after accepting rent from me for the first half of July, and after having confirmed with me just a few hours previously on July 16 that I would vacate my room by the end of July, she suddenly reneged on her previous agreement with me and began violating MICHIGAN PENAL CODE 750.411h by engaging in “a willful course of conduct involving repeated or continuing harassment of another individual that would cause a reasonable person to feel terrorized, frightened, intimidated, threatened, harassed, or molested and that actually causes the victim to feel terrorized, frightened, intimidated, threatened, harassed, or molested.” She came to my room repeatedly to pound on my door and scream and yell at me about how I should vacate my room immediately. She refused to leave when I asked her to leave. She threatened to take all my belongings and dump them in the street if I did not leave within 48 hours. Anyone would have felt frightened, intimidated, and threatened–and I certainly did.
Second, she then violated MICHIGAN PENAL CODE 750.411a by making a false report of crime to the police. Her offense in this case is quite heinous, and I doubt that Moga would have committed it without first getting Abbot Lundquist’s approval. As a criminal, Moga does a pretty poor job. She was unable to explain to the police after they arrived just why she had called them. She said I had made some “threat,” but was incapable of saying what the threat was, who it had been made to, or when it had been made. Her entire crime, so poorly planned, was very odd, because I hadn’t even spoken to anyone at the Center for 16 days–ever since I’d been given my 30-days notice–except to pay rent, at which times I simply politely ascertained how much money was wanted and received a receipt after handing over payment. Even the police looked puzzled. The police asked ME why Moga had called them. But she had simply made up the entire story about a threat. She called the police only because she did not wish to adhere to Michigan’s landlord-tenant law and she thought she could use the police to avoid complying with the law. The police did not make any arrests, although they ought to have arrested Moga.
Finally, Moga or Lundquist violated MICHIGAN PENAL CODE 750.552 by entering my room without my permission. They knew they didn’t have my permission because I had a key to my door and I always kept the door locked, thus publicly and clearly expressing my desire that no one enter without my permission, but when I was in the middle of removing my belongings from my room and was out of my room for about two minutes, one of them entered my room without my permission, to remove items.