The Finders (movement)

The Finders were a communal and lifestyle movement accused of being a cult founded in Washington, D.C. in the early 1970s by . The movement loosely based its teachings on, among others, the writings of the philosopher Lao Tsu.^[1] In the spirit of Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, they believed in complete passivity when faced with assertive official authority.^[1]

1987 arrest case[]

It came to wider public attention when two members of the movement were arrested in Tallahassee, Florida, in 1987 and charged with misdemeanor child abuse of the six children accompanying them, the two men having responded with silence when, in a public park, the police inquired as to their identity and relationship to the children. .^[2] The men were Douglas Ammerman and James Michael Holwell, both described as "well-dressed men in suits." They used a van to transport "six scruffy, hungry children" of varying ages. The age range of the children was between age 2 and 11.^[1]

The men were released six weeks later, with the state of Florida dropping all charges against them. Federal authorities concluded that there was no evidence of criminal activity. The authorities contacted the mothers of the children, who came to Tallahassee and retrieved them.^[1]

Allegations against the movement[]

Despite this resolution, the issue was brought to wider attention as Skip Clements, a resident of Stuart, Florida with no direct knowledge of the Finders or its members,^{[citation needed]} alleged without evidence that the Central Intelligence Agency had compelled the U.S. Customs Service to cease the investigation, supposedly because the commune was used as a front to train agents. Clements' unsubstantiated allegations drew the interest of two United States Congress members and an investigation by the Department of Justice.^[1] The issue gained wider attention in 1993 when a 1987 "report," by a junior Customs clerk who had no direct knowledge of the Finders or its members,^{[citation needed]} was made public, which stated without evidence that the DC Police Department investigation into The Finders had been dropped as a "a CIA internal matter."^{[citation needed]} Despite absence of any evidence or verification by the Washington, DC Police Department, the belief that this "report" indicated a larger conspiracy of child abuse became popular in some quarters, with Vice Magazine assessing in 2019 that "The Finders become a sort of Patient Zero" for the larger network of beliefs in government-linked child abuse such as "Pizzagate or Jeffrey Epstein’s so-called suicide."^[2]

In 2019, the FBI released hundreds of documents related to The Finders, noting on their FBI Vault website it was their top requested topic.^[1]

References[]

External links[]

• The Finders, FBI.Vault.gov