60 Minutes

Himself - Correspondent:
Wouldn't it be nice, some people said, if Los Angeles had some streetcars? Well, Los Angeles used to have some streetcars, a lot of them. Believe it or not, L. A. had the biggest and best streetcar system in the United States with over 1,000 miles of track that hauled over 100 million people a year as early as 1920.

Tom Bradley:
I dare say you could go around this city and you wouldn't find more than a dozen people who were aware there was such a charge of conspiracy.

Himself - Correspondent:
The conspiracy didn't hit Los Angeles until the end of World War 2, a month after the new owners took over the transit company. Two hundred thirty-seven new buses arrived; this followed a year in which the electric lines had made a million and a half dollars and carried over 200 million passengers. By the end of GM's motorization campaign in 1955, almost 90% of the streetcars were gone from from American cities, including Los Angeles.

Himself - Correspondent:
In 1944, the trolleys had begun to disappear. It wasn't progress, and it wasn't suicide... it was murder by conspiracy. That was the conclusion of a federal jury, upheld on appeal. The way it worked was that General Motors, Firestone Tire and Standard Oil of California and some other companies, depending on the location of the target, would arrange financing for an outfit called National City Lines which cozied up to city councils and county commissioners and bought up transit systems like LA's. Then they would junk or sell the electric cars and pry up the rails for scrap, and beautiful modern buses would be substituted - buses made by General Motors and running on Firestone Tires and burning Standard's gas.

Himself - Correspondent:
William Dixon put together the criminal conspiracy case that the federal government brought against General Motors and the others in 1947. At 84, he's the only principal in that case still alive. There was nothing you could do to bring back the streetcars.

William Dixon:
No, nothing, not a thing. You're absolutely right, yes.

Himself - Correspondent:
The conspirators had managed, in the decade from 1936 to 1946, to dismantle streetcar lines in forty-five cities. The key to the federal case was intent. Did the defendants just go along with the national trend, or did they destroy electric mass-transit on purpose? The juries and the judges said that they were big boys and they knew what they were doing. But Dixon thinks the punishment was ridiculous. The government had asked that individual corporate officers be sent to jail.

William Dixon:
The government did not get them, much to my disquietous surprise and personal disgust.

Himself - Correspondent:
What was the punishment for the individuals?

William Dixon:
Well, the judge said this was nothing more than a "traffic violation" by the defendants, and he imposed a one-dollar fine on the individual defendants as punishment.

Himself - Correspondent:
The corporations, on the other hand, were given the maximum penalty: a $5,000 fine.

Himself - Correspondent:
General Motors sold something like $25 million of equipment to National City Lines. They paid $5,000 penalty. That's not a bad deal.

William Dixon:
No, that's an excellent deal.

Himself - Correspondent:
Maybe the worst thing is, the conspirators left no room for second thoughts. In losing, they tried to make sure that the streetcars would be gone for good.

Gordon Bates:
They started pulling tracks just as fast as they could get the crews out there to pull 'em.

Himself - Correspondent:
Didn't anybody notice?

Gordon Bates:
Well, we heard the rumors like everybody else did, that General Motors, Firestone, Standard Oil and all that. As far as we were concerned, it was strictly rumors.

Himself - Correspondent:
Some old streetcars were sold to less automobile-mad cities abroad. But most of them were just piled up in junkyards. In this city, that seemed to make sense, even to people who weren't making any money out of them. A few of the cars were saved and lovingly restored by volunteers in museums around the country. On Saturdays there, the public comes in to rediscover the old sensible joys of the trolley.

Himself - Correspondent:
Not all the trolleys are in museums. A few cities like New Orleans and Philadelphia never gave theirs up. They're feeling pretty smug about that now. More dramatically, some other cities have bitten the bullet and resumed service... gone back to the future. Like San Diego, for instance. They've been running trolleys since 1981 and adding new routes constantly. It seems to work unbelievably well. Listen to San Diego Mayor Maureen O'Connor.

Maureen O'Connor:
Everyone in San Diego loves the trolley. The only problem now here is, we can't get them into the neighborhoods fast enough. They're a clean, efficient system, and they're very cost-effective.

Stephen Glass:
My life was one very long process of lying and lying again, to figure out how to cover those other lies. Like a stock graph, there's going to be exceptions in this. But the general trend of the stories is that they started out with a few made up details and quotes. And granted a few too many, of course. But a few. And then they progressed into stories that were completely fabricated. Just completely made up out of whole cloth.

Himself - Correspondent:
Who was the role model, the living example of what the est Training could do? Who else but Werner Erhard, a man some of his employees say, thought of himself, as god.

Werner Erhard:
I didn't arrive at the opportunity to make the world work for everyone by figuring out how to do it! Don't you get that nothing transformational occurs that way!

Celeste Erhard:
I have been afraid, deeply afraid of my father my whole life. My whole life... he's a terrifying man, he can be very terrifying.

Adair Erhard:
My dad... freaked out, he pushed him back on the chair, he fell over. At this point you know my brother was so petrified he actually peed in his pants. Um, you know he's down on the floor, he's kicking him, he's hitting him.

Adair Erhard:
At one point someone picked up a statue and hit her over the head. Um, you know my dad constantly saying: 'What aren't you saying, what aren't you saying?'... he himself also got up and, while she was on the floor, and kicked her a number of times.

Celeste Erhard:
At one point, on the second night, I did stand up and say: 'Please, you're killing her, you're killing her.' I mean, my mother was blue, her face was blue, she had, like drool coming out of the side of her mouth. She was dying. She was, you know, suffocating. And all he said to me was: 'Sit down, or you'll get more of the same.' And that is a direct quote, I remember every word. And that's all he said. And I sat down.

Adair Erhard:
She was strangled literally. She turned blue, there was spit running out of the side of her mouth...

Adair Erhard:
You know, he, whatever he said, that she should do, she had to do. And that was part of the instructions. Yeah, you have to be a maid for your house... I wanted to - say something so bad, or just do something about it, and there's, it's just so petrified all the time and there's just no way I could be okay with myself to, to tell anybody or to do anything about what was going on.

Deborah Pimental:
I wasn't there. But I believe my sister when she says that my father raped her... forcibly had sexual intercourse with her.

Deborah Pimental:
[Werner Erhard said that] There had been sexual intercourse, and that it had been a nurturing experience for my sister. He said that 'I did not rape her.'

Deborah Pimental:
...it was not a nurturing experience for her. And she's had to have a lot of therapy about that...

Celeste Erhard:
I kept thinking - that he would be a father, I kept thinking that when he got older, he'd want children, and he'd want his daughters. I just, I, I really thought that. You know that maybe he'd get wiser with age and he'd regret what he'd done, but um, he didn't.

Werner Erhard:
There is only one appropriate response to these allegations, to heal and restore my family. And that is what I will do. To respond to the accusations at this time, would only further publicly exploit my family, and there has already been enough of that.

Himself - Correspondent:
Since the 1970s some seven-hundred-thousand people have signed up for a self-improvement called 'est', or as it's now called 'The Forum.' Est was the brainchild of a former used-car salesman named Jack Rosenberg. Back in the sixties, Rosenberg deserted his wife and four children in Philadelphia, changed his name to Werner Hans Erhard, and moved to California where he started another family, and, came up with the idea for est. In a nutshell, Erhard's message was this: If you are in a rut, the problem isn't your parents, your boss or the system, it's you. Take responsibility, Erhard said, and you can transform your life overnight.

Robert Larzelere:
'I am god.' He could, he had, he did say sometimes in staff meetings.

Wendy Drucker:
I would never have believed that I, could be a person who would wind up in a cult. I thought that those were the people down at the airport, you know with the tambourines. And yet, certainly mind control was involved. And if that's what cults do, and they set up a leader to be bigger than anybody else, a god-like figure, I would say yes, that was true in the organization.

Wendy Drucker:
We were told to surrender to him as 'source.' I think that's idolatry.

Wendy Drucker:
This was not like, being an employee. This was like being, a servant, or a devotee.

Dawn Damas:
They said some true things about their father that are terrible.

Dawn Damas:
And he beats his wife, and he beats his children, and rapes a daughter - and then he goes and tells people how to have marvelous relationships. I'm sorry, that's what I have against Werner Erhard.

Dawn Damas:
He started to ask St. John about school and started to notice St. John's grades, and got livid, and went over to Sinjin and started to slap him and hit him, and picked him up and threw him on the ground and started to kick him - in front of everybody and nobody moved, everyone was paralyzed. Um, and then said to St. John: 'If you ever get grades like this again, I'll break both of your legs with a baseball bat.'

Dawn Damas:
There's something about the fact that he is still out there doing all this and people still believe in him. This man still gets people sitting in an audience looking up at him, believing, that what he says is just so wonderful.