While active JDC members say that their spiritual leader, Franklin Jones, known as Da Free John, is a man of integrity whose whole life is devoted to serving his devotees, former JDC members paint a strikingly different picture.

Both Patricia Masters and Andrew Parker, who have made legal declarations to accompany the suit against the JDC filed by Beverly O'Mahony, as well as other former members were interviewed by the Record in March during an exhaustive investigation of the sect by this paper.

Masters, the former wife of JDC member Dennis Duff, was a member for nearly 10 years and was toward the end of her time in the sect in charge of procurement for the Hermitage Order, the small circle of high ranking JDC members living on Translation Island in Fiji.

Masters says she spent all her time raising funds to pay for the lavish gifts Jones wanted for his nine wives.

The gifts included "hand beaded G-strings and one wife wanted a pair of thigh high spiked-heel boots and a matching necklace. That was all.

I was lucky if I could keep the gifts below $2,000 a birthday (for each of the wives)."

The demands, she said, became more and more odd.. ``When they started asking for designer clothes for the wives, I thought, Wait a minute. They're on an island in the middle of the ocean. What's wrong with a loin cloth?"

Masters also claims that couples were forced to perform for pornographic movies directed by Jones at the Clear Lake property the sect owns.

"During one party at Clear Lake he said, "OK, we're going something different." He tried to make me and my husband perform in a porno movie. I said no and was cursed. He picked out others and they did it. Then he showed it. I was upset, freaked out. He said it was just my uptightness."

Masters and other ex-members say Jones' move to Fiji, where he lives on an island bought for the sect by Silicon Valley entrepreneur Neal Stewart, one of the sect's wealthiest benefactors, was yet another step toward his isolation from the outside world, an isolation that allows him to do virtually anything he wishes. "It became obvious over time," she says, "that as he became more and more outrageous and indulgent, he was more and more pulling away from society."

Andrew Parker was a member of JDC from 1978 to mid-1983 and was for about a year a member of the JDC board of directors.

In time, Parker said, "It came clear that, despite the talk, there was literally no service to mankind going on. A huge amount of money was coming in and there was a huge amount of manpower, but it was all directed at him. Nobody outside benefited. It was all for his lifestyle."

As an example, Parker points to the Manner 'of Flowers, Jones' lavish home in ClearLake. Parker recalls JDC members working "all through the night through the summer of 1979 to satisfy the master's wishes."

Parker says that Jones "drew back behind the inner circle after 1978, to systematically deceive the membership.

"Whatever he was initially - a man of understanding, simple and unpretentious - changed over time. He would tell the same stories to his followers over and over again and he was like Gulliver. He kept getting taller and taller."

Jones' methods and directives are frequently aimed at abusing and degrading women, Parker says.

"Women are seriously hurt in this, What is done to them emotionally is insidious."

A woman who was in JDC for about 10 years beginning in 1973, said that Jones' nine wives "were encouraged to look like hookers, to be very sexual and always sexually available to him -- as are all the others. As you got closer to the inner circle, you were encouraged to get involved at his command, in front of the group."

Salvatore Lucania co-founded the sect with Jones in 1972 and has known him since 1968. Both were involved in Scientology before founding JDC.

"He is a coward," Lucania says of Jones. "Just the way he treats women is sufficient for anybody to know that. But he has never been touched. The moment he is touched, reality will set in and that might flip him. And there's your Guyana."