Controversial spiritual leader Gabriel of Urantia died. He leaves a troubled legacy in Arizona

An infamous Arizonan passed away earlier this month. He went by many names, among them “Gabriel of Urantia.”

Born Anthony Delevin in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Gabriel moved to Arizona in the 1970s and founded a religious movement he called the Global Community Communications Alliance. Many former members have called it a cult.

In 1998, Gabriel and his group were the subject of a pretty damning “Dateline” investigation.

Shortly after Gabriel’s death, The Show spoke to writer Joseph Flatley, the author of a book called “New Age Grifter,” which tells the story of Gabriel and his followers.

Full conversation

JOSEPH FLATLEY: They refer to themselves as Divine Administration, meaning that when Jesus came back on what they call a planetary spaceship, that they would be the government. So these people are living in this compound and in Tubac, picking beans or milking goats or whatever.

But they know that when Jesus returns, one of them is going to be the governor of Hawaii. One of them is going to be the president of Spain or whatever, you know, so they see the community as a spiritual training ground.

SAM DINGMAN: And where did Gabriel himself see himself as fitting into all of that hierarchy?

FLATLEY: Gabriel was referred to as an Audio Fusion Material Complement, which means that, you know, this higher power spoke through him.

DINGMAN: How much do we know about what life was like on this compound that he eventually started?

FLATLEY: They began in Sedona. They had a plot of land that was called Avalon Gardens, which they moved south in the early 2000s, and now they’re based in Tubac in what they call Avalon — everything’s a mouthful — Avalon Organic Gardens & Eco Village.

I had the pleasure to visit that a few years ago, and it’s really lovely. I mean, it’s a lovely area. It’s in the Santa Cruz River basin. So it’s a lot of greenery, a lot of plants, a lot of animals. The houses are all really nice. Life there is highly regimented. So every minute of every day, except maybe like a few hours on Sunday, is set aside.

When you’re not working a specific job, you’re working in the garden. When you’re not working in the garden, you’re taking Bible classes. When you’re not taking Bible classes, you’re going to church services. They do have a bunch of different businesses that they use to keep the cult afloat.

Kids are essentially homeschooled, although they — from the children that I’ve spoken to who are no longer there, whose parents got them out — it’s more like, you know, a few hours a week of schooling plus maybe like 30 hours a week of manual labor. It’s not pleasant. They have this —

DINGMAN: So just to be clear, these are kids doing manual labor.

FLATLEY: Oh, yeah. These are kids. One kid told me that it was so hot one day that his shoes melted while he was out doing physical labor.

DINGMAN: Oh my God.

FLATLEY: Yeah. You know, like a 13-year-old kid. And then one of the most kind of shocking or interesting features is they have something they call the chip game, which isn’t a game and doesn’t use chips. It’s positioned as a spiritual practice, where basically everybody in this compound is on high alert to catch anybody else thinking or doing the wrong thing.

And if they are caught, they get written up, and it gets reported to the elders. And they might have to go to counseling, or they might have to just respond, have homework — basically like write an essay or fill out a form. It’s just like a massive snitch system where everybody is on their guard all the time.

And I talk to people who have been out for years, and they’re still kind of reeling from this constant paranoia that they have to live in.

DINGMAN: In an obituary that you wrote for Gabriel, you quoted some former members who do not have nice things to say about him. To quote one of them, the way that he was going to celebrate Gabriel’s death is with a shot of Jack Daniel’s, because the world just became a better place.

His daughters also fled the compound, if I understand correctly. What were their objections to life at Avalon Eco Village as you understand them?

FLATLEY: Well, his one daughter unfortunately passed away in March, but the other one remains one of the community’s most vocal critics. Essentially, their complaint is that it’s a cult. I mean, you grow up in this kind of microcosm of paranoia and abuse.

Unlike some of the worst cults that you hear about, Gabriel wasn’t sexually abusing anybody. There was no doctrine of abuse. But you have a situation where you have a bunch of adults that basically warehouse their kids while they’re off finding their bliss.

So I hear a lot of stories of malnutrition with the children. They’re not getting proper health care. The most shocking things are women — and they’re pretty much all women — who as children were sexually abused. And adults either didn’t know about it, or they caught wind of it later because the neglect was so strong that they wouldn’t notice that their children were abused.

Or when it came out, there are incidents of people who have been abused and then go to their parents or to leadership and say that they were abused, and they’re told it was their fault, or they were paying some past-self karmic debt.

Gabriel never abused anybody, as far as I know, but they created an environment where children just were not safe and probably still aren’t safe.

DINGMAN: Right. Right. Well, you mentioned a moment ago, the idea that they had some businesses to kind of keep all of this going.

And 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: Yeah.

(Gabriel of Urantia’s CosmoPop music plays)

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.

(Gabriel of Urantia’s CosmoPop music plays)