The Buenos Aires Yoga School occupies a ten-story building in the center of Buenos Aires.
It has been there for more than 30 years without attracting too much attention.
There were never yoga classes there, but there were private parties.
The "students" engaged in group sex, often in full view of their children.
In the nineties, the leader of the group, Juan Percowicz, alias
the angel
, faced with his "apostles" an investigation for child abuse.
They all came out clean.
At that time, the sect had already permeated powerful men and international human rights organizations, who did not hesitate to come to its defense.
Even a delegation of Democratic Party legislators traveled from the United States to ask for the freedom of Juan Percowicz and his henchmen, whom he considered politically persecuted.
Almost 30 years later, the Argentine Justice arrested Percowicz and 18 other members of the group.
They are the same as then, but older.
The charges, yes, are new.
The network of human trafficking was joined by robbery, fraud, money laundering and even the illegal practice of medicine.
Those enlightened ones who promised "eternal happiness" were now millionaires.
"The failure of justice in the 1990s produced over time a feeling of impunity with effects within the sect," says Commissioner Ricardo Juri, head of the Federal Police Trafficking in Persons Department and in charge of the raids.
“It helped him to say 'come, the enemies wanted to destroy us and they haven't been able to, so this is the right path.'
They kept that sectarian structure and started expanding and doing business,” he explains.
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On video: police raids against the Buenos Aires Yoga School
The leaders lived until Friday of last week in some of the 26 rooms of the headquarters, observed by a large photo of Juan Percowicz.
This man, who is now 84 years old, is the soul of the sect and an object of adoration for all members.
From his head came the structure of the organization, a complex system of levels that had him at seven and the “ordinary humans” at one, two and three.
In the middle were "apostles", "geniuses" and "students".
The latter were the targets of a setup to attract, control, deceive and, above all, make money.
BA Group, a school that promised happiness through “ontological coaching”, was the quarry for new victims.
The chosen ones had to be vulnerable and also rich.
"You are not going to find poor people, they all have money," says Commissioner Juri.
If any of the members rebelled, he was sent to the CMI-Abasto clinic, where he was subjected to a long “sleep cure” based on psychotropic drugs.
"In turn, members of this group had real estate and law firms, with accountants, lawyers and notaries who replicated the hierarchy of the Yoga School," explains Juri.
The network of professionals allowed them to keep the assets of the deceased members and move and launder the money collected by the organization.
The researchers calculate a monthly flow of half a million dollars.
The result of the raids was in line with that sum:
When the police tracked down the money, it reached the United States.
Juri says that, at first, they even thought that the base of operations was in that country, until they discovered that it was the other way around.
Everything was cooked in Buenos Aires.
“They managed to get some members to settle in the United States and replicate the formula.
What we know is that these members were there creating companies and some branches of the BA Group, from where they promoted cures at the clinic in Buenos Aires” against drug use or AIDS.
The operation was completed with the purchase of real estate in Las Vegas and other cities.
Uptake through sexual offering was also active.
“The mechanics was that a member of the sect with a
green card
I had clients there.
We know, for example, that a girl did not travel to the United States because the client had not yet bought an apartment to house her.
At the same time, they were trying to enter power structures, with the sale of motivational talks”, says Juri.
The leader and founder of the Yoga School of Buenos Aires, Juan Percowicz, arrested by the Argentine Federal Police.PFA
Placido Domingo, the target
Attracting powerful people was the key to success.
A wiretap involved in the investigation reveals the efforts of its leaders to capture Plácido Domingo.
And also the failure of those attempts, which began in the 1990s thanks to the singer's relationship with at least four members of the Yoga School, two of them renowned soloists and composers with careers in the United States.
"With music we have been trying for 30 years and we have not succeeded," she says in a conversation to which EL PAÍS Susana Mendelievich, alias
Mendy, has had access.
The 75-year-old woman tells a fellow member of the sect that hours later she will see Plácido Domingo who, at that time, in April of this year, was in Buenos Aires to give a concert at the Teatro Colón.
Mendelievich then receives as a recommendation that he propose to the singer to join some of the motivational talks that the organization gave to attract followers.
“It's one more try, one has to keep trying, of course.
Like slide that we are also doing this [the talks].
It would be like opening two fronts” of attack, both women agree at the end of the conversation.
In a previous recording, a man who appears to be Plácido Domingo negotiates with Mendelievich the best way to meet in the room at the Hotel Alvear where he was staying without being discovered by "the agents."
The woman then calls Juan Percowicz to tell him the details of the appointment.
“Plácido said that he could come to visit us, that is to say, that he is going to come to visit me.
Because he goes home to New York and remembered it yesterday, "says the woman. In the case there is no evidence that the meeting took place nor does Plácido Domingo face any charges, according to judicial sources of the investigation.
In the 176,000 hours of recordings made since last February on 35 cell phones of the sect, no new references to the singer or the quote appear.
Instead, the efforts to find a new recruitment strategy are deduced.
Mendelievich: “Maybe now we are going to meet in a little while.
Luis takes us…”
Female voice: “Are you going to talk about music only, or
coucheado
[motivational talks] too?”
Mendelievich: “I don't know that, we didn't talk about that with Mariano.
But it's a good idea, because with the quilombos [messes] that he and his family have...
Female voice: "Even if I didn't have so many quilombos... the reality is that... as if to open the game, let's say..."
Mendelievich: “Yes, yes, because the reality is with music we have been trying for 30 years and we have not succeeded.
Which does not mean that this time it will not be different.
Female voice: “It's one more try, one has to keep trying, of course.
Like slide that we are also doing this [the talks].
Watch with Mariano”.
Mendelievich: "Surely you will love it."
female voice.
"It would be like opening two fronts."
The talk highlights the commitment of the sect to take advantage of what it considers to be a moment of weakness of Placido Domingo, after he was pointed out in the #Metoo as responsible for sexual harassment in the United States by twenty women.
Many of his shows had been cancelled.
Those are the “family quilombos” that Mendelievich and his partner refer to, an open window to bring the singer closer through the
couch
that they used to attract followers.
The names mentioned in the recording allow, at the same time, to reconstruct Placido Domingo's contacts with some members of the sect over time.
“Mariano” is Mariano Krawczyk or Kraus, as he prefers to call himself, an Argentine musician who in the 1990s was among the best concert oboe players in the world.
Kraus, today arrested in the case, was the favorite of another Argentine, the violinist Rubén González, now deceased, director in 1986 of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and suspected of opening a "branch" of the School of Yoga in that city.
The link between these two musicians, considered heroes by the students of that time, with Plácido Domingo came to light thanks to the memory of Pablo Salum, Kraus's stepson.
Salum is one of the denouncers of the sect, which he accuses of forcing him to witness, as a child, the orgies that adults allegedly organized.
In February 1996, Plácido Domingo appeared at the Campo Argentino de Polo, in Buenos Aires, in front of 10,000 people.
The program closed with an original bet: a segment of the opera
Cartas Marcadas
, composed by three members of the Yoga School: Mendielevich, Kraus and González.
The female voice that accompanied Plácido Domingo that night was that of a Nobel soprano named Verónica Loiácono, today a fugitive.
In 1996, the newspaper
La Nación
published a review of the concert praising Plácido Domingo's voice and calling attention to the dubious quality of the closing.
The tangos “
My beloved Buenos Aires
and
The day you love me
were contributions full of nostalgia but also many stains due to lack of amalgamation between orchestra, tenor and circumstantial collaborators Rubén González (violin) Mariano Kraus (oboe with his ineffable and showy red tuxedo ) in a failed attempt to achieve a Buenos Aires atmosphere (...) The low level of composition and interpretation of the soprano and tenor duo of
Cartas Marcadas is unacceptable
de Kraus, Mendelievich and González that Plácido Domingo -in a gesture of prosperity and desire to encourage- sang together with the beginner Verónica Loiácono”, summarized the chronicle.
Argentine researchers do not know what led Placido Domingo to accept that the members of the sect add one of his works to the repertoire.
Nor how is it that the relationship was maintained for so many years, at least with Mendelievich, to the point that the tenor called her when he visited Buenos Aires last April, after 20 years of absence in Argentina.
“They knew that Plácido Domingo was coming and they had prepared a move so that he would pay attention to them”, explains curator Ricardo Juri.
The leaders of the sect “threw lines and there comes the call” from Plácido Domingo to Mendelievich, quite a surprise.
"Having Plácido Domingo served them to generate or produce businesses using his image," says the curator.
Percowicz and 18 other members of the Yoga School ended up in prison and another four are fugitives.
They no longer have the ancestry that got them out of jail in the 1990s.
The investigation, meanwhile, is just beginning.
At the headquarters of the Trafficking in Persons Department of the Police, a room accumulates dozens of boxes with documentation and suitcases that have not yet been checked.
In the parking lot there is an immaculate Ford Bronco, which Percowicz premiered as a result of the generosity of his apostles.
Broken his car, the sect rushed to buy him a new one.
They raised $50,000, searched the internet for something the leader liked, and paid it in cash.
All without raising suspicion.
Electronic equipment seized during a raid on the Yoga School of Buenos Aires.PFA
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