8. The Kingston Group
The Kingston Group, known as the Order internally and the Davis County Cooperative Society officially, is a powerful clan of Mormon fundamentalists said to control the largest criminal organization in Utah. The Kingston Group utilizes its younger members as virtual slave labor while maintaining a public front of a cooperative society and business enterprise owning almost 100 businesses in Salt Lake City as well as a casino, cattle ranches, and factories across the country. The members blend into the wider community, maintaining a front of politeness and wearing nondescript clothing, as a cover for a massive crime ring and cult practicing polygamy and child abuse. The Kingston Group is a bizarre offshoot of Mormon fundamentalism first founded by Elden Kingston during the Great Depression after he supposedly received a revelation from an angel to form a “united order.”
He believed the Church had lost its legitimacy when it gave up polygamy in 1890 and that he was descended directly from Jesus Christ. Today, his descendants believe in keeping their bloodline pure (which means incest and high rates of genetic deformity) so they must avoid hospitals and birth records for fear of scrutiny. Elden Kingston also preached of a hierarchy system called the Law of Satisfaction, ranking everyone in the community from the leaders down to the wives and children. Husbands ranked higher than wives, first wives ranked higher than second wives, and so on. Children and teenage wives are used as slave labor in stores and coal mines and paid in “scrip,” currency used only among the Order.
Elden was replaced after he died in 1948 by his brother J.O., who taught women of the clan to defraud the government through fraudulent welfare claims, a practice known as “bleeding the beast,” and began purchasing slot machines from the mob.
They have extreme natalist views that maintain an extremely high birth rate, which results in poverty and hunger among members of the clan. An ex-member kicked out for being gay alleged that his father told his mother, “You know, it’s been two years since you had a kid. With cows we slaughter them if they don’t have a calf every two years.” The group is said to maintain its criminal empire with a good legal understanding of how to manipulate local politicians as well as an isolationist attitude and avoidance of public hospitals and the police. One former member put it this way: “Money, sex, and power. They’ll do what they need to do to defend what’s theirs.”
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