Mastermind of Amish beard-cutting raids is in prison — and he’s staying put, judge says

In Amish tradition, men’s beards and women’s hair carry religious significance — and once they’re married, men stop shaving and women stop trimming their hair.

In fact, religious beliefs around hair are so strong that one member of an Amish community in Ohio told an FBI agent that “he would prefer to be beaten black and blue [rather] than to suffer the disfigurement and humiliation of having his hair removed.”

That forced beard and hair removal nightmare is exactly what happened to the Amish man who spoke to the FBI, and to four other men and women during nighttime raids in 2011, according to an FBI criminal complaint. The attacks were carried out by members of the breakaway Bergholz clan — and the mastermind behind them, Amish bishop Sam Mullet, Sr., was sentenced to 15 years in prison after he was convicted in 2012 of orchestrating the attacks, the Cleveland Plain-Dealer reports.

Mullet recently tried to get his sentence vacated, arguing that his public defender made significant errors in the case, which prevented him from getting a fair trial. But on Thursday, a U.S. district court judge rejected his arguments and affirmed his sentence, writing that none of his lawyer’s “errors” had harmed Mullet’s trial.

"To the contrary, Mullet was represented by a seasoned and effective trial and appellate counsel," Judge Dan Polster wrote.

That’s yet another setback for Mullet. At this point, Mullet is the only person convicted in the attacks who remains in federal prison, the Plain-Dealer reports. His appeal to the 6th Circuit was rejected in 2016, and the Supreme Court decided not to take up his appeal of the circuit court’s decision earlier this year.

Mullet was the leader of his 18-family community about 100 miles from Cleveland, and his involvement in the crime was hands off, court records said. Mullet himself didn’t touch the victims’ hair, for example, but he orchestrated it all, prosecutors said — and the attacks were done to get revenge against other Amish communities he felt had wronged him or disagreed with his religious beliefs, according to court records.

“None of the terror that was unleashed on the victims ... would have happened without Sam Mullet,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Kristy Parker said at the trial, according to the Associated Press.

The attackers showed up at their victims' homes unannounced and used battery-operated clippers and a special-order, $27.95 horse mane sheer to carry out the attacks, FBI investigators found. After the attacks, the men who carried them out took pictures of their now-shaved victims with a disposable camera, court records said.

When family members — including children and grandmothers — tried to stop the attacks, the attackers pushed them aside, sometimes injuring them, court records said.

“Cutting off beards was a very clever tactic because the Bergholz barbers knew that the easiest way to disgrace and to shame an Amish man was to cut off his beard," Don Kraybill, a professor at Pennsylvania’s Elizabethtown College, told Al Jazeera America.

Following the attacks, 16 community members faced hate crime or obstruction charges. All 16 charged in the case were convicted, Fox 8 reports, but in 2015 they were re-sentenced after the hate crime charges were overturned. The 6th Circuit had found that the judge in the trial had not given the jury proper instructions.

Mullet’s sentence was cut from 15 years to just under 11, Fox 8 reported.

There were also allegations of sexual and psychological abuse against Mullet in the court records filed against him — including accusations that he forced people to sleep in his chicken coop for days as punishment, and that he had sexual “counseling” sessions with married women to “cleanse them of the devil,” the FBI said.

Former members of the community, including relatives of Mullet, have spoken out about the group’s leader.

“Sam Mullet’s community is a cult. They don’t have freedom,” Dan Shrock, Mullet’s then-23-year-old grandson, told Al-Jazeera in 2014. “He has power over people's minds, gets them to do things he wants them to do and believe in him.”

This story was originally published May 4, 2018 at 9:11 PM with the headline "Mastermind of Amish beard-cutting raids is in prison — and he’s staying put, judge says."