MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — Swami Bhaktipada, the disgraced former leader of a West Virginia Hare Krishna community, has died in India. He was 74.
Spokesman Henry Doktorski said Bhaktipada was hospitalized in India in July with a collapsed lung and bleeding brain. Doktorski said Bhaktipada died Monday.
Also known as Kirtanananda Swami, Bhaktipada had been born Keith Ham in Peekskill, N.Y., the son of a Southern Baptist minister. He became a Krishna swami in 1966.
In the late 1960s, Bhaktipada and his longtime partner, the late Howard Morton Wheeler, formed New Vrindaban, the community with a famed Palace of Gold. They started with about 132 acres and eventually acquired nearly 5,000, becoming a destination for pilgrims in the International Society for Krishna Consciousness.
Bhaktipada ran the New Vrindaban community near Moundsville from the 1970s to the early 1990s.
In 1987, the FBI seized records in a raid. Federal prosecutors later accused of him of ordering the murders of two devotees who threatened his control and of amassing more than $10 million through illegal fundraising schemes.
He appealed his 1991 racketeering conviction, then pleaded guilty at a second trial in August 1996 and was sentenced to 20 years. A judge reduced the sentence to 12 years in 1997, citing Bhaktipada’s poor health. He suffered from severe asthma and complications from childhood polio.
He was barred from returning to New Vrindaban and eventually moved to India in 2008.
