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What caused the Barkouras empire to begin unraveling was a series of messy divorces. First, a colleague, Robert Phillips, was divorced in 1977 by his wife Wilma, who charged that he had forced her to attend sessions with Barkouras in an effort to "destroy her personal identity." Next, Marga divorced Barkouras on grounds of incompatibility. Her lawyer, George Miskovsky, referred to Barkouras in court as "a big, strong stud lay analyst." Finally, in a quieter proceeding, Kay Delaporte, a patient of Barkouras' and a teacher at his school, sued her husband Chris, an administrator in the U.S. Interior Department, for divorce, charging that he was a homosexual. He complained that Barkouras was behind the action.
As a result, Barkouras claims, he acquired a powerful enemy. Chris Delaporte, who has been involved in Oklahoma politics for eight years, helped get his friend Larry Patton named U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Oklahoma in 1977. Another friend of Delaporte's is Boren, who was elected a U.S. Senator in 1978.
When a fire caused $185,000 damage to Sternlofs Timberridge Institute in 1979, Patton asked a grand jury to investigate. A juror told TIME: "They said Barkouras was the Jim Jones of the Oklahoma City jet set. I never really knew what they were trying to get him on. Our grand jury was on a kind of witch hunt."
The jury decided that no indictment of Barkouras, or anyone else, was warranted.
In an effort to stop the "witch hunt," Barkouras last February told the Rev. Gene Garrison, a Baptist minister and close friend of Boren's, that he was prepared to expose Delaporte and Boren as homosexuals. In Boren's case, it was an old charge—and one that he denied during his Senate campaign by publicly swearing, on a white-bound Bible, that he was heterosexual. Barkouras took no further action, but a few weeks later Jack Anthony, 28, an heir to an Oklahoma department-store fortune and a student of Barkouras', was arrested at 4 a.m. while changing a wiretap connected to Sternlofs home phone. Soon afterward, traveling in seven cars, 14 FBI agents went to Barkouras' foundation to seize records. At a preliminary hearing an assistant to Patton shouted, "Anthony is the pawn of Barkouras!" The jury found Anthony guilty of wiretapping. At the sentencing, Judge Lee West compared the feud between Barkouras and his critics to a street-gang rumble. The Justice Department and FBI are now investigating whether officials may have gone too far in their search for evidence against Barkouras.
Meanwhile, all lay analysts have been barred by the state legislature from practicing in Oklahoma. Observes Miskovsky, Marga Barkouras' attorney: "Football, politics, oil and sex are all considered sports in Oklahoma. Barkouras gave people something to talk about because he was playing in all of them. Except football." —By Ellie McGrath. Reported by Jonathan Beaty/Oklahoma City