A Fiery, Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

Saturday night, March 1, was quiet in Shelton, an industrial town of 29,000 in the Naugatuck Valley region of southwestern Connecticut. At the Sponge Rubber Products factory, which stretched for two blocks along the Housatonic River, only two guards and a boiler operator were on duty. Suddenly three men, armed and wearing ski masks, appeared inside the building. They abducted the three employees and drove them to a nearby woods, where they taped them to a tree. One gunman hinted to his captives that he and his companions were connected with the radical Weatherman movement.

A short while later, a series of thundering explosions blew away a large portion of the four-story building, rattling houses for miles around. Immediately afterward, a ferocious blaze erupted; it raged for eight hours. No one was injured, but the $10 million factory was reduced to a heap of blackened brick and twisted metal. More than 900 people who had worked at the plant--the company's largest of several in the area--joined the unemployment rolls, already swollen in the Naugatuck Valley.

Last week a federal grand jury in New Haven returned an indictment accusing ten persons of conspiring to blow up the factory--and there was not a Weatherman among them. Quite the contrary. The first on the list of the indicted was none other than Charles D. Moeller, 48, president of both Sponge Rubber Products, a division of Grand Sheet Metal Products Co., and of their parent company, Ohio Decorative Products Inc. of Spencerville, Ohio. If convicted, Moeller could be sent to prison for a total of 60 years on six counts.

Thirty-two FBI offices had helped unravel the crime. Ironically, it was the red-herring reference to the Weatherman that brought the FBI into the case at the outset. The alleged conspiracy sounds something like a Mannix plot on TV--with a few Fellini-esque wrinkles. According to the indictment, Moeller paid $50,000 in company funds to David Bubar, 47, a trim, wavy-haired Baptist minister and self-proclaimed clairvoyant from Memphis who purports to have foreseen a variety of specific deaths, illnesses and other disasters. Bubar met Moeller about ten years ago, became his spiritual guru and ultimately a director of Ohio Decorative Products. He supposedly served Sponge Rubber Products as a water-purification consultant, annoying various managers by poking around the main Shelton plant unescorted and as he pleased. But the plant, so far as anyone knew, had no water problems.

Low Profits. Two weeks before the bombing, according to his brother John, a minister in Cheshire, Conn., Bubar "got vibrations" of an impending explosion. The Government contends that the psychic preacher indulged in a bit of self-fulfilling prophecy: Bubar allegedly paid out part of Moeller's money to Peter Betres, 54, a Butler, Pa., hotelkeeper who in turn paid off a gallery of other suspects. Thus recruited, the arson team bought dynamite, detonating material and 24 drumfuls of gasoline. Then they gathered at the plant on the day of the crime, together with Bubar, who arranged to let them in. They proceeded to blow up the factory.

Federal authorities, anxious to minimize any prejudicial publicity, have so far not revealed their theory of the crime's motive. The signs seem to point to old-fashioned insurance fraud. Moeller bought Sponge Rubber Products' manufacturing operations and inventories last year from the B.F. Goodrich Co., which had found the company's profits unacceptably low. Shortly thereafter, he lost a $5 million Sears, Roebuck account after jacking up prices too abruptly, then lost more business after severely tightening credit terms for customers. A day after Moeller's arrest, Sponge Rubber Products' attorneys filed an insurance claim, asking $37 million for loss of business, $14 million for the plant's contents and $10 million for the building itself.

Moeller's friends and acquaintances in Spencerville cannot imagine that the local farm boy and self-made man could have plotted such a scheme. "He doesn't do things that way," says Police Chief David Colgan. "He's a square shooter, a good, levelheaded businessman."

In Shelton, the news of the indictments was small comfort. The unemployment rate in town is a high 14%, and nearly 300 of the people left jobless by the bombing are still out of work. It is likely that Sponge Rubber Products will fold altogether, bad news for the 600 people working at its three other plants still operating in the area. Says Lloyd Witmer, an aide to Shelton's mayor: "You hear comments like 'So they caught the people who did it, so now they'll bring them to trial. But what does that do for us? It won't bring our jobs back.' "

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