Anti-cult story: A Yalie.

From Ted Patrick and Tom Dulack's 1976 book Let Our Children Go! pp. 98-105, which is about Ted Patrick, a 5'8", early 40s black guy with a speech impediment who was a former boxer and a fundamentalist Christian and started the field of cult deprogramming in the early 70s after encountering the Children of God as San Diego community affairs liaison for then-governor Ronald Reagan, at which time he earned the name "Black Lightning" for his finesse in pulling off flawless kidnappings of upper-middle class kids who got tangled up in cults --

The back story is that in the early 70s the son of a Los Angeles lawyer ("Wes Lockwood") went to Yale and immediately became involved in Hannah Lowe's New Testament Missionary Fellowship, since every student in the freshman class got a slick-looking brochure mailed to their home describing the religious heritage of Yale College and suggesting they attend a (seemingly university-affiliated) Bible study group for fellowship if they were interested. After doing this, the kid got into fringe Pentecostalism, started speaking in tongues and doing ecstatic dancing, began to think Hannah Lowe was a prophetess, started giving her all his money and got a part-time job washing dishes at the Yale Faculty Club to support her, and then renounced his parents as instruments of demonic powers...

As the story begins, "Black Lightning" and Wes's father and uncle just kidnapped Wes from off of the street in front of the Yale Faculty Club in broad daylight, and were driving him to a motel in western Pennsylvania to deprogram him when a ruckus happened at the turnpike offramp --

I thought [Wes] was asleep as we approached the eastern end of the Pennsylvania Turnpike and I pulled up to the gate to get the ticket. There was a black man on the gate, and when we stopped, and I rolled down the window, Wes erupted. "Call the police. Please. Call the police," he screamed. "They're kidnapping me!"

I snatched the ticket from the man's fingers and got out of there fast. I told Wes, "Look, Wes -- that was a brother on the gate. I'm the only black man in the car. You think he's going to call the police on a brother?"

As it turned out, the brother did exactly that...

After "Black Lightning" gets things sorted out -- the police let him go after they found out he was doing deprogramming -- he pulls into the one-horse Pennsylvania town where he's supposed to call his friend who he had deprogrammed and had found the safe hotel for this deprogramming, only it's a redneck steel town and "Black Lightning" has to go into a bar to use the phone...

[After making the call] I returned to the bar and decided, hostility or no hostility, lynch mentality or no lynch mentality, I needed a drink after this long and difficult day and I was going to have one.

I sat down at the bar and, in as friendly a voice as I could manage, asked the bartender if he had any Cutty Sark. He said he did.

"Give me a double," I said. "On the rocks."

Pouring the drink, he set the glass down in front of me.

"How much?" I asked.

"A dollar-twenty," he said.

"Then that's two-forty for the double?"

"No. Sixty cents a shot."

"Sixty cents a shot! Hell, I've paid two-forty for a single where I come from. At prices like that, buy everybody a drink. Let's liven up the place."

Right after this, "Black Lightning" finds out the bartender is the uncle of the deprogrammed guy who was arranging a hotel room for the current deprogramming, and so the bartender gives "Black Lightning" the whiskey, tells him that his money is no good in this town, and lets him use the vacant apartment above the bar for the deprogramming, which goes smoothly until the second night...

That night [Wes] and his father got into a violent fight. Wes had been screaming that his mother was evil, was of Satan, all sorts of filthy and outrageous things, and the father lost his patience finally and smacked him. At that Wes leaped on his father and the two were at each other's throats -- I mean they were trying to strangle each other. They were overturning furniture and lamps were crashing to the floor. I jumped between them and pried them apart, and dragged Wes into the bedroom. My own patience was a little thin about then, and I threw him down onto the bed and said, "Now you sit there, sit your ass down, and if you so much as move a muscle again I'm going to knock the shit out of you. You understand?"

Fortunately, Wes calmed down, and on the third night he broke down and hugged his father, and turned his rage against cult-leader Hannah Lowe.