Thursday, Aug. 31, 2006 | 7:25 a.m.
In the end, the lion lay down like a lamb.
Warren Jeffs, the fugitive polygamist leader whose mug shot was next to Osama bin Laden's on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list and who was rumored to travel with a "God Squad" of armed and dangerous faithful, was caught Monday night in a T-shirt and shorts, eating a salad.
The Nevada Highway Patrol trooper who caught Jeffs said nerves gave him away - his carotid artery wouldn't quit quivering.
The quiet arrest, according to experts and insiders who have waited years to see the federal fugitive collared, is shaking the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.
Changes are shaping up along the Arizona-Utah border in the area once called Short Creek, where 10,000 FLDS faithful live today. In more ways than one, insiders say, Jeffs is beginning to lose his stranglehold on the church, its members and a $130 million fortune.
"I figured he went quietly because he didn't have a choice," Gary Engels says. "It's just another detail. It's part of the process - Warren was taken down like any common fleeing felon."
Engels knows the FLDS better than most outsiders. For the past two-plus years, the Mohave County, Ariz., sheriff's investigator has gone about building criminal cases against Jeffs and others in the polygamist community.
On Tuesday, media were met with a familiar flat-faced silence in the twin cities of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Ariz., home to FLDS faithful who said little, shut doors and pulled curtains closed.
But this silence, like Jeffs', shouldn't be interpreted as stoicism, Engels says: "On the outside, they are going to appear like they have never even heard about it, but inside, they're worried about it."
Jeffs will make an initial appearance in Las Vegas Justice Court today, pending extradition on charges of rape and sexual misconduct in Utah and Arizona. It's common knowledge that he will be able to run his church and its businesses from behind bars, although in time the self-proclaimed prophet might find it harder to control what happens beyond the penitentiary walls, authorities say.
But it's not just barbed wire that will cut into Jeffs' reign, says Bruce Wisan, a federally appointed fiduciary who took over the church's United Effort Plan Trust in 2005 after church leaders were accused of using the funds to harbor the fugitive Jeffs.
While Jeffs is behind bars, a Utah judge is considering motions to approve a plan to give current and former FLDS faithful a chance to control their rightful portions of the trust - assets once used by Jeffs and appointed leaders to reward and punish members of the church, giving property or taking it away, sometimes kicking followers out of their homes and taking away their families.
By giving church members in the twin cities a deed to their homes, Wisan says, they'll have their first taste of entitlement .
"Over a period of time, their (the FLDS faithful) sadness or their despair will start to change," Wisan says. "Over a period of time, with the UEP trust in different hands and their leader in jail, a lot of that is going to have, in my mind, a softening effect or a weakening effect on his control."
Disassembling the UEP trust does more than weaken the church's real-estate wallet, says John Nielsen, a former FLDS member who was kicked out by Jeffs and now advises Wisan on what to do with the church property. The real shift in power, Nielsen says, will come from the inward assurance that no church members can be ejected from homes they will own.
"Every day, more and more every day, the men down there can adjust in their mind a little bit more that they don't have to leave the house if Warren tells them to," he says. "Warren is all of a sudden faced with a different ball game. He's got to get some friends."
Which raises another problem for Jeffs - he may be the prophet, but he's not always popular.
Roger Hoole, an attorney representing several dissidents who are suing the church, says he knows through clients and connections in the FLDS community that some people sighed in secret relief when word spread that Jeffs was nabbed.
"It's a combination of the fact that he has been abandoning them, he has been doing crazy things, he has been splitting up family after family, he has been marginalized and on the run and now he's in custody," Hoole says.
"And all of these things come down on him. There are a lot of people who I think are ready to bolt. They haven't got to the point where they are asking each other, but they are asking themselves."
Then there is the media scrutiny, the cameramen at the corner store, reporters snooping around the nooks and crannies of two small towns.
There are the series of sex-crime cases pending against church men besides Jeffs, and the frustration of a far-away tyrant - a man who called himself a mouthpiece of God but who was arrested with women's wigs and a whimper.
And then there is also the possibility that the dissolution of the UEP trust and distribution of its assets carry with them the stricture that beneficiaries not practice polygamy on their newly gained property.
How long, then, can Warren Jeffs' reign continue?
Wisan calls himself an optimist, and gives it two years.
Hoole is practical and doesn't underestimate Jeffs. He says it will take at least 10 years before his influence disappears.
Nielsen, the former FLDS member, says it will take at least 15 years to fully dethrone him: "What they are trying to live is pretty much an obsolete way of living. Kings went out a long time ago. I think that deep down inside, Warren is a smart enough guy to realize that."
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