The highlight of the current operations is a professional go-kart track being dubbed the USA International Raceway that is expected to bring the professional go-kart circuit to the area.
"This is the most exciting business that's ever come to Shawano," Gronvall said.
Just outside the city limits here lies the Midwest Amusement Park and USA International Raceway, its vacant grounds and winter-worn buildings evoking the same kind of eerie feeling that makes off-season attractions such good settings for horror films.
In receivership since 2010, the amusement park is at the center of a long-running, angry dispute between the town and members of a mysterious, Catholic-bashing group that intended to use profits from the attraction and other local businesses to build a school here and fund another in India.
Now, the group’s CEO is on the run after failing to show up in court last December to explain why she filed court papers denouncing a bankruptcy judge as a “Catholic Knight Witch Hunter” and “popess” — and why she called U.S. bankruptcy courts a cabal of “white Supremacist” “Catholic beasts.”
The imbroglio is just the latest chapter in the strange history of the Dr. R.C. Samanta Roy Institute of Science and Technology (SIST), a nonprofit organization with extensive property holdings in the area that once included the Midwest Amusement Park.
SIST was formerly known as The Disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ — or “Brethren,” as they called themselves internally. City officials call the quirky, standoffish group a cult. It was founded in the 1970s by Rama Chandra Behera, a charismatic Indian convert to Christianity whose iron-fisted micromanagement of his followers’ lives led to repeated kidnappings by “deprogrammers” in the 1970s and 1980s.
In the last decade, the Brethren have again drawn unwanted attention, as young adults who were raised among them claimed to have suffered abuse at the hands of the leader their parents so admired. Some former members, including one who spoke to the Intelligence Report, have alleged that Behera punished them for perceived infractions by applying an electric cattle prod to sensitive parts of their bodies.
One face, many names: The Maryland-based leader of a radical Wisconsin group has been variously known as Rama Chandra Behera, R.C. Samanta Roy and Avraham Cohen. Board members and employees of SIST — which claims more than $6 million in net assets and whose unpaid president is Cohen — are worried about what might happen to Isaacson and enraged over alleged attacks on their group.
SIST declined to provide an official spokesperson to discuss its claims and the allegations against it. However, a group of six people that included three SIST board members, one of whom has acted as an attorney for SIST, met with a writer for the Intelligence Report. Miriam Sindt, a paralegal whose father joined the group in the 1970s and today sits on SIST’s board of directors, said she fears the worst. “Either she’ll get locked up and we’ll never see her again,” she said of Isaacson, “or she’ll come out on a stretcher,” the victim of a Catholic conspiracy to silence her forever.