THE PHILADELPHIA DAILY NEWS	Local Thursday, June 19, 1997

T here was never anything normal about Ira Einhorn.

On the surface were the long beard, sloppy clothes and hint of body odor, which suggested he had not bathed in weeks. Beneath that carefully crafted veneer was an incredible mind totally hooked on the Establishments of the World.

Established politicians and plutocrats, business leaders and bureaucrats were his passion. All had power of varying forms, and Ira believed he could harness their individual and collective powers by feeding them what he considered to be the collective truth about the future.

To this day, I have no idea how or why I ever got on Ira's radar screen. Somehow, I got on his ``mailing list,'' which meant I would receive a package of materials from him about once a month.

Always different, the package would contain articles from obscure journals and newspapers discussing things as diverse as the gold standard or the latest extraterrestrial research commissioned by the communists.

Everything Ira did was strange, and so was the source of my monthly package from this worldly, erudite hippie. He had somehow convinced Bill Cashel, then president of Bell of Pennsylvania, to underwrite the cost of copying 150 pages of articles each month and mail them in Bell envelopes to Ira's mailing list of hundreds of people.

You'd get the package and scratch your head. Why is this guy, who I barely know, sending me almost indecipherable translations from Lithuania on what the Soviets are doing with their germ warfare program? Each month I'd get maybe a dozen such articles, which I initially ignored.

Then, curiosity got to this cat. I started reading the materials and was fascinated. Ira was serving as an Internet browser for me and hundreds of others he had met.

Granted he was using snail mail instead of e-mail, but the stuff you got opened my mind beyond the narrow horizons of my job at the time. I was regional administrator of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and Ira was exposing me to how China was financing its housing programs for hundreds of millions of people.

So, I was hooked and easily agreed to the first proposal for dinner. One-on-one, he was almost always charming but more than a bit self-centered -- until it came time to pick up the bill.

A year went by, another dozen packages and a few dinners, and then the shock that hit his mailing list and Philadelphia at the same time. The body of the happy hippie's girlfriend, Holly Maddux, was found in a trunk in his apartment.

Always capable of conjuring up outlandish scenarios to explain anything, Ira explained to me calmly that this was a concerted plot by the CIA and KGB to frame him before he could expose their complicity in joint extraterrrestrial research.

He claimed to be anxious to get into court so he could finally get the guilty international spies under oath to disclose the ultimate truths that he could not then disclose for fear of his own life.

And that's when someone -- I can't remember who -- asked me if I'd serve as chair of Ira's legal defense fund. It would be simple, I was assurred, because his mailing list contained dozens of multimillionaires who could easily foot the bills.

I felt at the time that it was highly probable that Ira had, indeed, stuffed Holly into that trunk. But he was broke, and someone would organize a legal defense fund effort.

Why not me, I stupidly said, since at worst it would produce an extremely interesting trial. And everyone deserves his day in court.

So, I had the stationery printed for the defense fund, and about the time it arrived from the printers, Ira skipped town.

With Ira on the lam, no money was ever raised. Now none will need to be raised because Ira's lawyers will probably negotiate million-dollar contracts for book and movie rights.

And if there ever is a trial, Ira will become more ubiquitous than O.J. Both on and off the stand, he'll try to prove those super spies actually did do it.

As a man who believed firmly in extraterrestrial life, he always believed he was above and beyond the laws that bind us mere mortals to pedestrian lives here on earth.

Philadelphia Online -- Philadelphia Daily News -- Local News Copyright Thursday, June 19, 1997