It was one week after actor Philip Seymour Hoffman died of a heroin overdose and Michael Roach, the leader of his own off-shoot of Tibetan Buddhism, was going to be speaking about addiction to a group of followers in Manhattan’s quirky East Village neighborhood.
“Peel-off your addiction with ancient Tibetan wisdom,” the flyer read. “Secrets from the Wheel of Life” was the name of the talk.
It was a frigid February evening when I headed down to Asher Levy elementary school to hear Roach speak. I had been trying to interview him for months. The subject: a strange story of guru devotion, delusion, diamonds, tantric sex, and a mysterious, grizzly death in the Arizona desert.
The truth is, I had met Roach once in 2006 when a friend brought me to one of his lectures, called “teachings,” in New York. He sat cross-legged up on a stage alongside Christie McNally, his then “tantric partner,” who was also, in his eyes and in the eyes of many of their followers, the reincarnation of a Tibetan Buddhist goddess.
