Ocean Living Institute

The Ocean Living Institute was incorporated in Delaware in 1974, with its principal place of business in New Jersey, ostensibly to promote education and research in oceanography. Adam Starchild was listed as its president and Dyer Grossman as its executive director. The Internal Revenue Service granted it an "automatic" tax exemption, as it did the Church of the New Revelation, without challenging or investigating its claim to be a charitable organization. Gerald Richards, organizer of Brother Paul's Children's Mission on North Fox Island, told police that the institute, the church and the Educational Foundation for Youth of Illinois had been set up as tax dodges and used as fronts for the production of child pornography; Starchild said they might have been "used" for that purpose by Grossman.¹

At Richards's arrest in July 1976 police found a letter from Grossman proposing "child care" sites in Michigan, New Jersey, California, Arizona, Texas, Vermont, Washington, Oregon and the District of Columbia, observing that counties would pay up to 150 dollars a month per boy, state agencies up to 400 and federal agencies up to 700, and that profits would be greatest if each site were set up under the church or the Educational Foundation for Youth because of their tax exemptions.¹

The Grossman Letter

The writer S. Dovey wrote that Richards handed over the letter in August 1976, postmarked July 19, 1976, with the institute's return address, and that it mentioned a twelve-year-old boy Grossman had obtained through a Big Brother program. The writer S. Dovey described the institute as a sea-steading project. Dovey also wrote that Starchild was Malcolm Willis McConahy, an offshore tax attorney who faked his death in 1975, and a scoutmaster in Minneapolis expelled in 1965.²