A Lowdown Clash of High IQs : Mensa: Instead of being a sanctuary for the erudite, local chapter is beset by feuds, sniping and anonymous threats.

Geniuses do the darndest things. But how about the dumbest? That’s what some members of the Greater Los Angeles chapter of Mensa, the high-IQ society, want to know.

Last month, the chairman of the local Mensa board received an anonymous letter attacking another board member for allegedly being under investigation by the FBI. The letter was the latest of more than a dozen mysterious missives--including two death threats--that have been received by Los Angeles-area Mensans over the last three years.

Some of the letters, many that appear to have been pounded out on the same rickety typewriter, are snippy (“Why do you have to be mean to most people?” asks a recent letter to a board member). Others, like the one that predicted its recipient wouldn’t live to celebrate Christmas, 1993, are downright creepy. And, to the embarrassment of Mensa’s brainy top brass, they just keep coming.

“The whole damn thing doesn’t seem to go away. It’s acquiring a life of its own,” said Steve Balas, the executive vice chairman of the Los Angeles chapter.

“It’s infantile,” said VeraLouise Pfeiffer, who serves with her husband as the chapter’s “ombudscouple.” “There are better things we could do with our brains.”

Indeed, the secret scribe affair is proving to be an increasingly distracting problem for the local smarty-pants club, which limits its membership to people whose IQs are higher than 98% of the population. But the letters only prove a simple truth, Mensa leaders say: the brilliant aren’t immune to petty bickering. In fact, when they put their high-powered minds to it, their peevishness knows no bounds.

“Smart people can be devious in a more creative way,” said Ed Hakim, the board member who says he has received two written death threats, as well as one over the telephone, since late 1991.

Rich Kapnick--who says he also received anonymous letters when he was editor of Lament, the chapter’s newsletter--agreed. The clever “are worse because they’re intelligent, so they can be more dumb,” he said. “Jealousies are rampant at the high end of the IQ spectrum.”

Kapnick ought to know. For two years, he and Hakim have been locked in an ongoing feud--a veritable festival of nastiness that has led some people to suspect Kapnick of sending the death threats to Hakim. The war began in October, 1991, when Kapnick--then the editor of Lament--rewrote a short blurb about a fund-raiser, publishing a version that downplayed Hakim’s role in its success and gave Kapnick much of the credit.

Hakim was outraged, writing a six-page letter to the board in which he called Kapnick, among other things, “ludicrous, arrogant and cowardly.” Ever since, the two have traded insults with a viciousness that is undeniably above average.

“Hakim has waged a campaign of hate,” said Kapnick, a Burbank-based marketing consultant who describes himself as a “high-range genius.” “If I died, he’d spit on my grave. I’m determined to outlive him, if only for that reason.”

The squabble has exasperated some other Mensans, who say they joined the 2,000-member local chapter in search of contemplative--not contemptible--colleagues.

The group is primarily a social one, whose members gather for superlative chit-chat at regular hikes, dinners and parties. Mensans have their own slang: Mensa couples are known as M & M’s; NQM’s are Not Quite Mensans, people who fall a few points short of the minimum IQ (about 132 or 133, depending on the test). But fundamentally, Mensans are no different from anyone else: They just want to be understood.

At its best, said Balas, a Mensa gathering is “an opportunity to associate with individuals where you can automatically shift into high gear and everybody keeps up with you. It’s a little piece of heaven.”

Lately, however, what with quarreling and the poison-pen letters, heaven has seen some dark days. The name-calling and finger-pointing “is getting to be like a copy cat kind of thing,” Pfeiffer said. And already, such snippy behavior has cost Mensa at least one member.

Christopher Nyerges, who preceded Kapnick as the editor of Lament, says he ended his 10-year association with Mensa in part because of such antics.

“I ran into too many people who just had nothing better to do than to enjoy arguing,” said Nyerges, who said he also received anonymous letters that made him “the brunt of extreme ridicule. The bickering, the childishness--many of them regard that as a sport. Ask anybody.”

An informal and unrepresentative sampling of Mensa members supports Nyerges. Although they are concerned that the group’s reputation is being tarnished by the foibles of a few members, many confirmed that among Mensans, immaturity is not an unknown trait.

“Being intelligent doesn’t necessarily give you a larger than average amount of common sense,” said Mel Anderson, the chairman of the board. “We have a few high-profile members who seem to want to have the limelight.”

“We have,” said board secretary Merilyn Walker, “a lot of social morons.”

Many people suspect the death threats are merely idiotic pranks. But Hakim has reported them to the FBI, and in recent months, four Mensa members say they have received visits from a special agent. (FBI officials will not confirm whether they are conducting an investigation. Sending a death threat through the U.S. mail is a felony.)

Kapnick says he was among those interviewed by the FBI, and he gleefully admits that he used the meeting as yet another opportunity to needle Hakim. “He’s probably not the one (who wrote the letters), but I can’t resist this urge,” Kapnick said with a giggle. “I saw an opportunity to get a little dig in.”

Last month, when a similar allegation about Hakim was repeated in an anonymous letter, Kapnick denied sending it. He says he suspects another longtime Mensa member, a patent agent named Gil Kivenson.

Kivenson calls Kapnick “insane.”

“Small minds talk about each other, mediocre minds talk about events and superior minds talk about ideas,” Kivenson said. “Since very few discussions at Mensa are about ideas, that’s what I think of their minds.”

The board has attempted to muzzle the phantom letter writer or writers by twice condemning their behavior. Kapnick and Hakim, meanwhile, continue to seethe. Kapnick, who keeps a folder full of copies of the unsigned letters, as well as his exchanges with Hakim, professes astonishment that anyone would spend their days embroiled in such silliness.

For his part, Hakim says that out of love for Mensa, he is trying hard not to air the chapter’s dirty laundry. But self-restraint is a struggle.

“I want to be able to tell my Mensa peers that I have not . . . mentioned anybody by name in an accusatory manner,” he said. “But death threats because there is a feud seems to me wholly inappropriate.”

Will the case of the erudite ghost writer ever be cracked? Perhaps not. But Balas, the executive vice chairman, offers this theory about the culprit’s identity: “It’s a representative of Densa--you know, the opposite of Mensa.”