CALIFORNIA ALBUM : Gypsy Clan Facing Test as Psychics : Hearing will be held in San Diego today on difficult-to-prove ‘theft by false pretense’ charges against Marks family. The group has been active in county since the ‘40s.

True to their Gypsy traditions, the women of the Marks family have offered their mystical services to the people of San Diego for generations.

From darkened parlors in small homes dotted throughout the county, Marks women have offered to help the love-struck to find happiness and the misbegotten to get free of the curses and negative energy of modern life.

A chain of Marks family establishments, offering fortunetelling, Tarot card readings and other psychic assistance, has stretched from the blue-collar, commercial strips of National City to the affluent, beach clime of Encinitas.

But now, in an unusually hard-nosed legal tactic, the district attorney’s office has filed criminal charges against six members of the Marks family, charging them with bilking customers of hundreds of thousands of dollars with phony promises about curing headaches and mending broken love lives.

It is not uncommon for fortunetellers and other soothsayers to be charged with theft, for making money mysteriously disappear during ritual cleansing ceremonies. In fact, a recent episode of the television show “NYPD Blue” had such an incident as a subplot.

The heart of the San Diego case, however, involves harder-to-prove allegations of “theft by false pretense.” Prosecutors have alleged that the Marks women illegally took money from their customers with promises they knew they could not fulfill.

As a condition of bail, four Marks women--Elaine Marks, 37, Laura Gordon Marks, 50 (also known as Madam Ruth), Sonia Marks, 52 (also known as Mrs. Renee), and Dorothy Marks, 41 (also known as Sister Sofie)--are prohibited from engaging in psychic activity or being in a place where such activity is under way. The other two defendants are juveniles.

One elderly gentleman allegedly gave the Marks family $675,000 over 11 years to rekindle his romantic spirit through prayer and other spiritual means. Finally, convinced he was being duped, he went to police.

The Markses have fought back by hiring three of the city’s top criminal defense attorneys to protect their livelihood and, as they see it, their religion of probing the supernatural for relief from life’s vexations.

The attorneys plan a vigorous defense based on concerns about freedom of religion, the 1st Amendment and the need for society to respect cultural diversity.

“If what the Marks family does is criminal, how about those astrologers who were advising Nancy Reagan when she was in the White House?” said Robert Grimes, attorney for one of the Marks women. “Is astrology somehow more scientific than what the Gypsies do? And how about those psychic lines that advertise on TV for $6 a minute, $240 an hour? Is the D.A. going to bust them too?”

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The Marks family saga in San Diego dates, like so many other San Diego families, to the 1940s when the city was experiencing rapid expansion and business opportunities were plentiful.

The family patriarch, Dewey, and his wife, Rose, moved to San Diego from Kansas City. Other large American cities already had established Gypsy communities but San Diego did not. Soon the family was dominant in the region’s psychic industry, which proved to be a lucrative one.

“It’s something our women are gifted with,” one Marks family member told a television reporter recently. “They’re consultants. They’ve been doing it for years, for generations.”

The family empire is now run by Dewey’s and Rose’s three sons, the sons’ wives and their children. Law enforcement sources estimate that the family owns $10 million worth of real estate in the county.

The Markses’ way of life and business has not been free of controversy.

There have been a passel of civil suits by customers who did not find happiness, love, wealth or fame despite giving up their money in exchange for prayers and specialized rituals. Two local television stations, KGTV and KFMB, have done undercover exposes on the family.

Family members have suffered a few small-time criminal convictions. One was convicted of attempting to bribe a police officer. Another was convicted of theft after a customer’s money, which he was told would be returned, suddenly disappeared during a ceremony meant to cleanse the money of evil spirits.

Reviewing an ordinance from Azusa, the state Supreme Court in 1985 struck down as unconstitutional local laws banning fortune-telling and palm reading. Prosecutors throughout the state have been reluctant to file charges against Gypsies and others who specialize in a mystic brand of self-improvement.

One problem is that few people wander into a psychic parlor thinking it is something approved by the American Medical Assn., making it harder for customers later to prove they were duped.

Customers “knew going in that they were submitting themselves to what is essentially a very non-traditional type of treatment,” said Deputy San Diego City Atty. William Newsome, who has headed the consumer fraud unit. “They knew they were entering into what, at the very least, is a murky area of mysticism and surreality.”

The district attorney’s case against the Markses includes charges of burglary--that family members went into the homes and boats of their customers and took things without permission.

But other charges are in a penal-code area that is considerably more obtuse. At issue in the case, which goes to preliminary hearing today, is a section of law called “Theft by False Pretense,” that is, taking money by making false promises.

On those charges, which are rarely filed in such cases, prosecutors will have to prove that the psychics knew that they could not cure someone’s headaches, get their wandering spouse to return, or make them irresistible to the opposite sex.

“The common theme,” said August Meyer, the deputy district attorney handling the case, “is that spiritual intervention can stop the negative energy in someone’s life.”

Defense attorneys argue that the prayers and ceremonies used by the Marks women, however offbeat, deserve the same protection as more widespread religions. All three alleged victims, they note, sought out the Marks family voluntarily and kept returning (and paying) for services.

“Even though it may seem strange to some, the Gypsy way of life is a very religious way of life,” said Marks attorney Peter Hughes, who once represented the Methodist Church. “Despite the assertions (by the prosecutor at arraignment) this is not a slam-dunk case.”

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The criminal complaint against the Marks family in San Diego Superior Court, listed as Case 110330, is barely a week old. But legends involving Gypsies date back centuries.

One legend told by Gypsies themselves is that it was a Gypsy who saved Christ from agony by stealing the nail that was supposed to be driven through his heart on the cross. For this and other reasons, Gypsy folklore holds that they are the chosen people of God and unfettered by human law.

A contradictory folk legend, however, holds that it was Gypsies who made the nails for the cross at Calvary when no one else would and for that reason Gypsies have been cursed to wander the Earth.

Gypsies emigrated to Eastern Europe from India and from there to the New World. The early Gypsies were nomadic, tribal and patriarchal. Their language is an offshoot of Sanskrit, and their religion has elements of Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Zoroastrianism.

Historically, Gypsies have been among the world’s most persecuted people.

Starting in 1933, the Nazis methodically killed between 1 million and 1.5 million of them in an attempt to destroy the Gypsy population. A front-page story in the San Diego Union in 1881 warned that Gypsies from Bulgaria had been spotted in San Diego, but reassured readers that the police would run them out of town if they began begging.

Although only a small percentage of the estimated 1 million people of Gypsy descent in America engages in fortunetelling and psychic readings, Gypsy influence in the industry is strong.

“Fortunetelling has been part of the Romani (Gypsy) culture for 14 centuries, dating to our ancestors in India where it is a revered skill,” said Ian Hancock, a British citizen of Gypsy descent who is a Gypsy scholar, a leader in the International Romani Union, and a professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin.

“The Romani word for fortune-teller means, literally, healer,” Hancock said. “Although the Romani people’s beliefs have changed over the centuries, there has been a continuum of belief in fortune-telling and spiritualism. In America, fortunetelling has not been as respected, and there have been culture clashes with the authorities.”

The belief that Gypsies can inflict and remove curses, Hancock said, may have begun as a self-protective device as Gypsies suffered hostility and threats when moving from country to country. In San Diego, one selling point the Markses allegedly use with prospective customers is that only Gypsies can remove curses and locate the source of negative energy.

Marks family members have always been elusive quarry for the press. Except for a brief interview with a consumer reporter for KFMB-TV, the CBS affiliate, no member of the family has spoken about the current charges.

A woman at the National City home of “Big Mike” Marks, son of the late Dewey Marks and now considered “king of the Gypsies” in San Diego County, shouted at a Times reporter and photographer to go away and not take any pictures of the huge PSYCHIC sign visible from Interstate 5 in the National City area. Similar reactions were received at other Marks-owned establishments.

Gene Bardot, the San Diego detective who headed the eight-month investigation, said additional victims are coming forth since news of the psychic bust has been splashed on television.

One problem is that many of the newly discovered victims are embarrassed and do not want their names made public, Bardot said, which could hinder the prosecution. In fact, even the three victims mentioned in the current indictment are identified only by first names.

The Markses “come across people when they are at a crisis time in their lives and need desperately to hear something good,” Bardot said. He does not buy the argument that the cures and services were religious in nature.

“Our experience is that when the money runs out so does the conversation between the Marks family and the customer,” he said.