"Egypt has the pyramids, " Yahweh Ben Yahweh told a downtown business luncheon last May. "India has the Taj Mahal. France has the Eiffel Tower. Rome has the pope. Orlando has Disney. Miami has the son of Yahweh.

"The world's greatest attraction, " he said, "is in your midst. I'm here."

Now suddenly, he's gone.

Wednesday morning's arrest of Yahweh in New Orleans and 12 of his followers in Liberty City and elsewhere in the country on racketeering charges may have spelled the death knell of the church he started in 1978. But it was just one more click in the roller-coaster ride of good press-bad press that has come to symbolize the Yahweh story:

Applauded by business leaders in the spring. Handcuffed by FBI agents in the fall. Celebrated in the Miami Arena in October. Jailed in November, his followers now leaderless.

The history of the Temple of Love, the Yahwehs' Miami-based mother church, is the history of its founder. It's the story of his dream of peace and black pride, and of that dream unraveling, peeled away over the years, from insinuation to allegation to investigation to indictment.

Through the 1980s, there were the good deeds -- the infectious self-esteem among white-robed Yahwehs as they set up schools and restaurants, opened motels and renovated apartment houses, each rising like a phoenix from the ash and burned-out crack dens of the inner-city.

But there was also a sense of evil -- always just below the surface, rising first with rumors of Yahweh preaching a vicious hatred of whites, later with dark tales from former members of firebombings, beatings and murder.

As the good-and-bad legend of its leader grew, so did the church's real-estate empire, finally reaching $8 million this year. It was that very expansion that brought about a turning point in the sect's history -- their violent takeover of an apartment complex on Oct. 30, 1986, and the murders of two men who tried to stop them.

It was the beginning of the end.

If Wednesday's arrests actually lead to a core of evil, then its roots may run back to 1938, when the man who would become known as Yahweh Ben Yahweh says he first realized he was divine. Born Oct. 27, 1935, Hulon Mitchell Jr. grew up in segregated Enid, Okla., son of a strict Pentecostal minister and oldest in a family of 15.

Through the years, the blue-eyed Mitchell would shed one religious identity after another -- from "Hulon Shah" to "Father Michel" to "Brother Love." In Atlanta, Mitchell embraced Islam, borrowing Muslim techniques he would soon use to gather disciples to his new religion in a new home: Miami.

Arriving in South Florida in 1978, Mitchell took a new name, becoming Moses Israel, Yeshua Messiah, Yahweh al Messiah and Yahweh Ben Yahweh, "God, the son of God." From his fortress- like headquarters on Northwest 62nd Street, Yahweh began to print, tape-record and film his caustically racist preachings for national distribution.

Yahweh cut a colorful figure from the beginning. Turbaned and bejeweled, guarded by men armed with six-foot wooden staffs, Yahweh and his message that American blacks are the true Jews dwelling in the land of the "white devil" attracted professionals and cops, teachers and street people.

But trouble was never far behind: A grisly 1981 beheading of a former member was linked by police to the temple.

Its description of white Jews as the biblical "synagogue of Satan" alarmed Jewish groups. Families of temple followers feared their relatives were victims of mind control.