THE CHURCH OF BLEACH

Mark Grenon and his sons earned a small fortune selling a “miracle” tonic made with chlorine dioxide and labeled a religious sacrament. Then a SWAT team came calling

- Thomas Buckley

MARK GRENON JOLTED AWAKE IN A SWEAT, HIS heart pounding. He’d been shaken by a nightmare that his family was about to be captured by armed forces who wanted to put him behind bars for life.

In a rare feat for a false prophet, Grenon’s vision essentially came true. At the break of dawn the next morning, July 8, 2020, as police helicopters circled overhead, a SWAT team appeared in armored vehicles and raided the headquarters of the Genesis II Church of Health and Healing in Bradenton, Fla., which doubled as the family home. Two of Grenon’s sons, Jordan and Jonathan, were arrested.

Grenon, the church’s self-styled archbishop, was also wanted by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Office of Criminal Investigations, along with another of his eight sons, Joseph, but they’d fled for Colombia weeks earlier. For more than a decade, the Grenons had enriched themselves by selling Miracle Mineral Solution, or MMS, a “sacramental” drink that promised to cure ills such as Alzheimer’s and cancer but that scientific consensus holds to be potentially lethal and have no medical value whatsoever. Thousands of people had bought it to bathe in, spray-on, or ingest.