They know him simply as “Berk,” the beaming white-haired man who appears with a train of carts most Sunday mornings on a bleak stretch of Massachusetts Avenue near the methadone clinics.
He comes bearing gifts: fluffernutter sandwiches, clean socks and underwear, and sweets, because he knows people addicted to opiates often crave sugar. They crave human touch too, he says, and he makes sure to lay his hands on each person who approaches the carts, squeezing their arms, clapping their shoulders, asking, “How are you doing today, brother?”
He calls himself a “hope dealer.”
The carts are decked with signs: “It’s OK to ask for help.” “You are stronger than addiction.”
Oftentimes, people are just looking for something to eat, or something clean to wear. But when he senses an opening, he’ll ask whether someone has a Facebook account. If they say yes, he’ll pull it up on his phone and find a picture of them looking healthy and happy. “What would it take,” he asks, “to bring this person back?”
When they are ready, he offers, call him and he’ll pick them up and take them to treatment.
“Berk is like the Messiah,” says Max Bendix, a Boston College student who volunteers with Berk’s nonprofit, The Boston Recovery Foundation. When he talks to people, “you see that they light up.” He is “a helper” and a “very wholesome person.”
The business cards he hands out read “BERK,” with a cellphone number. The name on the tag he wears around his neck says “Berk Fhara,” which also appears on the papers registering his charity with the state.
Until recently, “Berk Fhara” turned up little online: no news stories and nothing on the sex offender registry or in court documents. So if the young volunteers working with him, or the students at Worcester Academy who partnered with his charity, or the homeless and addicted people he helps, tried to learn more about the benevolent man with a slight, unplaceable accent who frequents the blighted streets around Massachusetts Avenue and Melnea Cass Boulevard, they would have had little luck.
For that, they would have needed the name the Massachusetts Department of Correction keeps on file: Kheyberk Fharah. Sometimes Khey Berk Fharahk. Born February 22, 1965. Or February 22, 1966. Or February 22, 1967.
Over the years, he’s claimed to be a Jesuit priest. An immigration official. An employee of the City of Boston. A survivor of an abusive Hare Krishna cult.
Now, he claims to be a changed man.
I first encountered the man I knew as Berk last year, as I was reporting a story about addiction on Mass. Ave. A woman whose son had died of an overdose introduced him as a trusted advocate. “He’s wonderful,” she told me. “He could tell you some stories.”
I began shadowing his group sometimes while members handed out supplies on Mass. Ave. or Southampton Street on Sunday mornings, listening as Berk explained the workings of different drugs — how “tina” is slang for meth, “hard” for crack. He had a beatific demeanor and missionary zeal, delivering spontaneous, polished encyclicals on the dignity of the suffering, the power of hope.
But whenever I asked him questions about himself, he deflected. He didn’t want the spotlight to be on him, he always said. He wanted it to be on those he served.
For someone so talkative, his evasiveness was surprising, so I ran the name that appeared on his name tag through public records databases. Strangely, nothing at all came up. Perhaps he was a foreign national, I thought. Or maybe he had his own addiction story he wasn’t eager to discuss.
And then one day, about a year after I first met Berk, the woman who had introduced us sent me a message. Someone had seen a picture of them together on Facebook, and sent her another, longer name. That name brought me to Middlesex Superior Court, where the clerk handed me a thick case file.
The victim came to in a parking lot next to train tracks. He didn’t know where he was. His pants were unzipped, and a stranger’s mouth was on his penis. He froze in terror. “Come on, it’s OK,” the man said, according to court records.
“Where am I?” he asked. “Winchester or Medford,” the man lied. They were in Melrose, in a car parked next to the man’s apartment.
The victim, referred to in some court documents as John Doe, staggered out of the car, zipping up his pants. His keys and wallet were missing. As Doe moved away, the car pulled up behind him. “Remember,” the man called through the open window. “You agreed to this.”
It was 2002, and Doe was 18. He had been out drinking with friends at Clarke’s bar near Faneuil Hall. Ten beers, plus two White Russians. He had gotten sick. Around 1:30 in the morning, a bouncer suggested he step outside and get some air. He obeyed, stumbling into an alley. That is where Fharah found him, with his head between his knees.
“This is a bad area to be hanging around,” Fharah warned the teenager. He had been “jumped by five or six [expletives]” here, a few weeks before, Fharah told him, using a slur for Black people. He asked where Doe lived. “Wilmington,” he replied. Fharah said he lived nearby, in Reading, and would drive him home. Doe borrowed his cellphone, and told his friend at the bar that he was getting a ride.
On the way to the car, Doe noticed that the stranger kept touching him, feeling his back and torso. Once in the passenger seat, Doe passed out.
The collect call came from John Doe at 4:30 a.m., according to a sworn statement his father later provided to the police. Doe was crying, and hard to understand. He was at a pay phone near a gas station, and a Brooks Pharmacy, and could his dad come and get him?
When they got home, Doe went straight to bed. His parents heard him crying throughout the next day, but he wouldn’t tell them what was wrong — just that someone had “tried something” with him.
Doe finally confided in his doctor, who persuaded him to tell his parents, though he refused to go to the police. Instead, his father hired a private detective to trace the number Doe had called his friend from that night.
It led him to Kheyberk Fharah, and the apartment next to the parking lot in Melrose.
Doe’s father suspected Fharah still had his son’s wallet, with his address. What if he came for him again? He decided to start watching him.
Each Saturday night, he followed as Fharah drove to the area around Quincy Market. Fharah seemed to be hunting for intoxicated young men — looking on park benches and in doorways — and trying to coax them into his car.
On October 26, 2002, Doe’s parents went together to the area around Faneuil Hall. At 2:30 a.m., they watched as Fharah propped up a young blond man, so drunk he could barely walk, and led him to the car. Fharah looked around to see if anyone was watching, and then took the young man’s wallet and shoved him into the back seat. Doe’s mother approached the car window. Through it, she saw Fharah performing oral sex on an unconscious man. He looked up at her, and she fled.
What his parents witnessed finally persuaded Doe to go to the police, who began their own surveillance campaign. A report from the Melrose police describes Fharah’s pattern:
“He would find the most helpless. If he saw one leaning on a wall, or staggering, he would approach that one, put his arm on, or around, that person’s shoulder and try to walk them back to his [motor vehicle]. All the time touching, in a frisking like manner, down their backs to the belt line, checking their waist, then pockets. Mr. Fharah was very proficient at this movement.”
One morning, at about 4 a.m., after several hours of watching Fharah unsuccessfully try to lure drunk men into his car, Melrose police stopped him for a traffic violation. When they pulled him over, he confessed that his license was expired. He gave the arresting officers his date of birth as February 22, 1967. While he was being booked at the station, he gave a different one: February 22, 1965. He listed his occupation as a Jesuit priest with the Archdiocese of Boston. In reality, he was a maintenance worker.
John Doe picked Fharah’s booking photo out of a lineup, and a warrant was issued for his arrest. (Doe did not respond to a Globe request for an interview.)
In Fharah’s apartment, police found the belongings of other young men. There were also law enforcement badges: one from the Cambridge Police Department, and one from the State Police. They recovered cocaine, 28 methadone pills, and 99 propoxyphene pills, an opiate that, particularly when mixed with alcohol, has a soporific effect and a bitter taste.
A Social Security card in his possession led them to a 27-year-old named Daniel. Fharah was never charged with a crime related to him, but Daniel told police about an experience remarkably similar to Doe’s.
Reached by phone this month, Daniel didn’t want to speak about Fharah, except to say he doubts he’s changed. Daniel asked the Globe not to use his last name, to protect his privacy.
In an affidavit prosecutors used to support their argument in the Doe case, Daniel said he was in the area around Faneuil Hall at 2 a.m., drunk, eating a piece of pizza, and struggling to stay awake. It was about a month before Doe’s encounter with Fharah.
Sitting on a park bench, Daniel became aware of two things at the same time: There was a stranger nudging him, and his phone and wallet were missing.
The man asked if he was alone. He needed to find his friend and wallet, Daniel replied. “It must have been those [expletives] that took your wallet,” Fharah told him, using the same racial slur. Daniel’s friend had left with a girl, Fharah added, sounding like he knew them. Since Daniel had no money, Fharah said, he would be glad to drive him home, to Quincy.
In the car, the plan changed. There was too much traffic going toward Quincy, Fharah said. Daniel should come to his apartment because his girlfriend was having a party there. Daniel wanted to refuse, but Fharah pointed out that he had no money to get home.
When they got to the apartment in Melrose, there was no party. Quickly, Fharah mixed Daniel a drink. After a few sips, Daniel realized it tasted odd — bitter, and strong. Fharah moved closer, and began trying to give him a massage. He was in a physical therapy program at Tufts, Fharah said. (Tufts has no record of him.)
Daniel asked to go to bed, beginning to feel drowsy and confused. As he lay down, he thought he saw Fharah appear in the bedroom doorway. He remembers nothing at all after that. In the morning, he woke up without pants or a shirt.
Fharah drove him back to Quincy the next day. In the car, he kept muttering that Daniel was a good kid. Daniel wasn’t certain, but he even thought he heard him say he was lucky he was a good kid. He got out of the car a few blocks from his house, not wanting Fharah to know where he lived.
Three days later, Daniel’s wallet appeared in his mailbox, missing $100 and his Social Security card. It had apparently been delivered by hand.
In 2004, Kheyberk Fharah was sentenced to 15 years at MCI-Cedar Junction for the rape of John Doe. Later, he would tell me that this stint in prison changed him. It was not his first.
In 1992, Fharah’s hunting grounds were not far from the ones he frequented in the early 2000s, according to documents from Suffolk Superior Court. At least three times that year, Fharah impersonated an officer of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, a precursor to ICE. In reality, he worked for the Massachusetts Parole Board as a contract urine analyst.
Carrying a gun and a forged business card, Fharah went into Government Center station, which was full of Hispanic immigrants commuting on the Blue Line from East Boston. He would approach and demand to see their papers.
Angel Galvez, an undocumented migrant from Guatemala, told the police that Fharah ordered him to come with him for an interview. If he refused, or made any sudden moves, “It will be bad for you,” Fharah said. But they didn’t go to a police station, or the INS office. Instead, Fharah forced Galvez to a room in a nearby office building and made him strip. He handcuffed him, and then raped him. When Fharah let him go, he gave him back his possessions, except for a gold chain.
Two months later, again in the guise of an INS agent, Fharah approached 21-year-old Edwin Argueta, also from Guatemala, at the same station. Showing him a gun, he ordered Argueta into his car, where he handcuffed him, groped him, and took $85 from his wallet.
Less than a week later, Fharah detained a third Guatemalan man, Joel Argueta, forced him into an empty office in the MBTA station, and handcuffed him. Then, Fharah brought him at gunpoint to his car and sexually assaulted him over the course of three hours. He had made Argueta empty his pockets of papers, and when he finally let him go, Argueta accidentally swept up a parking receipt with Fharah’s name and address on it — information that would eventually lead to his arrest.
Because of a plea deal, Fharah was given a relatively light sentence: nine to 10 years for kidnapping and three to five years for assault with a dangerous weapon.
In addition to the criminal case, the men also filed a civil lawsuit against the MBTA, through which their names were made public. They argued that the transit authority should have realized what was happening, and stopped Fharah. MBTA police had once stopped him in the act of detaining someone. But they simply let both men go. The three victims were awarded $250,000 each.
Afterward, the victims “wanted to get out of the country as soon as possible,” one of their attorneys in the civil case, Tyler Fox, remembers, describing them as deeply traumatized. “They wanted to go somewhere where they thought no one would know about what happened to them.” The Globe was unable to locate Angel Galvez, Joel Argueta, or Edwin Argueta.
The intersection of Massachusetts Avenue and Melnea Cass Boulevard is the center of Boston’s opioid crisis, no longer thronged with tents after the city cleared them in 2023, but still a magnet for drug users and those who prey on them. Homeless people and addicts are in many ways the perfect victims: viewed with skepticism by police, sometimes on drugs that affect memory and comprehension, often unwilling to report crimes against them.
In this kaleidoscopic ecosystem of dealers, sex traffickers, outreach workers, volunteers, and drug users, there is little accountability: anyone can claim to be anything. Many denizens of the area don’t have cellphones, or access to the internet. But even if they did, they might not bother to check if someone helping them is a registered sex offender, or works where they say they do.
Fharah does not appear to have shed his habit of pretending to be employed somewhere he is not.
Two former employees of the Boston Public Health Commission, who requested anonymity because their current employers don’t allow them to speak to the media, recall that after his 2016 release, Fharah brought a stream of young men in for services at 774 Albany Street, which houses a walk-in treatment program and needle exchange. They were uncomfortable with how he seemed to hover over the men, filling out paperwork for them and declining to leave them alone. Eventually, they came to believe he was posing as an employee of BPHC, including at some outreach events.
One employee recalls asking the legal department to stop Fharah from identifying himself on Facebook as an outreach worker at the Boston Public Health Commission. “We needed constant vigilance,” she says. “He was restricted from all BPHC campuses, but he’d show up.”
In response to a public records request, BPHC provided a copy of a “bar list,” showing that in 2017, the commission banned Fharah from the premises indefinitely. The reason listed was “inappropriate and concerning representation of himself.”
Jesus Sanchez Jaramillo, a science teacher who volunteered with Fharah’s nonprofit, says Fharah also represented himself as a city employee to the group. Jaramillo remembers offering to come over and help Fharah make sandwiches for a Sunday expedition last fall. Fharah declined, saying he’d be working late. He worked for the city, he added, helping people reintegrate into society after prison.
It never occurred to Jaramillo to doubt him. “I heard that,” he says, “And I’m like, Oh my God, that’s so nice.”
Fharah is a Level 3 sex offender — which the registry defines as someone with “a high risk of re-offending” who poses “a high degree of danger to the public.” He is required to report his home address, his places of work (full or part time, paid or unpaid), and any aliases to the sex offender registry. A first-time failure to register carries a maximum sentence of five years in state prison.
The Boston Recovery Foundation lists “Berk Fhara” as a founder, which is also the name on the ID badge he wears. That name is not among his aliases on the sex offender registry, though closer versions appeared after the Globe asked him about it.
His home address is registered to the second floor of a modest two-story house in Jamaica Plain. But again, until the Globe asked him about it in early June, he had failed to register his place of work, Healthy Duct Property Services, an air duct cleaning business in Waltham. The earliest customer reviews mentioning him online are four years old.
“John and Berk are truly some of the most honest and genuine business owners I’ve ever met,” reads one Google review.
John is John Cox, the owner of Healthy Duct. He is also the chairman of the board of the Boston Recovery Foundation. Cox has been convicted once of indecent assault and battery of a child, and twice of child rape, most recently for the 2006 rape of a 6-year-old in Hyannis. Cox’s address and workplace are both listed on the sex offender registry. He did not reply to a request for comment.
The Globe is not naming the Boston Recovery Foundation’s other cofounder because he is in high school. Reached by phone, a school official who organized an event with Fharah through the student said the school was unaware of Cox’s and Fharah’s sex offender statuses, and would inform the student’s parents.
“The failure to register is probably the most common offense for people who have a sex offense conviction,” says R. Karl Hanson, a professor at Carleton University in Canada and the president of the Society for the Advancement of Actuarial Risk Needs Assessment, which creates tools to assess recidivism risk. To him, not registering often doesn’t say much about a person’s likelihood of reoffending.
“People forget” to register, Hanson says, and “sometimes they get substantial criminal justice punishment for that, which I consider to be punishment for sloppiness.”
But there are rare instances when the registry does make sense, he says. “If somebody is actively seeking opportunities to be in positions of trust with a vulnerable victim group, and is hiding, that’s when you want a registry.”
Hearing a summary of Fharah’s convictions, Hanson says that he stands out, with risk factors including a history of recidivism, a “very elaborate set of offending patterns,” a habit of targeting vulnerable groups, and his associations with other sex offenders.
“What’s troubling,” Hanson says, “is the putting himself in a position where he’s exposed to this at-risk group and trying to hide his previous social identity.”
In early June, Fharah met me at a coffee shop in Jamaica Plain. I told him I’d discovered his criminal history, and wanted to know why he was obscuring it. I asked him about the altered spelling of his name: Don’t the people he associates with have the right to do their due diligence, and decide whether to spend time with him or not?
Fharah denied trying to hide his identity, saying that the Department of Correction misspelled his name. He claimed that searching online for “Berk Fhara” returns details of his convictions. I told him that was not true.
“If I were trying to conceal my identity and my past,” he responded, “I would be like ‘Edward Jones’ or something.”
Although he says he has always spelled his name “Berk Fhara,” a 1987 staff list from a Massachusetts Halfway Houses Inc. lists a “Kheyberk Fharahk,” and a solicitation for donations for children of parolees appeared in The Lowell Sun in 1989, also under “Kheyberk Fharahk.” At some point the k seems to have dropped off his last name, then the h.
A few days after our conversation, his place of work and two new aliases appeared on the sex offender registry: “Das Pralad” and “Berk Fharah” — though still not “Berk Fhara,” the name he currently uses.
Fharah acknowledges guilt in the 1992 assaults, adding that he initially began by committing robberies before escalating to sexual violence. He did it because it made him feel “respected,” he said. He targeted Hispanic men, he said, because a friend had been raped by a member of Mara Salvatrucha, a gang that originated in the Salvadoran diaspora.
He disputes John Doe’s mother’s account of him assaulting someone in his car as well as Daniel’s account to police, although he was unable to explain why he had Daniel’s Social Security card.
Fharah also says he never impersonated a city employee, and that, newly released from prison, he didn’t understand how Facebook worked when he listed the Boston Public Health Commission as his workplace.
It’s his past that makes him so well-suited to serve vulnerable populations, Fharah says. “What would I do with all this life experience, dark as it might be, if I don’t use it to help others?”
Fharah was himself a victim of child sex abuse, he says. He was born in Dallas, and his parents were Hare Krishna. In an interview with the Globe and in a letter written to the judge in the 2002 rape case, he said his parents were missionaries, and he spent his early years traveling across Europe before settling in South Africa. At the age of 6, he was sent to a Hare Krishna boarding school in Texas, he says. His parents eventually settled in Costa Rica, where he described being brutally abused and raped multiple times, including at the age of 9 by a trusted older friend.
From Costa Rica, he was sent to a Hare Krishna boarding school in India, where he says he was repeatedly raped by his teachers. Leaders of the Hare Krishna movement have acknowledged a pattern of abuse in its boarding schools in the 1970s and ’80s.
As he grew older, he bounced between Hare Krishna communities in England and Texas, he wrote, before being sexually abused by a temple elder. He eventually left the movement.
“Sometimes our wounds, if they’re not healed, they bleed on other people, innocent people, and they bleed into our future,” he said in the interview with the Globe.
Fharah insists that he is no longer victimizing people. “My past is ugly, but my present is not,” he says. “I’m just asking people to let me continue with my healing process.”
One Boston Recovery Foundation board member, Conan Langlois, says that, as a recovering drug user, he supports second chances. But he was stunned to learn of Fharah’s history. “He needs to be honest about who he is,” Langlois says. He says he plans to resign from the board. “That is just something that I can’t be a part of.”
Another board member, Jennifer Hogue, met Fharah at a sharing circle for people who’ve spent time in prison and their advocates, hosted by her Quaker congregation. She is aware of his previous convictions, but believes he’s changed. “He’s just this beautiful soul who personifies compassion and generosity,” she says. “It’s hard for Berk to enjoy, for example, a good meal, knowing that there are people who aren’t able to have one.”
“He’s a street pastor in a way,” says Patricia Wild, a Quaker who also met Fharah through the sharing circle and invited him to live with her and her husband for three months. “If Berk Fharah had thought by standing up there and saying, ‘Here’s something that you need to know about me, so that we can all continue to do the work that we’re doing together,’ if he thought that that would somehow make his organization work better, he would have done it.”
Four Boston Recovery Foundation volunteers reached by the Globe were not aware of Fharah’s history, although one, Bendix, the Boston College student, said he planned to continue working with him.
Jaramillo, the teacher, is less sure. “I don’t even know what to think anymore,” he says. “I trusted him.” He shudders to think that he unknowingly attended events with Fharah and high school students, though not his own.
Even people who have committed terrible crimes can change, Jaramillo says, but “hiding it and pretending ... that’s the part that I am not OK with.”
Fharah continues to spend his Sundays pulling his cart up and down Mass. Ave., with its sign reading “Start a new chapter today.” In summer, the warmer weather draws bigger crowds. “My healing process includes serving others,” he told me, smiling.
I expected Fharah to be angry that I had dug up his history. But at the beginning of our interview, he was even-tempered and pleasant, making jokes, giving me a pen inscribed with the words “Hope Dealer.”
Toward the end, the mood shifted. “There’s a question I usually ask, especially when someone uses my past against me,” Fharah said.
“The question is not for me, the question is for you, and everyone else,” he said. “What do you choose to be in my path, if you choose to be in my path: an obstacle? Or a supporter of my efforts?
“If you want to deny me the opportunity to experience my own transformation,” he said, inclining his head toward me, “then you are an obstacle to healing.”
Annalisa Quinn can be reached at annalisa.quinn@globe.com. Follow her @annalisa_quinn.