LOS ANGELES, Aug. 28 — Some of the original members of Charles Manson’s “family” are still operating, says Brooks Poston, one of the very few Manson members who managed to escape Manson’s clutches.

“The girls are in control of the family now,” Poston says. “I’m not sure if they are capable of any crimes now, simply because there is no one strong personality there any more — nobody who can tell them what to do.”

For nine months, in 1969 and 1970, Brooks Poston was a member in good standing of Manson and his group of warped disciples. In February, 1970, he woke up to what was going on.

“I was dissatisfied,” he says, “but I didn’t know how to leave. I wasn’t sure that he wasn’t Christ — if he really was, then I shouldn’t go. But I didn’t like it with him. I had to eat, sleep, do everything when he told me. And I didn’t like it when he beat up the girls.”

For a while, when Manson was in Los Angeles and Poston and some others were left behind at the family’s ranch, they were apart. That was when a man named Paul Crockett met Poston and convinced him he should do something constructive with his life.

With Crockett’s help, Poston and one or two others escaped. Today, Brooks Poston is a member of a musical group, Desert Sun. And, perhaps to do penance for what his former family members did, he also is active with the Foundation For the Advancement of Human Awareness, working with people to make the most of their potential.

Poston is a lean, fair-haired Texan, now 25, who left home as a teenager because he was “disenchanted with my parents.” He came to California to finish high school but soon found himself entrapped by Manson.

“I met this girl who took me to see Charley,” he says. “The first thing I saw Charley do was kneel down and kiss a guy’s feet. That impressed me. Also, he had five girls living with him. That was a natural trap for guys. Charley gave me a shirt. He said anything that was his was mine.”

Poston was impressionable and Manson was clever. It didn’t take the ex-convict long to have Poston as his newest disciple.

“Charlie was very unusual,” Poston says. “He was very humble. He said the right words — love, peace, freedom. All the phrases which appealed to me then.

“He knew how to play on our weaknesses. One girl had body hair. She felt inadequate. Charley told her she was beautiful.

“To us, he was a Christ-figure. I believed 100 per cent he was Christ. I was on acid then, of course, but I saw him do things, like he would grant eternal life to people. He was miraculous.”

Through careful administration of drugs, plus his native skill at psychology, Manson subjugated his family until they would do anything and everything he told them to.

Fortunately for Poston, he retained enough of his inhibitions so that Manson did not completely trust him. Thus, he was, as he says, “the bottom man on the totem pole.

“I wasn’t included in a lot of things,” he says. “I wasn’t asked to take part in the orgies. I had to do the physical labor — I worked as a cowboy, I shoveled a lot of horse manure, I chopped a lot of wood.”

Still, for those many months, Poston followed Manson. One of Charley’s ideas was that an inter-racial war — he called it “helter-skelter” — between blacks and whites was coming. They all believed him.

“He re-programmed everyone who came in to accept his ideas,” Poston says. “He used drugs, singing — he was a fabulous musician — and talking. He would say ‘Everyone must submit to my love.’ He’d repeat it on acid trips. You would feel it, registering like a shock wave on your body.

“He’d stretch himself on a cross. He’d say, ‘Good is bad and bad is good.’ His ideas took over as our reality.”

Even after Poston made his break, in February of 1970, Manson tried to lure him back. Poston, Crockett and some others had a cabin in the woods.

“Charley figured if he couldn’t get us back, he’d kill us,” Poston says. “He tried to sneak up on our cabin at night. But we had a big dog and he’d start to growl. We’d go out and there would be Charley with a knife.

“‘One of these nights,’ he said, “I’m going to get you.'”

But Poston and the other escapees managed to survive. They were the lucky ones.

“It was literally total insanity,” Poston says now. “I decided to talk to people, young people, to tell them there is another way to freedom. I got myself in it and I got myself out of it ”

By DICK KLEINER