>>10332A lot of religions (well, for a given value of "religion") have been known to surreptitiously organize harassment of socially nonconformant women, of critics, and of apostates. Scientology's been publicly found to engage in what they call "Fair Game," muslim gangs in non-muslim countries are known to harass apostates and relatives of apostates and friendly acquaintances of apostates, etc.
There are also criminal groups who were implicated in organized harassment of essentially random citizens, including the infamous Calabrian Ndragheta. This is frequently targeted at socially isolated young women. When it has been exposed, motives were usually made clear in short order; the harassment was a prelude to abduction and sex trafficking / enslavement.
Harassment of nobodies across decades did occur as the work of state actors, most infamously by the CIA in the mid-20th century.
Several of these groups have fairly direct ties to Masonic lodges, particularly the Italian mafia which has a long history with the Italian masonic lodges which were frequently criminalized. There is a lot of speculation and theorizing about Masonic ties to harassment campaigns and mysterious disappearances - for instance the Pulitzer Prize winner Timothy Egan wrote a book claiming the Montana Freemasons were responsible for the assassination of Civil War hero Thomas Francis Meagher after a harassment campaign failed to dislodge him from his post. Regardless of the truth of that claim, it is widely attested that the Masonic lodges in the Montana territory were prone to form themselves into anonymized "vigilance committees" to pursue frontier justice against undesirables, and this is one of the reasons why Masonic emblems and number sequences commonly appear in the insignia of Montana law enforcement, most popularly the '3-7-77' of Montana state police.
