Texas_Tickle
4th Level Orange Feather
- Joined
- Aug 28, 2002
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Church of Scientology (believe it or not, this is really a registered "church")
Ruined lives. Lost fortunes. Federal crimes. Scientology poses as
a religion but really is a ruthless global scam -- and aiming for
the mainstream
by Richard Behar
By all appearances, Noah Lottick of Kingston, Pa., had been a
normal, happy 24-year-old who was looking for his place in the
sun. On the day last June when his parents drove to New York City
to obtain his body, they were nearly catatonic with grief.
This young Russian-studies scholar had jumped from a 10th-floor
window of the Milford Plaza Hotel and bounced off the hood of a
stretch limousine. When the police arrived, his fingers were
still clutching $171 in cash, virtually the only money he hadn't
turned over to the Church of Scientology, the self-help
"philosophy" group he had discovered just seven months earlier.
His death inspired his father Edward, a physician, to start his
own investigation of the church. "We thought Scientology was
something like Dale Carnegie," Lottick says. "I now believe it's
a school for psychopaths." Their so-called therapies are
manipulations. They take the best and the brightest people and
destroy them." The Lotticks want to sue the church for
contributing to their son's death, but the prospect has them
frightened. For nearly 40 years, the big business of Scientology
has shielded itself exquisitely behind the First Amendment as
well as a battery of high-priced criminal lawyers and shady
private detectives.
The Church of Scientology, started by science-fiction writer L.
Ron Hubbard to "clear" people of unhappiness, portrays itself as
a religion. In reality the church is a hugely profitable global
racket that survives by intimidating members and critics in a
Mafia-like manner. At times during the past decade, prosecutions
against Scientology seemed to be curbing its menace. Eleven top
Scientologists, including Hubbard's wife, were sent to prison in
the early 1980s for infiltrating, burglarizing and wiretapping
more than 100 private and government agencies in attempts to
block their investigations. In recent years hundreds of longtime
Scientology adherents -- many charging that they were mentally of
physically abused -- have quit the church and criticized it at
their own risk. Some have sued the church and won; others have
settled for amounts in excess of $500,000. In various cases
judges have labeled the church "schizophrenic and paranoid" and
"corrupt, sinister and dangerous."
Yet the outrage and litigation have failed to squelch
Scientology. The group, which boasts 700 centers in 65 countries,
threatens to become more insidious and pervasive than ever.
Scientology is trying to go mainstream, a strategy that has
sparked a renewed law- enforcement campaign against the church.
Many of the group's followers have been accused of committing
financial scams, while the church is busy attracting the unwary
through a wide array of front groups in such businesses as
publishing, consulting, health care and even remedial education.
In Hollywood, Scientology has assembled a star-studded roster of
followers by aggressively recruiting and regally pampering them
at the church's "Celebrity Centers," a chain of clubhouses that
offer expensive counseling and career guidance. Adherents include
screen idols Tom Cruise and John Travolta, actresses Kirstie
Alley, Mimi Rogers, and Anne Archer, Palm Springs mayor and
performer Sonny Bono, jazzman Chick Corea and even Nancy
Cartwright, the voice of cartoon star Bart Simpson. Rank-and-file
members, however, are dealt a less glamorous Scientology.
According to the Cult Awareness Network, whose 23 chapters
monitor more than 200 "mind control" cults, no group prompts more
telephone pleas for help than does Scientology. Says Cynthia
Kisser, the network's Chicago-based executive director:
"Scientology is quite likely the most ruthless, the most
classically terroristic, the most litigious and the most
lucrative cult the country has ever seen. No cult extracts more
money from its members." Agrees Vicki Aznaran, who was one of
Scientology's six key leaders until she bolted from the church in
1987: "This is a criminal organization, day in and day out. It
makes Jim and Tammy [Bakker] look like kindergarten." To explore
Scientology's reach, TIME conducted more than 150 interviews and
reviewed hundreds of court records and internal Scientology
documents. Church officials refused to be interviewed. The
investigation paints a picture of a depraved yet thriving
enterprise. Most cults fail to outlast their founder, but
Scientology has prospered since Hubbard's death in 1986. In a
court filing, one of the cult's many entities -- the Church of
Spiritual Technology -- listed $503 million in income just for
1987. High-level defectors say the parent organization has
squirreled away an estimated $400 million in bank accounts in
Liechtenstein, Switzerland and Cyprus. Scientology probably has
about 50,000 active members, far fewer than the 8 million the
group claims. But in one sense, that inflated figure rings true:
millions of people have been affected in one way or another by
Hubbard's bizarre creation.
Scientology is now run by David Miscavige, 31, a high school
dropout and second-generation church member. Defectors describe
him as cunning, ruthless and so paranoid about perceived enemies
that he kept plastic wrap over his glass of water. His obsession
is to obtain credibility for Scientology in the 1990s. Among
other tactics, the group:
* Retains public relation powerhouse Hill and Knowlton to help
shed the church's fringe-group image.
* Joined such household names as Sony and Pepsi as a main
sponsor of Ted Turner's Goodwill Games.
* Buys massive quantities of its own books from retail stores
to propel the titles onto best-seller lists.
* Runs full-page ads in such publications as Newsweek and
Business Week that call Scientology a "philosophy," along
with a plethora of TV ads touting the group's books.
* Recruits wealthy and respectable professionals through a web
of consulting groups that typically hide their ties to
Scientology.
The founder of this enterprise was part storyteller, part
flimflam man. Born In Nebraska in 1911, Hubbard served in the
Navy during World War II and soon afterward complained to the
Veterans Administration about his "suicidal inclinations" and his
"seriously affected" mind. Nevertheless, Hubbard was a moderately
successful writer of pulp science fiction. Years later, church
brochures described him falsely as an "extensively decorated"
World War II hero who was crippled and blinded in action, twice
pronounced dead and miraculously cured through Scientology.
Hubbard's "doctorate" from "Sequoia University" was a fake
mall-order degree. In a I984 case in which the church sued a
Hubbard biographical researcher, a California judge concluded
that its founder was "a pathological liar."
Hubbard wrote one of Scientology's sacred texts, Dianetics: The
Modern Science of Mental Health, in 1950. In it he introduced a
crude psychotherapeutic technique he called "auditing." He also
created a simplified lie detector (called an "E-meter") that was
designed to measure electrical changes In the skin while subjects
discussed intimate details of their past. Hubbard argued that
unhappiness sprang from mental aberrations (or "engrams") caused
by early traumas. Counseling sessions with the E-meter, he
claimed, could knock out the engrams, cure blindness and even
improve a person's intelligence and appearance.
Hubbard kept adding steps, each more costly, for his followers to
climb. In the 1960s the guru decreed that humans are made of
clusters of spirits (or "thetans") who were banished to earth
some 75 million years ago by a cruel galactic ruler named Xenu.
Naturally, those thetans had to be audited.
An Internal Revenue Service ruling in 1967 stripped Scientology's
mother church of its tax-exempt status. A federal court ruled in
1971 that Hubbard's medical claims were bogus and that E-meter
auditing could no longer be called a scientific treatment.
Hubbard responded by going fully religious, seeking First
Amendment protection for Scien- tology's strange rites. His
counselors started sporting clerical collars. Chapels were built,
franchises became "missions," fees became "fixed donations," and
Hubbard's comic-book cosmology became "sacred scriptures.'
During the early 1970s, the IRS conducted its own auditing
sessions and proved that Hubbard was skimming millions of dollars
from the church, laundering the money through dummy corporations
in Panama and stashing it in Swiss bank accounts. Moreover,
church members stole IRS documents, filed false tax returns and
harassed the agency's employees. By late 1985, with high-level
defectors accusing Hubbard of having stolen as much as S200
million from the church, the IRS was seeking an indictment of
Hubbard for tax fraud. Scientology members "worked day and night"
shredding documents the IRS sought, according to defector
Aznaran, who took part in the scheme. Hubbard, who had been in
hiding for five years, died before the criminal case could be
prosecuted.
Today the church invents costly new services with all the zeal of
its founder. Scientology doctrine warns that even adherents who
are "cleared" of engrams face grave spiritual dangers unless they
are pushed to higher and more expensive levels. According to the
church's latest price list, recruits -- "raw meat," as Hubbard
called them -- take auditing sessions that cost as much as $1,000
an hour, or $12,500 for a 12 1/2-hour "intensive."
Psychiatrists say these sessions can produce a drugged-like,
mind-controlled euphoria that keeps customers coming back for
more. To pay their fees, newcomers can earn commissions by
recruiting new mem- bers, become auditors themselves (Miscavige
did so at age 12), or join the church staff and receive free
counseling in exchange for what their written contracts describe
as a "billion years" of labor. "Make sure that lots of bodies
move through the shop," implored Hubbard in one of his bulletins
to officials. "Make money. Make more money. Make others produce
so as to make money . . . However you get them in or why, just do
it."
Harriet Baker learned the hard way about Scientology's business
of selling religion. When Baker, 73, lost her husband to cancer,
a Scientologist turned up at her Los Angeles home peddling a
$1,300 auditing package to cure her grief. Some $15,000 later,
the Scientologists discovered that her house was debt free. They
arranged a $45,000 mortgage, which they pressured her to tap for
more auditing until Baker's children helped their mother snap out
of her daze. Last June, Baker demanded a $27,000 refund for
unused services, prompting two cult members to show up at her
door unannounced with an E-meter to interrogate her. Baker never
got the money and, financially strapped, was forced to sell her
house in September.
Before Noah Lottick killed himself, he had paid more than $5,000
for church counseling. His behavior had also become strange. He
once remarked to his parents that his Scientology mentors could
actually read minds. When his father suffered a major heart
attack, Noah insisted that it was purely psychosomatic. Five days
before he jumped, Noah burst into his parents' home and demanded
to know why they were spreading "false rumors" about him -- a
delusion that finally prompted his father to call a psychiatrist.
It was too late. "From Noah's friends at Dianetics" read the card
that accompanied a bouquet of flowers at Lottick's funeral. Yet
no Scientology staff members bothered to show up. A week earlier,
local church officials had given Lottick's parents a red-carpet
tour of their center. A cult leader told Noah's parents that
their son had been at the church just hours before he disappeared
-- but the church denied this story as soon as the body was
identified. True to form, the cult even haggled with the Lotticks
over $3,000 their son had paid for services he never used,
insisting that Noah had intended it as a "donation."
The church has invented hundreds of goods and services for which
members are urged to give "donations." Are you having trouble
"moving swiftly up the Bridge" -- that is, advancing up the
stepladder of en- lightenment? Then you can have your case
reviewed for a mere $1,250 "donation." Want to know "why a thetan
hangs on to the physical universe?" Try 52 of Hubbard's
tape-recorded speeches from 1952, titled "Ron's Philadelphia
Doctorate Course Lectures," for $2,525. Next: nine other series
of the same sort. For the collector, gold-and-leather-bound
editions of 22 of Hubbard's books (and bookends) on subjects
ranging from Scientology ethics to radiation can be had for just
$1,900.
To gain influence and lure richer, more sophisticated followers,
Scientology has lately resorted to a wide array of front groups
and financial scams. Among them:
* CONSULTING. Sterling Management Systems, formed in 1983, has
been ranked in recent years by Inc. magazine as one of
America's fastest-growing private companies (estimated 1988
revenues: $20 mil- lion). Sterling regularly mails a free
newsletter to more than 300,000 health-care professionals,
mostly dentists, promising to increase their incomes
dramatically. The firm offers seminars and courses that
typically cost $10,OOO. But Sterling's true aim is to hook
customers for Scientology. "The church has a rotten product,
so they package it as something else," says Peter
Georgiades, a Pittsburgh attorney who represents Sterling
victims. "It's a kind of bait and switch." Sterling's
founder, dentist Gregory Hughes is now under investigation
by California's Board of Dental Examiners for incompetence.
Nine lawsuits are pending against him for malpractice (seven
others have been settled), mostly for orthodontic work on
children.
Many dentists who have unwittingly been drawn into the cult
are filing or threatening lawsuits as well. Dentist Robert
Geary of Medina, Ohio, who entered a Sterling seminar in
1988, endured "the most extreme high-pressure sales tactics
I have ever faced." Sterling officials told Geary, 45, that
their firm was not linked to Scientology, he says. but Geary
claims they eventually convinced him that he and his wife
Dorothy had personal problems that required auditing. Over
five months, the Gearys say, they spent $130,000 for
services, plus $50,000 for "gold-embossed, investment-grade"
books signed by Hubbard. Geary contends that Scientologists
not only called his bank to increase his credit card limit
but also forged his signature on a $20,000 loan application.
"It was insane," he recalls. "I couldn't even get an
accounting from them of what I was paying for." At one
point, the Gearys claim, Scientologists held Dorothy hostage
for two weeks in a mountain cabin, after which she was
hospitalized for a nervous breakdown.
Last October, Sterling broke some bad news to another
dentist, Glover Rowe of Gadsden, Ala., and his wife Dee.
Tests showed that unless they signed up for auditing
Glover's practice would fail, and Dee would someday abuse
their child. The next month the Rowes flew to Glendale,
Calif., where they shuttled daily from a local hotel to a
Dianetics center. "We thought they were brilliant people
because they seemed to know so much about us," recalls Dee.
"Then we realized our hotel room must have been bugged."
After bolting from the center, $23,000 poorer, the Rowes
say, they were chased repeatedly by Scientologists on foot
and in cars. Dentists aren't the only once at risk.
Scientology also makes pitches to chiropractors, podiatrists
and veterinarians.
* PUBLIC INFLUENCE. One front, the Way to Happiness
Foundation, has distributed to children in thousands of the
nation's public schools more than 3.5 million copies of a
booklet Hubbard wrote on morality. The church calls the
scheme "the largest dissemination project in Scientology
history." Applied Scholastics is the name of still another
front, which is attempting to install a Hubbard tutorial
program in public schools, primarily those populated by
minorities. The group also plans a 1,000 acre campus, where
it will train educators to teach various Hubbard methods.
The disingenuously named Citizens Commission on Human Rights
is a Scientology group at war with psychiatry, its primary
competitor. The commission typically issues reports aimed at
discrediting particular psychiatrists and the field in
general. The CCHR is also behind an all-out war against Eli
Lilly, the maker of Prozac, the nation's top-selling
antidepression drug. Despite scant evidence, the group's
members -- who call themselves "psychbusters" -- claim that
Prozac drives people to murder or suicide. Through mass
mailings, appearances on talk shows and heavy lobbying, CCHR
has hurt drug sales and helped spark dozens of lawsuits
against Lilly.
Another Scientology linked group, the Concerned
Businessmen's Association of America, holds antidrug
contests and awards $5,000 grants to schools as a way to
recruit students and curry favor with education officials.
West Virginia Senator John D. Rockefeller IV unwittingly
commended the CBAA in 1987 on the Senate floor. Last August
author Alex Haley was the keynote speaker at its annual
awards banquet in Los Angeles. Says Haley: "I didn't know
much about that group going in. I'm a Methodist." Ignorance
about Scientology can be embarrassing: two months ago,
Illinois Governor Jim Edgar, noting that Scientology's
founder "has solved the aberrations of the human mind,"
proclaimed March 13 "L. Ron Hubbard Day." He rescinded the
proclamation in late March, once he Iearned who Hubbard
really was.
* HEALTH CARE. HealthMed, a chain of clinics run by
Scientologists, promotes a grueling and excessive system of
saunas, exercise and vitamins designed by Hubbard to purify
the body. Experts denounce the regime as quackery and
potentially harmful, yet HealthMed solicits unions and
public agencies for contracts. The chain is plugged heavily
in a new book, Diet for a Poisoned Planet, by journalist
David Steinman, who concludes that scores of common foods
(among them: peanuts, bluefish, peaches and cottage cheese)
are dangerous.
Former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop labeled the book
"trash," and the Food and Drug Administration issued a paper
in October that claims Steinman distorts his facts.
"HealthMed is a gateway to Scientology, and Steinman's book
is a sorting mechanism," says physician William Jarvis, who
is head of the National Council Against Health Fraud.
Steinman, who describes Hubbard favorably as a "researcher,"
denies any ties to the church and contends, "HealthMed has
no affiliation that I know of with Scientology."
* DRUG TREATMENT. Hubbard's purification treatments are the
mainstay of Narconon, a Scientology-run chain of 33 alcohol
and drug rehabilitation centers -- some in prisons under the
name "Criminon" -- in 12 countries. Narconon, a classic
vehicle for drawing addicts into the cult, now plans to open
what it calls the world's largest treatment center, a
1,400-bed facility on an Indian reservation near Newkirk,
Okla. (pop. 2,400. At a 1989 ceremony in Newkirk, the As-
sociation for Better Living and Education presented Narconon
a check for $200,000 and a study praising its work. The
association turned out to be part of Scientology itself.
Today the town is battling to keep out the cult, which has
fought back through such tactics as sending private
detectives to snoop on the mayor and the local newspaper
publisher.
* FINANCIAL SCAMS. Three Florida Scientologists, including
Ronald Bernstein, a big contributor to the church's
international "war chest," pleaded guilty in March to using
their rare-coin dealership as a money laundry. Other
notorious activities by Scientologists include making the
shady Vancouver stock exchange even shadier (see box) and
plotting to plant operatives in the World Bank,
International Monetary Fund and Export-Import Bank of the
U.S. The alleged purpose of this scheme: to gain inside
information on which countries are going to be denied credit
so that Scientology-linked traders can make illicit profits
by taking "short" positions in those countries' currencies.
In the stock market the practice of "shorting" involves
borrowing shares of publicly traded companies in the hope
that the price will go down before the stocks must be bought
on the market and returned to the lender. The Feshbach
brothers of Palo Alto, Calif. -- Kurt, Joseph and Matthew -
have become the leading short sellers in the U.S., with more
than $500 million under management. The Feshbachs command a
staff of about 60 employees and claim to have earned better
returns than the Dow Jones industrial average for most of
the 1980s. And, they say, they owe it all to the teachings
of Scientology, whose "war chest" has received more than $1
million from the family.
The Feshbachs also embrace the church's tactics; the
brothers are the terrors of the stock exchanges. In
congressional hearings in 1989, the heads of several
companies claimed that Feshbach operatives have spread false
information to government agencies and posed in various
guises -- such as a Securities and Exchange Commission
official -- in an effort to discredit their companies and
drive the stocks down. Michael Russell, who ran a chain of
business journals, testified that a Feshbach employee called
his bankers and interfered with his loans. Sometimes the
Feshbachs send private detectives to dig up dirt on firms,
which is then shared with business reporters, brokers and
fund managers.
The Feshbachs, who wear jackets bearing the slogan "stock
busters," insist they run a clean shop. But as part of a
current probe into possible insider stock trading, federal
officials are reportedly investigating whether the Feshbachs
received confidential information from FDA employees. The
brothers seem aligned with Scientology's war on psychiatry
and medicine: many of their targets are health and bio-
technology firms. ""Legitimate short selling performs a
public service by deflating hyped stocks," says Robert
Flaherty, the editor of Equities magazine and a harsh critic
of the brothers. "But the Feshbachs have damaged scores of
good start-ups."
Occasionally a Scientologist's business antics land him in
jail. Last August a former devotee named Steven Fishman
began serving a five-year prison term in Florida. His crime:
stealing blank stock-confirmation slips from his employer, a
major brokerage house, to use as proof that he owned stock
entitling him to join dozens of successful class-action
lawsuits. Fishman made roughly $1 million this way from 1983
to 1988 and spent as much as 30% of the loot on Scientology
books and tapes.
Scientology denies any tie to the Fishman scam, a claim
strongly disputed by both Fishman and his longtime
psychiatrist, Uwe Geertz, a prominent Florida hypnotist.
Both men claim that when arrested, Fishman was ordered by
the church to kill Geertz and then do an "EOC," or end of
cycle, which is church jargon for suicide.
* BOOK PUBLISHING. Scientology mischiefmaking has even moved
to the book industry. Since 1985 at least a dozen Hubbard
books, printed by a church company, have made best-seller
lists. They range from a 5,000-page sci-fi decology (Black
Genesis, The Enemy Within, An Alien Affair) to the
40-year-old Dianetics. In 1988 the trade publication
Publishers Weekly awarded the dead author a plaque
commemorating the appearance of Dianetics on its best-seller
list for 100 consecutive weeks.
Critics pan most of Hubbard's books as unreadable, while
defectors claim that church insiders are sometimes the real
authors. Even so, Scientology has sent out armies of its
followers to buy the group's books at such major chains as
B. Dalton's and Waldenbooks to sustain the illusion of a
best-selling author. A former Dalton's manager says that
some books arrived in his store with the chain's price
stickers already on them, suggesting that copies are being
recycled. Scientology claims that sales of Hubbard books now
top 90 million worldwide. The scheme, set up to gain
converts and credibility, is coupled with a radio and TV
advertising campaign virtually un- paralleled in the book
industry.
Scientology devotes vast resources to squelching its critics.
Since 1986 Hubbard and his church have been the subject of four
unfriendly books, all released by small yet courageous
publishers. In each case, the writers have been badgered and
heavily sued. One of Hubbard's policies was that all perceived
enemies are "fair game" and subject to being "tricked, sued or
lied to or destroyed." Those who criticize the church
journalists, doctors, lawyers and even judges often find
themselves engulfed in litigation, stalked by private eyes,
framed for fictional crimes, beaten up or threatened with death.
Psychologist Margaret Singer, 69, an outspoken Scientology critic
and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, now
travels regularly under an assumed name to avoid harassment.
After the Los Angeles Times published a negative series on the
church last summer, Scientologists spent an estimated $1 million
to plaster the reporters' names on hundreds of billboards and bus
placards across the city. Above their names were quotations taken
out of context to portray the church in a positive light.
The church's most fearsome advocates are its lawyers. Hubbard
warned his followers in writing to "beware of attorneys who tell
you not to sue . . . the purpose of the suit is to harass and
discourage rather than to win." Result: Scientology has brought
hundreds of suits against its perceived enemies and today pays an
estimated $20 million annually to more than 100 lawyers.
One legal goal of Scientology is to bankrupt the opposition or
bury it under paper. The church has 71 active lawsuits against
the IRS alone. One of them, Miscavige vs. IRS, has required the
U.S. to pro- duce an index of 52,000 pages of documents. Boston
attorney Michael Flynn, who helped Scientology victims from 1979
to 1987, personally endured 14 frivolous lawsuits, all of them
dismissed. Another lawyer, Joseph Yanny, believes the church "has
so subverted justice and the judicial system that it should be
barred from seeking equity in any court." He should know: Yanny
represented the cult until 1987, when, he says, he was asked to
help church officials steal medical records to blackmail an
opposing attorney (who was allegedly beaten up instead). Since
Yanny quit representing the church, he has been the target of
death threats, burglaries, lawsuits and other harassment.
Scientology's critics contend that the U.S. needs to crack down
on the church in a major, organized way. "I want to know, Where
is our government?" demands Toby Plevin, a Los Angeles attorney
who handles victims. "It shouldn't be left to private litigators,
because God knows most of us are afraid to get involved." But
law-enforcement agents are also wary. "Every investigator is very
cautious, walking on eggshells when it comes to the church," says
a Florida police detective who has tracked the cult since 1988.
"It will take a federal effort with lots of money and manpower."
So far the agency giving Scientology the most grief is the IRS,
whose officials have implied that Hubbard's successors may be
looting the church's coffers. Since 1988, when the U.S. Supreme
Court upheld the revocation of the cult's tax-exempt status, a
massive IRS probe of church centers across the country has been
under way. An IRS agent, Marcus Owens, has estimated that
thousands of IRS employees have been involved. Another agent, in
an internal IRS memorandum, spoke hopefully of the "ultimate
disintegration" of the church. A small but helpful beacon shone
last June when a federal appeals court ruled that two cassette
tapes featuring conversations between church officials and their
lawyers are evidence of a plan to commit "future frauds" against
the IRS.
The IRS and FBI have been debriefing Scientology defectors for
the past three years, in part to gain evidence for a major
racketeering case that appears to have stalled last summer.
Federal agents complain that the Justice Department is unwilling
to spend the money needed to endure a drawn-out war with
Scientology or to fend off the cult's notorious jihads against
individual agents. "In my opinion the church has one of the most
effective intelligence operations in the U.S., rivaling even that
of the FBI," says Ted Gunderson, a former head of the FBI's Los
Angeles office.
Foreign governments have been moving even more vigorously against
the organization. In Canada the church and nine of its members
will be tried in June on charges of stealing government documents
(many of them retrieved in an enormous police raid of the
church's Toronto headquarters). Scientology proposed to give $1
million to the needy if the case was dropped, but Canada spurned
the offer. Since 1986 authorities in France, Spain and Italy have
raided more than 50 Scien- tology centers. Pending charges
against more than 100 of its overseas church members include
fraud, extortion, capital flight, coercion, illegally practicing
medicine and taking advantage of mentally incapacitated people.
In Germany last month, leading politicians accused the cult of
trying to infiltrate a major party as well as launching an
immense recruitment drive in the east.
Sometimes even the church's biggest zealots can use a little
protection. Screen star Travolta, 37, has long served as an
unofficial Scientology spokesman, even though he told a magazine
in 1983 that he was opposed to the church's management.
High-level defectors claim that Travolta has long feared that if
he defected, details of his sexual life would be made public. "He
felt pretty intimidated about this getting out and told me so,"
recalls William Franks, the church's former chairman of the
board. "There were no outright threats made, but it was implicit.
If you leave, they immediately start digging up everything."
Franks was driven out in 1981 after attempting to reform the
church.
The church's former head of security, Richard Aznaran, recalls
Scientology ringleader Miscavige repeatedly joking to staffers
about Travolta's allegedly promiscuous homosexual behavior. At
this point any threat to expose Travolta seems superfluous: last
May a male porn star collected $100,000 from a tabloid for an
account of his alleged two-year liaison with the celebrity.
Travolta refuses to comment, and in December his lawyer dismissed
questions about the subject as "bizarre." Two weeks later,
Travolta announced that he was getting married to actress Kelly
Preston, a fellow Scientologist.
Shortly after Hubbard's death the church retained Trout & Ries, a
respected, Connecticut-based firm of marketing consultants, to
help boost its public image. "We were brutally honest," says Jack
Trout. "We advised them to clean up their act, stop with the
controversy and even to stop being a church. They didn't want to
hear that." Instead, Scientology hired one of the country's
largest p.r. outfits, Hill and Knowlton, whose executives refuse
to discuss the lucrative relationship. "Hill and Knowlton must
feel that these guys are not totally off the wall," says Trout.
"Unless it's just for the money." One of Scientology's main
strategies is to keep advancing the tired argument that the
church is being "persecuted" by antireligionists. It is supported
in that position by the American Civil Liberties Union and the
National Council of Churches. But in the end, money is what
Scientology is all about. As long as the organization's opponents
and victims are successfully squelched, Scientology's managers
and lawyers will keep pocketing millions of dollars by helping it
achieve its ends.
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Mining Money in Vancouver
[Sidebar; page 54]
One source of funds for the Los Angeles-based church is the
notorious, self-regulated stock exchange in Vancouver, British
Columbia, often called the scam capital of the world. The
exchange's 2,300 penny-stock listings account for $4 billion in
annual trading. Local journalists and insiders claim the vast
majority range from total washouts to outright frauds.
Two Scientologists who operate there are Kenneth Gerbino and
Michael Baybak, 20-year church veterans from Beverly Hills who
are major donors to the cult. Gerbino, 45, is a money manager,
marketmaker and publisher of a national financial newsletter. He
has boasted in Scientology journals that he owes all his
stock-picking success to L. Ron Hubbard. That's not saying much:
Gerbino's newsletter picks since 1985 have cumulatively returned
24%, while the Dow Jones industrial average has more than
doubled. Nevertheless Gerbino's short-term gains can be
stupendous. A survey last October found Gerbino to be the only
manager who made money in the third quarter of 1990, thanks to
gold and other resource stocks. For the first quarter of 1991,
Gerbino was dead last. Baybak, 49, who runs a public relations
company staffed with Scientologists, apparently has no ethics
problem with engineering a hostile takeover of a firm he is hired
to promote.
Neither man agreed to be interviewed for this story, yet both
threatened legal action through attorneys. "What these guys do is
take over companies, hype the stock, sell their shares, and then
there's nothing left," says John Campbell, a former securities
lawyer who was a director of mining company Athena Gold until
Baybak and Gerbino took it over.
The pattern has become familiar. The pair promoted a mining
venture called Skylark Resources, whose stock traded at nearly $4
a share in 1987. The outfit soon crashed, and the stock is around
2 cents. NETI Technologies, a software company, was trumpeted in
the press as "the next Xerox" and in 1984 rose to a market value
of $120 million with Baybak's help. The company, which later
collapsed, was delisted two months ago by the Vancouver exchange.
Baybak appeared in 1989 at the helm of Wall Street Ventures, a
start-up that announced it owned 35 tons of rare Middle Eastern
postage stamps -- worth $100 million -- and was buying the
world's largest collection of southern Arabian stamps (worth $350
million). Steven C. Rockefeller Jr. of the oil family and former
hockey star Denis Potvin joined the company in top posts, but
both say they quit when they realized the stamps were virtually
worthless. "The stamps were created by sand-dune nations to
exploit collectors," says Michael Laurence, editor of Linn's
Stamp News, America's largest stamp journal. After the stock
topped $6, it began a steady descent, with Baybak unloading his
shares along the way. Today it trades at 18 cents.
Athena Gold, the current object of Baybak's and Gerbino's
attentions, was founded by entrepreneur William Jordan. He turned
to an established Vancouver broker in 1987 to help finance the
company, a 4,500-acre mining property near Reno. The broker
promised to raise more than $3 million and soon brought Baybak
and Gerbino into the deal. Jordan never got most of the money,
but the cult members ended up with a good deal of cheap stock and
options. Next they elected directors who were friendly to them
and set in motion a series of complex maneuvers to block Jordan
from voting stock he controlled and to run him out of the
company. "I've been an honest policeman all my life and I've seen
the worst kinds of crimes, and this ranks high," says former
Athena shareholder Thomas Clark, a 20-year veteran of Reno's
police force who has teamed up with Jordan to try to get the gold
mine back. "They stole this man's property."
With Baybak as chairman, the two Scientologists and their staffs
are promoting Athena, not always accurately. A letter to
shareholders with the 1990 annual report claims Placer Dome, one
of America's largest gold-mining firms, has committed at least
$25.5 million to develop the mine. That's news to Placer Dome.
"There is no pre-commitment," says Placer executive Cole
McFarland. "We're not going to spend that money unless survey
results justify the expenditure."
Baybak's firm represented Western Resource Technologies, a
Houston oil-and-gas company, but got the boot in October. Laughs
Steven McGuire, president of Western Resource: "His is a p.r.
firm in need of a p.r. firm." But McGuire cannot laugh too
freely. Baybak and other Scientologists, including the estate of
L. Ron Hubbard, still control huge blocks of his company's stock.
[ Caption: ATHENA GOLD'S WILLIAM JORDAN. Cult members got cheap
stock, then ran him out of the company ]
-----------------------------------------------------------------
[The following part was only in the international version of
TIME]
Pushing Beyond the U.S.:
Scientology makes its presence felt in Europe and Canada
By Richard Behar
In the 1960s and '70s, L. Ron Hubbard used to periodically fill a
converted ferry ship with adoring acolytes and sail off to spread
the word. One by one, countries -- Britain, Greece, Spain,
Portugal, and Venezuela -- closed their ports, usually because of
a public outcry. At one point, a court in Australia revoked the
church's status as a religion; at another, a French court
convicted Hubbard of fraud in absentia.
Today Hubbard's minions continue to wreak global havoc, costing
governments considerable effort and money to try to stop them. In
Italy a two-year trial of 76 Scientologists, among them the
former leader of the church's Italian operations, is nearing
completion in Milan. Two weeks ago, prosecutor Pietro Forno
requested jail terms for all the defendants who are accused of
extortion, cheating "mentally incapacitated" people and evading
as much as $50 million in taxes. "All of the trial's victims went
to Scientology in search of a cure or a better life," said Forno,
"But the Scientologists were amateur psychiatrists who practiced
psychological terrorism". For some victims, he added, "the
intervention of the Scientologists was devastating."
The Milan case was triggered by parents complaining to officials
that Scientology had a financial stranglehold on their children,
who had joined the church or entered Narconon, its drug
rehabilitation unit. In 1986 Treasury and paramilitary police
conducted raids in 20 cities across Italy shutting down 27
Scientology centers and seizing 100,000 documents. To defend
itself in the trial, the cult has retained some of Italy's most
famous lawyers.
In Canada, Scientology is using a legal team that includes
Clayton Ruby, one of the country's foremost civil rights lawyers,
to defend itself and nine of its members who are to stand trial
in June in Toronto. The charges: stealing documents concerning
Scientology from the Ministry of the Attorney General, the
Canadian Mental Health Association, two police forces and other
institutions. The case stems from a 1983 surprise raid of the
church's Toronto headquarters by more than 100 policemen, who had
arrived in three chartered buses; some 2 million pages of
documents were seized over a two-day period. Ruby, whose legal
maneuvers delayed the case for years, is trying to get it
dismissed because of "unreasonable delay."
Spain's Justice Ministry has twice denied Scientology status as a
religion, but that has not slowed the church' s expansion. In
1989 the Ministry of Health issued a report calling the sect
"totalitarian" and "pure and simple charlatanism." The year
before, the authorities had raided 26 church centers, with the
result that 11 Scientologists stand accused of falsification of
records, coercion and capital flight. "The real god of this
organization is money," said Madrid examining magistrate Jose
Maria Vasquez Honrnbia, before referring the case to a higher
court because it was too complex for his jurisdiction. Eugene
Ingram, a private investigator working for Scientology claims he
helped get Honrubia removed from the case for leaking nonpublic
documents to the press.
In France it took a death to spur the government into action: 16
Scientologists were indicted last year for fraud and "complicity
in the practice of illegal medicine" following the suicide of an
industrial designer in Lyon. In the victim's house investigators
found medication allegeally provided to him by the church without
doctor's prescription. Among those charged in the case is the
president of Scientology's French operations and the head of the
Paris-based Celebrity Centre, which caters to famous members.
Outside the U.S., Scientology appears to be most active in
Germany where the attorney general of the state of Bavaria has
branded the cult "distinctly totalitarian" and aimed at "the
economic exploitation of customers who are in bondage to it." In
1984 nearly 100 police raided the church in Munich. At the time,
city officials were reportedly collaborating with U.S. tax
inspectors and trying to prove that the cult was actually a
profitmaking business. More recently, Hamburg state authorities
moved to rescind Scientology's tax reduced status, while members
of parliament are seeking criminal proceedings. In another
domain, church linked management consulting firms have
infiltrated small and middle sized companies throughout Germany,
according to an expose published this month in the newsmagazine
DER SPIEGEL; the consultants, who typically hide their ties to
Scientology, indoctrinate employees by using Hubbard's methods. A
German anticult organization estimates that Scientology has at
least 60 fronts or splinter groups operating in the country.
German politics appears as well to attract Hubbard's zealots. In
March the Free Democrats, partners in Chancellor Helmut Kohl' s
ruling coalition in Bonn, accused Scientology of trying to
infiltrate their Hamburg branch. Meanwhile the main opposition
party, the Social Democrats, has been warning its members in the
formerly com- munist eastern part of the country against
exploitation by the church. Even federal officials are being used
by the church: one Scientology front group sent copies of a
Hubbard written pamphlet on moral values to members of the
Bundestag. The Office of Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher
unwittingly endorsed the Scientologists' message: "Indeed, the
world would be a more beautiful place if the principles
formulated in the pamphlet, a life characterized by reason and
responsibility, would find wider attention."
[end of Internationl Edition-only section]
-----------------------------------------------------------------
The Scientologists and Me
[Sidebar, page 57]
Strange things seem to happen to people who write about
Scientology. Journalist Paulette Cooper wrote a critical book on
the cult in 1971. This led to a Scientology plot (called
Operation Freak-Out) whose goal, according to church documents,
was "to get P.C. incarcerated in a mental institution or jail."
It almost worked: by impersonating Cooper, Scientologists got her
indicted in 1973 for threatening to bomb the church. Cooper, who
also endured 19 lawsuits by the church, was finally exonerated in
1977 after FBI raids on the church offices in Los Angeles and
Washington uncovered documents from the bomb scheme. No
Scientologists were ever tried in the matter.
For the TIME story, at least 10 attorneys and six private
detectives were unleashed by Scientology and its followers in an
effort to threaten, harass and discredit me. Last Oct. 12, not
long after I began this assignment, I planned to lunch with
Eugene Ingram, the church's leading private eye and a former cop.
Ingram, who was tossed off the Los Angeles police force In 1981
for alleged ties to prostitutes and drug dealers, had told me
that he might be able to arrange a meeting with church boss David
Miscavige. Just hours before the lunch, the church's "national
trial counsel," Earle Cooley, called to inform me that I would be
eating alone.
Alone, perhaps, but not forgotten. By day's end, I later learned,
a copy of my personal credit report -- with detailed information
about my bank accounts, home mortgage, credit-card payments, home
address and Social Security number -- had been illegally
retrieved from a national credit bureau called Trans Union. The
sham company that received it, "Educational Funding Services" of
Los Angeles, gave as its address a mail drop a few blocks from
Scientology's headquarters. The owner of the mail drop is a
private eye named Fred Wolfson, who admits that an Ingram
associate retained him to retrieve credit reports on several
individuals. Wolfson says he was told that Scientology's
attorneys "had judgments against these people and were trying to
collect on them." He says now, "These are vicious people. These
are vipers." Ingram, through a lawyer, denies any involvement in
the scam.
During the past five months, private investigators have been
contacting acquaintances of mine, ranging from neighbors to a
former colleague, to inquire about subjects such as my health
(like my credit rating, it's excellent) and whether I've ever had
trouble with the IRS (unlike Scientology, I haven't). One
neighbor was greeted at dawn outside my Manhattan apartment
building by two men who wanted to know whether I lived there. I
finally called Cooley to demand that Scientology stop the
nonsense. He promised to look into it.
After that, however, an attorney subpoenaed me, while another
falsely suggested that I might own shares in a company I was
reporting about that had been taken over by Scientologists (he
also threatened to contact the Securities and Exchange
Commission). A close friend in Los Angeles received a disturbing
telephone call from a Scientology staff member seeking data about
me -- an indication that the cult may have illegally obtained my
personal phone records. Two detectives contacted me, posing as a
friend and a relative of a so-called cult victim, to elicit
negative statements from me about Scientology. Some of my
conversations with them were taped, transcribed and presented by
the church in affidavits to TIME's lawyers as "proof" of my bias
against Scientology.
Among the comments I made to one of the detectives, who
represented himself as "Harry Baxter," a friend of the victim's
family, was that "the church trains people to lie." Baxter and
his colleagues are hardly in a position to dispute that
observation. His real name is Barry Silvers, and he is a former
investigator for the Justice Department's Organized Crime Strike
Force. (RB)
Ruined lives. Lost fortunes. Federal crimes. Scientology poses as
a religion but really is a ruthless global scam -- and aiming for
the mainstream
by Richard Behar
By all appearances, Noah Lottick of Kingston, Pa., had been a
normal, happy 24-year-old who was looking for his place in the
sun. On the day last June when his parents drove to New York City
to obtain his body, they were nearly catatonic with grief.
This young Russian-studies scholar had jumped from a 10th-floor
window of the Milford Plaza Hotel and bounced off the hood of a
stretch limousine. When the police arrived, his fingers were
still clutching $171 in cash, virtually the only money he hadn't
turned over to the Church of Scientology, the self-help
"philosophy" group he had discovered just seven months earlier.
His death inspired his father Edward, a physician, to start his
own investigation of the church. "We thought Scientology was
something like Dale Carnegie," Lottick says. "I now believe it's
a school for psychopaths." Their so-called therapies are
manipulations. They take the best and the brightest people and
destroy them." The Lotticks want to sue the church for
contributing to their son's death, but the prospect has them
frightened. For nearly 40 years, the big business of Scientology
has shielded itself exquisitely behind the First Amendment as
well as a battery of high-priced criminal lawyers and shady
private detectives.
The Church of Scientology, started by science-fiction writer L.
Ron Hubbard to "clear" people of unhappiness, portrays itself as
a religion. In reality the church is a hugely profitable global
racket that survives by intimidating members and critics in a
Mafia-like manner. At times during the past decade, prosecutions
against Scientology seemed to be curbing its menace. Eleven top
Scientologists, including Hubbard's wife, were sent to prison in
the early 1980s for infiltrating, burglarizing and wiretapping
more than 100 private and government agencies in attempts to
block their investigations. In recent years hundreds of longtime
Scientology adherents -- many charging that they were mentally of
physically abused -- have quit the church and criticized it at
their own risk. Some have sued the church and won; others have
settled for amounts in excess of $500,000. In various cases
judges have labeled the church "schizophrenic and paranoid" and
"corrupt, sinister and dangerous."
Yet the outrage and litigation have failed to squelch
Scientology. The group, which boasts 700 centers in 65 countries,
threatens to become more insidious and pervasive than ever.
Scientology is trying to go mainstream, a strategy that has
sparked a renewed law- enforcement campaign against the church.
Many of the group's followers have been accused of committing
financial scams, while the church is busy attracting the unwary
through a wide array of front groups in such businesses as
publishing, consulting, health care and even remedial education.
In Hollywood, Scientology has assembled a star-studded roster of
followers by aggressively recruiting and regally pampering them
at the church's "Celebrity Centers," a chain of clubhouses that
offer expensive counseling and career guidance. Adherents include
screen idols Tom Cruise and John Travolta, actresses Kirstie
Alley, Mimi Rogers, and Anne Archer, Palm Springs mayor and
performer Sonny Bono, jazzman Chick Corea and even Nancy
Cartwright, the voice of cartoon star Bart Simpson. Rank-and-file
members, however, are dealt a less glamorous Scientology.
According to the Cult Awareness Network, whose 23 chapters
monitor more than 200 "mind control" cults, no group prompts more
telephone pleas for help than does Scientology. Says Cynthia
Kisser, the network's Chicago-based executive director:
"Scientology is quite likely the most ruthless, the most
classically terroristic, the most litigious and the most
lucrative cult the country has ever seen. No cult extracts more
money from its members." Agrees Vicki Aznaran, who was one of
Scientology's six key leaders until she bolted from the church in
1987: "This is a criminal organization, day in and day out. It
makes Jim and Tammy [Bakker] look like kindergarten." To explore
Scientology's reach, TIME conducted more than 150 interviews and
reviewed hundreds of court records and internal Scientology
documents. Church officials refused to be interviewed. The
investigation paints a picture of a depraved yet thriving
enterprise. Most cults fail to outlast their founder, but
Scientology has prospered since Hubbard's death in 1986. In a
court filing, one of the cult's many entities -- the Church of
Spiritual Technology -- listed $503 million in income just for
1987. High-level defectors say the parent organization has
squirreled away an estimated $400 million in bank accounts in
Liechtenstein, Switzerland and Cyprus. Scientology probably has
about 50,000 active members, far fewer than the 8 million the
group claims. But in one sense, that inflated figure rings true:
millions of people have been affected in one way or another by
Hubbard's bizarre creation.
Scientology is now run by David Miscavige, 31, a high school
dropout and second-generation church member. Defectors describe
him as cunning, ruthless and so paranoid about perceived enemies
that he kept plastic wrap over his glass of water. His obsession
is to obtain credibility for Scientology in the 1990s. Among
other tactics, the group:
* Retains public relation powerhouse Hill and Knowlton to help
shed the church's fringe-group image.
* Joined such household names as Sony and Pepsi as a main
sponsor of Ted Turner's Goodwill Games.
* Buys massive quantities of its own books from retail stores
to propel the titles onto best-seller lists.
* Runs full-page ads in such publications as Newsweek and
Business Week that call Scientology a "philosophy," along
with a plethora of TV ads touting the group's books.
* Recruits wealthy and respectable professionals through a web
of consulting groups that typically hide their ties to
Scientology.
The founder of this enterprise was part storyteller, part
flimflam man. Born In Nebraska in 1911, Hubbard served in the
Navy during World War II and soon afterward complained to the
Veterans Administration about his "suicidal inclinations" and his
"seriously affected" mind. Nevertheless, Hubbard was a moderately
successful writer of pulp science fiction. Years later, church
brochures described him falsely as an "extensively decorated"
World War II hero who was crippled and blinded in action, twice
pronounced dead and miraculously cured through Scientology.
Hubbard's "doctorate" from "Sequoia University" was a fake
mall-order degree. In a I984 case in which the church sued a
Hubbard biographical researcher, a California judge concluded
that its founder was "a pathological liar."
Hubbard wrote one of Scientology's sacred texts, Dianetics: The
Modern Science of Mental Health, in 1950. In it he introduced a
crude psychotherapeutic technique he called "auditing." He also
created a simplified lie detector (called an "E-meter") that was
designed to measure electrical changes In the skin while subjects
discussed intimate details of their past. Hubbard argued that
unhappiness sprang from mental aberrations (or "engrams") caused
by early traumas. Counseling sessions with the E-meter, he
claimed, could knock out the engrams, cure blindness and even
improve a person's intelligence and appearance.
Hubbard kept adding steps, each more costly, for his followers to
climb. In the 1960s the guru decreed that humans are made of
clusters of spirits (or "thetans") who were banished to earth
some 75 million years ago by a cruel galactic ruler named Xenu.
Naturally, those thetans had to be audited.
An Internal Revenue Service ruling in 1967 stripped Scientology's
mother church of its tax-exempt status. A federal court ruled in
1971 that Hubbard's medical claims were bogus and that E-meter
auditing could no longer be called a scientific treatment.
Hubbard responded by going fully religious, seeking First
Amendment protection for Scien- tology's strange rites. His
counselors started sporting clerical collars. Chapels were built,
franchises became "missions," fees became "fixed donations," and
Hubbard's comic-book cosmology became "sacred scriptures.'
During the early 1970s, the IRS conducted its own auditing
sessions and proved that Hubbard was skimming millions of dollars
from the church, laundering the money through dummy corporations
in Panama and stashing it in Swiss bank accounts. Moreover,
church members stole IRS documents, filed false tax returns and
harassed the agency's employees. By late 1985, with high-level
defectors accusing Hubbard of having stolen as much as S200
million from the church, the IRS was seeking an indictment of
Hubbard for tax fraud. Scientology members "worked day and night"
shredding documents the IRS sought, according to defector
Aznaran, who took part in the scheme. Hubbard, who had been in
hiding for five years, died before the criminal case could be
prosecuted.
Today the church invents costly new services with all the zeal of
its founder. Scientology doctrine warns that even adherents who
are "cleared" of engrams face grave spiritual dangers unless they
are pushed to higher and more expensive levels. According to the
church's latest price list, recruits -- "raw meat," as Hubbard
called them -- take auditing sessions that cost as much as $1,000
an hour, or $12,500 for a 12 1/2-hour "intensive."
Psychiatrists say these sessions can produce a drugged-like,
mind-controlled euphoria that keeps customers coming back for
more. To pay their fees, newcomers can earn commissions by
recruiting new mem- bers, become auditors themselves (Miscavige
did so at age 12), or join the church staff and receive free
counseling in exchange for what their written contracts describe
as a "billion years" of labor. "Make sure that lots of bodies
move through the shop," implored Hubbard in one of his bulletins
to officials. "Make money. Make more money. Make others produce
so as to make money . . . However you get them in or why, just do
it."
Harriet Baker learned the hard way about Scientology's business
of selling religion. When Baker, 73, lost her husband to cancer,
a Scientologist turned up at her Los Angeles home peddling a
$1,300 auditing package to cure her grief. Some $15,000 later,
the Scientologists discovered that her house was debt free. They
arranged a $45,000 mortgage, which they pressured her to tap for
more auditing until Baker's children helped their mother snap out
of her daze. Last June, Baker demanded a $27,000 refund for
unused services, prompting two cult members to show up at her
door unannounced with an E-meter to interrogate her. Baker never
got the money and, financially strapped, was forced to sell her
house in September.
Before Noah Lottick killed himself, he had paid more than $5,000
for church counseling. His behavior had also become strange. He
once remarked to his parents that his Scientology mentors could
actually read minds. When his father suffered a major heart
attack, Noah insisted that it was purely psychosomatic. Five days
before he jumped, Noah burst into his parents' home and demanded
to know why they were spreading "false rumors" about him -- a
delusion that finally prompted his father to call a psychiatrist.
It was too late. "From Noah's friends at Dianetics" read the card
that accompanied a bouquet of flowers at Lottick's funeral. Yet
no Scientology staff members bothered to show up. A week earlier,
local church officials had given Lottick's parents a red-carpet
tour of their center. A cult leader told Noah's parents that
their son had been at the church just hours before he disappeared
-- but the church denied this story as soon as the body was
identified. True to form, the cult even haggled with the Lotticks
over $3,000 their son had paid for services he never used,
insisting that Noah had intended it as a "donation."
The church has invented hundreds of goods and services for which
members are urged to give "donations." Are you having trouble
"moving swiftly up the Bridge" -- that is, advancing up the
stepladder of en- lightenment? Then you can have your case
reviewed for a mere $1,250 "donation." Want to know "why a thetan
hangs on to the physical universe?" Try 52 of Hubbard's
tape-recorded speeches from 1952, titled "Ron's Philadelphia
Doctorate Course Lectures," for $2,525. Next: nine other series
of the same sort. For the collector, gold-and-leather-bound
editions of 22 of Hubbard's books (and bookends) on subjects
ranging from Scientology ethics to radiation can be had for just
$1,900.
To gain influence and lure richer, more sophisticated followers,
Scientology has lately resorted to a wide array of front groups
and financial scams. Among them:
* CONSULTING. Sterling Management Systems, formed in 1983, has
been ranked in recent years by Inc. magazine as one of
America's fastest-growing private companies (estimated 1988
revenues: $20 mil- lion). Sterling regularly mails a free
newsletter to more than 300,000 health-care professionals,
mostly dentists, promising to increase their incomes
dramatically. The firm offers seminars and courses that
typically cost $10,OOO. But Sterling's true aim is to hook
customers for Scientology. "The church has a rotten product,
so they package it as something else," says Peter
Georgiades, a Pittsburgh attorney who represents Sterling
victims. "It's a kind of bait and switch." Sterling's
founder, dentist Gregory Hughes is now under investigation
by California's Board of Dental Examiners for incompetence.
Nine lawsuits are pending against him for malpractice (seven
others have been settled), mostly for orthodontic work on
children.
Many dentists who have unwittingly been drawn into the cult
are filing or threatening lawsuits as well. Dentist Robert
Geary of Medina, Ohio, who entered a Sterling seminar in
1988, endured "the most extreme high-pressure sales tactics
I have ever faced." Sterling officials told Geary, 45, that
their firm was not linked to Scientology, he says. but Geary
claims they eventually convinced him that he and his wife
Dorothy had personal problems that required auditing. Over
five months, the Gearys say, they spent $130,000 for
services, plus $50,000 for "gold-embossed, investment-grade"
books signed by Hubbard. Geary contends that Scientologists
not only called his bank to increase his credit card limit
but also forged his signature on a $20,000 loan application.
"It was insane," he recalls. "I couldn't even get an
accounting from them of what I was paying for." At one
point, the Gearys claim, Scientologists held Dorothy hostage
for two weeks in a mountain cabin, after which she was
hospitalized for a nervous breakdown.
Last October, Sterling broke some bad news to another
dentist, Glover Rowe of Gadsden, Ala., and his wife Dee.
Tests showed that unless they signed up for auditing
Glover's practice would fail, and Dee would someday abuse
their child. The next month the Rowes flew to Glendale,
Calif., where they shuttled daily from a local hotel to a
Dianetics center. "We thought they were brilliant people
because they seemed to know so much about us," recalls Dee.
"Then we realized our hotel room must have been bugged."
After bolting from the center, $23,000 poorer, the Rowes
say, they were chased repeatedly by Scientologists on foot
and in cars. Dentists aren't the only once at risk.
Scientology also makes pitches to chiropractors, podiatrists
and veterinarians.
* PUBLIC INFLUENCE. One front, the Way to Happiness
Foundation, has distributed to children in thousands of the
nation's public schools more than 3.5 million copies of a
booklet Hubbard wrote on morality. The church calls the
scheme "the largest dissemination project in Scientology
history." Applied Scholastics is the name of still another
front, which is attempting to install a Hubbard tutorial
program in public schools, primarily those populated by
minorities. The group also plans a 1,000 acre campus, where
it will train educators to teach various Hubbard methods.
The disingenuously named Citizens Commission on Human Rights
is a Scientology group at war with psychiatry, its primary
competitor. The commission typically issues reports aimed at
discrediting particular psychiatrists and the field in
general. The CCHR is also behind an all-out war against Eli
Lilly, the maker of Prozac, the nation's top-selling
antidepression drug. Despite scant evidence, the group's
members -- who call themselves "psychbusters" -- claim that
Prozac drives people to murder or suicide. Through mass
mailings, appearances on talk shows and heavy lobbying, CCHR
has hurt drug sales and helped spark dozens of lawsuits
against Lilly.
Another Scientology linked group, the Concerned
Businessmen's Association of America, holds antidrug
contests and awards $5,000 grants to schools as a way to
recruit students and curry favor with education officials.
West Virginia Senator John D. Rockefeller IV unwittingly
commended the CBAA in 1987 on the Senate floor. Last August
author Alex Haley was the keynote speaker at its annual
awards banquet in Los Angeles. Says Haley: "I didn't know
much about that group going in. I'm a Methodist." Ignorance
about Scientology can be embarrassing: two months ago,
Illinois Governor Jim Edgar, noting that Scientology's
founder "has solved the aberrations of the human mind,"
proclaimed March 13 "L. Ron Hubbard Day." He rescinded the
proclamation in late March, once he Iearned who Hubbard
really was.
* HEALTH CARE. HealthMed, a chain of clinics run by
Scientologists, promotes a grueling and excessive system of
saunas, exercise and vitamins designed by Hubbard to purify
the body. Experts denounce the regime as quackery and
potentially harmful, yet HealthMed solicits unions and
public agencies for contracts. The chain is plugged heavily
in a new book, Diet for a Poisoned Planet, by journalist
David Steinman, who concludes that scores of common foods
(among them: peanuts, bluefish, peaches and cottage cheese)
are dangerous.
Former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop labeled the book
"trash," and the Food and Drug Administration issued a paper
in October that claims Steinman distorts his facts.
"HealthMed is a gateway to Scientology, and Steinman's book
is a sorting mechanism," says physician William Jarvis, who
is head of the National Council Against Health Fraud.
Steinman, who describes Hubbard favorably as a "researcher,"
denies any ties to the church and contends, "HealthMed has
no affiliation that I know of with Scientology."
* DRUG TREATMENT. Hubbard's purification treatments are the
mainstay of Narconon, a Scientology-run chain of 33 alcohol
and drug rehabilitation centers -- some in prisons under the
name "Criminon" -- in 12 countries. Narconon, a classic
vehicle for drawing addicts into the cult, now plans to open
what it calls the world's largest treatment center, a
1,400-bed facility on an Indian reservation near Newkirk,
Okla. (pop. 2,400. At a 1989 ceremony in Newkirk, the As-
sociation for Better Living and Education presented Narconon
a check for $200,000 and a study praising its work. The
association turned out to be part of Scientology itself.
Today the town is battling to keep out the cult, which has
fought back through such tactics as sending private
detectives to snoop on the mayor and the local newspaper
publisher.
* FINANCIAL SCAMS. Three Florida Scientologists, including
Ronald Bernstein, a big contributor to the church's
international "war chest," pleaded guilty in March to using
their rare-coin dealership as a money laundry. Other
notorious activities by Scientologists include making the
shady Vancouver stock exchange even shadier (see box) and
plotting to plant operatives in the World Bank,
International Monetary Fund and Export-Import Bank of the
U.S. The alleged purpose of this scheme: to gain inside
information on which countries are going to be denied credit
so that Scientology-linked traders can make illicit profits
by taking "short" positions in those countries' currencies.
In the stock market the practice of "shorting" involves
borrowing shares of publicly traded companies in the hope
that the price will go down before the stocks must be bought
on the market and returned to the lender. The Feshbach
brothers of Palo Alto, Calif. -- Kurt, Joseph and Matthew -
have become the leading short sellers in the U.S., with more
than $500 million under management. The Feshbachs command a
staff of about 60 employees and claim to have earned better
returns than the Dow Jones industrial average for most of
the 1980s. And, they say, they owe it all to the teachings
of Scientology, whose "war chest" has received more than $1
million from the family.
The Feshbachs also embrace the church's tactics; the
brothers are the terrors of the stock exchanges. In
congressional hearings in 1989, the heads of several
companies claimed that Feshbach operatives have spread false
information to government agencies and posed in various
guises -- such as a Securities and Exchange Commission
official -- in an effort to discredit their companies and
drive the stocks down. Michael Russell, who ran a chain of
business journals, testified that a Feshbach employee called
his bankers and interfered with his loans. Sometimes the
Feshbachs send private detectives to dig up dirt on firms,
which is then shared with business reporters, brokers and
fund managers.
The Feshbachs, who wear jackets bearing the slogan "stock
busters," insist they run a clean shop. But as part of a
current probe into possible insider stock trading, federal
officials are reportedly investigating whether the Feshbachs
received confidential information from FDA employees. The
brothers seem aligned with Scientology's war on psychiatry
and medicine: many of their targets are health and bio-
technology firms. ""Legitimate short selling performs a
public service by deflating hyped stocks," says Robert
Flaherty, the editor of Equities magazine and a harsh critic
of the brothers. "But the Feshbachs have damaged scores of
good start-ups."
Occasionally a Scientologist's business antics land him in
jail. Last August a former devotee named Steven Fishman
began serving a five-year prison term in Florida. His crime:
stealing blank stock-confirmation slips from his employer, a
major brokerage house, to use as proof that he owned stock
entitling him to join dozens of successful class-action
lawsuits. Fishman made roughly $1 million this way from 1983
to 1988 and spent as much as 30% of the loot on Scientology
books and tapes.
Scientology denies any tie to the Fishman scam, a claim
strongly disputed by both Fishman and his longtime
psychiatrist, Uwe Geertz, a prominent Florida hypnotist.
Both men claim that when arrested, Fishman was ordered by
the church to kill Geertz and then do an "EOC," or end of
cycle, which is church jargon for suicide.
* BOOK PUBLISHING. Scientology mischiefmaking has even moved
to the book industry. Since 1985 at least a dozen Hubbard
books, printed by a church company, have made best-seller
lists. They range from a 5,000-page sci-fi decology (Black
Genesis, The Enemy Within, An Alien Affair) to the
40-year-old Dianetics. In 1988 the trade publication
Publishers Weekly awarded the dead author a plaque
commemorating the appearance of Dianetics on its best-seller
list for 100 consecutive weeks.
Critics pan most of Hubbard's books as unreadable, while
defectors claim that church insiders are sometimes the real
authors. Even so, Scientology has sent out armies of its
followers to buy the group's books at such major chains as
B. Dalton's and Waldenbooks to sustain the illusion of a
best-selling author. A former Dalton's manager says that
some books arrived in his store with the chain's price
stickers already on them, suggesting that copies are being
recycled. Scientology claims that sales of Hubbard books now
top 90 million worldwide. The scheme, set up to gain
converts and credibility, is coupled with a radio and TV
advertising campaign virtually un- paralleled in the book
industry.
Scientology devotes vast resources to squelching its critics.
Since 1986 Hubbard and his church have been the subject of four
unfriendly books, all released by small yet courageous
publishers. In each case, the writers have been badgered and
heavily sued. One of Hubbard's policies was that all perceived
enemies are "fair game" and subject to being "tricked, sued or
lied to or destroyed." Those who criticize the church
journalists, doctors, lawyers and even judges often find
themselves engulfed in litigation, stalked by private eyes,
framed for fictional crimes, beaten up or threatened with death.
Psychologist Margaret Singer, 69, an outspoken Scientology critic
and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, now
travels regularly under an assumed name to avoid harassment.
After the Los Angeles Times published a negative series on the
church last summer, Scientologists spent an estimated $1 million
to plaster the reporters' names on hundreds of billboards and bus
placards across the city. Above their names were quotations taken
out of context to portray the church in a positive light.
The church's most fearsome advocates are its lawyers. Hubbard
warned his followers in writing to "beware of attorneys who tell
you not to sue . . . the purpose of the suit is to harass and
discourage rather than to win." Result: Scientology has brought
hundreds of suits against its perceived enemies and today pays an
estimated $20 million annually to more than 100 lawyers.
One legal goal of Scientology is to bankrupt the opposition or
bury it under paper. The church has 71 active lawsuits against
the IRS alone. One of them, Miscavige vs. IRS, has required the
U.S. to pro- duce an index of 52,000 pages of documents. Boston
attorney Michael Flynn, who helped Scientology victims from 1979
to 1987, personally endured 14 frivolous lawsuits, all of them
dismissed. Another lawyer, Joseph Yanny, believes the church "has
so subverted justice and the judicial system that it should be
barred from seeking equity in any court." He should know: Yanny
represented the cult until 1987, when, he says, he was asked to
help church officials steal medical records to blackmail an
opposing attorney (who was allegedly beaten up instead). Since
Yanny quit representing the church, he has been the target of
death threats, burglaries, lawsuits and other harassment.
Scientology's critics contend that the U.S. needs to crack down
on the church in a major, organized way. "I want to know, Where
is our government?" demands Toby Plevin, a Los Angeles attorney
who handles victims. "It shouldn't be left to private litigators,
because God knows most of us are afraid to get involved." But
law-enforcement agents are also wary. "Every investigator is very
cautious, walking on eggshells when it comes to the church," says
a Florida police detective who has tracked the cult since 1988.
"It will take a federal effort with lots of money and manpower."
So far the agency giving Scientology the most grief is the IRS,
whose officials have implied that Hubbard's successors may be
looting the church's coffers. Since 1988, when the U.S. Supreme
Court upheld the revocation of the cult's tax-exempt status, a
massive IRS probe of church centers across the country has been
under way. An IRS agent, Marcus Owens, has estimated that
thousands of IRS employees have been involved. Another agent, in
an internal IRS memorandum, spoke hopefully of the "ultimate
disintegration" of the church. A small but helpful beacon shone
last June when a federal appeals court ruled that two cassette
tapes featuring conversations between church officials and their
lawyers are evidence of a plan to commit "future frauds" against
the IRS.
The IRS and FBI have been debriefing Scientology defectors for
the past three years, in part to gain evidence for a major
racketeering case that appears to have stalled last summer.
Federal agents complain that the Justice Department is unwilling
to spend the money needed to endure a drawn-out war with
Scientology or to fend off the cult's notorious jihads against
individual agents. "In my opinion the church has one of the most
effective intelligence operations in the U.S., rivaling even that
of the FBI," says Ted Gunderson, a former head of the FBI's Los
Angeles office.
Foreign governments have been moving even more vigorously against
the organization. In Canada the church and nine of its members
will be tried in June on charges of stealing government documents
(many of them retrieved in an enormous police raid of the
church's Toronto headquarters). Scientology proposed to give $1
million to the needy if the case was dropped, but Canada spurned
the offer. Since 1986 authorities in France, Spain and Italy have
raided more than 50 Scien- tology centers. Pending charges
against more than 100 of its overseas church members include
fraud, extortion, capital flight, coercion, illegally practicing
medicine and taking advantage of mentally incapacitated people.
In Germany last month, leading politicians accused the cult of
trying to infiltrate a major party as well as launching an
immense recruitment drive in the east.
Sometimes even the church's biggest zealots can use a little
protection. Screen star Travolta, 37, has long served as an
unofficial Scientology spokesman, even though he told a magazine
in 1983 that he was opposed to the church's management.
High-level defectors claim that Travolta has long feared that if
he defected, details of his sexual life would be made public. "He
felt pretty intimidated about this getting out and told me so,"
recalls William Franks, the church's former chairman of the
board. "There were no outright threats made, but it was implicit.
If you leave, they immediately start digging up everything."
Franks was driven out in 1981 after attempting to reform the
church.
The church's former head of security, Richard Aznaran, recalls
Scientology ringleader Miscavige repeatedly joking to staffers
about Travolta's allegedly promiscuous homosexual behavior. At
this point any threat to expose Travolta seems superfluous: last
May a male porn star collected $100,000 from a tabloid for an
account of his alleged two-year liaison with the celebrity.
Travolta refuses to comment, and in December his lawyer dismissed
questions about the subject as "bizarre." Two weeks later,
Travolta announced that he was getting married to actress Kelly
Preston, a fellow Scientologist.
Shortly after Hubbard's death the church retained Trout & Ries, a
respected, Connecticut-based firm of marketing consultants, to
help boost its public image. "We were brutally honest," says Jack
Trout. "We advised them to clean up their act, stop with the
controversy and even to stop being a church. They didn't want to
hear that." Instead, Scientology hired one of the country's
largest p.r. outfits, Hill and Knowlton, whose executives refuse
to discuss the lucrative relationship. "Hill and Knowlton must
feel that these guys are not totally off the wall," says Trout.
"Unless it's just for the money." One of Scientology's main
strategies is to keep advancing the tired argument that the
church is being "persecuted" by antireligionists. It is supported
in that position by the American Civil Liberties Union and the
National Council of Churches. But in the end, money is what
Scientology is all about. As long as the organization's opponents
and victims are successfully squelched, Scientology's managers
and lawyers will keep pocketing millions of dollars by helping it
achieve its ends.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Mining Money in Vancouver
[Sidebar; page 54]
One source of funds for the Los Angeles-based church is the
notorious, self-regulated stock exchange in Vancouver, British
Columbia, often called the scam capital of the world. The
exchange's 2,300 penny-stock listings account for $4 billion in
annual trading. Local journalists and insiders claim the vast
majority range from total washouts to outright frauds.
Two Scientologists who operate there are Kenneth Gerbino and
Michael Baybak, 20-year church veterans from Beverly Hills who
are major donors to the cult. Gerbino, 45, is a money manager,
marketmaker and publisher of a national financial newsletter. He
has boasted in Scientology journals that he owes all his
stock-picking success to L. Ron Hubbard. That's not saying much:
Gerbino's newsletter picks since 1985 have cumulatively returned
24%, while the Dow Jones industrial average has more than
doubled. Nevertheless Gerbino's short-term gains can be
stupendous. A survey last October found Gerbino to be the only
manager who made money in the third quarter of 1990, thanks to
gold and other resource stocks. For the first quarter of 1991,
Gerbino was dead last. Baybak, 49, who runs a public relations
company staffed with Scientologists, apparently has no ethics
problem with engineering a hostile takeover of a firm he is hired
to promote.
Neither man agreed to be interviewed for this story, yet both
threatened legal action through attorneys. "What these guys do is
take over companies, hype the stock, sell their shares, and then
there's nothing left," says John Campbell, a former securities
lawyer who was a director of mining company Athena Gold until
Baybak and Gerbino took it over.
The pattern has become familiar. The pair promoted a mining
venture called Skylark Resources, whose stock traded at nearly $4
a share in 1987. The outfit soon crashed, and the stock is around
2 cents. NETI Technologies, a software company, was trumpeted in
the press as "the next Xerox" and in 1984 rose to a market value
of $120 million with Baybak's help. The company, which later
collapsed, was delisted two months ago by the Vancouver exchange.
Baybak appeared in 1989 at the helm of Wall Street Ventures, a
start-up that announced it owned 35 tons of rare Middle Eastern
postage stamps -- worth $100 million -- and was buying the
world's largest collection of southern Arabian stamps (worth $350
million). Steven C. Rockefeller Jr. of the oil family and former
hockey star Denis Potvin joined the company in top posts, but
both say they quit when they realized the stamps were virtually
worthless. "The stamps were created by sand-dune nations to
exploit collectors," says Michael Laurence, editor of Linn's
Stamp News, America's largest stamp journal. After the stock
topped $6, it began a steady descent, with Baybak unloading his
shares along the way. Today it trades at 18 cents.
Athena Gold, the current object of Baybak's and Gerbino's
attentions, was founded by entrepreneur William Jordan. He turned
to an established Vancouver broker in 1987 to help finance the
company, a 4,500-acre mining property near Reno. The broker
promised to raise more than $3 million and soon brought Baybak
and Gerbino into the deal. Jordan never got most of the money,
but the cult members ended up with a good deal of cheap stock and
options. Next they elected directors who were friendly to them
and set in motion a series of complex maneuvers to block Jordan
from voting stock he controlled and to run him out of the
company. "I've been an honest policeman all my life and I've seen
the worst kinds of crimes, and this ranks high," says former
Athena shareholder Thomas Clark, a 20-year veteran of Reno's
police force who has teamed up with Jordan to try to get the gold
mine back. "They stole this man's property."
With Baybak as chairman, the two Scientologists and their staffs
are promoting Athena, not always accurately. A letter to
shareholders with the 1990 annual report claims Placer Dome, one
of America's largest gold-mining firms, has committed at least
$25.5 million to develop the mine. That's news to Placer Dome.
"There is no pre-commitment," says Placer executive Cole
McFarland. "We're not going to spend that money unless survey
results justify the expenditure."
Baybak's firm represented Western Resource Technologies, a
Houston oil-and-gas company, but got the boot in October. Laughs
Steven McGuire, president of Western Resource: "His is a p.r.
firm in need of a p.r. firm." But McGuire cannot laugh too
freely. Baybak and other Scientologists, including the estate of
L. Ron Hubbard, still control huge blocks of his company's stock.
[ Caption: ATHENA GOLD'S WILLIAM JORDAN. Cult members got cheap
stock, then ran him out of the company ]
-----------------------------------------------------------------
[The following part was only in the international version of
TIME]
Pushing Beyond the U.S.:
Scientology makes its presence felt in Europe and Canada
By Richard Behar
In the 1960s and '70s, L. Ron Hubbard used to periodically fill a
converted ferry ship with adoring acolytes and sail off to spread
the word. One by one, countries -- Britain, Greece, Spain,
Portugal, and Venezuela -- closed their ports, usually because of
a public outcry. At one point, a court in Australia revoked the
church's status as a religion; at another, a French court
convicted Hubbard of fraud in absentia.
Today Hubbard's minions continue to wreak global havoc, costing
governments considerable effort and money to try to stop them. In
Italy a two-year trial of 76 Scientologists, among them the
former leader of the church's Italian operations, is nearing
completion in Milan. Two weeks ago, prosecutor Pietro Forno
requested jail terms for all the defendants who are accused of
extortion, cheating "mentally incapacitated" people and evading
as much as $50 million in taxes. "All of the trial's victims went
to Scientology in search of a cure or a better life," said Forno,
"But the Scientologists were amateur psychiatrists who practiced
psychological terrorism". For some victims, he added, "the
intervention of the Scientologists was devastating."
The Milan case was triggered by parents complaining to officials
that Scientology had a financial stranglehold on their children,
who had joined the church or entered Narconon, its drug
rehabilitation unit. In 1986 Treasury and paramilitary police
conducted raids in 20 cities across Italy shutting down 27
Scientology centers and seizing 100,000 documents. To defend
itself in the trial, the cult has retained some of Italy's most
famous lawyers.
In Canada, Scientology is using a legal team that includes
Clayton Ruby, one of the country's foremost civil rights lawyers,
to defend itself and nine of its members who are to stand trial
in June in Toronto. The charges: stealing documents concerning
Scientology from the Ministry of the Attorney General, the
Canadian Mental Health Association, two police forces and other
institutions. The case stems from a 1983 surprise raid of the
church's Toronto headquarters by more than 100 policemen, who had
arrived in three chartered buses; some 2 million pages of
documents were seized over a two-day period. Ruby, whose legal
maneuvers delayed the case for years, is trying to get it
dismissed because of "unreasonable delay."
Spain's Justice Ministry has twice denied Scientology status as a
religion, but that has not slowed the church' s expansion. In
1989 the Ministry of Health issued a report calling the sect
"totalitarian" and "pure and simple charlatanism." The year
before, the authorities had raided 26 church centers, with the
result that 11 Scientologists stand accused of falsification of
records, coercion and capital flight. "The real god of this
organization is money," said Madrid examining magistrate Jose
Maria Vasquez Honrnbia, before referring the case to a higher
court because it was too complex for his jurisdiction. Eugene
Ingram, a private investigator working for Scientology claims he
helped get Honrubia removed from the case for leaking nonpublic
documents to the press.
In France it took a death to spur the government into action: 16
Scientologists were indicted last year for fraud and "complicity
in the practice of illegal medicine" following the suicide of an
industrial designer in Lyon. In the victim's house investigators
found medication allegeally provided to him by the church without
doctor's prescription. Among those charged in the case is the
president of Scientology's French operations and the head of the
Paris-based Celebrity Centre, which caters to famous members.
Outside the U.S., Scientology appears to be most active in
Germany where the attorney general of the state of Bavaria has
branded the cult "distinctly totalitarian" and aimed at "the
economic exploitation of customers who are in bondage to it." In
1984 nearly 100 police raided the church in Munich. At the time,
city officials were reportedly collaborating with U.S. tax
inspectors and trying to prove that the cult was actually a
profitmaking business. More recently, Hamburg state authorities
moved to rescind Scientology's tax reduced status, while members
of parliament are seeking criminal proceedings. In another
domain, church linked management consulting firms have
infiltrated small and middle sized companies throughout Germany,
according to an expose published this month in the newsmagazine
DER SPIEGEL; the consultants, who typically hide their ties to
Scientology, indoctrinate employees by using Hubbard's methods. A
German anticult organization estimates that Scientology has at
least 60 fronts or splinter groups operating in the country.
German politics appears as well to attract Hubbard's zealots. In
March the Free Democrats, partners in Chancellor Helmut Kohl' s
ruling coalition in Bonn, accused Scientology of trying to
infiltrate their Hamburg branch. Meanwhile the main opposition
party, the Social Democrats, has been warning its members in the
formerly com- munist eastern part of the country against
exploitation by the church. Even federal officials are being used
by the church: one Scientology front group sent copies of a
Hubbard written pamphlet on moral values to members of the
Bundestag. The Office of Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher
unwittingly endorsed the Scientologists' message: "Indeed, the
world would be a more beautiful place if the principles
formulated in the pamphlet, a life characterized by reason and
responsibility, would find wider attention."
[end of Internationl Edition-only section]
-----------------------------------------------------------------
The Scientologists and Me
[Sidebar, page 57]
Strange things seem to happen to people who write about
Scientology. Journalist Paulette Cooper wrote a critical book on
the cult in 1971. This led to a Scientology plot (called
Operation Freak-Out) whose goal, according to church documents,
was "to get P.C. incarcerated in a mental institution or jail."
It almost worked: by impersonating Cooper, Scientologists got her
indicted in 1973 for threatening to bomb the church. Cooper, who
also endured 19 lawsuits by the church, was finally exonerated in
1977 after FBI raids on the church offices in Los Angeles and
Washington uncovered documents from the bomb scheme. No
Scientologists were ever tried in the matter.
For the TIME story, at least 10 attorneys and six private
detectives were unleashed by Scientology and its followers in an
effort to threaten, harass and discredit me. Last Oct. 12, not
long after I began this assignment, I planned to lunch with
Eugene Ingram, the church's leading private eye and a former cop.
Ingram, who was tossed off the Los Angeles police force In 1981
for alleged ties to prostitutes and drug dealers, had told me
that he might be able to arrange a meeting with church boss David
Miscavige. Just hours before the lunch, the church's "national
trial counsel," Earle Cooley, called to inform me that I would be
eating alone.
Alone, perhaps, but not forgotten. By day's end, I later learned,
a copy of my personal credit report -- with detailed information
about my bank accounts, home mortgage, credit-card payments, home
address and Social Security number -- had been illegally
retrieved from a national credit bureau called Trans Union. The
sham company that received it, "Educational Funding Services" of
Los Angeles, gave as its address a mail drop a few blocks from
Scientology's headquarters. The owner of the mail drop is a
private eye named Fred Wolfson, who admits that an Ingram
associate retained him to retrieve credit reports on several
individuals. Wolfson says he was told that Scientology's
attorneys "had judgments against these people and were trying to
collect on them." He says now, "These are vicious people. These
are vipers." Ingram, through a lawyer, denies any involvement in
the scam.
During the past five months, private investigators have been
contacting acquaintances of mine, ranging from neighbors to a
former colleague, to inquire about subjects such as my health
(like my credit rating, it's excellent) and whether I've ever had
trouble with the IRS (unlike Scientology, I haven't). One
neighbor was greeted at dawn outside my Manhattan apartment
building by two men who wanted to know whether I lived there. I
finally called Cooley to demand that Scientology stop the
nonsense. He promised to look into it.
After that, however, an attorney subpoenaed me, while another
falsely suggested that I might own shares in a company I was
reporting about that had been taken over by Scientologists (he
also threatened to contact the Securities and Exchange
Commission). A close friend in Los Angeles received a disturbing
telephone call from a Scientology staff member seeking data about
me -- an indication that the cult may have illegally obtained my
personal phone records. Two detectives contacted me, posing as a
friend and a relative of a so-called cult victim, to elicit
negative statements from me about Scientology. Some of my
conversations with them were taped, transcribed and presented by
the church in affidavits to TIME's lawyers as "proof" of my bias
against Scientology.
Among the comments I made to one of the detectives, who
represented himself as "Harry Baxter," a friend of the victim's
family, was that "the church trains people to lie." Baxter and
his colleagues are hardly in a position to dispute that
observation. His real name is Barry Silvers, and he is a former
investigator for the Justice Department's Organized Crime Strike
Force. (RB)
