Going Clear

by Lawrence Wright

  Forty-seven million dollars—more than a thousand dollars per square foot—had previously been spent on the new center. The building had already been completed a couple of times, using the highest-grade materials—cold rolled steel, and anigre, a beautiful but extremely hard, pinkish African wood—only to have components ripped out because they didn’t meet Miscavige’s standards. Miscavige’s desk, also made of steel, was so heavy that De Vocht worried whether the structure would support it. He discovered that there were no actual architectural drawings for the building; there were only renderings of what it should look like. The stucco exterior walls were already cracked because the whole edifice was at a 1.25-inch tilt. The walls weren’t actually connected to the floors. Even a minor earthquake (Gold Base was just west of the San Andreas Fault) might cause the whole building to collapse. De Vocht recommended that the building be torn down and rebuilt from scratch, but Miscavige rejected that idea.

  The expense of essentially rebuilding a poorly constructed building from the inside was immense. When De Vocht had almost finished construction, having spent an additional $60 million, Miscavige still had a list of complaints. He was also critical of the landscaping. Gold Base is in a desert, but Miscavige demanded that the building appear to be set in a forest.

  One morning, De Vocht says, Miscavige and his wife were inspecting the large vault in the legal department of Building 50, when the leader stopped in his tracks and began rubbing his head. He turned pale. “Where did we put the gold bullion?” he asked his wife. For a full minute, Miscavige kept rubbing his head and asking about the gold, but then he snapped out of it and went on as if nothing had happened. De Vocht recalls that forty-five minutes later, Shelly Miscavige called him and asked him, “What are we going to do? He’s losing it.” She told him that Dave had gone “Type 3”—psychotic—because of all the Suppressive Persons at the base.3

  While De Vocht was working on Building 50, he was forced to attend a séance with five hundred other Sea Org members on Gold Base. People were called out by name and asked, “What crimes have you committed against David Miscavige?” One after another, people approached the microphone and confessed to ways in which they were suppressing the dissemination of Scientology or thinking taboo thoughts. De Vocht was disgusted by the orgy of self-abasement. One night, he simply took over the meeting and brought some semblance of order to it. That night, Shelly Miscavige asked him to be the Commanding Officer of the Commodore’s Messengers Org, which essentially put him in charge of the entire base. “It’s out of control,” she pleaded, saying that her husband counted on him and had no one else to turn to.

  In 2004, De Vocht finished reconstructing the 45,000-square-foot Building 50, which wound up costing $70 million. “You’re the biggest spender in the history of Scientology,” Miscavige told him. “You should be shot.”

  EVEN THOUGH MEMBERSHIP in the church has been declining for years, according to polls and census figures, money continues to pour into Scientology coffers in fantastic sums. Donors are accorded higher status depending on the size of their gifts to the International Association of Scientologists—Patron Maximus for a $25 million pledge, for instance. Nancy Cartwright, the voice of Bart Simpson, became a Patron Laureate for her $10 million gift to the association in 2007. The IAS now holds more than $1 billion, mostly in offshore accounts, according to former executives of the church. Scientology coursework alone can be very pricey—as much as $400,000 to reach the level of OT VIII. That doesn’t count the books and materials or the latest-model E-Meter, which is priced at $4,650. Then there is the auditing, which ranges in price from $5,000 to $8,000 for a twelve-hour “intensive,” depending on the location and the level of the auditor. Services sold in Clearwater alone amount to $100 million a year.

  Despite the frequent cost overruns on construction, Scientology undertook a worldwide building campaign, kicked off by Miscavige’s decision to use the occasion of 9/11 to issue a call for a massive expansion of the church. “Bluntly, we are the only people of Earth who can reverse the decline,” he announced. “The way to do better is to get big.”

  In some cases, the building projects have become significant moneymakers for the church. Across the street from Scientology’s Fort Harrison Hotel in Clearwater is the Super Power Building, intended to be a training facility to enhance the perceptions of upper-level thetans. The fund-raising kicked off with a $1 million gift from the Feshbach brothers. Despite years-long construction delays and fines imposed by the City of Clearwater, the 380,000-square-foot Super Power Building has proven to be a bonanza for the church, which has taken in at least $145 million in donations to complete the project—$120 million more than it was projected to cost when first proposed, in 1993. The church explains that the plan has been enlarged from its original goals, which has created delays and additional expenses. Tom De Vocht, who worked on the construction for years, said that the building remained unfinished for so long because no one knew what super power was.

  Under Miscavige’s leadership, the church has aggressively launched a program called Ideal Orgs, which aim to replicate the grandeur of Hubbard’s Saint Hill Manor. A number of the Ideal Orgs have been shuttered—including Seattle, Boston, and New Haven—because the local Scientology communities were unable to support them. Other notable churches and missions are now boarded up or unloaded—including one in Santa Monica that Paul and Deborah Haggis raised money to establish.

  THE INTENSITY OF the pressure on Sea Org members to raise money for the church—while working for next to nothing—can be understood in part through the account of Daniel Montalvo. His parents joined the Sea Org when he was five, and the very next year he signed his own billion-year contract. He says that he began working full-time in the organization when he was eleven and recalls that, along with other Sea Org members, including children, his days stretched from eight in the morning until eleven thirty at night. Part of his work was shoveling up asbestos that had been removed during the renovation of the Fort Harrison Hotel. He says no protective gear was provided, not even a mask. He rarely saw his parents. While he was at Flag Base in 2005, when he was fourteen, he guarded the door while Tom Cruise was in session. The sight of children working at a Sea Org facility would not have been unusual. They were separated from their parents and out of school. According to Florida child labor laws, minors who are fourteen and fifteen years old are prohibited from working during school hours, and may work only up to fifteen hours a week. Daniel said that he was allowed schooling only one day a week, on Saturday.

  When Daniel was fifteen, he was assigned to work on the renovation of Scientology’s publications building in Los Angeles, operating scissors lifts and other heavy equipment. According to California child labor laws, fifteen-year-old children are allowed to work only three hours per day outside of school, except on weekends—no more than eighteen hours per week total. Sixteen is the minimum age for children to work in any manufacturing establishment using power-driven hoisting apparatus, such as the scissors lift. Daniel graduated to work at the church’s auditing complex nearby, called the American Saint Hill Organization; then from six in the evening until three in the morning he volunteered at Bridge Publications. He was paid thirty-six dollars a week.

  Daniel’s work at Bridge Publications was sufficiently impressive that he was posted full-time in the manufacturing division there the following year. The church had issued a new edition of Hubbard’s books and lectures called The Basics, which was being aggressively marketed to Scientologists. One of Daniel’s jobs was to cut the “thumb notches” that mark the glossary and the appendix in these handsomely made books, like the notches one would find in an unabridged dictionary. A machine with a guillotine steel blade slices through the pages to produce the half-moon indentation. California law specifically forbids the operation of the machine by anyone under the age of eighteen. Daniel noted about twenty other minors working at the plant, all of them sleep deprived and working around heavy equipment. One night Daniel chopped off his
right index finger on the notching machine. A security officer picked up his finger and put it in a plastic bag with ice, then took Daniel to the children’s hospital in Hollywood. He was instructed to tell the admitting nurse that he had injured himself in a skateboarding accident. The doctors were unable to reattach his finger.

  After that, Daniel was sent to the sales division of Bridge Publications. Sales had been declining since The Basics had first been published in 2007. The Basics included eighteen books and a number of Hubbard lectures on CD; the complete package cost $6,500. Sea Orgs all over the world had call centers set up to sell them. In Los Angeles, there were hourly quotas to be met, and those who failed suffered various punishments, such as having water dumped on their head or being made to do push-ups or run up and down the stairs. There were security guards on every floor. A salesperson had to get a slip verifying that he had made his quota before he was permitted to go to bed.

  Often it was simply impossible to make the quota legitimately, so people ran unauthorized credit cards. Members of the Sea Org sales force would break into the church’s financial records and pull up the credit card information of public members. Members who had money on account at the church for future courses would see it drained to pay for books they didn’t order. Parishioners who balked at making contributions or buying unwanted materials were told they were in violation of church ethics, and their progress in Scientology was blocked or threatened.

  Members who pledge more than they can afford can find themselves in a compromised situation. One Scientologist who was a bank teller says he was told to comply with a robbery in order to pay off his debt to the church; the robbers took four thousand dollars. In 2009, Nancy Cartwright’s fiancé, Stephen E. Brackett, a contractor, had taken a substantial construction advance to renovate a restaurant. The company that insured the project later sued Cartwright, claiming that she and Brackett had diverted the money to the Church of Scientology. Brackett, an OT V, had been featured in a church ad for the Super Power Building, identified as a “key contributor.” “Mankind needs your help,” Brackett was quoted as saying in the ad. He later took his life by jumping off a bridge on Pacific Coast Highway near Big Sur.4

  The biggest financial scandal involving church members was a Ponzi scheme operated by Reed Slatkin; he was one of the co-founders, with Paul Haggis’s friend Sky Dayton, of EarthLink. Slatkin’s massive fraud involved more than half a billion dollars in investments; much of the initial “profit” was returned to Scientology investors, such as Daniel and Myrna Jacobs, who earned nearly $3 million on a $760,500 “investment.” According to Marty Rathbun, Slatkin’s Scientology investors included Anne Archer and Fox News commentator Greta Van Susteren. Later investors were not so lucky. Slatkin was convicted of defrauding $240 million; it is still not known how much of that money went directly to the church, although the court found that about $50 million was funneled to the church indirectly by investors with massive gains. In 2006, groups affiliated with the Church of Scientology, including the Celebrity Centre, agreed to pay back $3.5 million.

  IN JULY 2004 Miscavige hosted Tom Cruise’s forty-second birthday party aboard the Scientology cruise ship Freewinds. The Golden Era Musicians, including Miscavige’s father on trumpet, played songs from Cruise’s movies as film clips flickered on the giant overhead screens installed especially for the occasion. Cruise himself danced and sang “Old Time Rock and Roll,” reprising a famous scene in Risky Business, the movie that firmly established him as a star.

  Occasionally, the Freewinds is used to confine those Sea Org members that the church considers most at risk for flight. Among the crew on the ship during Cruise’s birthday party was Valeska Paris, a twenty-six-year-old Swiss woman. Paris had grown up in Scientology and joined the Sea Org when she was fourteen. Three years later, her stepfather, a self-made millionaire, committed suicide, leaving a diary in which he blamed the church for fleecing his fortune. When Valeska’s mother denounced the church on French television, Valeska was isolated at the Clearwater base in order to keep her away from her mother. The next year, at the age of eighteen, she was sent to the Freewinds. She was told she would be on the ship for two weeks. She was held there against her will for twelve years. Shortly before Cruise arrived, Paris developed a cold sore, which caused Miscavige to consign her to a condition of Treason, so she wasn’t allowed to go to the birthday party, but she later did wind up serving Cruise and his girlfriend at the time, the Spanish actress Penélope Cruz.

  In October, Miscavige acknowledged Cruise’s place in Scientology by awarding him the Freedom Medal of Valor. Miscavige called Cruise “the most dedicated Scientologist I know” before an audience of Sea Org members who had spent much of their lives working for the church for a little more than seven dollars a day. Then he hung the diamond-encrusted platinum medallion around the star’s neck.

  “I think you know that I am there for you,” Cruise said to the thrilled audience. “And I do care, so very, very, very much.” He turned to an imposing portrait of Hubbard, standing beside a globe. “To LRH!” he said, with a crisp salute.

  Lana Mitchell, the cook who had been accused of feeding Cruise the poisoned shrimp a few months before, had gotten out of Happy Valley, but she watched the ceremony while in RPF, along with some two hundred of her detained colleagues. About fifty of them were Sea Org executives who had been purged by Miscavige. They were being held in the Los Angeles complex on L. Ron Hubbard Way, in the massive blue former hospital where Spanky Taylor and so many others had been confined. Some had been in the organization for more than twenty years and had worked directly for Hubbard. They were completely cut off from the outside world—no television, radio, or even any music. As many as forty people were crammed into each of the former hospital rooms, with only one bathroom to share. Often there was not enough food to go around. Some of those confined had severe medical conditions, including Uwe Stuckenbrock, the former international security chief, who suffered from multiple sclerosis and had deteriorated to the point of being unable to speak. One of the jobs Mitchell was assigned on RPF was welding, but she had never done it before, and she burned her eyes because she wasn’t wearing the protective glasses correctly. She got no medical attention at all.

  Every effort was made to keep RPF’ers out of view. Windows were curtained so no one could see in or out. They traveled through tunnels and over rooftops when they needed to move about within the complex. There were no days off, although they were allowed to call their families on Christmas. Their sole diversion was watching the big Scientology galas on television. After all, the elaborate sets for these events were constructed by the RPF’ers in Los Angeles or at Flag Base in Clearwater. To view the big Cruise event, they were all taken to the mess hall.

  One of the penitents was Mark McKinstry, who had been National Sales Manager at Bridge Publications when the movie version of Battlefield Earth, starring John Travolta, came out in 2000. Hubbard’s tale is about an alien race of “Psychlos,” who have turned people into slaves—until a hero arises to liberate humanity. Travolta had worked for years to get the movie made, and wound up paying a significant portion out of his own pocket. It was at the peak of his career. “I told my manager, ‘If we can’t do the things now that we want to do, what good is the power?’ ” he remarked at the time. Miscavige had been deeply involved in the filming from the beginning. He would watch dailies of the film in Clearwater while he was overseeing the handling of the Lisa McPherson case. His critiques would then be typed up and sent to the Scientology representative who was always at Travolta’s side. When the movie was completed, Miscavige called Travolta to congratulate him, saying that LRH would be proud. He predicted it was going to be a blockbuster.

  McKinstry had been working for a year promoting the movie edition of the book. He traveled across the country with Travolta to push the book in bookstores, malls, and Walmarts. About 750,000 copies were sold. Like many others who have spent time with Travolta, McKinstry came to like him immensely. The acto
r was devoting a substantial amount of his own time and energy to making the book a success. But when the movie came out, it was a critical and box-office catastrophe. Even at the premiere, Sea Org members had to be bused in to Mann’s Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard to fill the empty seats for as many as three shows a day. For some of them, it was the first movie they had seen in years. “ ‘Battlefield Earth’ may well turn out to be the worst movie of this century,” the New York Times critic observed, in what proved to be a typical review. There were false accusations that the film contained subliminal messages promoting Scientology. Travolta’s career went into a lengthy dark period. Cruise later complained to Miscavige, saying that the movie was terrible for the church’s public image.5 Miscavige responded that it would never have been made if he’d had anything to do with it.

  McKinstry was dismayed when he went to a screening of the movie and watched people walking out or booing. His wife could see that he was upset and asked what was wrong. “Why didn’t anyone watch this movie before it was released?” he said. She reported to the church what he had said, and he was ordered to RPF.

  SHORTLY BEFORE HE RECEIVED Scientology’s top award, Cruise ended his three-year relationship with Penélope Cruz. Shelly Miscavige had been supervising her auditing and helping her through the Purification Rundown. But, like Nicole, Penélope was suspect in the eyes of the church’s leader. She was an independent-minded person and continued to meditate and identify herself as a Buddhist.

  Cruise traveled with a Scientology delegation to open a magnificent new church in Madrid, where he read his speech to the crowd in halting Spanish. Before the opening, however, he was sitting with his sister Lee Anne, who had become his publicist. Mike Rinder, who was in the room, remembers that Cruise heatedly complained to his sister that no one had been able to find him a new girlfriend. Miscavige walked in, Rinder says, and Cruise made the same complaint to him.6