The Unbreakable Miss Lovely: How the Church of Scientology tried to destroy Paulette Cooper

by Tony Ortega

  At one point, it seemed like the only three people who dared talk about Scientology in the press were Paulette, Nan McLean, and then-Clearwater mayor Gabe Cazares.

  She then explained how she had gotten interested in Scientology, with a friend who had taken some Scientology courses and then got the idea that he was the reincarnated Jesus Christ. That led her to take a course as she began investigating Scientology and realized that it seemed to keep enemies lists on former members. And it struck her as odd that when she tried to track down an article about Scientology she found a reference for at the New York library’s card catalog, the article would usually be missing, cut out neatly from its magazine or newspaper.

  After her Queen magazine story came out, the death threats began. Over the next four years, she said, she was sued four times, “one of which was for somebody else’s book,” a reference to the libel suit against Robert Kaufman’s book, Inside Scientology. (Paulette was sued for encouraging Kaufman to publish it.) But then Paulette had sued the church for harassment in 1972, “and this was actually shocking to them because Hubbard had written that....no one would ever sue Scientology, that they had too much to hide.”

  Later that year, the smear letters began appearing, five in total, that were sent to the residents in her apartment building, to her boyfriend, and one to her parents. One of them had called her a prostitute. “You can imagine how upsetting it is to open up something like that and read it,” she said.

  The smear letters were part of the reason she had moved into the Churchill in December 1972, hoping for better security. She explained that her cousin Joy had taken over her old apartment, and then had been attacked by a man with a gun.

  Paulette described that the FBI let her know they were investigating a couple of bomb threats at the New York church, and asked to fingerprint her. Then she learned she was the target of the investigation and was indicted.

  “The next eight months were a terrible, terrible nightmare in my life that I still feel sometimes that I suffer from to this day.”

  She explained that her biggest fear was the indictment becoming public and hitting the press. She knew that the public wouldn’t understand the difference between an indictment and a conviction.

  “I was most concerned about my parents, who had adopted me when I was six years old, and how humiliating it would be for them and their friends to have to explain to go through a trial like this.”

  She said that her attorneys only made things worse by telling her that they would need her parents to sit in the front row and make a good show for her. But such a thing would kill them, she tried to explain. And then there was Jerry Levin, who moved in with her and seemed like such a friend. At one point, she was even considering using him as a character witness in the trial.

  She then explained that months of not eating from the stress and nausea of what she was going through had left her so underweight, they had a hard time finding a doctor to perform a truth serum test on her. But after they did, and she passed it, the U.S. attorney’s office had “saved face” by postponing the trial and asking that she be ordered to get psychiatric help.

  (She didn’t mention that Jay Zelermyer had talked Bob Morvillo out of prosecuting the case. After the trial was postponed, she got into a dispute with Zelermyer and Charles Stillman when they wanted another $5,000 for getting her out of a trial after she and her father had already paid them $19,000, and she felt they had made mistakes that complicated, not helped, her legal situation.)

  She said that after threat of a trial disappeared, she tried to get back together with Bob Straus by inviting him to a party. But only then did she learn that a smear letter about her had been sent to his bosses, and he’d decided to cut off all ties with her.

  After the charges against her were formally dropped in late 1975, a new form of harassment had started, she said, with people imitating her over the phone to her friends. And then someone had tried once again to obtain her fingerprint, using a written joke in a bar. Now, she realized these were probably early steps in Operation Freakout.

  She talked about settling her lawsuits at the end of 1976, and then working with the FBI after it raided Scientology in 1977. She finally got to see the documents seized in the raid at the beginning of 1980, some of which proved that she’d been framed with the bomb threat letters. The documents also proved that she’d been sued for telling the truth, that her father had been targeted for harassment, and that Paulette had been under close surveillance for years.

  “It was incredible vindication to look at these documents and see that everything I had said about Scientology since 1968 was true, and that they had turned out to be worse than anything I had said or even imagined.”

  And that was why it was hard to believe that Scientology was really turning over a new leaf, which is what it had told the city of Clearwater.

  “I’ve only briefly told you some of the things that they’ve done to me, so that you’re not deceived by their true nature,” she said. “I believe that Scientology has never changed, will never change, and will keep issuing statements to people saying that they’ve changed.”

  Paulette’s testimony was a highlight of the hearings. But there were other notables in town who were taking part. Nibs, for example. He had switched sides once again, and was now wearing a new name, Ron DeWolf. But Paulette still suspected that he had taken part in her frame-up a decade earlier.

  “Cooper has questioned DeWolf’s credibility, suggesting that he is really in Clearwater to make a fast buck. And DeWolf has returned barb for barb,” said the Clearwater Times.

  On June 14, a few weeks after the hearings and while Michael Flynn was still in Clearwater staying at the Holiday Inn Surfside, he got a call from Boston. The man on the phone, Joseph Snyder, reminded Flynn that they had met several months earlier when Flynn gave a talk about Scientology’s history of spying to the American Society for Industrial Security.

  Snyder, like the other people who heard Flynn’s speech, protected companies from corporate espionage, and was interested to hear about Scientology’s long record of snooping and burglary. Snyder asked if they could get together when Flynn returned to Boston. Snyder didn’t want to say much over the phone, but he indicated that a client had hired him to find L. Ron Hubbard.

  When Flynn flew back to Boston, Snyder picked him up at Logan Airport and explained that he was working a strange case for his client, the Bank of New England. About a week earlier, two men had come into a branch of the Middle East Bank in New York City, and had tried to cash a check for $2 million. The check, made out to “Aquil Abdulamiar,” was signed by L. Ron Hubbard and was drawn on his account at the Bank of New England. After the two men failed to turn over any identification proving one of them was Abdulamiar, they departed, leaving the check behind. It turned out to be a forgery.

  The bogus check was a clever copy of a real check for more than a million dollars that Hubbard had written earlier in the year from his Bank of New England account to a tax shelter in California. Someone had apparently obtained that cancelled check and used it to create the fake one. But who? And what did Hubbard know? Hubbard’s bank wanted to find him to ask him about it, but Snyder didn’t know where to look.

  Flynn didn’t know what the check scheme was about, but he did help Snyder with what he knew about Hubbard—that no one seemed to have seen him since early 1980, and that Hubbard’s own wife, Mary Sue, hadn’t seen him since late 1979.

  After talking to Snyder, Flynn wondered, was the bogus check a sign that Hubbard had died, and that someone in Scientology was trying to cash in on his identity before news of his death got to the outside world?

  Hubbard’s son, Ron DeWolf, agreed with Flynn that there were other strong signs that his father had died. Inspired in part by the check-kiting caper, in November, with Flynn’s help, DeWolf filed a petition to the Riverside County Probate Court, asking it to determine if Hubbard was alive and to rule on the status of his estate.

  It was the most seri
ous, direct attack by Flynn on Scientology yet. DeWolf told reporters that if his father were alive, he would have to show up in court to prove it. Instead, Hubbard sent the judge in the case a handwritten letter assuring the court that he was still alive and in possession of his faculties. Affidavits and a fingerprint were also submitted, though Hubbard still concealed his actual location. The court was satisfied that he still lived.

  DeWolf’s legal assault was a failure, but for about a year it generated some of the worst publicity in the church’s history. Flynn was becoming the most dangerous enemy Scientology had ever faced. And it was time to do something about him.

  The same year as the Clearwater Hearings, Paulette learned that Barbara Lewis had fallen seriously ill. They hadn’t talked much since the end of 1975, when Paulette had angrily cut off ties with Barbara because she’d told Roland about her trip to London to see a man who wanted to marry her. But Paulette still harbored strong feelings for Barbara; they had been best friends during the worst of her days under indictment.

  That summer, in 1973, Jerry Levin was spending a lot of time with the both of them, and he would also go alone to Barbara’s apartment to complain about the way the Scientologists were treating Paulette. Now they understood that Jerry was just trying to get Barbara talking about Paulette to pump her for even more information. At the time, it seemed like Jerry was being a good friend.

  Barbara went through a lot of guilt during those days. She admitted to Paulette that it still bothered her the way the man who had attacked her so brutally years before had been prosecuted and sent to prison. She had been under a lot of pressure to choose his mug shot out of a photo-lineup. The police were certain that the young Puerto Rican janitor had committed the crime – he had run to Puerto Rico, just as a guilty person would. But Barbara had never really gotten a good look at the man who had tied her up and raped her so brutally over several hours. She would never forget the sound of his voice though, and she found herself wishing that she could have heard the young man speak before police took him into custody.

  And then, watching Paulette suffer for something she didn’t do made Barbara feel even worse. She couldn’t help thinking that the young man she’d sent to prison might be going through the same thing. The young man’s friends would sometimes call and tell Barbara that she had put away an innocent man. She told Paulette she found herself wishing the man himself would call her, so she could hear his voice.

  But then, Paulette and Barbara had stopped talking to each other, and over the years they only gradually became friends again.

  In July 1982, Barbara began bleeding. She was barely able to pay her rent, and had no money to see a doctor, so she didn’t have it looked at until September. At that point, she was diagnosed with terminal ovarian cancer.

  She lived two more years, receiving help from a couple of boyfriends, one of whom was a medical reporter for NBC and used his connections to get her a large room at NYU’s hospital with a view of the Hudson River. And that’s where Paulette often went to visit her as her health declined.

  On Paulette’s final visit, Barbara was barely conscious. She had sunk down on her bed, and was unable to see the lovely view of the river from her large wraparound room, the kind usually reserved for celebrities or the very rich. Her thin frame, down to only around 70 pounds, was lost in the bed sheets and blankets. Paulette held Barbara’s emaciated hand while she slept.

  Barbara died on July 10, 1984. When her obituary appeared, Paulette and Barbara’s other friends were in for a slight shock. They had assumed (and Barbara let them think) that Barbara was in her mid-40s. In fact, she had died on her 56th birthday.

  Paulette was thankful that she had known Barbara, especially during her lowest point when she was thinking of killing herself. Paulette was a wreck in the summer of 1973, and Barbara was one of the few people who helped get her through it.

  Once in a while, Barbara would tell her that when the mess with the church was over, the Scientologists responsible for the spying and harassment would be caught, and Paulette would win a million dollars from them in court. Paulette always answered that even one day of what she was going through wasn’t worth a million dollars.

  Two weeks after Barbara’s death, on July 24, 1984, a press conference in Los Angeles was held by the Church of Scientology in order to make a rather astounding claim. In charge of the conference were the president of the church—a man named Heber Jentzsch—a church attorney named John Peterson, the church’s spokesman, Robert Vaughn Young, and a private investigator named Eugene Ingram.

  Ingram had been hired the year before to gather evidence about the forged L. Ron Hubbard $2 million check made out to “Aquil Abdulamiar” that two men had tried to cash at a bank in New York in 1982.

  In January, Ingram had taken out ads in the New York Times, Washington Post, and the Boston Globe offering a reward of $100,000 for information that would lead to the conviction of the people who had tried to pass the bogus check. And now, the church was ready to reveal the results of its investigation. The culprit, they announced, was Paulette Cooper’s attorney, Mike Flynn.

  Their evidence for this was a legal declaration signed by a forger serving time in a prison in Naples, Italy. Ingram, the church’s private eye, had gone to Naples to get the declaration from the man, Ala Fadili Al Tamimi, who claimed he had created the bogus check and had gone to the bank with his brother, pretending to be Aquil Abdulamiar.

  But the scheme, he claimed, had been masterminded by Flynn. Al Tamimi said that Flynn used connections he had at the Bank of New England to get a legitimate check out of the bank for Al Tamimi to create a counterfeit version of it. And now, the church had the lawyer dead to rights. It called for the arrest and conviction of Flynn.

  But that didn’t happen.

  Eventually, Al Tamimi would recant his story. Ingram, meanwhile, turned out to be a disgraced Los Angeles cop who had been fired for, among other things, being accused of running a prostitution ring on the side.

  A few days after the press conference, a judge in Los Angeles, Paul Breckenridge, called the allegations against Flynn “garbage” as he dressed down Peterson, the church attorney, for even being involved in such a transparently bogus attempt to smear Flynn. It was desperate behavior, even by the standards of the Church of Scientology.

  But by the summer of 1984, Scientology was frantic about Flynn. He had filed 20 lawsuits, and the church had filed 13 against him. Flynn had spent $400,000 of his own money in litigation, and it was beginning to pay off in greater press coverage and successes in court. Scientology was doing whatever it could to distract public attention from what was happening in courtrooms in Los Angeles and London.

  A month before the press conference, on June 22, 1984, Judge Breckenridge announced a decision that Mike Flynn and many others thought might signal the beginning of the end of Scientology. That court decision was in the favor of a man named Gerry Armstrong, who was quickly supplanting Paulette Cooper as Scientology’s most feared and hated enemy.

  Armstrong had grown up in Chilliwack, British Columbia and had first learned about Scientology from a friend in 1969, when he was 22. In 1971, he moved to Los Angeles to join the Sea Org. Before long, he was sailing with L. Ron Hubbard on the Apollo, and became a trusted aide to the “Commodore.”

  After Hubbard moved back to land in Florida and then ended up in California, Armstrong was part of his “Household Unit,” making sure Hubbard’s quarters were up to his standards. While renovating one home at a 500-acre compound the church had purchased near Hemet, Armstrong discovered a collection of boxes that contained a huge trove of Hubbard’s original documents.

  Everything from Hubbard’s baby booties to his teenage journals to some of his most private, intimate writing about his sex life were in the stacks of documents. Until Armstrong saved them, the boxes were going to be discarded in the renovation.

  On January 8, 1980, Armstrong wrote to Hubbard, asking permission to create a biographical archive from the papers
. Hubbard agreed, and then the next month he went permanently into hiding.

  Later that year, a professional writer named Omar Garrison was hired by the church to author a biography of Hubbard, and Armstrong began working with him closely, cataloging the documents for Garrison’s use.

  But as he did so, Armstrong was shocked to see how much Hubbard’s actual records contradicted the things Hubbard and the church said about his life and exploits. To his followers, Hubbard had been born an adventurer – he’d grown up on a massive Montana ranch owned by his grandfather and by four years old had become the blood brother to a local Indian tribe. He was the youngest Eagle Scout in the history of the Boy Scouts, he had traded ideas with eastern shamans and mystics during extensive travels to Asia in his teens, he was one of the first atomic scientists in the country after his distinguished college career, he’d set records as a daring glider aviator, he’d been a war hero who had survived being machine-gunned as the first casualty in the Pacific theater of World War II. He’d captained “corvettes” that had engaged and sunk Japanese submarines, and after the war he’d healed his serious combat wounds with a new method that became Dianetics. It was a heroic, larger-than-life account of a man who had lived enough for a dozen men.

  And Gerry Armstrong knew that all of it was, to one extent or another, a fabrication. Hubbard’s own documents showed that he had lived a fascinating, varied life, and with many accomplishments to be proud of. But that’s not the story he told or the one promoted by the church. That worried Armstrong. He knew that Scientology made itself vulnerable by putting out claims about Hubbard that could be debunked by official records. In late 1981 and into 1982, he repeatedly went to his superiors, urging them to correct the record and to begin putting out information about Hubbard that actually matched what was in the documents.

  Instead of acting on his advice, the organization excommunicated him, “declaring” him a “suppressive person” on February 18, 1982.