by Tony Ortega
For too long, Paulette wasted time trying to figure out how someone stole her stationery and put a fingerprint on it. The simple truth was, there was no proof that it was her stationery anyway.
As for how her fingerprint got on the paper that was used, the best theory still appears to come back to Margie Shepherd’s odd behavior the day she visited Paulette and Joy on December 6, 1972, two days before the first bomb threat letter showed up at the New York org.
Margie was carrying a clipboard with a petition, and she claimed to be gathering signatures for the UFW. Both women noticed that Shepherd never took her gloves off, even though the temperature in the apartment was very warm.
Paulette took the clipboard from Margie with her left hand in order to sign it with her right hand. If there was a piece of stationery taped to the underside of the clipboard, Paulette could have left the print from her third finger on her left hand on the page without knowing it. (And just a few years later, the “Operation Freakout” documents described doing this very thing to get Paulette’s fingerprint for that scheme.)
Before Margie then handed the clipboard to Joy, she could have put another sheet of petitions under it so Joy would not have also left a fingerprint.
If there was a piece of stationery taped to the underside of the petition, did it already have the bomb threat typed on it? The letter could have been typed at any time in the months leading up to Margie’s visit. Nibs had access to Paulette’s typewriter in the late summer, a couple of months before Margie showed up. Paulette has always believed that the wording and poor grammar of the note reminded her of the way Nibs wrote – and she spent months working with him to craft “An Inside Look at Scientology” that summer and knew his writing quirks quite well.
Over the years, other theories she had considered – that Bernie and Barbara Green had something to do with the threat letters, for example – she had discarded. But she had never been able to eliminate Nibs.
Could there have been more than one attempt to obtain Paulette’s fingerprint? A woman named Lori Taverna, who testified at the 1982 Clearwater hearings, says that she was recruited into Scientology in 1965 and was later chosen to spy for the Guardian’s Office in New York by Bruce Raymond. But after being sent several military espionage manuals, she had a change of heart and made it clear she would not do any volunteer work for the GO. Then, in 1972, she says her boyfriend was recruited by Raymond for an operation.
After she pushed him for details, her boyfriend told her about his mission. Raymond had said that a woman in town, a writer, was trying to destroy Scientology. The Guardian’s Office had to do something about it, and her boyfriend’s job was to get the writer’s fingerprint on a piece of stationery or an envelope. Her boyfriend worked at a printing shop, so he had a legitimate cover – he would just be trying to sell her stationery. He said he was told to go to the writer’s office, and use his natural charm to get her talking and handling the papers.
Years later, after Taverna heard what had happened to Paulette, she assumed it was her boyfriend who had helped frame her. (He died in 1975.) But there are several problems with the story. Paulette didn’t go to an office (she worked at home), and she doesn’t remember a man of his description trying to sell her stationery in 1972.
Other leads are promising, but have never fully developed. Paulette wrote in 2007 that she had been told by former Scientologist Arnie Lerma that Margie Shepherd was actually a woman named Linda Kramer. But Lerma says he doesn’t remember it that way today – it was Paula Tyler he knew, and Paula Tyler was using her actual name. Len Zinberg, however, also remembers hearing that Margie Shepherd was actually a Linda Kramer, but no one else from the orgs contacted for this book knew anything about her.
Another seeming dead end: While it’s tempting to credit former church member Margery Wakefield’s affidavit that she heard talk in 1978 about a plot to assassinate Paulette, her details are sketchy at best, involve people whose names she can’t remember, and can’t be corroborated by anyone else. There’s no doubt that L. Ron Hubbard wanted Paulette Cooper’s life ruined, but Wakefield’s account doesn’t really lead anywhere. There’s no other evidence that what was left of the Guardian’s Office in the late 1970s was planning an outright assassination of Scientology’s old nemesis.
More than 30 years after the GO was disbanded, many of the original operatives are still associated with Scientology and still aren’t talking about their Snow White days. Others have died. A few, however, agreed to talk about their days as Scientology spies.
Each of them said they’re confident that Jerry Levin was actually Don Alverzo. One former operative says he’s certain because Alverzo was the guy who got his hands dirty as Scientology’s most trusted spy, and the only one with the unflappable quality that would allow him to live with Paulette Cooper for four months in the summer of 1973 without giving a hint of what was actually going on.
In 1982, at the Clearwater Hearings, Paulette said that documents seized in the raid convinced her that Don Alverzo had posed as Levin. (Alverzo was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the Snow White investigation, but was never charged with a crime. Even the FBI and Justice Department didn’t seem to know his real name.) One FBI document indicated that when she was interviewed about the frame-up in 1978, Paulette told the agency that Levin had talked about being a combat helicopter pilot (a detail she didn’t remember years later). Independently, and unaware of the FBI document, Merrell Vannier wrote that one of the few details he knew about Alverzo’s background was that Alverzo said he had been a combat helicopter pilot in Vietnam.
But in more recent years, Paulette began to have her doubts. Descriptions of Alverzo didn’t seem to match her memory of Levin. He may have been around the correct height, but Alverzo was said to have olive skin and dark hair. Levin was fair-skinned and had red hair as well as a slightly effeminate manner. Former GO employees, however, say that Alverzo was a chameleon who could pull off amazing changes in appearance and personality.
For several months, Paulette believed that another good candidate for Jerry Levin was a Boston Guardian’s Office operative named Jimmy Mulligan.
Mulligan had been a high-level GO official who was named in the Snow White documents and who would have at least overseen some of the operations against Paulette. (He was also the “Reverend” who Paulette’s publisher, Harry Shorten, apologized to in order to settle Scientology’s lawsuit against his company, Tower Publications, Inc.) Mulligan was slight in stature and had red hair, and he had an effeminate air – which all matched Levin.
Mulligan died in 1997, but photographs of him were obtained from one of his surviving brothers. When Paulette saw the photos, she knew immediately that Jimmy Mulligan was not Jerry Levin. The investigation had come back to Don Alverzo.
And then, a stunning break: Don Alverzo was identified and located.
In 1978, two prominent Scientologists married each other. Heber Jentzsch was a part time actor and singer who, four years later, would be named president of the Church of Scientology (mostly a spokesman position and not one of actual power in the organization). He married Karen de la Carriere, a top auditor who had been trained personally by L. Ron Hubbard. One of Karen’s bridesmaids was a young woman named Molly, who was married to Don Alverzo.
Although Heber Jentzsch was pressured by the church to divorce Karen in 1989, she still had the photographs of her wedding. She left Scientology in 2010 and quickly became a vocal critic, particularly over the way her ex-husband, Heber, had been treated, with banishment to Scientology’s bizarre internal prison for executives, which had become known as “The Hole.”
In 2014, knowing that Paulette Cooper was trying to find what had become of Don Alverzo, Karen pulled out her photographs of herself in her wedding gown with her bridesmaid, Molly Alverzo, and asked a friend who is a private investigator to see if he could track her down.
Through marriage and other records, the private eye found Molly and her husband, and learned his real name, and
where he lived and worked. He also tracked down a 2002 photograph of Alverzo, under his real name which was on the Internet.
That photograph was positively ID’d as Alverzo by Merrell Vannier, the former GO operative who, with Alverzo, had broken into the law firm that was representing the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1974, and by Len Zinberg, the GO volunteer in New York. Other former Scientologists who had been involved in the New York org in the early 1970s remembered him under his real name, and not his GO identity.
Don Alverzo had been found.
Or had he? Another former GO operative who had worked with Alverzo, Mike McClaughry, disagreed, telling us that the man in the 2002 photo was not Alverzo. And Paulette was skeptical that the man in the photo had been Jerry Levin. She remembered Levin as a slightly stocky young man, but the photograph showed a fat, aging older man. When she focused on his face and blocked out his figure, she thought it could be Levin, but she wasn’t sure.
But then, McClaughry’s wife, Virginia, a skilled researcher, tracked down a 1967 photograph of the man in a newspaper clipping announcing his graduation from Army Aviation School. Mike McClaughry looked at the photo and agreed: There was no longer any question that he was Don Alverzo.
Paulette looked at the same photo and also was convinced: She was “99 percent” sure that the man in the photo was the person who called himself Jerry Levin and lived with her for four months in 1973. This man was Don Alverzo, and Don Alverzo was Jerry Levin.
After a few unsuccessful attempts to catch him at his business office, I finally reached him on the phone, and he pleasantly asked what he could do for me. He was told that a book was being written about Paulette Cooper, and that it was hoped he might be persuaded to talk about his involvement with the New York org in the 1970s.
He said he didn’t understand the question. I repeated myself. Paulette Cooper? The Guardian’s Office? B-I? That you were known as Don Alverzo?
“I’m sorry, I don’t even understand what language you’re talking. I guess you have the wrong person.”
Like Merrell Vannier had described him, the man was unflappable.
While I was on the hunt for Alverzo, talking with about a dozen former GO agents, it became obvious to me that even after 40 years, some of them had changed little in their attitudes about Paulette Cooper. Although some of them were entirely out of Scientology and had gained some perspective on their previous activities, repeatedly they said that Cooper was still someone they reviled.
“She didn’t deserve to be treated the way she was, but she’s a bad person,” one former GO operative said.
Another person, who had been the “Cooper I/C” – the person “in charge” of Scientology’s litigation with Paulette – said he couldn’t understand why a book would be written about her. “She’s not important,” he said, before asking never to be called again and hanging up the telephone.
The other person who infiltrated Paulette’s life, Paula Tyler, is less of a mystery. She’s still a church member, and lives in Clearwater, Florida. She didn’t respond to questions about her role in the operation against Paulette. Like other former GO operatives, Tyler has remained a church member but hasn’t played a visible role in the church’s management.
Her daughter is a different story. Erin Banks rose through Scientology’s public relations ranks, and by 2013 had made it to the national media office. Her comments to newspapers show up when a new building opens in the Midwest, for example. On Scientology’s web page describing its PR team, she’s listed on the second rank along with her husband, Nick Banks.
When Paulette found that Paula Tyler had a page on Facebook (under a married name), she sent her a message through the social media platform.
“How does it feel to ruin a life?” she said. She didn’t get a reply. She sent the same message to Charles Batdorf, the GO operative who had been part of Operation Freakout, and also didn’t get a reply – but then Batdorf took down his Facebook page.
The Guardian herself, Mary Sue Hubbard, died of breast cancer in 2002. The GO’s ringleader, Jane Kember, is today still involved in Scientology, reportedly taking courses at Saint Hill Manor, Scientology’s United Kingdom headquarters in East Grinstead, England. Like other living Snow White veterans, Kember maintains ties to Scientology without holding any official position.
Kember had twin sons, one of whom is in the Sea Organization in Los Angeles. The other one was reportedly never in Scientology.
The Guardian’s Office was dismantled after Mary Sue Hubbard and Jane Kember and the other nine defendants in the Snow White Program were sentenced to prison. In 1981, it was time for a new group of loyal Scientologists to take over while L. Ron Hubbard was in hiding.
Bill Franks, now in his late 60s, was made Scientology’s executive director international in April 1981 and it became his job later that year to dissolve what was left of the GO. On Hubbard’s orders (relayed through David Miscavige), Franks took over the Guardian’s Office just long enough to take it apart.
It was Franks who, with Miscavige, met with Mary Sue Hubbard in a Los Angeles hotel to give her the news that she was being sacrificed for the good of her husband and for Scientology. She would step down from her role as Guardian, she would go to prison (for only a year, it turned out), and she would no longer have a position of power in the organization. (Franks’ story is confirmed by John Brousseau, who had wired up the two men before they met with Mary Sue, and he listened in from a van about a block away.)
Franks says that in order to dismantle the GO, he first had to understand what it had been doing. So he spent hours going through the spy unit’s files, and says it became obvious to him that Hubbard was obsessed with Paulette Cooper.
“A lot of the stuff I read was from Hubbard. He thought Paulette Cooper was working for every group he could imagine that was against Scientology. It was striking,” he says. “It was striking that this woman, who I never met – she had just written a book and was a journalist – that there was so much anger. And it was clear, Hubbard said to do anything including getting rid of her, in one memo I read.”
Franks claims that Hubbard, in handwritten notes that were later destroyed, ordered assassinations of Scientology critics, including David Mayo, who had once been Hubbard’s own Scientology counselor before he was driven out of the church. Others doubt Franks on this score, but Mayo has reportedly told people that he believes he was on an assassination list and he reportedly continues to live under the assumption that Scientology still wants him dead.
Franks is aware that some doubt his memories. But he says there is no question about what he saw—he still vividly remembers Hubbard’s hatred for Paulette. “For some reason he had this thing for Paulette. He just thought she was the antichrist,” he says.
Robert Kaufman had told her, years before he died in 1996, “No matter what you do in life and how many years down the road it will be, they will never leave you alone. They will always have a spy on you.”
20
A spy comes forward
In February 2011, Marty Rathbun revealed that a Vanity Fair reporter had been working for Scientology for 20 years. Rathbun produced a document dated five years earlier – February 14, 2006 – which he said was written by Linda Hamel, the woman who today runs Scientology’s spy operations as the Commanding Officer of the Office of Special Affairs International (CO OSA Int) the unit that replaced the Guardian’s Office.
In that memo, Hamel reveals that the VF reporter was keeping tabs on British journalist Andrew Morton, who at the time was working on an unauthorized biography of Tom Cruise. According to Hamel, the church spy told Morton he wanted to profile him for Vanity Fair. Actually, he was trying to gather information about the Cruise book and what Morton might put in it. He then reported what he learned to Hamel.
Rathbun, in revealing that the reporter was a paid spy for the church, marveled that so many journalists had talked to the man over the years about their Scientology projects, and somehow didn’t notice that the spy
never actually wrote anything about Scientology himself.
One person the reporter regularly checked in with was Paulette Cooper. He told her he was writing an expose on Tony Pellicano, the detective she had worked with many years earlier. She considered the reporter a friend, and he encouraged her when she came to New York to get together with him to talk about politics and the news.
Inevitably, Scientology would come up. From their very first meeting years earlier, he had always said he would one day write about Scientology, though she wondered why he never did. Paulette now realizes that her Vanity Fair reporter friend had been keeping tabs on her for years on behalf of Scientology. Once again, she’d been suckered.
But in recent years, she’s become more comfortable than ever as something of a legend among the mix of Anonymous activists, old-time critics, and ex-Scientologists who spend a lot of time writing and talking about Scientology. Particularly now, as the church lurches from one major crisis to another. She jokingly tells Paul that if she dies before him, “sprinkle my ashes over the nearest Scientology org so that I have the last word.”
In the summer of 2012, Paulette even accepted an invitation to a backyard barbecue, where many of the most notorious Scientology critics were gathering. She was there, with Paul, to be interviewed by Lawrence Wright, who was collecting video for the web version of his book, Going Clear, which was coming out in a few months.
And practically the same week that Wright’s book hit bookshelves, Paulette was featured in a television program, on the ID network, which recreated her experience being tailed on her way to F. Lee Bailey’s office in Boston by Nancy Many. The recognition was gratifying. But still, Paulette said, what she really craved was to hear from the people who had tried so hard to destroy her life.
Over the years, very few had come forward. In the 1980s, she was heckled during a talk she gave to the Investigative Reporters & Editors convention. It was Robert Vaughn Young, who was then one of Scientology’s chief spokesmen. He defected from the church in 1996, and later apologized to her. But that was a rare exception.