Tragically, Yvonne did not get the medical treatment she needed until it was too late. When she finally saw a doctor she was told she had a brain tumour. ‘They said it was inoperable,’ says Spanky Taylor, who was her personal public relations officer at the time.75 Yvonne’s lack of treatment was not unusual. ‘Nobody got medical help in Scientology,’ recalls Nancy Many, who worked with Yvonne. ‘We were taught it was your overts – if you were sick, it was your fault, you pulled it in.’76 Yvonne’s daughter Janis says sick people in Scientology were considered a liability. ‘It was not a matter of singling her out, it’s a matter of the culture. If you get sick you are considered “downstat”, you’re not contributing.’77
The appalling treatment of one of Scientology’s most successful disseminators continued. When Yvonne requested to go to Flag base at Clearwater to get the auditing she thought would help her, Spanky Taylor asked one of Scientology’s finance executives if they could pay for an airline ticket. ‘I was told if Yvonne wants to get to Flag, she can take a fucking Greyhound bus,’ says Taylor.78
Yvonne’s children were not even told she was dying. Spanky Taylor remembers how devastating that was for the mother of three. ‘She wanted her kids so bad,’ she tells me in tears, nearly 40 years later. ‘We talked a lot about how much she wanted to be with her kids and she was not permitted.’79 Hubbard had callously separated Yvonne from her children when they very young. Now his organisation and its warped policies were denying her access to her children once more, as she lay in bed dying from the effects of a tumour and a stroke that had gone undiagnosed and had not been treated properly.
When Yvonne first became ill, none of her three children were told. Terri found out through an anonymous phone call. When she picked up the phone, a woman said, ‘Your mother is very ill and nobody is going to tell you.’ The caller hung up straight away. Terri jumped in her car and drove to the Wilcox berthing building where her mother lived with her then husband, Heber Jentzsch.
Terri arrived to find her mother in a delirious state with the door wide open and no-one attending to her. ‘It was the strangest thing,’ says Terri. ‘It was like the Twilight Zone; nobody was there.’80 Terri called an ambulance and got her mother to the hospital where doctors discovered a large inoperable tumour in her brain.
Yvonne’s eldest daughter was not allowed to stay and look after her. ‘I was forced back to work,’ says Terri. ‘I was told others were caring for her, that she was getting auditing and that would handle her illness and that she was improving.’81 Terri was lied to. Yvonne was not getting better. A few months later Terri received a letter from her mother that had been handwritten by someone else. ‘I knew it was her way of telling me something was very wrong,’ she says.82
Terri borrowed money for an airfare and flew straight to Clearwater without telling her superiors. She was faced with an awful dilemma; she knew she had to go and see her mother, but didn’t feel like she could tell her brother, Peter, or sister, Janis. ‘If I tell them and they ask permission to go, nobody’s going to let all three of us go. They’ll stop all of us from going. So I had to do it secretly. I had no choice.’83
When Terri landed at Tampa airport she called Yvonne to tell her she was on her way. ‘She was slurring her words, she could hardly speak,’ says Terri. ‘I could tell it was a bad situation. I said, “Hang on, hang on I’ll be there soon.”’84 When Terri arrived she found her mother in a room by herself, with no-one there to comfort her. ‘Tezzie, I’m so glad you’re here,’ Yvonne told her eldest daughter. ‘She repeated it over and over as I hugged her and she hugged me,’ says Terri, ‘and then she faded away and never came to and died two to three days later.’85
After Yvonne died in January 1978, Hubbard ordered that the Celebrity Centre become a shrine to her.86 For a while her old office at the building in Los Angeles was set aside as a tribute to Yvonne and her work, but it didn’t last long. ‘It was demolished,’ says Nancy Many, a former head of the Celebrity Centre. ‘It’s now the President of CC’s office with no mention of Yvonne.’87 Terri says she heard David Miscavige personally order that it be removed in its entirety. ‘He never wanted anyone to receive any credit for anything unless it was himself,’ she says.88
IN AUGUST 1990, JANIS Grady became the third of the Gillham children to break out of the Sea Org. David Miscavige’s extreme behaviour was once again a driving force behind the decision. Like Terri, Janis had made the successful transition from being one of Hubbard’s first messengers into a Scientology executive. In 1988, she led the team that prepared Scientology’s cruise ship the Freewinds for its first voyage. From 1987 to 1990, she was in charge of Scientology’s international management team.89
In the summer of 1990, Sea Org members at Scientology’s International Base (also known as Int or Gold) had been working overtime preparing for the arrival of Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise. As part of the base’s overhaul, the villas, also known as the G units, were being renovated for Scientology’s star couple. For weeks Sea Org members had been working day and night to get the accommodation up to Hollywood standards.90 Then Mother Nature intervened and turned all of Miscavige’s best-laid plans to mud.
Flooding rains ravaged the nearby town of Hemet and Scientology’s base did not escape the damage. Roads were closed due to mudslides, trees were uprooted, water flooded into buildings. Former Sea Org member Marc Headley estimated the rain caused several million dollars’ worth of damage. ‘The villas were flooded,’ he said. ‘The mountain above the G Units turned to mud and flowed over the highway and straight into the Gs.’91
The staff on the base were drenched, exhausted and covered in mud. They had done all they could to try and save the villas from being destroyed by mudslides. ‘I saw the Gold crew risking their lives to prevent property being ruined,’ says Janis Grady.92 But their efforts were not appreciated. Miscavige blamed the Sea Org for the damage.
Miscavige called for a compulsory muster of all staff in the base’s dining hall.93 A podium was set up at the front of the room. The crew, in their hundreds, stood to attention while they waited for their leader to arrive. Miscavige thundered into the room and started screaming at the staff, berating those who had risked their lives to save the villas from being damaged.
Miscavige described the workers assembled in front of him as ‘scum’ and assigned the entire base to the condition of ‘Confusion’ meaning 15-minute meal breaks and no other liberties.94 Janis Grady, like many others, was shocked by the tirade. ‘DM [Miscavige] got up there in front of everybody ranting and raving about how the Gold crew were doing nothing about dealing with the storm and I was standing there and I’m thinking this guy has flipped! And that’s when I made my decision – I’m done.’95
Janis had permission to go to Los Angeles for three days to catch up with her Australian aunt and uncle who were visiting the US. Her husband Paul did not have a leave pass, so she pretended she was dropping him back at the apartment complex before heading to LA.
Instead, Janis and Paul headed straight to the airport where they picked up Janis’s aunt and uncle before heading to her father’s place. Peter Gillham Snr was still a Scientologist but he was not in the Sea Org. They told him they were not returning to Hemet and asked for a number and address for Janis’s brother.
Peter Gillham Jnr had been out of the Sea Org for eight years and lived in the rural Californian community of Upper Ojai. Janis tried calling him, but he did not answer. She decided to turn up unannounced. ‘We found his house but he wasn’t home but there was someone from down the road in his house watching TV,’ Janis recalls, laughing. ‘And she said, “Oh, your brother is camping down at the beach at Point Mugu.”’96 Janis and Paul headed for the coast.
Janis had been in the Sea Org since she was 11. At the age of 34, she was about to spend her first night as a free woman. It was a joyous occasion. ‘We camped out on the beach, our first night of freedom,’ she says. ‘And I got to meet my nieces and my nephew. Because my brother was declared �
�suppressive” I’d never seen the kids!’97 Soon after, Janis got confirmation that she was pregnant. She would now, like her brother, be able to have her own family, something she could never have done inside the Sea Org.
Eventually Janis called her sister, Terri, in Florida to let her know she had escaped. Then she called the International Base and told them she was not coming back. When Janis tried to retrieve personal items she had in storage at the U-Haul at Hemet, she discovered that someone had already been through her belongings. ‘They had already broken in to the storage room and they took all my photographs of me, my mother and any crew members, or me in uniform. They took all my birthday cards that were signed by LRH [Hubbard]. They took anything that was Scientology or LRH connected.’98
By the end of the year Janis and Terri were reunited. They decided to set up a business in Las Vegas. Terri had spent time there in the 1980s visiting Caesar’s Palace casino with Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman and Miscavige when Tom flew them there in his private airplane for Terri’s birthday. After leaving the Sea Org she got an offer that took her back to the desert city. ‘I got a call from somebody who knew my mother in the early ’70s,’ she says, ‘and he said come to Vegas, it’s boomtown USA, come and help me start a mortgage company. I’ll teach you the mortgage business and you manage the company for me.’99
The sisters and their husbands moved in to a two-bedroom apartment in the Polo Club on Decatur Boulevard. Mark Fisher, a former Sea Org colleague who left the same night as Janis, joined the business as well and was sleeping on the sofa in their apartment until he could afford his own place. After a few months, their company, City Mortgage, needed a new agent. Terri interviewed a friendly young man from out of town named Dave Lubow. She hired him soon after as a loan officer.
Lubow got very close to Terri and Janis, their husbands, and Mark Fisher. He moved in to the same apartment block as them, played racquetball with Fernando and hung out with the former Sea Org members after hours. He started asking personal questions about their time in Scientology and why they all decided to leave. Fernando asked him if he worked for the Church of Scientology. He denied it.
Dave Lubow didn’t close too many sales in those early months, but he didn’t really need to. He had another source of income he could rely on. The Church of Scientology, through its lawyers, had paid him to infiltrate City Mortgage and spy on the former Scientologists. He would send regular reports to the Office of Special Affairs (OSA) in Los Angeles. Miscavige wanted as much information as he could get on Terri and Janis.
Marty Rathbun was Miscavige’s right hand man at the time. He says he was told to arrange for someone to infiltrate and spy on the Las Vegas group. Rathbun told OSA-Intel head Linda Hamel to find the right person for the job. Lubow was hired soon after.100
The intelligence flowed freely back to Scientology headquarters and to Miscavige. ‘Quite frankly, the more reporting he did, the more obsessed Miscavige became,’ recalled Rathbun. ‘Those people all pinned their gripes about their experiences in Scientology to their personal experiences with Miscavige.’101 According to Rathbun, Scientology’s leader became ‘intensely obsessed with that Las Vegas crowd.’102 Just how obsessed was highlighted by the undercover operation that was coming.
Dave Lubow had given Fernando a telephone as a Christmas present. The phone was used to call David Mayo, Hubbard’s former auditor, who had been treated so brutally by Miscavige. Terri had been trying to track down Mayo for years and had finally found a phone number for him. She now believes the phone was bugged and that phone call triggered the extraordinary operation that was about to unfold.
Terri Gamboa was used to working late from her time as head of Author Services. At City Mortgage, she continued the habit to get ahead of the game for the following day. One night at around 9 pm the phone rang. It was Ian Markham-Smith, a Brit who said he was from an international public relations firm and wanted to have lunch and talk about investing with them in the mortgage company. After their initial meeting he indicated that he liked them so much he had a further opportunity for them.
Markham-Smith was a former Fleet Street journalist who would later publish books about Jerry Springer and Nicolas Cage. He took Terri and Fernando to Caesar’s Palace where he wined and dined them and outlined his proposal. He wanted them to go to Australia and set up and run a horse property. They would host international clients, take them riding in the countryside, escort them to the opera and high-end restaurants and be paid good money for their troubles.
For someone like Terri, who loved riding horses, it was an irresistible offer. ‘We were definitely suspicious at first,’ she says. ‘It was too good to be true, but what the hell, what are we going to do? Not do it because you are suspicious it’s the church?’103
TERRI AND FERNANDO SIGNED on for the deal. They were paid $84,000 a year for just three days work each month as well as being on call whenever needed. It was excellent money for 1991, with expenses thrown in on top. The rest of the time they could ride horses and enjoy themselves. The property was north of Melbourne. In the two years they were there only two or three clients were sent out. With their living expenses covered, they were able to bank their wages and reinvest them into the mortgage business back in Las Vegas when they returned.
Dave Lubow, the loan officer who could not close a sale in Las Vegas, found the money to visit them in Australia a number of times. After the first year, when Terri and Fernando were thinking of leaving, he tried to convince them to stay and set up a Bed and Breakfast with him. ‘He was like, “No, no, this will be great.” He tried everything,’ says Terri.104 It all seemed very suspicious. Ian Markham-Smith gave Terri and Fernando a mobile phone and insisted they must be available to answer it at all times, even though there were was virtually no demand for clients.
Back in Las Vegas, Lubow blew his cover while drinking with a friend. On one occasion he brought a broker named Jack into City Mortgage. Janis started doing private deals with him. ‘One day,’ recalls Janis, ‘I ask Jack, “Is Dave bringing you deals? Because he’s not closing anything with me.” He says, “Oh, no. Dave’s not here as a loan officer, that’s just a cover. He’s a private investigator and he’s on a case.”’105
Janis switched to private investigator mode on Lubow. She asked Jack how he knew his friend was working undercover. He admitted that, after a night of drinking, he was invited back to Dave’s apartment, which was full of equipment used for bugging telephones. It was then that Dave explained what he really did for money. ‘I’m not a loan officer,’ he told Jack. ‘That’s just my cover. I’m actually a private investigator and I’m on a case.’106
According to Janis, Lubow showed Jack his private investigator badge, his gun and his bugging equipment. ‘Jack was innocently spilling the beans to me on Dave,’ says Janis, ‘and he had no clue.’107 Janis and Terri now knew that Lubow was a spy, but they did not let on. If they had exposed him, the Church of Scientology would have simply hired another operative.
After two years of being paid good money to ride horses in Australia, Terri and Fernando returned to Las Vegas in late 1993, despite protests from Lubow and Ian Markham-Smith, who had urged them to stay. Both Marty Rathbun and Mike Rinder, two of Scientology’s most senior executives at the time, have confirmed that the church financed the operation to get the pair out of the country. According to Rathbun, the reason was clear. He says Miscavige was concerned that Terri could have undermined their negotiations with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to gain tax-exempt status.108
At the time, Scientology’s greatest priority was to regain the tax exemption it had lost in 1967, when the IRS had decided it was a commercial operation run for the benefit of Hubbard. In 1973, Hubbard decided the church should not pay its back taxes. Within 20 years, the Church of Scientology owed US$1 billion to the IRS, a debt that threatened its livelihood.109 The church continued to fight the decision, bombarding the IRS with lawsuits, with over 200 cases on behalf of the church, and over 2000 on behalf of
individual Scientologists.
When the Scientology entity the Church of Spiritual Technology (CST) sued the United States government over its denial of tax-exempt status in 1992, court documents listed Terri as a trustee of CST and a Director, President, and shareholder of Author Services. This was two years after she had left the Sea Org.
Terri believes Miscavige wanted her out of the country because he feared that she could have undermined either the litigation or the negotiations with the IRS. ‘If the IRS called me and said you’re a lifetime trustee, I would’ve said I left years ago,’ she says. ‘That would have undermined it right there, because they filed that I was a lifetime trustee. So they lied. Either way they would’ve been in trouble.’110
If the IRS had contacted Terri, it would have blown Miscavige’s cover. ‘I think Miscavige also didn’t want me to find out that I was a lifetime trustee and that I had power over him,’ she says. ‘I’m sure to this day Marion Pouw and Greg Wilhere have no idea that they are lifetime trustees of CST and that they have power over Miscavige.’111
The two-year period when Terri was out of the way in Australia was a time when the IRS was asking a lot of questions of Miscavige. The US tax agency was conducting an extensive review of the Church of Scientology’s affairs. The review came about after the Scientologists had bombarded the IRS with litigation and freedom of information requests, had put their staff under surveillance and made personal attacks in their magazine Freedom. When Miscavige and Rathbun told the IRS commissioner Fred Goldberg the attacks and litigation would cease if they got an unqualified tax exemption for all of their activities, the IRS agreed to review their tax-exempt status.112
Over the following two years, the Church of Scientology gave the IRS everything they wanted. Miscavige and Rathbun would visit Washington, DC virtually every week to answer questions and deliver documents. Two hundred Scientologists had been commandeered to internally review the organisation’s financial records.113 During their two-year review the IRS failed to interview the lifetime trustee Terri Gamboa who was named in key documents. If they had tracked her down, Scientology’s history could have been very different.
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