Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief (47 page)

The church provided an affidavit of a former Sea Org member,
Yael Lustgarten, who stated that she was present at the meeting and that the attack by Miscavige never happened. She claims that Hawkins made a mess of his presentation—“He smelled of body odor
, he was unshaven, his voice tone was very low and he could hardly be heard”—and he was merely instructed to shape up. On the other hand,
Amy Scobee said she witnessed the attack—it was her cubicle the two men fell into—and after the altercation, she recalled, “I gathered all the buttons
from Jeff’s shirt and the change from his pockets and gave them back to him.”

Tommy Davis later testified that he had conducted an investigation of the charges of abuse at the base. He said that all of the abuse
had been committed by Rinder, Rathbun, and De Vocht—none by Miscavige.

TOM DE VOCHT GREW UP
in a little central Florida town called Fort Meade. When he was ten years old, in 1974, his cousin,
Dicky Thompson, a keyboardist in the
Steve Miller Band, came to visit, riding a Harley-Davidson motorcycle. That year the band had a number one song, “The Joker,” and Thompson rode into town with a glow of fame around him. “He had a weird
stare,” De Vocht remembered. “He invited my sister to meet Steve Miller and
John Travolta.” Within a
year, most of De Vocht’s family had joined the Church of Scientology. In July 1977, thirteen-year-old Tom De Vocht signed the billion-year contract for the Sea Org.

De Vocht became one of
Miscavige’s allies and moved up the bureaucratic ladder quickly. In 1986, he was appointed the Commanding Officer of the
Commodore’s Messengers Org at Flag. In 2001, Miscavige called him, complaining, “Tom, I can’t get my building done.” The new headquarters for the
Religious Technology Center at
Gold Base, Building 50, was years behind schedule and well over budget. Miscavige directed De Vocht to come to Gold Base and oversee the construction. The first day he got there, De Vocht realized that “this building is going to be the end of me.”

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.