Richard Behar before TIME
Dave Touretzky
Back in 1986, five years before his fateful TIME Magazine article,
Richard Behar wrote a piece for Forbes called "The prophet and profits
of Scientology". It's now available in the Secret Library of
Scientology as a scanned PDF:
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Library/Shelf/behar/behar-forbes-1986.pdf
Thanks to Roger Gonnet for supplying the PDF version.
If someone wanted to turn this into plain HTML and mail me the file,
I'd be most grateful.
No wonder Scientology hates the Internet.
-- Dave Touretzky: "October is Behar's 20 year anniversary as an SP."
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Secrets
thorazine shuffle
"Dave Touretzky" <d...@cs.cmu.edu> wrote in message
news:44b06b70$1...@news2.lightlink.com...
Thanks, Dave, and you too, Roger.
Good stuff.
ewsnead
"Dave Touretzky" <d...@cs.cmu.edu> wrote in message
news:44b06b70$1...@news2.lightlink.com...
>
This is some great additional entheta with which to vex the cult.
Entheta is good. More entheta is even better.
Death to the analytic mind!
--
ewsnead
We accumulate our opinions at an age when our understanding is at its
weakest. - George Christoph Lichtenberg
http://www.xenu.net
http://www.whyaretheydead.net
http://www.lermanet.com
http://www.scientomogy.info/index.html#NEW
http://firstdistributorsnz.com/scien...south-park.htm
http://www.torymagoo.org
http://www.xenutv.com
and (drum roll)
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/9363363/inside_scientology
Barbara Schwarz
Dave Touretzky schrieb:
> Back in 1986, five years before his fateful TIME Magazine article,
> Richard Behar wrote a piece
Richard Behar pushed German p$ych lines. He will go down in shame as
all other reporters who didn't investigate and just repeated lies and
fabricated their own.
As Behar's Time part about Scientology in Germany is completely FALSE
(and I should know as its President of that time) it is to conclude
that the rest of this primitive articles and other trash are garbage
too.
Barbara Schwarz (Looking for the original Mark [Marty] Rathbun. No
impostor, please!)
http://www.thunderstar.net/~schwarz/lrh/fbidocs.html
--
Dave Touretzky has bomb instructions on the net.
http://www.religiousfreedomwatch.org/extremists/
Barbzzzzz "Babbles" Graham, is the selfproclaimed "chaplain" of an
allegedly non-existing organization named ARSCC that doesn't pay taxes.
But if they don't exist, how come they have a Chief Financial Officer
(jail bird, drug loving and habitual offender Korey Jerome Kruse aka
"Simkatu" and "Lord Xenu") who works and travels on behalf of ARSCC?
Barbara Graham in her own words: "Anything's legal if you don't get
caught." And: "You asshole. I was *never* a good person, you sad piece
of crap. --
Spidergraham, Chaplain, ARSCC"
More: http://www.religiousfreedomwatch.org/extremists/graham1.html
thorazine shuffle
"Barbara Schwarz" <barbara...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1152415678....@b28g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
It seems to me that he did quite a bit of investigation. The piece seems
very well researched.
Skipper
Barbara Schwarz <barbara...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Dave Touretzky schrieb:
>
> > Back in 1986, five years before his fateful TIME Magazine article,
> > Richard Behar wrote a piece
>
> Richard Behar pushed German p$ych lines. He will go down in shame as
> all other reporters who didn't investigate and just repeated lies and
> fabricated their own.
> As Behar's Time part about Scientology in Germany is completely FALSE
> (and I should know as its President of that time) it is to conclude
> that the rest of this primitive articles and other trash are garbage
> too.
Well, you'd know garbage. Which restaurant did you eat behind today?
Barbara Schwarz
thorazine shuffle schrieb:
As an eyewitness and person in the storm, I am telling you that Behar
didn't research at all. He just printed rumours and falsehoods. What a
shame.
Barbara Schwarz
Skipper schrieb:
> In article <1152415678....@b28g2000cwb.googlegroups.com>,
> Barbara Schwarz <barbara...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Dave Touretzky schrieb:
> >
> > > Back in 1986, five years before his fateful TIME Magazine article,
> > > Richard Behar wrote a piece
> >
> > Richard Behar pushed German p$ych lines. He will go down in shame as
> > all other reporters who didn't investigate and just repeated lies and
> > fabricated their own.
> > As Behar's Time part about Scientology in Germany is completely FALSE
> > (and I should know as its President of that time) it is to conclude
> > that the rest of this primitive articles and other trash are garbage
> > too.
>
> Well, you'd know garbage. Which restaurant did you eat behind today?
Being cheap and stupid doesn't change anything from the fact that Behar
didn't research. I have loads of documents that prove that he reported
completely wrongfully about what happened in Germany. As he didn't
write facts about Scientology in Germany, you can conclude that he did
the same with all the rest of the article. Behar is a propadandist and
not an investigative reporter.
Skipper
Barbara Schwarz <barbara...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Skipper schrieb:
>
> > In article <1152415678....@b28g2000cwb.googlegroups.com>,
> > Barbara Schwarz <barbara...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > Dave Touretzky schrieb:
> > >
> > > > Back in 1986, five years before his fateful TIME Magazine article,
> > > > Richard Behar wrote a piece
> > >
> > > Richard Behar pushed German p$ych lines. He will go down in shame as
> > > all other reporters who didn't investigate and just repeated lies and
> > > fabricated their own.
> > > As Behar's Time part about Scientology in Germany is completely FALSE
> > > (and I should know as its President of that time) it is to conclude
> > > that the rest of this primitive articles and other trash are garbage
> > > too.
> >
> > Well, you'd know garbage. Which restaurant did you eat behind today?
>
> Being cheap and stupid doesn't change anything from the fact that Behar
> didn't research.
Babs, are you admitting to being cheap and stupid and dumpster-diving
here, all in one line? Wow. Did you down some truth serum or something?
> I have loads of documents that prove that he reported
> completely wrongfully about what happened in Germany. As he didn't
> write facts about Scientology in Germany, you can conclude that he did
> the same with all the rest of the article. Behar is a propadandist and
> not an investigative reporter.
Hide them in your submarine in the great Salt Lake, babe, they're comin
for ya.
Kevin Brady
>
> Skipper schrieb:
>
>> In article <1152415678....@b28g2000cwb.googlegroups.com>,
>> Barbara Schwarz <barbara...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> > Dave Touretzky schrieb:
>> >
>> > > Back in 1986, five years before his fateful TIME Magazine article,
>> > > Richard Behar wrote a piece
>> >
>> > Richard Behar pushed German p$ych lines. He will go down in shame as
>> > all other reporters who didn't investigate and just repeated lies and
>> > fabricated their own.
>> > As Behar's Time part about Scientology in Germany is completely FALSE
>> > (and I should know as its President of that time) it is to conclude
>> > that the rest of this primitive articles and other trash are garbage
>> > too.
>>
>> Well, you'd know garbage. Which restaurant did you eat behind today?
>
> Being cheap and stupid doesn't change anything from the fact that Behar
> didn't research. I have loads of documents that prove that he reported
> completely wrongfully about what happened in Germany. As he didn't
> write facts about Scientology in Germany, you can conclude that he did
> the same with all the rest of the article. Behar is a propadandist and
> not an investigative reporter.
Do those documents also verify Hubbard as your father, and Ike as your
grandfather, and finally demonstrate your USA Citizen stature, born in a
Lake in Utah?
Eru Ilúvatar
>As an eyewitness and person in the storm,
i.e. one of the criminals
>I am telling you that Behar didn't research at all. He just
>printed rumours and falsehoods. What a shame.
Why would anybody take you word for it, Barbara. You aren't
exactly known for telling the truth and you certainly have the
motive to lie about it. Then there's that little problem you
have with delusions...
Playfullminx
Dave Touretzky wrote:
> Back in 1986, five years before his fateful TIME Magazine article,
> Richard Behar wrote a piece for Forbes called "The prophet and profits
> of Scientology". It's now available in the Secret Library of
> Scientology as a scanned PDF:
>
> http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Library/Shelf/behar/behar-forbes-1986.pdf
>
> Thanks to Roger Gonnet for supplying the PDF version.
>
> If someone wanted to turn this into plain HTML and mail me the file,
> I'd be most grateful.
Sure thing, Dave.
I'll email it to you now.
roger gonnet
"Barbara Schwarz" <barbara...@gmail.com> a écrit dans le message de news:
1152415678....@b28g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
>
> Dave Touretzky schrieb:
>
>> Back in 1986, five years before his fateful TIME Magazine article,
>> Richard Behar wrote a piece
>
> Richard Behar pushed German p$ych lines.
what sort of nazi lines do you push, "schweinkopf?"
r
roger gonnet
De : "Dave Touretzky" <d...@cs.cmu.edu>
Groupes de discussion : alt.religion.scientology
Envoy�: dimanche 9 juillet 2006 04:35
Objet : Richard Behar before TIME
You can do that directly from adobe acrobat. This document is a formatted text +
images, OCRed, so, it can be turned into txt, html,doc etc, with acrobat.
You can also use the ctrl+4 command to see the document txt parts differently
(that makes it more easy to select and copy some parts)
Besides, for any long text, I don't recommend the text/doc/html versions, since
they are far slower to open than PDF.
I've definitely choosen PDF as the best way to get anything done, for the
following motivations:
- long files open in a matter of seconds, even 5 or 20 megs enormous files are
opened in no time while it's very slow with word etc.
- the search place is ready to use
- the navigation through is much easier
- a page or a pages lot can easily be displaced-replaced from one place to
another in a document, while it's almost impossible with MS word or html etc.
- parts of a pdf doc can very easily be copied from one opened doc to another
open document.
- extraction of one page or some pages can easily be done
- printing a choosen part of one page can be done too
- the images don't need different files than the text, which meant they are
inside the doc
- they can be transferred directly by mail
- they can be reformatted (not always perfect, as it depends of the original
making) in a number of other formats, directly from acrobat (from pdf to jpegs,
docs, txt, rtf, etc)
- depending of the original definition, the "image only" documents can be
directly OCRed from the text, since acrobat contain an OCR system.
- one can write on the doc (or put stamps, notations etc) more easily than with
word, without changing the pagination.
The general ideas to have such documents in pdf format are :
1/to get the most evident presentation possible with the images
2/having them searchable nevertheless (therefore indexed through search engines)
3/ having documents whose parts can be extracted/copied easily.
==
Here is a direct exemple of a pdf reformatting Forbes article to txt with
acrobat 7.08: I did not touch anything, so, the legends of photos and the
off-text parts are mixed in the article parts.
==
L. Ron Hubbard, one of the most bizarre entrepreneurs on record, proved cult
religion can be big business. Now he's declared dead, and the question is, did
he take $200 million with him?
The prophet and profits of Scientology
L. Ron Hubbard gone underground in New York City: 1973
By Richard Behar
O
NLY A FEW CAN BOAST the fi要ancial success of L. Ron Hub苑ard, the science
fiction story負eller and entrepreneur who reported衍y died and was cremated last
January at the age of 74.
For roughly three decades Hubbard ran the notorious Church of Scientol觔gy� a
"religion" he formed to "clear" mankind of misery. It came complete with finance
dictators, "gang-bang secfurity) checks," lie de負ectors, "committees of
evidence" and detention camps. In 1977 the FBI sent 134 agents, armed with
warrants and sledgehammers, storming into Scientology centers in Los Angeles and
Washington. Eleven top church officials, including Hubbard's third wife, went to
jail for infiltrating, bur茆larizing and wiretapping over 100 government
agencies, including the IRS, FBI and CIA. Hubbard could hold his own with any of
his science fic負ion novels.
Amid all the melodrama, at least $200 million in cash produced by his strange
creation was gathered in Hub苑ard's name, and there is believed to be much more
in organization assets: The Church of Scientology�has proved to be one of the
most lucrative businesses around. If FORBES had known as much as it knows now,
after interviewing dozens of eyewit要esses and examining sworn testimo要y and
court records in both criminal and civil cases, Hubbard would have been included
high on the Forbes Four Hundred.
There is something that FORBES still doesn't know, however. It is something no
one may know outside a small, secretive band of Hubbard's followers: What is
happening to all that money?
Hubbard himself has not been seen publicly since 1980, when he went underground,
disappearing even from the view of high "church" officials.
That's in character: He was said by spokesmen to have retired from Scientology's
management in 1966. In fact, for 20 years after, he maintained a grip so tight
that sources say since his 1980 disappearance three appoint苟d "messengers" have
been able to gather tens of millions of dollars at will, harass and intimidate
Scientol觔gy members, and rule with an iron fist an international network that
is still estimated to have tens of thou貞ands of adherents-all merely on his
unseen authority.
How could Hubbard do all this? As early as the 1950s, officials at the American
Medical Association were warning that Scientology, then known as Dianetics, was
a cult. More recently, in 1984, courts of law here and abroad labeled the
organization such things as "schizophrenic and paranoid" and "corrupt, sinister
and dangerous," while Hubbard himself was described as "a pathological liar" and
"a charlatan and worse."
But the central fact is the money: hundreds of millions of dollars last seen in
the form of cold cash or highly negotiable securities. "It's a perfect story
about greed and lust tor power," says William Franks, who was driven out of the
organization in 1981, when he was the church's chairman of the board and its
executive director inter要ational, the post Hubbard officially relinquished 20
years ago. "If you un-
FORBES 400/OCTOBER 27, 1986
Scientology world Headquarters building in Los Angeles
"Hubbard, told me at one time the biggest mistake we made was going religious."
demand it on that basis, and stay away from the 'religious' aspects, it makes
perfect sense."
A few facts about Hubbard's early life are known. Lafayette Ronald Hub苑ard was
bom in Tilden, Neb. on Mar. 13, 1911. After serving in World War II, he wrote a
1947 letter to the Veter苔ns Administration in which he com計lained of his
"seriously affected" mind and "suicidal inclinations" and pleaded for help.
Hubbard was never負heless a moderately successful sci苟nce fiction writer. In
1949, addressing a writers' convention, he reportedly said, "If a man really
wants to make $1 million, the best way would be to start his own religion." In
1950 he published the book that would ultimately make him rich beyond the dreams
of avarice,
Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health. In 1951, during his second
di赳orce, Hubbard's wife claimed that he was "hopelessly insane" and that he
tortured her. Three years later, his "church" was born.
It did not act much like a church. Through the 1950s and much ot the 1960s,
Hubbard emphasized the "scientific" nature of a therapeutic technique he
invented. He called it "auditing." He said it could cute ill要ess, restore sight
to the blind and improve intelligence and appearance. Hubbard argued, in his
bestselling book, that inner turmoil sprang from mental aberrations he called
en茆rams" caused by past traumatic events, and could be eliminated by
identifying, recalling and reliving the events. Eliminate your engrams,
eliminate your turmoil. A similar pro苞ess is routine to most conventional
methods of psychotherapy, a fact Hubbard presumably was aware of. On this
unlikely base he built his S400 million empire.
Hubbard constructed a device he called an E-meter, actually a simpli苯ied lie
detector, to measure electrical changes in the skin while subjects gc over
intimate details of their past. Au苓itors (later also called ministers! would
conduct sessions with this de赳ice and zero in on Hubbard's en茆rams.
Psychiatrists say a successful session of going over long-suppressed traumas can
produce a sense of per貞onal relief and euphoria. That brought the troubled
subject back for more, money in hand. Lots of money. A large organization began
to form, with "franchises" around the coun負ry. There are a lot of troubled
people out there.
Side by side with his "scientific" treatments, Hubbard pitched a body of
religious beliefs-reincarnation and the like (see box, p. 322)-and claimed
tax-exempt status as a reli茆ion. It was not long before some of his auditing
subjects were drawn into what became a fast-growing cult. Some of them became
fanatics who "scientific" claims were bogus and that E-meter auditing would no
long苟r be labeled as a scientific treatment. But Hubbard was resourceful. The
way around the ruling was to call the meters and auditing strictly "reli茆ious
sacraments" and therefore be軌ond the FDA's reach. Hubbard's Scientology
counselors had already begun calling themselves ministers. Now they took to
wearing black and clerical collars. Chapels were con貞tructed in Scientology
centers around the country. "Franchises" be苞ame "missions," "fees" became
"fixed donations," and "theories" be苞ame "sacred scriptures." The money got
even bigger.
The system works like this: Pros計ects, normally spoken of as "raw
Hubbard and friends in 1974 (Pat Broeker, seated r.; eventual defector
Armstrong, I.)
Life became very peculiar aboard the good, ship Apollo.
would do virtually anything at Hub苑ard's command.
Unfortunately, the tax ploy and the big money drew the attention of the IRS: A
ruling stripped him of his tax苟xempt status in 1967.
But by then the money was so big Hubbard was able to buy a 342-foot oceangoing
ship, the Apollo. On it, he withdrew from his government perse苞utors and
cruised safely in interna負ional waters with an adoring retinue of followers.
The IRS was later able to prove in court that he was meanwhile skimming money,
at least $3 million in 1972 alone, and laundering it through schemes involving
phony billings, a dummy corporation in Pan苔ma and secret Swiss bank accounts.
In 1971 a U.S. federal court finally upheld an FDA ruling that Hubbard's meat,"
are offered a free 200-question "personality test" to determine whether
counseling (which means au苓iting) is needed. ("Auditing is always needed," says
one former counselor.) Scientology services range from a communications workshop
for S50 to the more popular one-on-one auditing sessions that soon cost anywhere
from, get this, S200 to more than $1,000 an hour. Special training courses go
for $12,000 and up.
How can anyone, except the very rich, afford to spend $200 to $ 1,000 an hour on
counseling? Plus pay for the books and other materials in which Hubbard did a
lively side business? Some newcomers are encouraged to become "field staff
members," who recruit new raw meat on the streets for commissions to pay for
their own services-they get 10% to 15% of all services rendered to the piece of
meat they bring in. Others go into the busi要ess side for a piece of the action.
Since it is not uncommon for people to spend more than $100,000 over a decade
for their salvation, "The regis負rars were making good bucks, buying Porsches
and Mercedes-Benzes," says one defector, Bent Corydon, "and the best counselors
were paid on a perfor衫ance scale." Corydon, who once ran the biggest single
Scientology mis貞ion, left in 1982 to start his own auditing religion.
For the less enterprising, another way to afford the religion is to sign a
contract for up to a billion years (rein苞arnation, remember) and join church
staff. After signing a note obligating
themselves to pay for all ser赳ices rendered in the event they break their
employment contracts and waiving all right to sue, these members receive free
auditing, room and board, a structured and controlled environment, and a small
allowance-less than $25 per week in the early 1980s-in return for labor that can
average as much as 15 hours per day.
Ultimately subjects are "cleared"-that is, pro要ounced cured of engrams. But
Hubbard was no dummy. He added more and more steps, each usually more ex計ensive
than the last, for his cult followers. Already, in the early 1950s, Hubbard
found that the prior lives of individ赴als also required auditing by the hour.
In the late 1960s, Hubbard had another revela負ion: Humans are actually composed
of clusters of spiri�tual beings, stemming back millions of years. Now those spiritual beings had to
be audited! Preposterous? Perhaps, but "eventually you lose the ability to even
form a belief about these things,'' says a former high-level Hubbard aide,
Gerald Armstrong. "Hubbard says, 'Jump,' you say, 'How high?' Hubbard says, 'I
have new technology,' you say, 'How wonderful.' "
The "meat" would have successive, increasingly strange levels of "clear虹ng"
revealed to them only gradually, of course, and only as they seemed ready to
"flow up the bridge," in the peculiar jargon that developed within the
organization. In 1981 yet more new revelations were issued, but only after
income from existing levels had dropped off. "If you don't have the money,
you're a slave," sums up Howard Rower, a successful New York real estate
developer who ran a Manhattan "mission" until 1983. "And if you have money,
you're fawned all over until you don't have any money."
The good ship Apollo got filled with hundreds of the most thoroughly pro茆rammed
of Hubbard's signees. On board, life became very peculiar. Frank Watson, a
chiropractor then in his 50s, told FORBES he was thrown overboard five times,
sometimes blindfolded, for minor infractions. The drop was 26 feet. One Tanja
Bur苓en testified she was required to serve at the age of 13 (both parents were
Scientologists) as Hubbard's personal slave, helping him dress and preparing his
toiletries. There are many more el positions in government agencies, It also
sent followers to burglarize and rifle files or plant wiretaps. Adroit Freedom
of Information Act filings by Scientologists caused the government to bring much
of its evidence from its Scientology investigations into one office in
Washington; his people then repeatedly burglarized the govern衫ent's office,
obtaining even those documents the government had no intention of releasing.
It was the discovery of this cam計aign that sent the startled G-men to
Scientology headquarters, search war訃ants and sledges in hand.
Even though his fall guys insulated Hubbard from jail that time, he knew he was
in trouble. "Hubbard told me at one time the biggest mistake we
"May be .. . lied to or destroyed."
I
t can be unpleasant crossing Hubbard's organization. Dr. John G. Clark,
assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, testified
as an ex計ert against the Church of Scien負ology� He reports that, in appar苟nt
retaliation, false complaints were circulated against his prac負ice, phone
threats were made to him, and ads placed in the Boston Herald offering $25,000
for evi苓ence leading to his criminal con赳iction. This went on, he says, for
ten years, during which two Church of Scientology�suits against him were
dismissed. Clark is suing for $35 million. Other cases of harassment of critics
have been documented. Such crude in負imidation tactics are a systematic policy
of the Church of Sciento衍ogy.�Why? Hubbard, in 1967,
And the money kept pouring in. But things started to get too hot for Hub苑ard.
One by one, foreign countries began closing their ports. England, Greece, Spain,
Portugal. France con赳icted him in absentia for fraud.
In 1975 he gave up the Apollo and touched down in Clearwater, Fla., which became
another headquarters to go with the first one in Los Ange衍es. Hubbard evidently
essayed a counterattack on his main persecu負ors: Former insiders say he had
al訃eady gone underground for a year in a modest apartment in New York's
bor觔ugh of Queens (see photo, p. 314) while he planned a campaign dubbed
Operation Snow White. This opera負ion planted Scientologists in low-lev-
Harvard's Dr. John G. Clark
wrote the following with regard to church enemies: "[They] may be deprived of
property or injured by any means by any Scientologist without any discipline of
the Scientologist. May be tricked, sued or lied to or destroyed."-R.B.
made was going religious and that we should have kept it straight as a
busi要ess," says a former high "church" official who doesn't want his name used.
"That would have avoided all the trouble with the IRS."
Besides the feds, Hubbard and his organization were getting sued by dis苔ffected
former Scientologists. In 1980 Hubbard went underground again, supposedly at a
ranch in the small California town of Creston, a 3l/2-hour drive north of Los
Angeles. Not even Chairman and Executive Director William Franks, then
admin虹strator of the entire Church of Scien負ology� could speak to him or see
him. All communications were via telex or written or oral messages car訃ied back
and forth by three trusted messengers-David Miscavige and. Patrick and Anne
Broeker, a husband and-wife team. All three were young adults who had been
indoctrinated for four or more years. According to de苯ectors, Miscavige, whose
father was a Scientologist, grew up in suburban Philadelphia and then England.
Mis苞avige is said to have joined church staff at age 16, and reportedly has
only a ninth-grade education. They say he is mean, a bully who acquired power
through an ability to intimidate and an image he created that he represent苟d
Hubbard's wishes. In the early
1980s he was claiming to see Hubbard once a week. He joined with the Broekers,
with whom Hubbard was presumably living at the time, and is now said to share
power with them. Anne reportedly has a sixth-grade education and joined the
organization when she was 11 (Bill Franks says he once taught the three Rs to
Anne and others). She is said to be as ruthless as Miscavige. Pat, however, is
said to have finished high school. He has been married at least three times and
is said to have married his way up the hierarchy, with one Hubbard female aide
after another.
Their credibility in the organiza負ion, however, was not total. "I truly believe
that Hubbard really died in 1980 and that this involves a scam on top of a
scam," the now-disaffected Chairman Franks told FORBES.
Now things really started hopping. The messengers and their agents- more
formally, the Commodore's Messenger Organization, or CMO- soon took two major
steps. One was an extensive two-year purge of the organization that drove away
hun苓reds of longtime adherents. It was not hard. "Wild paranoia permeates the
whole organization," says Don Larson, who served as the church's 525-per-week
"finance ethics officer," for which read "enforcer." Larson claims he alone
brought nearly 300 recalcitrant Scientologists to "Reha苑ilitation Project
Forces" at Scien負ology centers around the world over a period of 14 months,
until his own detention and departure in late 1983. "I was the hatchet man,"
says Larson. "I was responsible for all sorts of Ge貞tapo-type stuff."
In these sadistic detention pro茆rams, staff members would be co苟rced into
performing hard labor, eat虹ng leftovers out of buckets and sleep虹ng on floors.
Some were reportedly kept against their will.
The other move was to step up the flow of money dramatically. Among Larson's
duties were levying fines on wealthy auditing subjects, whose inti衫ate auditing
sessions had been tran貞cribed in writing, and forcibly dun要ing mission holders
(franchisees) for millions of additional dollars for Hub苑ard agents. "In 1983,"
says Larson, "I manipulated a half-million-dollar in虐eritance out of Bob B
He was naive as hell. D.M. (David Miscavige) called me up in the middle of the
night [about Bob B
|. ... He want�ed the money.
"What's all this got to do with reli�gion?" Larson muses. "I can't believe
the things I did."
"The question was always how to get more money into Hub苑ard's pocket and how to
hide that from the IRS," says Franks, who was responsible for investing about
$150 mil衍ion of church reserves in 1980, most of it held in foreign currencies.
"There was literal衍y cash all over the place. There would be people leaving
from Florida for Europe with bags of cash on a weekly basis. There were hundreds
of' bank accounts." In 1981 Franks started taking Hubbard's name off these
accounts as signato訃y-15 years after Hubbard was said to have retired from the
church-to hide the con�nection to church funds they represented.
Instead, much of the organi述ation's cash reportedly wound up in the Religious
Re貞earch Foundation (RRF), which former church mem苑ers say was a Liberian
shell corporation with bank ac苞ounts in Luxembourg and Liechtenstein. RRF was
set up by three otherwise unimpor負ant board members who had submitted their
resignations in advance. The RRF was used could not be traced.
A separate corporation called Au負hor Services, Inc. (ASI) was formed to manage
Hubbard's financial affairs and, apparently, those of the church as well.
According to Howard Schomer, ASI's treasury secretary in 1982, he sent up
through Hubbard's messengers weekly updates on Hub苑ard's net worth from ASI.
Schomer says Hubbard was pulling in well over SI million a week through ASI when
he, Schomer, left and that Hubbard's net worth, through ASI alone, had ris苟n
more than $30 million in a nine衫oney to Hubbard was back-billing the church for
Hubbard's past ser赳ices. According to Schomer and oth苟rs, Hubbard's weekly
gross income was the most important statistic kept by ASI, and it was ordained
that the income keep rising. Explains Schomer: "(Say) last week's income for
Hubbard was $750,000 and this week is down. In order to keep the graph on its
vertical trend to $800,000, they would come up with the figure to be used and
then find something that would justify that kind of money to Hubbard, like spe�cial courses or E-meters that he had once designed. Each item had potential
values put on them."
The most remarkable trans苔ction of all took place in 1982, when sources say
Hub苑ard or his agents sold some of his copyrights for a reported S85 million
(including S35 million said to be earmarked for his projected mausoleum) and
donated his trademarks, which were also valued at $85 million, to still another
corpo訃ation, Religious Technology Center. (This dual transaction created an
offsetting deduc負ion, thanks to the donation, which made the sale effective衍y
tax-free.) The head of Reli茆ious Technology Center also happens to be the very
same man who notarized the docu衫ent that authorized a key part of the
transaction-David Miscavige.
Altogether, FORBES can total up at least $200 million gath苟red in Hubbard's
name through 1982. There may well have been much more. All this time Hubbard
remained un貞een by anyone in the church, from Franks on down. Only the three
messengers were seen.
Yet the money machine was still grinding on nationwide and in some foreign
countries.
as a way station for money Auditing transcripts describing intimate life
histories,
from the church to the unseen in a Scientology storeroom in Clearwvater, Fla.
Hubbard's own accounts in Something to think about a lot. should you Switzerland
and Liechten苞onsider being audited.
stein. Franks claims that RRF accounts alone totaled well over S100 million by
1981. "RRF was as good as Hubbard," says he.
In 1980 Laurel Sullivan, for seven years Hubbard's principal public rela負ions
official, was put in charge of an internal operation called Mission Corporate
Category Sortout (Hubbard liked military jargon and organiza負ion), at the
behest of Miscavige. Sul衍ivan says she planned ways to juggle
the chmch's corporations to shield
the unseen Hubbard from legal liabil虹ty and to ensure that the income lines to
Hubbard from the church month period in 1982. Schomer, who never saw or spoke to
Hubbard after 1975, says that when he became visi苑ly troubled about these
matters, he himself was subjected to a ten-hour "gang-bang sec check," an
increasing衍y common experience among church members, which in this case
included being accused of being a CIA spy, threatened with jail and physical
harm and spat upon by Miscavige. Schomer is now suing Hubbard'5 es負ate,
Miscavige, the Broekers and ASI for S225 million.
A particularly handy device to get It soon developed that Hubbard had other
books to sell-a seemingly end衍ess succession of science fiction nov苟ls started
appearing in 1982, re赳iewed by critics in less than admir虹ng terms. Church
officials publish these under the name Bridge Publica負ions, paying Hubbard a
royalty on each sale. Harvey Haber, who served as Hubbard's personal literary
repre貞entative, says the order went out in 1982 to local Scientology missions
and individual members to buy up specified numbers of copies. It added up, he
reports, to tens of thousands of
newspapers on the life of Hubbard Hubbard's cosmology "the greatest humanitarian
in his負ory." This promotes the books, the
T
he upper levels of sacred scientological doctrine are said to be so powerful
that one could die of pneumonia if he tried to absorb them without proper
training. Although the Church of Scientology�has tak苟n legal action against
outsiders who possess the information, FORBES has obtained access to some of
Hubbard's secrets of the universe. Summarized (we as貞ume no responsibility for
any who read further), his cosmology goes like this:
Seventy-five million years ago there was a "galactic confedera負ion" of more
than 70 planets. Then, as now, there were "in苞ome taxes and suppressive
gov苟rnments." But the chief problem was overpopulation. There were 200 billion
to 500 billion people per planet. The boss was a mean titan, Xenu. He sent
people to Earth (called Teegeeach) to blow them up, thus resolving the
over計opulation.
copies, many of them bought only to be warehoused by the church. Some負imes
single orders for 20 or 30 copies would be placed. But usually neatly dressed
young adults would appear in bookstores and buy 2 or 3 copies apiece of
Hubbard's books, usually for cash. The first such novel, Battlefield Earth, soon
began appearing on best貞eller lists. Battalions of neatly dressed customers
have been buying ever since. By now, most Hubbard books have appeared on several
best貞eller lists. Much of the buying seems concentrated on the B. Dalton's and
Waldenbooks chains, which seem to be doing a land-office business, even while
other bookstores nearby report little interest in Hubbard's novels. Millions in
royalties were taken after
1981 in this fashion. All of this money went to Author Services, controlled by
the messengers.
But Hubbard's old nemeses had not forgotten him. In late September 1985, the
Internal Revenue Service sent a letter to the Church of Sciento衍ogy� warning
that it might indict Hubbard for tax fraud. But Hubbard may have had the last
laugh.
Ian. 23, 1986 was the date on Hub苑ard's new will. It dealt with copy訃ights he
still owned. They and any royalties would belong to a special L. Ron Hubbard
trust. Hubbard's third
Rounded up among the victims were "artists," "revolutionaries," "criminals" and
"those consid苟red too smart." After capture, these beings "had their lungs shot
with alcohol or glycol" and were transported by spaceships to earth. Xenu then
dropped nuclear bombs into volcanos. After the explosions, the individual
spirits (or thetans), deprived of physical body, were packaged (or clus負ered)
by Xenu through electronic and mechanical means in places like Hawaii and the
Canary Islands.
In a nutshell, each human today is made up of a cluster of these thetans, with
one dominant, and this is the cause of human unhap計iness and internal conflict.
Only through costly Scientology audit虹ng can the less dominant thetans be
removed. (What happens to them after that is not clear.) And Xenu? To this day,
Xenu is situated on a mountaintop somewhere stuck in an "electronic trap."-R.B.
wife was provided for. (Hubbard's son from an earlier marriage was long ago
disaffected and disinherited.) And it set instructions for dealing with his
remains. The body was to be cremated immediately following death, his ashes
scattered. No autopsy was to be allowed.
Hubbard died the next day, on Jan. 24, according to followers who were at his
deathbed. They called the coro要er early on the 25 th. The doctor who signed the
death certificate, citing as cause of death a "cerebral vascular accident," gave
as his address a medi苞al center in Los Angeles that was founded by
Scientologists. But there are those who believe Hubbard died in 1980, and still
others who believe he died sometime in between. We may never know.
Shortly thereafter, the Associated Press reported that the Church of
Scientology�had announced that 99% of Hubbard's estate had been left "to the
Church." Sources say a policy letter was posted in Scientol觔gy offices across
the country an要ouncing who was now officially in charge: Pat and Anne Broeker
and David Miscavige.
Since then, the Church of Scien負ology�has been on a big marketing blitz, with
heavy promotions on tele赳ision and thick color inserts in royalties on which go
into the Hub苑ard trust.
The "church" itself, meanwhile, faces its strongest challenge for sur赳ival.
Annual income, reportedly about S150 million in the early 1980s, is now thought
to be half that in the wake of the purges. Membership is down. The church claims
more than 6 million active members, a figure it has used for 15 years. But some
defec負ors put the real figure at less than 50,000. Moreover, an IRS criminal
in赳estigation is gathering momentum in Los Angeles, and new litigation has
flooded the courts. Awards for dam苔ges and personal suffering are being made,
some in the tens of millions of dollars, to former members as well as external
critics (see box, p. 318). One attorney alone, Boston-based Michael Flynn, has
represented 25 ex-Scientol觔gists and is giving advice on a class苔ction suit.
Hundreds of defectors worldwide have formed their own religions or for-profit
auditing businesses, gener苔lly charging rates under $100 an hour. Among the new
competitors is the man who once served as Hub苑ard's personal auditor, the
much-re赳ered David Mayo, who coauthored some of Hubbard's sacred texts and is
now writing his own scriptures.
So, as the original enterprise shrinks, a new, ungovernable cottage industry
grows up around it. It was created by the messengers' purges, and it further
undermines the organi述ation that the messengers inherit. If psychotherapy by
lie detector really is a useful technique, there is plenty of competition around
now, in effect called into being by the messengers' own deeds.
Hubbard-or his messengers-or both together, no one may ever quite know which,
brought their troubles on themselves. It would all make La苯ayette Ronald
Hubbard turn over in his grave, if he had one.
Category Magazine Article
The richest People in America - The Forbes Four Hundred
Title The Prophet and Profits of Scientology
Source "Forbes"
Author Richard Behar
Date October 27th, 1986
Description:
The article summarizes the history of Scientology during the 1970s and 1980s and
speculates on the financial wealth of the organization and its founder L. Ron
Hubbard.
The Prophet and Profits of Scientology
Witnesses
Speaking still further of research, for this year's edition Staff Writer Richard
Behar documented the remarkable career of the notorious L. Ron Hubbard and his
Church of Scientology. Some of our sources are clearly embittered against
Hubbard's organization, some confessed to systematic lies and other unsavory
acts in its service. How credible are they? The issue has been raised. Here's
Judge Paul Breckenridge Jr., Superior Court of California, who presided over one
Scientology lawsuit: "In all critical and important matters, their testimony was
precise, accurate, and rang true. . Each of these persons literally gave years
of his or her respective life. . Each has manifested a waste and loss or
frustration which is incapable of description. Each . is still bound by the
knowledge that the Church has in its possession his or her most inner thoughts
and confessions, all recorded in . security files of the organization, and that
the Church or its minions is fully capable of intimidation or other physical or
psychological abuse if it suits their ends." Judge for yourself. See page 314.
The prophet and profits of Scientology
L. Ron Hubbard, one of the most bizarre entrepreneurs on record, proved cult
religion can be big business. Now he's declared dead, and the question is, did
he take $200 million with him?
Only a few can boast the financial success of L. Ron Hubbard, the science
fiction story負eller and entrepreneur who reportedly died and was cremated last
January at the age of
74.
For roughly three decades Hubbard ran the notorious Church of Scientology, a
"religion" he formed to "clear" mankind of misery. It came complete with finance
dictators, "gang苑ang [security] checks," lie detectors, "committees of
evidence" and detention camps. In 1977 the FBI sent 134 agents, armed with
warrants ans sledgehammers, storming into Scientology centers in Los Angeles and
Washington. Eleven top church officials, including Hubbard's third wife, went to
jail for infiltrating, burglarizing and wiretapping over 100 government
agencies, including the IRS, FBI and CIA. Hubbard could hold his own with any of
his science fiction novels.
Amid all the melodrama, at least $200 million in cash produced by his strange
creation was gathered in Hubbard's name, and there is believed to be much more
in organization assets: The Church of Scientology has proved to be one of the
most lucrative businesses around. If FORBES had known as much as it knows now,
after interviewing dozens of eyewitnesses and examining sworn testimony and
court records in both criminal and civil cases, Hubbard would have been included
high on The Forbes Four Hundred.
There is something that FORBES still doesn't know, however. It is something no
one may know outside a small, secretive band of Hubbard's followers: What is
happening to all that money?
Hubbard himself has not been seen publicly since 1980, when he went underground,
disappearing even from the view of high "church" officials.
That's in character: He was said by spokesmen to have retired from Scientology's
management in 1966. In fact, for 20 years after, he maintained a grip so tight
that sources say since his 1980 disappearance three appointed "messengers" have
been able to gather tens of millions of dollars at will, harass and intimidate
Scientology members, and rule with an iron fist an international network that is
still estimated to have tens of thousands of adherents - all merely on his
unseen authority.
How could Hubbard do all this? As early as the 1950s, officials at the American
Medical Association were warning that Scientology, then known as Dianetics, was
a cult. More recently, in 1984, courts of law here and abroad labeled the
organization such things as "schizophrenic and paranoid" and "corrupt, sinister
and dangerous," while Hubbard himself was described as "a pathological liar" and
"a charlatan and worse."
But the central fact is the money: hundreds of millions of dollars last seen in
the form of cold cash or highly negotiable securities. "It's perfect story about
greed and lust for power," says William Franks, who was driven out of the
organization in 1981, when he was the church's chairman of the board and its
executive director international, the post Hubbard officially relinquished 20
years ago. "If you understand it on that basis, and stay away from the
'religious' aspects, it makes perfect sense."
A few facts about Hubbard's early life are known. Lafayette Ronald Hubbard was
born in Tilden, Neb. on Mar. 13, 1911. After serving in World War II, he wrote a
1947 letter to the Veterans Administration in which he complained of his
"seriously affected" mind and "suicidal inclinations" and pleaded for help.
Hubbard was nevertheless a moderately successful science fiction writer. In
1949, addressing said, "If a man really wants to make $1 million, the best way
would be to start his own religion." In 1950 he published the book that would
ultimately make him rich beyond the dreams of avarice, Dianetics: The Modern
Science of Mental Health. In 1951, during his second divorce, Hubbard's wife
claimed that he tortured her. Three years later, his "church" was born.
It did not act much like a church. Through the 1950s and much of the 1960s,
Hubbard emphasized the "scientific" nature of a therapeutic technique he
invented. He called it "auditing." He said it could cure illness, restore sight
to the blind and improve intelligence and appearance. Hubbard argued, in his
bestselling book, that inner turmoil sprang from mental aberrations he called
"engrams" caused by past traumatic events, and could be eliminated by
identifying, recalling and reliving the events. Eliminate your engrams,
eliminate your turmoil. A similar process is routine to most conventional
methods of psychotherapy, a fact Hubbard presumably was aware of. On this
unlikely base he built his $400 million empire.
Hubbard constructed a device he called an E-meter, actually a simplified lie
detector, to measure electrical changes in the skin while subjects go over
intimate details of their past. Auditors (later also called ministers) would
conduct sessions with this device and zero in on Hubbard's engrams.
Psychiatrists say a successful session of going over long貞uppressed traumas can
produce a sense of personal relief and euphoria. That brought the troubled
subject back for more, money in hand. Lots of money. A large organization began
to form, with "franchises" around the country. There are a lot of troubled
people out there.
Side by side with his "scientific" treatments, Hubbard pitched a body of
religious beliefs 訃eincarnation and the like (see box, p. 322) - and claimed
tax-exempt status as a religion. It was not long before some of his auditing
subjects were drawn into what became a fast茆rowing cult. Some of them became
fanatics who would do virtually anything at Hubbard's command.
Unfortunately, the tax ploy and the big money drew the attention of the IRS: A
ruling stripped him of his tax-exempt status in 1967.
But by then the money was so big Hubbard was able to buy a 342-foot oceangoing
ship, the Apollo. On it, he withdrew from his government persecutors and cruised
safely in international waters with an adoring retinue of followers. The IRS was
later able to prove in court that he was meanwhile skimming money, at least $3
million in 1972 alone, and laundering it through schemes involving phony
billings, a dummy corporation in Panama and secret Swiss bank accounts.
In 1971 a U.S. federal court finally upheld an FDA ruling that Hubbard's
"scientific" claims were bogus and that E-meter auditing would no longer be
labeled as a scientific treatment. But Hubbard was resourceful. The way around
the ruling was to call the meters and auditing strictly "religious sacraments"
and therefore beyond the FDA's reach. Hubbard's Scientology counselors had
already begun calling themselves ministers. Now they took to wearing black and
clerical collars. Chapels were constructed in Scientology centers around the
country. "Franchises" became "missions," "fees" became "fixed donations," and
"theories" became "sacred scriptures." The money got even bigger.
The system works like this: Prospects, normally spoken of as "raw meat," are
offered a free 200-question "personality test" to determine whether counseling
(which means auditing) is needed. ("Auditing is always needed," says one former
counselor.) Scientology services range from a communications workshop for $50 to
the more popular one-on-one auditing sessions that soon cost anywhere from, get
this, $200 to more than $1,000 an hour. Special training courses go for $12,000
and up.
How can anyone, except the very rich, afford to spend $200 to $1,000 an hour on
counseling? Plus pay for the books and other materials in which Hubbard did a
lively side business? Some newcomers are encouraged to become "field staff
members," who recruit new raw meat on the streets for commissions to pay for
their own services - they get 10% to 15% of all services rendered to the piece
of meat they bring in. Others go into the business side for a piece of the
action. Since it is not uncommon for people to spend more than $100,000 over a
decade for their salvation, "The registrars were making good bucks, buying
Porsches and Mercedes-Benzes," says one defector, Bent Corydon, "and the best
counselors were paid on a performance scale." Corydon, who once ran the biggest
single Scientology mission, left in 1982 to start his own auditing religion.
For the less enterprising, another way to afford the religion is to sign a
contract for up to a billion years (reincarnation, remember) and join church
staff. After signing a note obligating themselves to pay for all services
rendered in the event they break their employment contracts and waiving all
right to sue, these members receive free auditing, room and board, a structured
and controlled environment, and a small allowance - less than $25 per week in
the early 1980s - in return for labor that can average as much as 15 hours per
day.
Ultimately subjects are "cleared" - that is, pronounced cured of engrams. But
Hubbard was no dummy. He added more and more steps, each usually more expensive
than the last, for his cult followers. Already, in the early 1950s, Hubbard
found that the prior lives of individuals also required auditing by the hour. In
the late 1960s, Hubbard had another revelation: Humans are actually composed of
clusters of spiritual beings, stemming back millions of years. Now those
spiritual beings had to be audited! Preposterous? Perhaps, but "eventually you
lose the ability to even form a belief about these things," says a former
high-level Hubbard aide, Gerald Armstrong. "Hubbard says, 'Jump,' you say, 'How
high?' Hubbard says, 'I have new technology,' you say, 'How wonderful.'"
The "meat" would have successive, increasingly strange levels of "clearing"
revealed to them only gradually, of course, and only as they seemed ready to
"flow up the bridge," in the peculiar jargon that developed within the
organization. In 1981 yet more new revelations were issued, but only after
income from existing levels had dropped off. "If you don't have the money,
you're a slave," sums up Howard Rower, a successful New York real estate
developer who ran a Manhattan "mission" until 1983. "And if you have money,
you're fawned all over until you don't have any money."
The good ship Apollo got filled with hundreds of the most thoroughly programmed
of Hubbard's signees. On board, life became very peculiar. Frank Watson, a
chiropractor then in his 50s, told FORBES he was thrown overboard five times,
sometimes blindfolded, for minor infractions. The drop was 26 feet. One Tanja
Burden testified she was required to serve at the age of 13 (both parents were
Scientologists) as Hubbard's personal slave, helping him dress and preparing his
toiletries. There are many more such tales.
And the money kept pouring in. But things started to get too hot for Hubbard.
One by one, foreign countries began closing their ports. England, Greece, Spain,
Portugal. France convicted him in absentia for fraud.
In 1975 he gave up the Apollo and touched down in Clearwater, Fla., which became
another headquarters to go with the first one in Los Angeles. Hubbard evidently
essayed a counterattack on his main persecutors: Former insiders say he had
already gone underground for a year in a modest apartment in New York's borough
of Queens (see photo, p. 314) while he planned a campaign dubbed Operation Snow
White. This operation planted Scientologists in low-level positions in
government agencies. It also sent followers to burglarize and rifle files or
plant wiretaps. Adroit Freedom of Information Act filings by Scientologists
caused the government to bring much of its evidence from its Scientology
investigations into one office in Washington; his people then repeatedly
burglarized the government's office, obtaining even those documents the
government had no intention of releasing.
It was the discovery of this campaign that sent the startled G-men to
Scientology headquarters, search warrats and sledges in hand.
Even though his fall guys insulated Hubbard from jail that time, he knew he was
in trouble. "Hubbard told me at one time the biggest mistake we made was going
religious and that we should have kept it straight as a business," says a former
high "church" official who doesn't want his name used. "That would have avoided
all the trouble with the IRS."
Besides the feds, Hubbard and his organization were getting sued by disaffected
former Scientologists. In 1980 Hubbard went underground again, supposedly at a
ranch in the small California town of Creston, a 3 1/2-hour drive north of Los
Angeles. Not even Chairman and Executive Director William Franks, then
administrator of the entire Church of Scientology, could speak to him or see
him. All communications were via telex or written or oral messages carried back
and forth by three trusted messengers 胖avid Miscavige and Patrick and Anne
Broeker, a husband-and-wife team. All three were young adults who had been
indoctrinated for four or more years. According to defectors, Miscavige, whose
father was a Scientologist, grew up in suburban Philadelphia and then England.
Miscavige is said to have joined church staff at age 16, and reportedly has only
a ninth-grade education. They say he is mean, a bully who acquired power through
an ability to intimidate and an image he created that he represented Hubbard's
wishes. In the early 1980s he was claiming to see Hubbard once a week. He joined
with the Broekers, with whom Hubbard was presumably living at the time, and is
now said to share power with them. Anne reportedly has a sixth-grade education
and joined the organization when she was 11 (Bill Franks says he once taught the
three Rs to Anne and others). She is said to be as ruthless as Miscavige. Pat,
however, is said to have finished high school. He has been married at least
three times and is said to have married his way up the hierarchy, with one
Hubbard female aide after another.
Their credibility in the organization, however, was not total. "I truly believe
that Hubbard really died in 1980 and that this involves a scam on top of a
scam," the now-disaffected Chairman Franks told FORBES.
Now things really started hopping. The messengers and their agents - more
formally, the Commodore's Messenger Organization, or CMO - soon took two major
steps. One was an extensive two-year purge of the organization that drove away
hundreds of longtime adherents. It was not hard. "Wild paranoia permeates the
whole organization," says Don Larson, who served as the church's $25-per-week
"finance ethics officer," for which read "enforcer." Larson claims he alone
brought nearly 300 recalcitrant Scientologists to Rehabilitation Project Forces"
at Scientology centers around the world over a period of 14 months, until his
own detention and departure in late 1983. "I was the hatchet man," says
Larson."I was responsible for all sorts of Gestapo-type stuff."
In these sadistic detention programs, staff members would be coerced into
performing hard labor, eating leftovers out of buckets and sleeping on floors.
Some were reportedly kept against their will.
The other move was to step up the flow of money dramatically. Among Larson's
duties were levying fines on wealthy auditing subjects, whose intimate auditing
sessions had been transcribed in writing, and forcibly dunning mission holders
(franchisees) for millions of additional dollars for Hubbard agents. "In 1983,"
says Larson, "I manipulated a half-million-dollar inheritance out of Bob B --.
He was naive as hell. D.M. [David Miscavige] called me up in the middle of the
night [about Bob B --] . He wanted the money.
"What's all this got to do with religion?" Larson muses. "I can't believe the
things I did."
"The question was always how to get more money into Hubbard's pocket and how to
hide that from the IRS," says Franks, who was responsible for investing about
$150 million of church reserves in 1980, most of it held in foreign currencies.
"There was literally cash all over the place. There would be people leaving from
Florida for Europe with bags of cash on a weekly basis. There were hundreds of
bank accounts." In 1981 Franks started taking Hubbard's name off these accounts
as signatory - 15 years after Hubbard was said to have retired from the church -
to hide the connection to church funds they represented.
Instead, much of the organization's cash reportedly wound up in the Religious
Research Foundation (RRF), which former church members say was a Liberian shell
corporation with bank accounts in Luxembourg and Liechtenstein. RRF was set up
by three otherwise unimportant board members who had submitted their
resignations in advance. The RRF was used as a way station for money from the
church to the unseen Hubbard's own accounts in Switzerland and Liechtenstein.
Franks claims that RRF accounts alone totaled well over $100 million by 1981.
"RRF was as good as Hubbard," says he.
In 1980 Laurel Sullivan, for seven years Hubbard's principal public relations
official, was put in charge of an internal operation called Mission Corporate
Category Sortout (Hubbard liked military jargon and organization), at the behest
of Miscavige. Sullivan says she planned ways to juggle the church's corporations
to shield the unseen Hubbard from legal liability and to ensure that the income
lines to Hubbard from the church could not be traced.
A separate corporation called Author Services, Inc. (ASI) was formed to manage
Hubbard's financial affairs and, apparently, those of the church as well.
According to Howard Schomer, ASI's treasury secretary in 1982, he sent up
through Hubbard's messengers weekly updates on Hubbard's net worth from ASI.
Schomer says Hubbard was pulling in well over $1 million a week through ASI when
he, Schomer, left and that Hubbard's net worth, through ASI alone, had risen
more than $30 million in a nine-month period in 1982. Schomer, who never saw or
spoke to Hubbard after 1975, says that when he became visibly troubled about
these matters, he himself was subjected to a ten-hour "gang-bang sec check," an
increasingly common experience among church members, which in this case included
being accused of being a CIA spy, threatened with jail and physical harm and
spat upon by Miscavige. Schomer is now suing Hubbard's estate, Miscavige, the
Broekers and ASI for $225 million.
A particularly handy device to get money to Hubbard was back-billing the church
for Hubbard's past services. According to Schomer and others, Hubbard's weekly
gross income was the most important statistic kept by ASI, and it was ordained
that the income keep rising. Explains Schomer: "[Say] last week's income for
Hubbard was $750,000 and this week is down. In order to keep the graph on its
vertical trend to $800,000, they would come up with the figure to be used and
then find something that would justify that kind of money to Hubbard, Like
special courses or E-meters that he had once designed. Each item had potential
values put on them."
The most remarkable transaction of all took place in 1982, when sources say
Hubbard or his agents sold some of his copyrights for a reported $85 million
(including $35 million said to be earmarked for his projected mausoleum) and
donated his trademarks, which were also valued at $85 million, to still another
corporation, Religious Technology Center. (This dual transaction created an
offsetting deduction, thanks to the donation, which made the sale effectively
tax-free.) The head of Religious Technology Center also happens to be the very
same man who notarized the document that authorized a key part of the
transaction - David Miscavige.
Altogether, FORBES can total up at least $200 million gathered in Hubbard's name
through 1982. There may well have been much more. All this time Hubbard remained
unseen by anyone in the church, from Franks on down.Only the three messengers
were seen.
Yet the money machine was still grinding on nationwide and in some foreign
countries. It soon developed that Hubbard had other books to sell - a seemingly
endless succession of science fiction novels started appearing in 1982, reviewed
by critics in less than admiring terms. Church officials publish these under the
name Bridge Publications, paying Hubbard a royalty on each sale. Harvey Haber,
who served as Hubbard's personal literary representative, says the order went
out in 1982 to local Scientology missions and individual members to buy up
specified numbers of copies. It added up, he reports, to tens of thousands of
copies, many of them bought only to be warehoused by the church. Sometimes
single orders for 20 or 30 copies would be placed. But usually neatly dressed
young adults would appear in bookstores and buy 2 or 3 copies apiece of
"Hubbard's books, usually for cash. The first such novel, Battlefield Earth,
soon began appearing on best-seller lists. Battalions of neatly dressed
customers have been buying ever since. By now, most Hubbard books have appeared
on several best-seller lists. Much of the buying seems concentrated on the B.
Dalton's and Waldenbooks chains, which seem to be doing a land-office business,
even while other bookstores nearby report little interest in Hubbard's
novels.Millions in royalties were taken after 1981 in this fashion. All of this
money went to Author Services, controlled by the messengers.
But Hubbard's old nemeses had not forgotten him. In late September 1985, the
Internal Revenue Service sent a letter to the Church of Scientology, warning
that it might indict Hubbard for tax fraud. But Hubbard may have had the last
laugh.
Jan. 23, 1986 was the date on Hubbard's new will. It dealt with copyrights he
still owned. They and any royalties would belong to a special L. Ron Hubbard
trust. Hubbard's third wife was provided for. (Hubbard's son from an earlier
marriage was long ago disaffected and disinherited.) And it set instructions for
dealing with his remains. The body was to be cremated immediately following
death, his ashes scattered. No autopsy was to be allowed.
Hubbard died the next day, on Jan. 24, according to followers who were at his
deathbed. They called the coroner the death certificate, citing as cause of
death a "cerebral vascular accident," gave as his address a medical center in
Los Angeles that was founded by Scientologists. But there are those who believe
Hubbard died in 1980, and still others who believe he died sometime in between.
We may never know.
Shortly thereafter, the Associated Press reported that the Church of Scientology
had announced that 99% of Hubbard's estate had been left "to the Church."
Sources say a policy letter was posted in Scientology offices across the country
announcing who was now officially in charge: Pat and Anne Broeker and David
Miscavige.
Since then, the Church of Scientology has been on a big marketing blitz, with
heavy promotions on television and thick color inserts in newspapers on the life
of Hubbard, "the greatest humanitarian in history." This promotes the books, the
royalties on which go into the Hubbard trust.
The "church" itself, meanwhile, faces its strongest challenge for survival.
Annual income, reportedly about $150 million in the early 1980s, is now thought
to be half that in the wake of the purges. Membership is down. The church claims
more than 6 million active members, a figure it has used for 15 years. But some
defectors put the real figure at less than 50,000. Moreover, an IRS criminal
investigation is gathering momentum in Los Angeles, and new litigation has
flooded the courts. Awards for damages and personal suffering are being made,
some in the tens of millions of dollars, to former members as well as external
critics (see box, p. 318). One attorney alone, Boston-based Michael Flynn, has
represented 25 ex-Scientologists and is giving advice on a classaction suit.
Hundreds of defectors worldwide have formed their own religions or for-profit
auditing businesses, generally charging rates under $100 an hour. Among the new
competitors is the man who once served as Hubbard's personal auditor, the
much-revered David Mayo, who coauthored some of Hubbard's sacred texts and is
now writing his own scriptures.
So, as the original enterprise shrinks, a new, ungovernable cottage industry
grows up around it. It was created by the messengers' purges, and it further
undermines the organization that the messengers inherit. If psychotherapy by lie
detector really is a useful technique, there is plenty of competition around
now, in effect called into being by the messengers' own deeds.
Hubbard - or his messengers - or both together, no one may ever quite know
which, brought their troubles on themselves. It would all make Lafayette Ronald
Hubbard turn over in his grave, if he had one.
GRAPHIC: Picture 1, L. Ron Hubbard gone underground in New York City, 1973;
Picture 2, Scientology world headquarters building in Los Angeles, Bill
Nation/Picture Group; Picture 3, Hubbard and friends in 1974 (Pat Brokers,
seated r.; eventual defector Armstrong, l.), Life became very peculiar aboard
the good ship Apollo; Picture 4, Auditing transcripts describing intimate life
histories, in a Scientology storeroom in Clearwater, Fla., Something to think
about a lot, should you consider being audited., Stewart Lamont/Harrap Picture
5, no caption, Bill Nation/Picture Group
"May be . lied to or destroyed."
It can be unpleasant crossing Hubbard's organization. Dr. John G. Clark,
assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, testified
as an expert against the Church of Scientology. He reports that, in apparent
retaliation, false complaints were circulated against his practice, phone
threats were made to him, and ads placed in the Boston Herald offering $25,000
for evidence leading to his criminal conviction. This went on, he says, for ten
years, during which two Church of Scientology suits against him were dismissed.
Clark is suing for $35 million. Other cases of harassment of critics have been
documented. Such crude intimidation tactics are a systematic policy of the
Church of Scientology. Why? Hubbard, in 1967, wrote the following with regard to
church enemies: "[They] may be deprived of property or injured by any means by
any Scientologist without any discipline of the Scientologist. May be tricked,
sued or lied to or destroyed."
GRAPHIC: Picture, Harvard's Dr. John G. Clark, Rick Friedman/Black Star
Hubbard's cosmology
The upper levels of sacred scientological doctrine are said to be so powerful
that one could die of pneumonia if he tried to absorb them without proper
training. Although the Church of Scientology has taken legal action against
outsiders who possess the information, FORBES has obtained access to some of
Hubbard's secrets of the universe. Summarized (we assume no responsibility for
any who read further), his cosmology goes like this:
Seventy-five million years ago there was a "galactic confederation" of more than
70 planets.Then, as now, there were "income taxes and suppressive governments."
But the chief problem was overpopulation. There were 200 billion to 500 billion
people per planet. The boss was a mean titan, Xenu. He sent people to Earth
(called Teegeeach) to blow them up, thus resolving the overpopulation.
Rounded up among the victims were "artists," "revolutionaries," "criminals" and
"those considered too smart." After capture, these beings "had their lungs shot
with alcohol or glycol" and were transported by spaceships to earth. Xenu then
dropped nuclear bombs into volcanos. After the explosions, the individual
spirits (or thetans), deprived of physical body, were packaged (or clustered) by
Xenu through electronic and mechanical means in places like Hawaii and the
Canary Islands.
In a nutshell, each human today is made up of a cluster of these thetans, with
one dominant, and this is the cause of human unhappiness and internal conflict.
Only through costly Scientology auditing can the less dominant thetans be
removed. (What happens to them after that is not clear.) And Xenu? To this day,
Xenu is situated on a mountaintop somewhere stuck in an "electronic trap."
Tilman Hausherr
wrote:
>Besides, for any long text, I don't recommend the text/doc/html versions, since
>they are far slower to open than PDF.
>
>I've definitely choosen PDF as the best way to get anything done, for the
>following motivations:
>
>- long files open in a matter of seconds, even 5 or 20 megs enormous files are
>opened in no time while it's very slow with word etc.
I disagree, PDF sucks... takes forever to load because of the many
plugins that Adobe/Macromedia (or whatever the company is named this
week) installs; copy/paste doesn't work properly, and files can't be
searched by standard tools like GREP.
Here's the text file, that was posted to ars some time ago:
Povmec
Dave Touretzky wrote:
> Back in 1986, five years before his fateful TIME Magazine article,
> Richard Behar wrote a piece for Forbes called "The prophet and profits
> of Scientology". It's now available in the Secret Library of
> Scientology as a scanned PDF:
>
> http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Library/Shelf/behar/behar-forbes-1986.pdf
>
> Thanks to Roger Gonnet for supplying the PDF version.
>
> If someone wanted to turn this into plain HTML and mail me the file,
> I'd be most grateful.
Here is a "neutral' HTML version (no css):
http://www.xenu-directory.net/news/behar19861027_neutral.html
(I tried to be close to the PDF version, without the 3-column format
though).
Ray.
Magoo
Thanks to Dave T and Roger for getting
this to the public.
No wonder Scientology hates the Internet :)
Tory/Magoo!
"Dave Touretzky" <d...@cs.cmu.edu> wrote in message
news:44b06b70$1...@news2.lightlink.com...
>
roger gonnet
"Tilman Hausherr" <tilman...@snafu.de> a écrit dans le message de news:
hsn1b25lv5q9m6li4...@4ax.com...
I dunno what your PC does, but I guarantee you that it's more easy to search on
one's own pc than any other method. Since Google does the job of search
correctly , there is no problem.
Anyway, getting grey characters no images and no original possibility to check
anything is not what I'm looking at; I prefer to have something looking like
originals, rather than boring texts in txt, all of the same size and color and
no embellishments.
True, with an old pc like a 300 MHz or so, loading adobe is a bit long, but
adobe 7 is much faster than past versions.
Re "GREP", I never heard any where this name; must not be so standard. I'm using
MS Desktop with three or four add-ons - one for PDF, one for ZIP, one for RAR.
With tens gigs of data, I find any combination or single word in a matter of
seconds. Acrobat 7 is most of time open on my machine to avoid the loading time.
Magoo
"Eru Ilúvatar" <alsima...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:666$H01.34g61.515O.MiNISGaY.10b1604.K$020bcF1.0301$f00K37...@8g436f70403.4b2405048h3...
You just caught the fish, or maybe you're one of them.
Yaude used to do this: He's post as someone insane (BS)
then he'd argue with 'her'.....until a 'real critic' would buy
into the total con, and derail the entire thread.
Please don't let this thread get de-railed. This is key stuff.
Scientology does ~NOT~ want people reading things/facts
about L. Ron Hubbard AT ALL. They'll do anything to keep people from
discussing it.
So, let's get back to it: Where IS the $$$ and how much is there?
This article certainly speaks of $$$in Europe, and what a greedy
jerk Hubbard really was. Also, the $$ supposedly went into a
"Family Trust", yet I heard Mary Sue was cut out of this. Anyone
have any more facts on that? Will ~any~ of the kids get this trust?
I doubt it, seriously. The only child of Hubbard still "in" is Dianna.
Quinton is dead, Suzette hasn't been "on the bridge" in years, sane for
Arthur, and Nibs
was paid off years ago, when Bent's book came out which he co-authored, and
then disappeared soon after. I was at RPR when that all came down. One day
he was a "Co-author" the next day he'd signed a doc saying, "I've had no
difficulties with my Dad, bla blah"
It wasn't until I was out that I found out Nibs was PAID OFF BY SCIENTOLOGY!
Where do your IAS $$$ go? You got it! Many people have been paid off.
Also, how few people were active back when this was written.
Scientology has shrunk since then, dramatically, despite their endless
claims of expansion!
Thank GOD for the Internet, and all of the critics who take time
to post facts like this....so people can learn what really did go down.
I know how OSA works: They'll laugh this off, natter about Dave T
who posted it, and Richard B. who wrote it. Now granted, Most of them
nattering
(Complaining uselessly) will have never even read this article!
((And let's not forget, for those techies, Hubbard said,
"Natter (useless negative chatter)= OVERTS (bad, harmful deeds)!
But they're "Sure these guys are lying". How can they be so sure,
if they never read it?
IF by chance they did read it, have they actually compared notes on what
went down? I can promise you this: No, they won't, they can't, it's a "High
crime" to be in communication with an SP, so how could they?
Just thoughts to think of.
Thanks again.......and Happy Sunday~
Tory/Magoo~~~
Magoo
RPR= Ron's Public Relations Office. This is in charge entirely
of "Ron's PR"...having to do with his name, his image,
how people think and talk about L. Ron Hubbard-the slime bag
liar.
Also: IAS==International ASSociation of Scientologists.
One HAS to join this to get services, and Scientology is always
squeezing more money out of people, saying it's to "Help mankind"
or this project or that. Which is why I mention they paying off Nibs,
millions of dollars,and guess whose $$$ they no doubt used to pay
all these people off?
You got it! IAS baby.
SUCKERS who buy into it, criminals who use people's $$$ and lie to them! DM
you are a horses ASS.
Tory/Magoo~~~
"Magoo" <mag...@charter.net> wrote in message
news:sKbsg.1343$Ey2....@fe04.lga...
Playfullminx
No sweat. I have Acrobat and whipped him up a copy in HTML with the
images to boot. Ain't technology grand!!!
Playfullminx
Hey Ray,
Yeah, there were a few problems with the conversion...mostly due to the
3 column deal. All the text seemed to come through without a hitch
though. But my first pass was a little frustrating. But it was late,
so I just send the whole ball of wax.
There is a very easy way to correct it once it's converted though. But
you would step it through an RTF doc...then run it through Word. But I
had a date with the sandman....so I personnaly back burned it.
Kelli Ayed
The good news is there is another pdf reader - called "foxit reader".
You should check it out...
Kelli
>
> Here's the text file, that was posted to ars some time ago:
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
> Forbes 400 / October 27, 1986
>
> Speaking still further of research, for this year's edition Staff Writer
> Richard Behar documented the remarkable career of the notorious L. Ron
> Hubbard and his Church of Scientology. Some of our sources are clearly
> embittered against Hubbard's organization, some confessed to systematic
> lies and other unsavory acts in its service. How credible are they? The
> issue has been raised. Here's Judge Paul Breckenridge Jr., Superior Court
> of California, who presided over one Scientology lawsuit: "In all critical
> and important matters, their testimony was precise, accurate, and rang
> true. . . . Each of these persons literally gave years of his or her
> respective life. . . . Each has manifested a waste and loss or frustration
> which is incapable of description. Each . . . is still bound by the
> knowledge that the Church has in its possession his or her most inner
> thoughts and confessions, all recorded in . . . security files of the
> organization, and that the Church or its minions is fully capable of
> intimidation or other physical or psychological abuse if it suits their
> ends." Judge for yourself.
> The Editors
>
>
>
> The prophet and profits of Scientology
>
> By Richard Behar
>
> Only a few can boast the financial success of L. Ron Hubbard, the science
> fiction storyteller and entrepreneur who reportedly died and was cremated
> last January at the age of 74.
>
> For roughly three decades Hubbard ran the notorious Church of Scientology,
> a "religion" he formed to "clear" mankind of misery. It came complete with
> finance dictators, "gang-bang sec[urity] checks," lie detectors,
> "committees of evidence" and detention camps. In 1977 the FBI sent 134
> agents, armed with warrants and sledgehammers, storming into Scientology
> centers in Los Angeles and Washington. Eleven top church officials,
> including Hubbard's third wife, went to jail for infiltrating, burglarizing
> and wiretapping over 100 government agencies, including the IRS, FBI and
> CIA. Hubbard could hold his own with any of his science fiction novels.
>
> Amid all the melodrama, at least $200 million in cash produced by his
> strange creation was gathered in Hubbard's name, and there is believed to
> be much more in organization assets: The Church of Scientology has proved
> to be one of the most lucrative businesses around. If Forbes had known as
> much as it knows now, after interviewing dozens of eyewitnesses and
> examining sworn testimony and court records in both criminal and civil
> cases, Hubbard would have been included high on The Forbes Four Hundred.
>
> There is something that Forbes still doesn't know, however. It is
> something no one may know outside a small, secretive band of Hubbard's
> followers: What is happening to all that money?
>
> Hubbard himself has not been seen publicly since 1980, when he went
> underground, disappearing even from the view of high "church" officials.
>
> That's in character: He was said by spokesmen to have retired from
> Scientology's management in 1966. In fact, for 20 years after, he
> maintained a grip so tight that sources say since his 1980 disappearance
> three appointed "messengers" have been able to gather tens of millions of
> dollars at will, harass and intimidate Scientology members, and rule with
> an iron fist an international network that is still estimated to have tens
> of thousands of adherents - all merely on his unseen authority.
>
> How could Hubbard do all this? As early as the 1950s, officials at the
> American Medical Association were warning that Scientology, then known as
> Dianetics, was a cult. More recently, in 1984, courts of law here and
> abroad labeled the organization such things as "schizophrenic and paranoid"
> and "corrupt, sinister and dangerous," while Hubbard himself was described
> as "a pathological liar" and "a charlatan and worse."
>
> But the central fact is the money: hundreds of millions of dollars last
> seen in the form of cold cash or highly negotiable securities. "It's a
> perfect story about greed and lust for power," says William Franks, who was
> driven out of the organization in 1981, when he was the church's chairman
> of the board and its executive director international, the post Hubbard
> officially relinquished 20 years ago. "If you understand it on that basis,
> and stay away from the 'religious' aspects, it makes perfect sense."
>
> A few facts about Hubbard's early life are known. Lafayette Ronald Hubbard
> was born in Tilden, Neb. on Mar. 13, 1911. After serving in World War II,
> he wrote a 1947 letter to the Veterans Administration in which he
> complained of his "seriously affected" mind and "suicidal inclinations" and
> pleaded for help. Hubbard was nevertheless a moderately successful science
> fiction writer. In 1949, addressing a writers' convention, he reportedly
> said, "If a man really wants to make $1 million, the best way would be to
> start his own religion." In 1950 he published the book that would
> ultimately make him rich beyond the dreams of avarice, Dianetics: The
> Modern Science of Mental Health. In 1951, during his second divorce,
> Hubbard's wife claimed that he was "hopelessly insane" and that he tortured
> her. Three years later, his "church" was born.
>
> It did not act much like a church. Through the 1950s and much of the
> 1960s, Hubbard emphasized the "scientific" nature of a therapeutic
> technique he invented. He called it "auditing." He said it could cure
> illness, restore sight to the blind and improve intelligence and
> appearance. Hubbard argued, in his best-selling book, that inner turmoil
> sprang from mental aberrations he called "engrams" caused by past traumatic
> events, and could be eliminated by identifying, recalling and reliving the
> events. Eliminate your engrams, eliminate your turmoil. A similar process
> is routine to most conventional methods of psychotherapy, a fact Hubbard
> presumably was aware of. On this unlikely base he built his $400 million
> empire.
>
> Hubbard constructed a device he called an E-meter, actually a simplified
> lie detector, to measure electrical changes in the skin while subjects go
> over intimate details of their past. Auditors (later also called
> ministers) would conduct sessions with this device and zero in on Hubbard's
> engrams. Psychiatrists say a successful session of going over
> long-suppressed traumas can produce a sense of personal relief and
> euphoria. That brought the troubled subject back for more, money in hand.
> Lots of money. A large organization began to form, with "franchises"
> around the country. There are a lot of troubled people out there.
>
> Side by side with his "scientific" treatments, Hubbard pitched a body of
> religious beliefs - reincarnation and the like - and claimed tax-exempt
> status as a religion. It was not long before some of his auditing subjects
> were drawn into what became a fast-growing cult. Some of them became
> waiving all rights to sue, these members receive free auditing, room and
> board, a structured and controlled environment, and a small allowance -
> less than $25 per week in the early 1980s - in return for labor that can
> average as much as 15 hours per day.
>
> Ultimately subjects are "cleared" - that is, pronounced cured of engrams.
> But Hubbard was no dummy. He added more and more steps, each usually more
> expensive than the last, for his cult followers. Already, in the early
> 1950s, Hubbard found that the prior lives of individuals also required
> auditing by the hour. In the late 1960s, Hubbard had another revelation:
> Humans are actually composed of clusters of spiritual beings, stemming back
> millions of years. Now those spiritual beings had to be audited!
> Preposterous? Perhaps, but "eventually you lose the ability to even form
> a belief about these things," says a former high-level Hubbard aide, Gerald
> Armstrong. "Hubbard says, 'Jump,' you say, 'How high?' Hubbard says, 'I
> have new technology,' you say, 'How wonderful.'"
>
> The "meat" would have successive, increasingly strange levels of "clearing"
> revealed to them only gradually, of course, and only as they seemed ready
> to "flow up the bridge," in the peculiar jargon that developed within the
> organization. In 1981 yet more new revelations were issued, but only after
> income from existing levels had dropped off. "If you don't have the money,
> you're a slave," sums up Howard Rower, a successful New York real estate
> developer who ran a Manhattan "mission" until 1983. "And if you have
> money, you're fawned all over until you don't have any money."
>
> The good ship Apollo got filled with hundreds of the most thoroughly
> programmed of Hubbard's signees. On board, life became very peculiar.
> Frank Watson, a chiropractor then in his 50s, told Forbes he was thrown
> overboard five times, sometimes blindfolded, for minor infractions. The
> drop was 26 feet. One Tanja Burden testified she was required to serve at
> the age of 13 (both parents were Scientologists) as Hubbard's personal
> slave, helping him dress and preparing his toiletries. There are many more
> such tales.
>
> And the money kept pouring in. But things started to get too hot for
> Hubbard. One by one, foreign countries began closing their ports.
> England, Greece, Spain, Portugal. France convicted him in absentia for
> fraud.
>
> In 1975 he gave up the Apollo and touched down in Clearwater, Fla., which
> became another headquarters to go with the first one in Los Angeles.
> Hubbard evidently essayed a counterattack on his main persecutors: Former
> insiders say he had already gone underground for a year in a modest
> apartment in New York's borough of Queens while he planned a campaign
> dubbed Operation Snow White. This operation planted Scientologists in
> low-level positions in government agencies. It also sent followers to
> burglarize and rifle files or plant wiretaps. Adroit Freedom of
> Information Act filings by Scientologists caused the government to bring
> much of its evidence from its Scientology investigations into one office in
> Washington; his people then repeatedly burglarized the government's office,
> obtaining even those documents the government had no intention of
> releasing.
>
> It was the discovery of this campaign that sent the startled G-men to
> Scientology headquarters, search warrants and sledges in hand.
>
> Even though his fall guys insulated Hubbard from jail that time, he knew he
> was in trouble. "Hubbard told me at one time the biggest mistake we made
> was going religious and that we should have kept it straight as a
> business," says a former high "church" official who doesn't want his name
> used. "That would have avoided all the trouble with the IRS."
>
> Besides the feds, Hubbard and his organization were getting sued by
> disaffected former Scientologists. In 1980 Hubbard went underground again,
> supposedly at a ranch in the small California town of Creston, a 3 1/2 hour
> drive north of Los Angeles. Not even Chairman and Executive Director
> William Franks, then administrator of the entire Church of Scientology,
> could speak to him or see him. All communications were via telex or
> written or oral messages carried back and forth by three trusted messengers
> - David Miscavige and Patrick and Anne Broeker, a husband-and-wife team.
> All three were young adults who had been indoctrinated for four or more
> years. According to defectors, Miscavige, whose father was a
> Scientologist, grew up in suburban Philadelphia and then England.
> Miscavige is said to have joined church staff at age 16, and reportedly has
> only a ninth-grade education. They say he is mean, a bully who acquired
> power through an ability to intimidate and an image he created that he
> represented Hubbard's wishes. In the early 1980s he was claiming to see
> Hubbard once a week. He joined with the Broekers, with whom Hubbard was
> presumably living at the time, and is now said to share power with them.
> Anne reportedly has a sixth-grade education and joined the organization
> when she was 11 (Bill Franks says he once taught the three Rs to Anne and
> others). She is said to be as ruthless as Miscavige. Pat, however, is
> said to have finished high school. He has been married at least three
> times and is said to have married his way up the hierarchy, with one
> Hubbard female aide after another.
>
> Their credibility in the organization, however, was not total. "I truly
> believe that Hubbard really died in 1980 and that this involves a scam on
> top of a scam," the now-disaffected Chairman Franks told Forbes.
>
> Now things really started hopping. The messengers and their agents - more
> formally, the Commodore's Messenger Organization, or CMO - soon took two
> major steps. One was an extensive two-year purge of the organization that
> drove away hundreds of longtime adherents. It was not hard. "Wild
> paranoia permeates the whole organization." says Don Larson, who served as
> the church's $25-per-week "finance ethics officer," for which read
> "enforcer." Larson claims he alone brought nearly 300 recalcitrant
> Scientologists to "Rehabilitation Project Forces" at Scientology centers
> around the world over a period of 14 months, until his own detention and
> departure in late 1983. "I was the hatchet man," says Larson. "I was
> responsible for all sorts of Gestapo-type stuff."
>
> In these sadistic detention programs, staff members would be coerced into
> performing hard labor, eating leftovers out of buckets and sleeping on
> floors. Some were reportedly kept against their will.
>
> The other move was to step up the flow of money dramatically. Among
> Larson's duties were levying fines on wealthy auditing subjects, whose
> intimate auditing sessions had been transcribed in writing, and forcibly
> dunning mission holders (franchisees) for millions of additional dollars
> for Hubbard agents. "In 1983," says Larson, "I manipulated a
> half-million-dollar inheritance out of Bob B------. He was naive as hell.
> D.M. [David Miscavige] called me up in the middle of the night [about Bob
> B------]. . . . He wanted the money.
> that kind of money to Hubbard, like special courses or E-meters that he had
> once designed. Each item had potential values put on them."
>
> The most remarkable transaction of all took place in 1982, when sources say
> Hubbard or his agents sold some of his copyrights for a reported $85
> million (including $35 million said to be earmarked for his projected
> mausoleum) and donated his trademarks, which were also valued at $85
> million, to still another corporation, Religious Technology Center. (This
> dual transaction created an offsetting deduction, thanks to the donation,
> which made the sale effectively tax-free.) The head of Religious
> Technology Center also happens to be the very same man who notarized the
> document that authorized a key part of the transaction - David Miscavige.
>
> Altogether, Forbes can total up at least $200 million gathered in Hubbard's
> name through 1982. There may well have been much more. All this time
> Hubbard remained unseen by anyone in the church, from Franks on down. Only
> the three messengers were seen.
>
> Yet the money machine was still grinding on nationwide and in some foreign
> countries. It soon developed that Hubbard had other books to sell - a
> seemingly endless succession of science fiction novels started appearing in
> 1982, reviewed by critics in less than admiring terms. Church officials
> publish these under the name Bridge Publications, paying Hubbard a royalty
> on each sale. Harvey Haber, who served as Hubbard's personal literary
> representative, says the order went out in 1982 to local Scientology
> missions and individual members to buy up specified numbers of copies. It
> added up, he reports, to tens of thousands of copies, many of them bought
> only to be warehoused by the church. Sometimes single orders for 20 or 30
> copies would be placed. But usually neatly dressed young adults would
> appear in bookstores and buy 2 or 3 copies apiece of Hubbard's books,
> usually for cash. The first such novel, Battlefield Earth, soon began
> appearing on best-seller lists. Battalions of neatly dressed customers
> have been buying ever since. By now, most Hubbard books have appeared on
> several best-seller lists. Much of the buying seems concentrated on the B.
> Dalton's and Waldenbooks chains, which seem to be doing a land-office
> business, even while other bookstores nearby report little interest in
> Hubbard's novels. Millions in royalties were taken after 1981 in this
> fashion. All of this money went to Author Services, controlled by the
> messengers.
>
> But Hubbard's old nemeses had not forgotten him. In late September 1985,
> the Internal Revenue Service sent a letter to the Church of Scientology,
> warning that it might indict Hubbard for tax fraud. But Hubbard may have
> had the last laugh.
>
> Jan. 23, 1986 was the date on Hubbard's new will. It dealt with copyrights
> he still owned. They and any royalties would belong to a special L. Ron
> Hubbard trust. Hubbard's third wife was provided for. (Hubbard's son from
> an earlier marriage was long ago disaffected and disinherited.) And it set
> instructions for dealing with his remains. The body was to be cremated
> immediately following death, his ashes scattered. No autopsy was to be
> allowed.
>
> Hubbard died the next day, on Jan. 24, according to followers who were at
> his deathbed. They called the coroner early on the 25th. The doctor who
> signed the death certificate, citing as cause of death a "cerebral vascular
> accident," gave as his address a medical center in Los Angeles that was
> founded by Scientologists. But there are those who believe Hubbard died in
> 1980, and still others who believe he died sometime in between. We may
> never know.
>
> Shortly thereafter, the Associated Press reported that the Church of
> Scientology had announced that 99% of Hubbard's estate had been left "to
> the church." Sources say a policy letter was posted in Scientology offices
> across the country announcing who was now officially in charge: Pat and
> Anne Broeker and David Miscavige.
>
> Since then, the Church of Scientology has been on a big marketing blitz,
> with heavy promotions on television and thick color inserts in newspapers
> on the life of Hubbard, "the greatest humanitarian in history." This
> promotes the books, the royalties on which go into the Hubbard trust.
>
> The "church" itself, meanwhile, faces its strongest challenge for survival.
> Annual income, reportedly about $150 million in the early 1980s, is now
> thought to be half that in the wake of the purges. Membership is down.
> The church claims more than 6 million active members, a figure it has used
> for 15 years. But some defectors put the real figure at less than 50,000.
> Moreover, an IRS criminal investigation is gathering momentum in Los
> Angeles, and new litigation has flooded the courts. Awards for damage and
> personal suffering are being made, some in the tens of millions of dollars,
> to former members as well as external critics. One attorney alone,
> Boston-based Michael Flynn, has represented 25 ex-Scientologists and is
> giving advice on a class-action suit.
>
> Hundreds of defectors worldwide have formed their own religions or
> for-profit auditing businesses, generally charging rates under $100 an
> hour. Among the new competitors is the man who once served as Hubbard's
> personal auditor, the much-revered David Mayo, who co-authored some of
> Hubbard's sacred texts and is now writing his own scriptures.
>
> So, as the original enterprise shrinks, a new, ungovernable cottage
> industry grows up around it. It was created by the messenger's purges, and
> it further undermines the organization that the messengers inherit. If
> psychotherapy by lie detector really is a useful technique, there is plenty
> of competition around now, in effect called into being by the messengers'
> own deeds.
>
> Hubbard - or his messengers - or both together, no one may ever quite know
> which, brought their troubles on themselves. It would all make Lafayette
> Ronald Hubbard turn over in his grave, if he had one.
>
>
>
> [Box] "May be . . . lied to or destroyed."
>
> It can be unpleasant crossing Hubbard's organization. Dr. John G. Clark,
> assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School,
> testified as an expert against the Church of Scientology. He reports that,
> in apparent retaliation, false complaints were circulated against his
> practice, phone threats were made to him, and ads placed in the Boston
> Herald offering $25,000 for evidence leading to his criminal conviction.
> This went on, he says, for ten years, during which two Church of
> Scientology suits against him were dismissed. Clark is suing for $35
> million. Other cases of harassment of critics have been documented. Such
> crude intimidation tactics are a systematic policy of the Church of
> Scientology. Why? Hubbard, in 1967, wrote the following with regard to
> church enemies: "[They] may be deprived of property or injured by any
> means by any Scientologist without any discipline of the Scientologist.
> May be tricked, sued or lied to or destroyed." -- R.B.
>
>
>
> [Box] Hubbard's cosmology
>
> The upper levels of sacred scientological doctrine are said to be so
> powerful that one could die of pneumonia if he tried to absorb them without
> proper training. Although the Church of Scientology has taken legal action
> against outsiders who possess the information, Forbes has obtained access
> to some of Hubbard's secrets of the universe. Summarized (we assume no
> responsibility for any who read further), his cosmology goes like this:
>
> Seventy-five million years ago there was a "galactic confederation" of more
> than 70 planets. Then, as now, there were "income taxes and suppressive
> governments." But the chief problem was overpopulation. There were 200
> billion to 500 billion people per planet. The boss was a mean titan, Xenu.
> He sent people to Earth (called Teegeeach) to blow them up, thus resolving
> the overpopulation.
>
> Rounded up among the victims were "artists," "revolutionaries," "criminals"
> and "those considered too smart." After capture, these beings "had their
> lungs shot with alcohol or glycol" and were transported by spaceships to
> earth. Xenu then dropped nuclear bombs into volcanoes. After the
> explosions, the individual spirits (or thetans), deprived of physical body,
> were packaged (or clustered) by Xenu through electronic and mechanical
> means in places like Hawaii and the Canary Islands.
>
> In a nutshell, each human today is made up of a cluster of these thetans,
> with one dominant, and this is the cause of human unhappiness and internal
> conflict. Only through costly Scientology auditing can the less dominant
> thetans be removed. (What happens to them after that is not clear.) And
> Xenu? To this day, Xenu is situated on a mountaintop somewhere stuck in an
> "electronic trap." -- R.B.
>
Tilman Hausherr
wrote:
>Re "GREP", I never heard any where this name; must not be so standard. I'm using
Has existed for at least 25 years, maybe even longer. A single command
line tool to search text files.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grep
>MS Desktop with three or four add-ons - one for PDF, one for ZIP, one for RAR.
That is the problem... I don't know what "hidden extras" MS Desktop has.
Let's never forget that Bush already snooped on the european banking
system for years. I also hate to install many add-ons. Pure TXT format
is best to archive text articles. You don't know whether PDF will still
exist in 10-15 years. Software that was "hot" a years ago has simply
disappeared - e.g. WordStar.
Tilman
--
Tilman Hausherr [KoX, SP5.55] Entheta * Enturbulation * Entertainment
http://www.xenu.de
Resistance is futile. You will be enturbulated. Xenu always prevails.
Find broken links on your web site: http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html
The Xenu bookstore: http://home.snafu.de/tilman/bookstore.html
Zinj
use...@snafu.de says...
> On Sun, 9 Jul 2006 20:16:09 +0200, "roger gonnet" <r...@antisectes.net>
> wrote:
>
> >Re "GREP", I never heard any where this name; must not be so standard. I'm using
>
> Has existed for at least 25 years, maybe even longer. A single command
> line tool to search text files.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grep
>
> >MS Desktop with three or four add-ons - one for PDF, one for ZIP, one for RAR.
>
> That is the problem... I don't know what "hidden extras" MS Desktop has.
> Let's never forget that Bush already snooped on the european banking
> system for years. I also hate to install many add-ons. Pure TXT format
> is best to archive text articles. You don't know whether PDF will still
> exist in 10-15 years. Software that was "hot" a years ago has simply
> disappeared - e.g. WordStar.
>
> Tilman
GREP is originally a UNIX tool, although there are variations for various
Windows platforms. Some I've seen can deal with *.zip formats etc, but, it
would be too much to expect a single search tool to be able to read *inside*
all the silly 'formats' various word processors/compression tools etc.
create.
Still; it's not only generally known (outside of Windowsland) but pretty much
standard.
Zinj
--
You Can Lead a Clam to Reason; but You Can't Make Him Think
John
> news:666$H01.34g61.515O.MiNISGaY.10b1604.K$020bcF1.0301$f00K37...@8g436f70403.4b2405048h3...
>> Barbara Schwarz <barbara...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
> "Family Trust", yet I heard Mary Sue was cut out of this. Anyone
> have any more facts on that? Will ~any~ of the kids get this trust?
> I doubt it, seriously. The only child of Hubbard still "in" is Dianna.
> Quinton is dead, Suzette hasn't been "on the bridge" in years, sane for
> Arthur,
What a lovely freudian slip :)
Barbara Schwarz
Magoo wrote:
> Fantastic!
Richard Behar, you made NO research about what really happened in
Germany. I am a eye witness of the events and was in the center of the
storm. Your article is FALSE.
It's not even good enough to wipe the windows with it. People like you
give journalism a bad name. Only anti-religious extremists cheer that
kind of "journalism" on.
Hey, Richard, defamer, read that about L. Ron Hubbard:
http://www.thunderstar.net/~schwarz/lrh/fbidocs.html
Barbara Schwarz (Looking for the original Mark [Marty] Rathbun. No
impostor, please!)
http://www.thunderstar.net/~schwarz/lrh/fbidocs.html
--
(I am concerned about Dave Touretzky's activities. He also has bomb
instructions on the net.)
http://www.religiousfreedomwatch.org/extremists/
Brian J. Bruns aka Burns plays a "cop" on the net but he is a felon
(computer crimes), a spammer, an anti-free speech activist, and the
abusive AHBL website is his. He lies about me on his website. He is the
abuser and is supported by Korey Jerome Kruse ("Lord Xenu", "Simkatu"
or "Vivaldi") who just came out of jail and is, according to the
courts, an habitual offender.
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.religion.scientology/msg/70fdd710bf99c37a?dmode=source&hl=en
Zinj
barbara...@gmail.com says...
>
> Magoo wrote:
> > Fantastic!
>
> Richard Behar, you made NO research about what really happened in
> Germany. I am a eye witness of the events and was in the center of the
> storm. Your article is FALSE.
I'm sure that those interested in the truth will recognize your credibility
as your own mother, the daughter of L. Ron Hubbard and grand-daughter of
Dwight David Eisenhower raised in a submarine village under the Great Salt
Lake and abducted by a secretive organization called SMEGMAPUSS which
controlls all CIA and international governmental and 'psych' functions.
After all; you're a *Scientologist*!!
What you say is not what you *believe*; it's what you *know*!!!!
(Oh, and, let's not forget that you're married to a high level 'Church'
official who has been 'disappeared' by the same 'Church' that threw you out
20 years ago, yet you now support)
roger gonnet
> On Sun, 9 Jul 2006 20:16:09 +0200, "roger gonnet" <r...@antisectes.net>
> wrote:
>
>>Re "GREP", I never heard any where this name; must not be so standard. I'm
>>using
>
> Has existed for at least 25 years, maybe even longer. A single command
> line tool to search text files.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grep
>
>>MS Desktop with three or four add-ons - one for PDF, one for ZIP, one for RAR.
>
> That is the problem... I don't know what "hidden extras" MS Desktop has.
it's hyper easy.
take a look:
http://addins.msn.com/livefavs/addins_category_toolbar.aspx
> Let's never forget that Bush already snooped on the european banking
> system for years. I also hate to install many add-ons. Pure TXT format
> is best to archive text articles.
I don't think so it, since it's not even able to have any functioning URL. One
has to guess what are titles, etc etc. Besides, text articles do not contain all
these other interesting infos, images, titles etc.
It looks sad and does not attract customers.
Nobody could even see without reading a lot if the txt documents are newspapers,
your own creations, copies or anything else.
You don't know whether PDF will still
> exist in 10-15 years. Software that was "hot" a years ago has simply
> disappeared - e.g. WordStar.
Yes, but it's very evident for me that pdf has greatly bettered since years, and
that it's even used now in printing companies as one of the standards; not yet
reached the Quark XPress level, but well, it's usable and fine for me.
Besides, it's not far to reach the size of txt (I tried a 132 K txt doc: it
makes a 209 K pdf).
Anyway, adobe pdf is already re-formattable with some tools, into doc, and
acrobat contains lots of re-translators.
r
roger gonnet
"Zinj" <zinj...@yahoo.com> a écrit dans le message de news:
MPG.1f1b3b563...@news.day.sbcglobal.net...
> In article <psq2b2dpl90l1sld1...@4ax.com>, tilman-
> use...@snafu.de says...
>> On Sun, 9 Jul 2006 20:16:09 +0200, "roger gonnet" <r...@antisectes.net>
>> wrote:
>>
>> >Re "GREP", I never heard any where this name; must not be so standard. I'm
>> >using
>>
>> Has existed for at least 25 years, maybe even longer. A single command
>> line tool to search text files.
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grep
>>
>> >MS Desktop with three or four add-ons - one for PDF, one for ZIP, one for
>> >RAR.
>>
>> That is the problem... I don't know what "hidden extras" MS Desktop has.
>> Let's never forget that Bush already snooped on the european banking
>> system for years. I also hate to install many add-ons. Pure TXT format
>> is best to archive text articles. You don't know whether PDF will still
>> exist in 10-15 years. Software that was "hot" a years ago has simply
>> disappeared - e.g. WordStar.
>>
>> Tilman
>
> GREP is originally a UNIX tool, although there are variations for various
> Windows platforms. Some I've seen can deal with *.zip formats etc, but, it
> would be too much to expect a single search tool to be able to read *inside*
> all the silly 'formats' various word processors/compression tools etc.
> create.
true, lots of formats exist indeed -- producers wars...
>
> Still; it's not only generally known (outside of Windowsland) but pretty much
> standard.
Okay, but I never fell on it, though I bought my first pc 12 years ago.
Thanks,
r
Playfullminx
Barbara Schwarz wrote:
> Magoo wrote:
> > Fantastic!
>
> Richard Behar, you made NO research about what really happened in
> Germany. I am a eye witness of the events and was in the center of the
> storm. Your article is FALSE.
> It's not even good enough to wipe the windows with it. People like you
> give journalism a bad name. Only anti-religious extremists cheer that
> kind of "journalism" on.
Barbara, shutup. You are a moron and wouldn't know real jornalism if it
tied you down, made you smoke cigarettes and watch porn. You are a
total waste of a brain.
asstr...@email.com
Eru Ilúvatar wrote:
> Barbara Schwarz <barbara...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >As an eyewitness and person in the storm,
>
> i.e. one of the criminals
>
> >I am telling you that Behar didn't research at all. He just
> >printed rumours and falsehoods. What a shame.
>
> Why
No sicker liar here than you are, Peat. Why did you leave alt.astrology
and suddenly stink against the Scientologists, you freak?
Pete, (Eru Avatar) you sick phedophile pig! Stop defaming and stalking
women. They don't want you ancient convicted criminal and jail bird.
Milton Stapleton was originally not Milton but Pete and Peat and Petie
and hell knows what else. He was in jail and then changed his name to
Milton Stapleton.
His is what somebody wrote who watched him:
Petie, you lie, your astrology doesn't work --- it DIDN'T save you from
going to jail. Who is going to believe in your astrology---trying to
pimp the sexy hubs, rims and spokes? You FAILED! Your astrology
doesn't WORK!
Pete Stapleton about marijuana:
After all, pot is said to enhance one's ear for music, increase one's
sensuality and push the natural inhibitions into the back ground for
the moment.
Pete Stapleton about him being mentally ill.
I am also a diagnosed Manic Depressive. I was institutionalized for
a year in an attempt to resolve the problem.
I do stay clear of any activity that requires rigid scheduling over a
long period - of course this is the way the manic allowed me to live
(he
makes the money) - kind of free of restraints - and I'm still getting
away with it.
Peat Stapleton about rape and phedophelia:
So what if I DID force a 13 year old boy to have sex with me? It was
before megans law so there's nothing you can do about it!
Peat Stapleton in his "profession" as astrologist:
What Jo dream will not admit is that is or was in fact a prostitue.
And apparently was badly hurt by her pimp - since calling someone a
pimp seems to be her method of attack under all circumstance. And
what is worse - she apparently worked the farm workers truck in
California @ $5.00 per blow job. At least this is what was posted
about her on alt.astrology some time ago and she never denied it.
Out_Of_The_Dark
Dave Touretzky wrote:
> Back in 1986, five years before his fateful TIME Magazine article,
> Richard Behar wrote a piece for Forbes called "The prophet and profits
> of Scientology". It's now available in the Secret Library of
> Scientology as a scanned PDF:
>
> http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Library/Shelf/behar/behar-forbes-1986.pdf
>
> Thanks to Roger Gonnet for supplying the PDF version.
>
> If someone wanted to turn this into plain HTML and mail me the file,
> I'd be most grateful.
>
>
> -- Dave Touretzky: "October is Behar's 20 year anniversary as an SP."
> http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Secrets<
If I had read this article in 1986, I would have left the church much
sooner than I did.
Unfortunately, to be loyal to the church, one automatically ignored
these 'anti-scientology' . It's very sad to think that many others are
still living with that mindset.
Reading quotes from ex-member Don Larson admitting to orchestrating &
participating in giving those terrible gang bang sec checks while he
was an officer of the church was eye opening. I always expected his
co-terrorist, Class VIII auditor Norm Herring, to flee first. Minor
remnants of false data still at work until truth is presented. So, it's
good that information like Behar's Forbes article be reposted now and
again.
Speaking for myself, and not the many other public and RPF staff who
also endured and survived hours of that brainwashing and torture,
here's a belated "Thanks Don" for coming clean publicly and speaking
out against the cult of scientology."I forgive you."
-JustCallMeMary
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Library/Shelf/behar/behar-forbes-1986.pdf
Simkatu
> Back in 1986, five years before his fateful TIME Magazine article,
> Richard Behar wrote a piece for Forbes called "The prophet and profits
> of Scientology". It's now available in the Secret Library of
> Scientology as a scanned PDF:
>
> http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Library/Shelf/behar/behar-forbes-1986.pdf
>
> Thanks to Roger Gonnet for supplying the PDF version.
>
> If someone wanted to turn this into plain HTML and mail me the file,
> I'd be most grateful.
Here is an HTML version of the Behar article that appeared in Forbes:
--
Simkatu