22 Nov 2000
Fredric L. Rice
letters@SPTimes.com

The fact that former city commissioner Fred Thomas has offered to sell some of his downtown Clearwater property to the notorious Scientology organization should prompt people to think a bit deeper into the crafty ways of successful businessmen and what Mr. Thomas may very well be thinking of.

Take a look at the history of the Scientology organization and its unfortunate presence in Clearwater. Readers of these pages may well recall that when the Lisa McPherson Trust went looking for property to purchase in downtown Clearwater, the Scientology organization pulled out all the stops to try to keep the Trust from finding anything suitable. The Scientology organization, it was reported, offered downtown real estate sellers more money than the Trust was offering to try to keep the Trust out of Clearwater.

If Mr. Thomas wanted to sell his property to the Scientologists, I suspect he would have gone straight to Mr. Robert Minton of the Lisa McPherson Trust and made him an offer, knowing that the Scientology organization would immediately offer much more for the property to keep it out of the hands of the Trust.

And here's something else that your readers may not know about yet I would expect Mr. Thomas to know: Mr. Robert Minton has plans to open up a posh night club in Clearwater called "Club Xenu" in honor of the evil galactic overlord Xenu - someone that the Scientology organization doesn't want anyone outside of their organization to know about. A night club with a good restaurant downtown would mean "outsiders" coming to "their" city, and Scientologists - with their video cameras trained at passing vehicles and pedestrians 24 hours a day - don't want outsiders coming to their town. They want to own that city free and clear.

Mr. Thomas is a savvy businessman with political training. I bet the guy's smart enough to know how best to maximize the return on the property he's invested in. A buck says that he'll offer his property to Mr. Minton, and that the Scientology organization will make a counter offer, and Mr. Thomas will tell them, "Sorry, you already turned me down; no second chance." How best to launch Club Xenu than with newspaper articles describing how the Scientology organization had tried to keep the Club out of Clearwater?

Fredric L. Rice
frice@raids.org