A large number of newspapers, magazines, radio stations, and television
stations have described in detail the criminality of the "Church"
of Scientology. In all cases where the crime syndicate has learned of an
exposure before hand, the cult has attempted to intimidate and threaten in
a vain attempt to silence the truth about their criminal activities.
Time Magazine's broad-band exposure of the Scientology crime syndicate was
no exception. The cult tried every method of intimidation and threats of
lawsuit they could imagine, all to no avail. Once Time Magazine published
the following article, the cult launched yet another one of their futile
lawsuits against them knowing in advance that they would lose. But that's
not the point of Scientology's uncountable lawsuits. The cult's dead god,
L. Ron Hubbard, wrote an order which specifically demands that
civil lawsuits and the legal system be abused solely to harass critics to
try to financially ruin them and thus silence the truth.
(SeeOperation Clambake for details.)
This last week, on Friday, November 13, 1998, two more federal indictments
were handed down against the "Church" of Scientology for their
murder of Lisa McPherson (see the
Lisa McPherson Memorial Web Site for details.) Thousands
of newspaper articles and news casts around the world have covered these
latest federal indictments; there's no silencing the truth about this
deadly cult.
Please use the following Time Magazine article under the legal articles of
"Fair Use" provisions of the United States Copyright code, and
thank Time Magazine for having the guts to publish the truth
about this deadly, crimial cult. At times past, reporters have had their
car's break lines cut by this cult, and Mr. Richard Behar deserves our
thanks.
This young Russian-studies scholar had jumped from a 10th-floor
window of the Milford Plaza Hotel and bounced off the hood of a
stretch limousine. When the police arrived, his fingers were still
clutching $171 in cash, virtually the only money he hadn't turned over
to the Church of Scientology, the self-help "philosophy" group
he had discovered just seven months earlier.
His death inspired his father Edward, a physician, to start his
own investigation of the church. "We thought Scientology was something
like Dale Carnegie," Lottick says. "I now believe it's a school for
psychopaths." Their so-called therapies are manipulations. They take
the best and the brightest people and destroy them." The Lotticks want
to sue the church for contributing to their son's death, but the
prospect has them frightened. For nearly 40 years, the big business of
Scientology has shielded itself exquisitely behind the First Amendment
as well as a battery of high-priced criminal lawyers and shady private
detectives.
The Church of Scientology, started by science-fiction writer L.
Ron Hubbard to "clear" people of unhappiness, portrays itself
as a religion. In reality the church is a hugely profitable global racket
that survives by intimidating members and critics in a Mafia-like
manner. At times during the past decade, prosecutions against
Scientology seemed to be curbing its menace. Eleven top
Scientologists, including Hubbard's wife, were sent to prison in the
early 1980s for infiltrating, burglarizing and wiretapping more than
100 private and government agencies in attempts to block their
investigations. In recent years hundreds of longtime Scientology
adherents -- many charging that they were mentally of physically
abused -- have quit the church and criticized it at their own risk.
Some have sued the church and won; others have settled for amounts in
excess of $500,000. In various cases judges have labeled the church
"schizophrenic and paranoid" and "corrupt, sinister and
dangerous."
Yet the outrage and litigation have failed to squelch Scientology.
The group, which boasts 700 centers in 65 countries, threatens to
become more insidious and pervasive than ever. Scientology is trying
to go mainstream, a strategy that has sparked a renewed law-
enforcement campaign against the church. Many of the group's followers
have been accused of committing financial scams, while the church is
busy attracting the unwary through a wide array of front groups in
such businesses as publishing, consulting, health care and even
remedial education.
In Hollywood, Scientology has assembled a star-studded roster of
followers by aggressively recruiting and regally pampering them at the
church's "Celebrity Centers," a chain of clubhouses that offer
expensive counseling and career guidance. Adherents include screen
idols Tom Cruise and John Travolta, actresses Kirstie Alley, Mimi
Rogers, and Anne Archer, Palm Springs mayor and performer Sonny Bono,
jazzman Chick Corea and even Nancy Cartwright, the voice of cartoon
star Bart Simpson. Rank-and-file members, however, are dealt a less
glamorous Scientology.
According to the Cult Awareness Network, whose 23 chapters monitor
more than 200 "mind control" cults, no group prompts more
telephone pleas for help than does Scientology. Says Cynthia Kisser, the
network's Chicago-based executive director: "Scientology is quite
likely the most ruthless, the most classically terroristic, the most
litigious and the most lucrative cult the country has ever seen. No
cult extracts more money from its members." Agrees Vicki Aznaran, who
was one of Scientology's six key leaders until she bolted from the
church in 1987: "This is a criminal organization, day in and day out.
It makes Jim and Tammy [Bakker] look like kindergarten." To explore
Scientology's reach, TIME conducted more than 150 interviews and
reviewed hundreds of court records and internal Scientology documents.
Church officials refused to be interviewed. The investigation paints a
picture of a depraved yet thriving enterprise. Most cults fail to
outlast their founder, but Scientology has prospered since Hubbard's
death in 1986. In a court filing, one of the cult's many entities --
the Church of Spiritual Technology -- listed $503 million in income
just for 1987. High-level defectors say the parent organization has
squirreled away an estimated $400 million in bank accounts in
Liechtenstein, Switzerland and Cyprus. Scientology probably has about
50,000 active members, far fewer than the 8 million the group claims.
But in one sense, that inflated figure rings true: millions of people
have been affected in one way or another by Hubbard's bizarre
creation.
Scientology is now run by David Miscavige, 31, a high school
dropout and second-generation church member. Defectors describe him as
cunning, ruthless and so paranoid about perceived enemies that he kept
plastic wrap over his glass of water. His obsession is to obtain
credibility for Scientology in the 1990s. Among other tactics, the
group:
The founder of this enterprise was part storyteller, part flimflam
man. Born In Nebraska in 1911, Hubbard served in the Navy during World
War II and soon afterward complained to the Veterans Administration
about his "suicidal inclinations" and his "seriously
affected" mind. Nevertheless, Hubbard was a moderately successful
writer of pulp science fiction. Years later, church brochures described
him falsely as an "extensively decorated" World War II hero
who was crippled and blinded in action, twice pronounced dead and
miraculously cured through Scientology. Hubbard's "doctorate"
from "Sequoia University" was a fake mall-order degree. In a
I984 case in which the church sued a Hubbard biographical researcher, a
California judge concluded that its founder was "a pathological
liar."
Hubbard wrote one of Scientology's sacred texts, Dianetics: The
Modern Science of Mental Health, in 1950. In it he introduced a crude
psychotherapeutic technique he called "auditing." He also
created a simplified lie detector (called an "E-meter") that
was designed to measure electrical changes In the skin while subjects
discussed intimate details of their past. Hubbard argued that unhappiness
sprang from mental aberrations (or "engrams") caused by early
traumas. Counseling sessions with the E-meter, he claimed, could knock
out the engrams, cure blindness and even improve a person's intelligence
and appearance.
Hubbard kept adding steps, each more costly, for his followers to
climb. In the 1960s the guru decreed that humans are made of clusters
of spirits (or "thetans") who were banished to earth some 75
million years ago by a cruel galactic ruler named Xenu. Naturally, those
thetans had to be audited.
An Internal Revenue Service ruling in 1967 stripped Scientology's
mother church of its tax-exempt status. A federal court ruled in 1971
that Hubbard's medical claims were bogus and that E-meter auditing
could no longer be called a scientific treatment. Hubbard responded by
going fully religious, seeking First Amendment protection for Scien-
tology's strange rites. His counselors started sporting clerical
collars. Chapels were built, franchises became "missions," fees
became "fixed donations," and Hubbard's comic-book cosmology
became "sacred scriptures.'
During the early 1970s, the IRS conducted its own auditing
sessions and proved that Hubbard was skimming millions of dollars from
the church, laundering the money through dummy corporations in Panama
and stashing it in Swiss bank accounts. Moreover, church members stole
IRS documents, filed false tax returns and harassed the agency's
employees. By late 1985, with high-level defectors accusing Hubbard of
having stolen as much as S200 million from the church, the IRS was
seeking an indictment of Hubbard for tax fraud. Scientology members
"worked day and night" shredding documents the IRS sought,
according to defector Aznaran, who took part in the scheme. Hubbard,
who had been in hiding for five years, died before the criminal case
could be prosecuted.
Today the church invents costly new services with all the zeal of
its founder. Scientology doctrine warns that even adherents who are
"cleared" of engrams face grave spiritual dangers unless they
are pushed to higher and more expensive levels. According to the church's
latest price list, recruits -- "raw meat," as Hubbard called
them -- take auditing sessions that cost as much as $1,000 an hour,
or $12,500 for a 12 1/2-hour "intensive."
Psychiatrists say these sessions can produce a drugged-like,
mind-controlled euphoria that keeps customers coming back for more. To
pay their fees, newcomers can earn commissions by recruiting new mem-
bers, become auditors themselves (Miscavige did so at age 12), or join
the church staff and receive free counseling in exchange for what
their written contracts describe as a "billion years" of
labor. "Make sure that lots of bodies move through the shop,"
implored Hubbard in one of his bulletins to officials. "Make money.
Make more money. Make others produce so as to make money . . . However
you get them in or why, just do it."
Harriet Baker learned the hard way about Scientology's business of
selling religion. When Baker, 73, lost her husband to cancer, a
Scientologist turned up at her Los Angeles home peddling a $1,300
auditing package to cure her grief. Some $15,000 later, the
Scientologists discovered that her house was debt free. They arranged
a $45,000 mortgage, which they pressured her to tap for more auditing
until Baker's children helped their mother snap out of her daze. Last
June, Baker demanded a $27,000 refund for unused services, prompting
two cult members to show up at her door unannounced with an E-meter to
interrogate her. Baker never got the money and, financially strapped,
was forced to sell her house in September.
Before Noah Lottick killed himself, he had paid more than $5,000
for church counseling. His behavior had also become strange. He once
remarked to his parents that his Scientology mentors could actually
read minds. When his father suffered a major heart attack, Noah
insisted that it was purely psychosomatic. Five days before he jumped,
Noah burst into his parents' home and demanded to know why they were
spreading "false rumors" about him -- a delusion that finally
prompted his father to call a psychiatrist.
It was too late. "From Noah's friends at Dianetics" read the
card that accompanied a bouquet of flowers at Lottick's funeral. Yet no
Scientology staff members bothered to show up. A week earlier, local
church officials had given Lottick's parents a red-carpet tour of
their center. A cult leader told Noah's parents that their son had
been at the church just hours before he disappeared -- but the church
denied this story as soon as the body was identified. True to form,
the cult even haggled with the Lotticks over $3,000 their son had paid
for services he never used, insisting that Noah had intended it as a
"donation."
The church has invented hundreds of goods and services for which
members are urged to give "donations." Are you having
trouble "moving swiftly up the Bridge" -- that is, advancing
up the stepladder of en- lightenment? Then you can have your case
reviewed for a mere $1,250 "donation." Want to know "why a
thetan hangs on to the physical universe?" Try 52 of Hubbard's
tape-recorded speeches from 1952, titled "Ron's Philadelphia
Doctorate Course Lectures," for $2,525. Next: nine other series
of the same sort. For the collector, gold-and-leather-bound editions
of 22 of Hubbard's books (and bookends) on subjects ranging from
Scientology ethics to radiation can be had for just $1,900.
To gain influence and lure richer, more sophisticated followers,
Scientology has lately resorted to a wide array of front groups and
financial scams. Among them:
Many dentists who have unwittingly been drawn into the cult are
filing or threatening lawsuits as well. Dentist Robert Geary of
Medina, Ohio, who entered a Sterling seminar in 1988, endured "the
most extreme high-pressure sales tactics I have ever faced." Sterling
officials told Geary, 45, that their firm was not linked to
Scientology, he says. but Geary claims they eventually convinced him
that he and his wife Dorothy had personal problems that required
auditing. Over five months, the Gearys say, they spent $130,000 for
services, plus $50,000 for "gold-embossed, investment-grade"
books signed by Hubbard. Geary contends that Scientologists not only
called his bank to increase his credit card limit but also forged his
signature on a $20,000 loan application. "It was insane," he
recalls. "I couldn't even get an accounting from them of what I was
paying for." At one point, the Gearys claim, Scientologists held
Dorothy hostage for two weeks in a mountain cabin, after which she was
hospitalized for a nervous breakdown.
Last October, Sterling broke some bad news to another dentist,
Glover Rowe of Gadsden, Ala., and his wife Dee. Tests showed that
unless they signed up for auditing Glover's practice would fail, and
Dee would someday abuse their child. The next month the Rowes flew to
Glendale, Calif., where they shuttled daily from a local hotel to a
Dianetics center. "We thought they were brilliant people because they
seemed to know so much about us," recalls Dee. "Then we realized
our hotel room must have been bugged." After bolting from the center,
$23,000 poorer, the Rowes say, they were chased repeatedly by
Scientologists on foot and in cars. Dentists aren't the only once at
risk. Scientology also makes pitches to chiropractors, podiatrists and
veterinarians.
Another Scientology linked group, the Concerned Businessmen's
Association of America, holds antidrug contests and awards $5,000
grants to schools as a way to recruit students and curry favor with
education officials. West Virginia Senator John D. Rockefeller IV
unwittingly commended the CBAA in 1987 on the Senate floor. Last
August author Alex Haley was the keynote speaker at its annual awards
banquet in Los Angeles. Says Haley: "I didn't know much about that
group going in. I'm a Methodist." Ignorance about Scientology can be
embarrassing: two months ago, Illinois Governor Jim Edgar, noting that
Scientology's founder "has solved the aberrations of the human
mind," proclaimed March 13 "L. Ron Hubbard Day." He
rescinded the proclamation in late March, once he Iearned who Hubbard
really was.
Former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop labeled the book "trash,"
and the Food and Drug Administration issued a paper in October that
claims Steinman distorts his facts. "HealthMed is a gateway to
Scientology, and Steinman's book is a sorting mechanism," says
physician William Jarvis, who is head of the National Council Against
Health Fraud. Steinman, who describes Hubbard favorably as a
"researcher," denies any ties to the church and contends,
"HealthMed has no affiliation that I know of with Scientology."
In the stock market the practice of "shorting" involves borrowing
shares of publicly traded companies in the hope that the price will go
down before the stocks must be bought on the market and returned to
the lender. The Feshbach brothers of Palo Alto, Calif. -- Kurt, Joseph
and Matthew - have become the leading short sellers in the U.S., with
more than $500 million under management. The Feshbachs command a staff
of about 60 employees and claim to have earned better returns than the
Dow Jones industrial average for most of the 1980s. And, they say,
they owe it all to the teachings of Scientology, whose "war
chest" has received more than $1 million from the family.
The Feshbachs also embrace the church's tactics; the brothers are
the terrors of the stock exchanges. In congressional hearings in 1989,
the heads of several companies claimed that Feshbach operatives have
spread false information to government agencies and posed in various
guises -- such as a Securities and Exchange Commission official -- in
an effort to discredit their companies and drive the stocks down.
Michael Russell, who ran a chain of business journals, testified that
a Feshbach employee called his bankers and interfered with his loans.
Sometimes the Feshbachs send private detectives to dig up dirt on
firms, which is then shared with business reporters, brokers and fund
managers.
The Feshbachs, who wear jackets bearing the slogan "stock
busters," insist they run a clean shop. But as part of a current
probe into possible insider stock trading, federal officials are
reportedly investigating whether the Feshbachs received confidential
information from FDA employees. The brothers seem aligned with Scientology's
war on psychiatry and medicine: many of their targets are health and
bio-technology firms. ""Legitimate short selling performs a
public service by deflating hyped stocks," says Robert Flaherty, the
editor of Equities magazine and a harsh critic of the brothers. "But
the Feshbachs have damaged scores of good start-ups."
Occasionally a Scientologist's business antics land him in jail.
Last August a former devotee named Steven Fishman began serving a
five-year prison term in Florida. His crime: stealing blank
stock-confirmation slips from his employer, a major brokerage house,
to use as proof that he owned stock entitling him to join dozens of
successful class-action lawsuits. Fishman made roughly $1 million this
way from 1983 to 1988 and spent as much as 30% of the loot on
Scientology books and tapes.
Scientology denies any tie to the Fishman scam, a claim strongly
disputed by both Fishman and his longtime psychiatrist, Uwe Geertz, a
prominent Florida hypnotist. Both men claim that when arrested,
Fishman was ordered by the church to kill Geertz and then do an
"EOC," or end of cycle, which is church jargon for suicide.
Critics pan most of Hubbard's books as unreadable, while defectors
claim that church insiders are sometimes the real authors. Even so,
Scientology has sent out armies of its followers to buy the group's
books at such major chains as B. Dalton's and Waldenbooks to sustain
the illusion of a best-selling author. A former Dalton's manager says
that some books arrived in his store with the chain's price stickers
already on them, suggesting that copies are being recycled.
Scientology claims that sales of Hubbard books now top 90 million
worldwide. The scheme, set up to gain converts and credibility, is
coupled with a radio and TV advertising campaign virtually un-
paralleled in the book industry.
Scientology devotes vast resources to squelching its critics.
Since 1986 Hubbard and his church have been the subject of four
unfriendly books, all released by small yet courageous publishers. In
each case, the writers have been badgered and heavily sued. One of
Hubbard's policies was that all perceived enemies are "fair
game" and subject to being "tricked, sued or lied to or
destroyed." Those who criticize the church journalists, doctors,
lawyers and even judges often find themselves engulfed in litigation,
stalked by private eyes, framed for fictional crimes, beaten up or
threatened with death. Psychologist Margaret Singer, 69, an outspoken
Scientology critic and professor at the University of California,
Berkeley, now travels regularly under an assumed name to avoid
harassment.
After the Los Angeles Times published a negative series on the
church last summer, Scientologists spent an estimated $1 million to
plaster the reporters' names on hundreds of billboards and bus
placards across the city. Above their names were quotations taken out
of context to portray the church in a positive light.
The church's most fearsome advocates are its lawyers. Hubbard
warned his followers in writing to "beware of attorneys who tell you
not to sue . . . the purpose of the suit is to harass and discourage
rather than to win." Result: Scientology has brought hundreds of suits
against its perceived enemies and today pays an estimated $20 million
annually to more than 100 lawyers.
One legal goal of Scientology is to bankrupt the opposition or
bury it under paper. The church has 71 active lawsuits against the IRS
alone. One of them, Miscavige vs. IRS, has required the U.S. to pro-
duce an index of 52,000 pages of documents. Boston attorney Michael
Flynn, who helped Scientology victims from 1979 to 1987, personally
endured 14 frivolous lawsuits, all of them dismissed. Another lawyer,
Joseph Yanny, believes the church "has so subverted justice and the
judicial system that it should be barred from seeking equity in any
court." He should know: Yanny represented the cult until 1987, when,
he says, he was asked to help church officials steal medical records
to blackmail an opposing attorney (who was allegedly beaten up
instead). Since Yanny quit representing the church, he has been the
target of death threats, burglaries, lawsuits and other harassment.
Scientology's critics contend that the U.S. needs to crack down on
the church in a major, organized way. "I want to know, Where is our
government?" demands Toby Plevin, a Los Angeles attorney who handles
victims. "It shouldn't be left to private litigators, because God
knows most of us are afraid to get involved." But law-enforcement
agents are also wary. "Every investigator is very cautious, walking on
eggshells when it comes to the church," says a Florida police
detective who has tracked the cult since 1988. "It will take a federal
effort with lots of money and manpower."
So far the agency giving Scientology the most grief is the IRS,
whose officials have implied that Hubbard's successors may be looting
the church's coffers. Since 1988, when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld
the revocation of the cult's tax-exempt status, a massive IRS probe of
church centers across the country has been under way. An IRS agent,
Marcus Owens, has estimated that thousands of IRS employees have been
involved. Another agent, in an internal IRS memorandum, spoke
hopefully of the "ultimate disintegration" of the church. A
small but helpful beacon shone last June when a federal appeals court
ruled that two cassette tapes featuring conversations between church
officials and their lawyers are evidence of a plan to commit "future
frauds" against the IRS.
The IRS and FBI have been debriefing Scientology defectors for the
past three years, in part to gain evidence for a major racketeering
case that appears to have stalled last summer. Federal agents complain
that the Justice Department is unwilling to spend the money needed to
endure a drawn-out war with Scientology or to fend off the cult's
notorious jihads against individual agents. "In my opinion the church
has one of the most effective intelligence operations in the U.S.,
rivaling even that of the FBI," says Ted Gunderson, a former head of
the FBI's Los Angeles office.
Foreign governments have been moving even more vigorously against
the organization. In Canada the church and nine of its members will be
tried in June on charges of stealing government documents (many of
them retrieved in an enormous police raid of the church's Toronto
headquarters). Scientology proposed to give $1 million to the needy if
the case was dropped, but Canada spurned the offer. Since 1986
authorities in France, Spain and Italy have raided more than 50
Scientology centers. Pending charges against more than 100 of its overseas
church members include fraud, extortion, capital flight, coercion,
illegally practicing medicine and taking advantage of mentally
incapacitated people. In Germany last month, leading politicians
accused the cult of trying to infiltrate a major party as well as
launching an immense recruitment drive in the east.
Sometimes even the church's biggest zealots can use a little
protection. Screen star Travolta, 37, has long served as an unofficial
Scientology spokesman, even though he told a magazine in 1983 that he
was opposed to the church's management. High-level defectors claim
that Travolta has long feared that if he defected, details of his
sexual life would be made public. "He felt pretty intimidated about
this getting out and told me so," recalls William Franks, the church's
former chairman of the board. "There were no outright threats made,
but it was implicit. If you leave, they immediately start digging up
everything." Franks was driven out in 1981 after attempting to reform
the church.
The church's former head of security, Richard Aznaran, recalls
Scientology ringleader Miscavige repeatedly joking to staffers about
Travolta's allegedly promiscuous homosexual behavior. At this point
any threat to expose Travolta seems superfluous: last May a male porn
star collected $100,000 from a tabloid for an account of his alleged
two-year liaison with the celebrity. Travolta refuses to comment, and
in December his lawyer dismissed questions about the subject as
"bizarre." Two weeks later, Travolta announced that he was
getting married to actress Kelly Preston, a fellow Scientologist.
Shortly after Hubbard's death the church retained Trout & Ries, a
respected, Connecticut-based firm of marketing consultants, to help
boost its public image. "We were brutally honest," says Jack
Trout. "We advised them to clean up their act, stop with the
controversy and even to stop being a church. They didn't want to hear
that." Instead, Scientology hired one of the country's largest
p.r. outfits, Hill and Knowlton, whose executives refuse to discuss the
lucrative relationship. "Hill and Knowlton must feel that these
guys are not totally off the wall," says Trout. "Unless it's
just for the money." One of Scientology's main strategies is to
keep advancing the tired argument that the church is being
"persecuted" by antireligionists. It is supported in that
position by the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Council
of Churches. But in the end, money is what Scientology is all about.
As long as the organization's opponents and victims are successfully
squelched, Scientology's managers and lawyers will keep pocketing
millions of dollars by helping it achieve its ends.
One source of funds for the Los Angeles-based church is the
notorious, self-regulated stock exchange in Vancouver, British
Columbia, often called the scam capital of the world. The
exchange's 2,300 penny-stock listings account for $4 billion in
annual trading. Local journalists and insiders claim the vast
majority range from total washouts to outright frauds.
Two Scientologists who operate there are Kenneth Gerbino and
Michael Baybak, 20-year church veterans from Beverly Hills who
are major donors to the cult. Gerbino, 45, is a money manager,
marketmaker and publisher of a national financial newsletter. He
has boasted in Scientology journals that he owes all his
stock-picking success to L. Ron Hubbard. That's not saying much:
Gerbino's newsletter picks since 1985 have cumulatively returned
24%, while the Dow Jones industrial average has more than
doubled. Nevertheless Gerbino's short-term gains can be
stupendous. A survey last October found Gerbino to be the only
manager who made money in the third quarter of 1990, thanks to
gold and other resource stocks. For the first quarter of 1991,
Gerbino was dead last. Baybak, 49, who runs a public relations
company staffed with Scientologists, apparently has no ethics
problem with engineering a hostile takeover of a firm he is hired
to promote.
Neither man agreed to be interviewed for this story, yet both
threatened legal action through attorneys. "What these guys do is
take over companies, hype the stock, sell their shares, and then
there's nothing left," says John Campbell, a former securities
lawyer who was a director of mining company Athena Gold until
Baybak and Gerbino took it over.
The pattern has become familiar. The pair promoted a mining
venture called Skylark Resources, whose stock traded at nearly $4
a share in 1987. The outfit soon crashed, and the stock is
around 2 cents. NETI Technologies, a software company, was
trumpeted in the press as "the next Xerox" and in 1984 rose
to a market value of $120 million with Baybak's help. The company,
which later collapsed, was delisted two months ago by the
Vancouver exchange.
Baybak appeared in 1989 at the helm of Wall Street Ventures, a
start-up that announced it owned 35 tons of rare Middle Eastern
postage stamps -- worth $100 million -- and was buying the
world's largest collection of southern Arabian stamps (worth $350
million). Steven C. Rockefeller Jr. of the oil family and former
hockey star Denis Potvin joined the company in top posts, but
both say they quit when they realized the stamps were virtually
worthless. "The stamps were created by sand-dune nations to
exploit collectors," says Michael Laurence, editor of Linn's
Stamp News, America's largest stamp journal. After the stock
topped $6, it began a steady descent, with Baybak unloading his
shares along the way. Today it trades at 18 cents.
Athena Gold, the current object of Baybak's and Gerbino's
attentions, was founded by entrepreneur William Jordan. He
turned to an established Vancouver broker in 1987 to help finance
the company, a 4,500-acre mining property near Reno. The broker
promised to raise more than $3 million and soon brought Baybak
and Gerbino into the deal. Jordan never got most of the money,
but the cult members ended up with a good deal of cheap stock and
options. Next they elected directors who were friendly to them
and set in motion a series of complex maneuvers to block Jordan
from voting stock he controlled and to run him out of the
company. "I've been an honest policeman all my life and I've seen
the worst kinds of crimes, and this ranks high," says former
Athena shareholder Thomas Clark, a 20-year veteran of Reno's
police force who has teamed up with Jordan to try to get the gold
mine back. "They stole this man's property."
With Baybak as chairman, the two Scientologists and their staffs
are promoting Athena, not always accurately. A letter to
shareholders with the 1990 annual report claims Placer Dome, one
of America's largest gold-mining firms, has committed at least
$25.5 million to develop the mine. That's news to Placer Dome.
"There is no pre-commitment," says Placer executive Cole
McFarland. "We're not going to spend that money unless survey
results justify the expenditure."
Baybak's firm represented Western Resource Technologies, a
Houston oil-and-gas company, but got the boot in October. Laughs
Steven McGuire, president of Western Resource: "His is a p.r.
firm in need of a p.r. firm." But McGuire cannot laugh too
freely. Baybak and other Scientologists, including the estate of
L. Ron Hubbard, still control huge blocks of his company's stock.
[Caption: ATHENA GOLD'S WILLIAM JORDAN. Cult members got cheap
stock, then ran him out of the company ]
[The following part was only in the international version of TIME]
In the 1960s and '70s, L. Ron Hubbard used to periodically fill a
converted ferry ship with adoring acolytes and sail off to spread
the word. One by one, countries -- Britain, Greece, Spain,
Portugal, and Venezuela -- closed their ports, usually because of
a public outcry. At one point, a court in Australia revoked the
church's status as a religion; at another, a French court
convicted Hubbard of fraud in absentia.
Today Hubbard's minions continue to wreak global havoc, costing
governments considerable effort and money to try to stop them. In
Italy a two-year trial of 76 Scientologists, among them the former
leader of the church's Italian operations, is nearing completion
in Milan. Two weeks ago, prosecutor Pietro Forno requested jail
terms for all the defendants who are accused of extortion,
cheating "mentally incapacitated" people and evading as much
as $50 million in taxes. "All of the trial's victims went to
Scientology in search of a cure or a better life," said Forno,
"But the Scientologists were amateur psychiatrists who practiced
psychological terrorism". For some victims, he added, "the
intervention of the Scientologists was devastating."
The Milan case was triggered by parents complaining to officials
that Scientology had a financial stranglehold on their children,
who had joined the church or entered Narconon, its drug
rehabilitation unit. In 1986 Treasury and paramilitary police
conducted raids in 20 cities across Italy shutting down 27
Scientology centers and seizing 100,000 documents. To defend
itself in the trial, the cult has retained some of Italy's most
famous lawyers.
In Canada, Scientology is using a legal team that includes Clayton
Ruby, one of the country's foremost civil rights lawyers, to
defend itself and nine of its members who are to stand trial in
June in Toronto. The charges: stealing documents concerning
Scientology from the Ministry of the Attorney General, the
Canadian Mental Health Association, two police forces and other
institutions. The case stems from a 1983 surprise raid of the
church's Toronto headquarters by more than 100 policemen, who had
arrived in three chartered buses; some 2 million pages of
documents were seized over a two-day period. Ruby, whose legal
maneuvers delayed the case for years, is trying to get it
dismissed because of "unreasonable delay."
Spain's Justice Ministry has twice denied Scientology status as a
religion, but that has not slowed the church' s expansion. In 1989
the Ministry of Health issued a report calling the sect
"totalitarian" and "pure and simple charlatanism."
The year before, the authorities had raided 26 church centers, with the
result that 11 Scientologists stand accused of falsification of
records, coercion and capital flight. "The real god of this
organization is money," said Madrid examining magistrate Jose
Maria Vasquez Honrnbia, before referring the case to a higher
court because it was too complex for his jurisdiction. Eugene
Ingram, a private investigator working for Scientology claims he
helped get Honrubia removed from the case for leaking nonpublic
documents to the press.
In France it took a death to spur the government into action: 16
Scientologists were indicted last year for fraud and "complicity
in the practice of illegal medicine" following the suicide of an
industrial designer in Lyon. In the victim's house investigators
found medication allegeally provided to him by the church without
doctor's prescription. Among those charged in the case is the
president of Scientology's French operations and the head of the
Paris-based Celebrity Centre, which caters to famous members.
Outside the U.S., Scientology appears to be most active in Germany
where the attorney general of the state of Bavaria has branded the
cult "distinctly totalitarian" and aimed at "the
economic exploitation of customers who are in bondage to it." In
1984 nearly 100 police raided the church in Munich. At the time, city
officials were reportedly collaborating with U.S. tax inspectors
and trying to prove that the cult was actually a profitmaking
business. More recently, Hamburg state authorities moved to
rescind Scientology's tax reduced status, while members of
parliament are seeking criminal proceedings. In another domain,
church linked management consulting firms have infiltrated small
and middle sized companies throughout Germany, according to an
expose published this month in the newsmagazine DER SPIEGEL; the
consultants, who typically hide their ties to Scientology,
indoctrinate employees by using Hubbard's methods. A German
anticult organization estimates that Scientology has at least 60
fronts or splinter groups operating in the country. German
politics appears as well to attract Hubbard's zealots. In March
the Free Democrats, partners in Chancellor Helmut Kohl' s ruling
coalition in Bonn, accused Scientology of trying to infiltrate
their Hamburg branch. Meanwhile the main opposition party, the
Social Democrats, has been warning its members in the formerly communist
eastern part of the country against exploitation by the
church. Even federal officials are being used by the church: one
Scientology front group sent copies of a Hubbard written pamphlet
on moral values to members of the Bundestag. The Office of Foreign
Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher unwittingly endorsed the
Scientologists' message: "Indeed, the world would be a more
beautiful place if the principles formulated in the pamphlet, a
life characterized by reason and responsibility, would find wider
attention."
[end of Internationl Edition-only section]
Strange things seem to happen to people who write about
Scientology. Journalist Paulette Cooper wrote a critical book on the
cult in 1971. This led to a Scientology plot (called Operation
Freak-Out) whose goal, according to church documents, was "to get P.C.
incarcerated in a mental institution or jail." It almost worked: by
impersonating Cooper, Scientologists got her indicted in 1973 for
threatening to bomb the church. Cooper, who also endured 19 lawsuits
by the church, was finally exonerated in 1977 after FBI raids on the
church offices in Los Angeles and Washington uncovered documents from
the bomb scheme. No Scientologists were ever tried in the matter.
For the TIME story, at least 10 attorneys and six private
detectives were unleashed by Scientology and its followers in an
effort to threaten, harass and discredit me. Last Oct. 12, not long
after I began this assignment, I planned to lunch with Eugene Ingram,
the church's leading private eye and a former cop. Ingram, who was
tossed off the Los Angeles police force In 1981 for alleged ties to
prostitutes and drug dealers, had told me that he might be able to
arrange a meeting with church boss David Miscavige. Just hours before
the lunch, the church's "national trial counsel," Earle
Cooley, called to inform me that I would be eating alone.
Alone, perhaps, but not forgotten. By day's end, I later learned,
a copy of my personal credit report -- with detailed information about
my bank accounts, home mortgage, credit-card payments, home address
and Social Security number -- had been illegally retrieved from a
national credit bureau called Trans Union. The sham company that
received it, "Educational Funding Services" of Los Angeles, gave
its address a mail drop a few blocks from Scientology's headquarters.
The owner of the mail drop is a private eye named Fred Wolfson, who
admits that an Ingram associate retained him to retrieve credit
reports on several individuals. Wolfson says he was told that
Scientology's attorneys "had judgments against these people and
were trying to collect on them." He says now, "These are
vicious people. These are vipers." Ingram, through a lawyer, denies
any involvement in the scam.
During the past five months, private investigators have been
contacting acquaintances of mine, ranging from neighbors to a former
colleague, to inquire about subjects such as my health (like my credit
rating, it's excellent) and whether I've ever had trouble with the IRS
(unlike Scientology, I haven't). One neighbor was greeted at dawn
outside my Manhattan apartment building by two men who wanted to know
whether I lived there. I finally called Cooley to demand that
Scientology stop the nonsense. He promised to look into it.
After that, however, an attorney subpoenaed me, while another
falsely suggested that I might own shares in a company I was reporting
about that had been taken over by Scientologists (he also threatened
to contact the Securities and Exchange Commission). A close friend in
Los Angeles received a disturbing telephone call from a Scientology
staff member seeking data about me -- an indication that the cult may
have illegally obtained my personal phone records. Two detectives
contacted me, posing as a friend and a relative of a so-called cult
victim, to elicit negative statements from me about Scientology. Some
of my conversations with them were taped, transcribed and presented by
the church in affidavits to TIME's lawyers as "proof" of my
bias against Scientology.
Among the comments I made to one of the detectives, who represented
himself as "Harry Baxter," a friend of the victim's family,
was that "the church trains people to lie." Baxter and his
colleagues are hardly in a position to dispute that observation. His
real name is Barry Silvers, and he is a former investigator for the
Justice Department's Organized Crime Strike Force. (RB)
[Photograph, page 51]
[Chart, page 52-53]
Further facts
about this criminal empire may be found at
Operation Clambake and FACTNet.
Even as the cult of Scientology tries to destroy the truth, the truth
shall be loosed over the planet forever. -- Anonymous
Time Magazine May 6, 1991 page 50.
Special Report (cover story)
Copyright © 1991 Time Magazine
The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power
Ruined lives. Lost fortunes. Federal crimes. Scientology poses as
a religion but really is a ruthless global scam -- and aiming for the
mainstream
by Richard Behar
By all appearances, Noah Lottick of Kingston, Pa., had been a
normal, happy 24-year-old who was looking for his place in the sun. On
the day last June when his parents drove to New York City to obtain
his body, they were nearly catatonic with grief.
Mining Money in Vancouver
[Sidebar; page 54]
Pushing Beyond the U.S.:
Scientology makes its presence felt in Europe and Canada
By Richard Behar
The Scientologists and Me
[Sidebar, page 57]
The Lotticks lost their son
[photograph of the couple standing beside the grave of their son.]
[Photograph, page 53]
Harriet Baker, 73, lost her house
[photograph of Harriet Baker on front of her old home.]
The Bridge to enlightenment
[shows costs of various "courses" ranging from a free Personality
Test to more than $1,000 an hour for "finding and releasing"
"body thetans" (BTs).]
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