Inside Scientology (30 page)

Thousands of Scientologists came to Clearwater each year, lured by the church's depiction of Flag as the "Mecca of Technical Perfection." AMC was one of dozens of Scientologist-owned companies in Clearwater. There were Scientologist-run schools, nail salons, and cafés. Scientologists frequented the same restaurants and shops. They patronized one another's businesses, most of which were listed in a local guide, "The Word of Mouth Directory of Honest & Reliable Businesses," which listed every Scientology-friendly business in town: plumbers, realtors, doctors, dentists, chiropractors, auto mechanics, locksmiths, and health food stores. Walking down Cleveland Street, a key downtown thoroughfare that was dominated by Scientology-owned businesses, Lisa could pick up copies of church newspapers and glance through classified ads written in Scientology's lingo. "I don't know how I could truly convey what it's like living here," Lisa wrote to one friend in Dallas. "It's like Utopia."

I
T
W
A
S
N
O
A
C
C
I
D
E
N
T
that Scientology picked Clearwater for its mecca. A balmy outpost on a crystalline bay, it struck the church hierarchy as "a city that could be owned," according to Larry Brennan, who helped scout the Gulf Coast for locations in 1975 when Hubbard, still sailing on the
Apollo,
declared his intent to move back on land.

Clearwater in the mid-1970s was a conservative, largely elderly community, deeply resistant to change. One of the city's most illustrious landmarks, the fifty-year-old Fort Harrison Hotel, looked like a moldy, forlorn relic of times past. In 1975, the hotel's owners put the Fort Harrison up for sale, and that October, a company named the Southern Land Development and Leasing Corporation offered just under $3 million in cash to buy both the hotel and the similarly rundown Bank of Clearwater building, across the street.

The new owner of the buildings, it was announced, was an ecumenical group called the United Churches of Florida. Local reporters, curious as to how a church could have access to that much cash, made inquiries but could find no records about United Churches or Southern Land Sales and Development. If that wasn't odd enough, security guards soon began to appear on the streets, lending the United Churches a rather military mien. Clearwater's mayor, Gabriel Cazares, began asking questions but found few answers. "I am discomfited by the increasing visibility of security personnel, armed with billy clubs and mace, employed by the United Churches of Florida,"
he said in a speech made shortly after the group arrived. "I am unable to understand why this degree of security is required by a religious organization."

Reporters from two of the local newspapers, the
Clearwater Sun
and the
St. Petersburg Times,
were equally puzzled and spent the next several months digging for information about the suspicious new church. Finally, in January 1976, a
St. Petersburg Times
reporter named Bette Orsini began to close in on the truth: the United Churches of Florida was really a front for the controversial and wealthy Church of Scientology.
^*
Before Orsini could break the story, church leaders, having been tipped off, decided to make the announcement themselves; they sent a representative to reassure the community that the church meant no harm and that its members, who by now were streaming into Clearwater, were law-abiding citizens who simply wanted to practice their religion in peace.

But the people of Clearwater did not take kindly to this intrusion. Most resented the clandestine way that Scientologists had arrived and wondered about the church's true motives. These suspicions did not go away, particularly once the Church of Scientology filed lawsuits against both Cazares and the
Clearwater Sun
(and threatened to sue the
St. Petersburg Times
), accusing them of libel and, in the case of Cazares, violation of the church's civil rights. But what alienated the people of Clearwater most was the Scientologists' insularity: the strange shirt-and-tie formality of their clothes; the secretiveness with which they went about their business; the strange penchant they had for suing anyone who spoke negatively of them or even asked a simple question about them or their practices.

Everything the Scientologists did seemed to put them at odds with the local community. The church purchased property from local sellers but refused to pay taxes. They closed off the Fort Harrison to the public. In March 1976, a couple who had run a gift shop inside the Fort Harrison sued for loss of business after the church abruptly shut down their air conditioning, telephone, and alarm system and refused to restore the services.

Then, in the fall of 1978, word began to leak out of Washington, D.C., that Scientology had far broader plans for Clearwater than simply buying property. During the FBI raid that uncovered Operation Snow White, the feds discovered documents that detailed the Church of Scientology's plans to "take over" the sleepy Florida city, a project code-named Operation Goldmine. As the
St. Petersburg Times
reported it, "Church functionaries were directed 'to fully investigate the Clearwater city and county area so we can distinguish our friends from our enemies and handle as needed.'"

Church officials were directed to identify key media and political leaders and either win their allegiance or, if that failed, discredit them through a variety of covert tactics. Reporters at the
St. Petersburg Times
and the
Clearwater Sun
who had investigated Scientology were put on an "enemies list." This list also included the legendary publisher of the
Times,
Nelson Poynter, and the paper's editor, Eugene Patterson; Mayor Cazares and the Clearwater chief of police were also cited, among others. Scientology's "covert agents" had taken jobs at local newspapers, law firms, community agencies, and even the Greater Clearwater Chamber of Commerce. When Clearwater citizens became aware of this plot, they took it as a declaration of war. "People were in a frenzy against Scientology when those documents started coming out," recalled the
Washington Post
writer and editor Richard Leiby, who was then a reporter for the
Clearwater Sun.
"They thought they had a crazy cult in their midst."

This was no small thing in 1978, the year of the Jonestown massacre in Guyana. The story of the group's mass suicide was horrifying: a paranoid cult leader, Jim Jones, urging his followers to drink vats of Kool-Aid laced with cyanide, leaving more than nine hundred people dead, their bodies bloated by exposure to the sun. It was one of the most heavily covered stories of the 1970s, leading the news for months after the November 1978 incident. "Cult of Death" was the label that both
Time
and
Newsweek
gave to Jonestown. In Clearwater, people looked at the Scientologists and wondered what was next.

In the wake of the "Clearwater Conspiracy," as the CBS news program
60 Minutes
dubbed the plot, thousands of Clearwater residents took to the streets in protest, demanding that the Church of Scientology leave town. Mayor Cazares, who'd resigned in 1978 and learned through the Snow White documents that Scientologists intent on ruining his political career had once tried to frame him as the driver in a hit-and-run accident in Washington, D.C., called upon the federal government to be wary, warning that the Church of Scientology was a "politically fascist organization."
Richard Tenney, one of the Clearwater city commissioners, spearheaded a concerned citizens group, Save Sparkling Clearwater, that held anti-Scientology rallies in public stadiums and parks. (In one particularly heated exchange, local Scientologists, infuriated by the vociferous criticism of editorialists at the
Clearwater Sun,
marched on the paper's downtown headquarters dressed as Nazi storm troopers, an alarming sight for the city's elderly Jewish population.)

But Scientology's acquisition of properties in Clearwater continued. "We knew that no one, government or individual, could beat us legally and make us leave town," said Larry Brennan, who, arguing that Scientology's services were religious in nature, had helped persuade the state of Florida to grant the Scientology organization a "consumer's certificate of exemption," which recognized it as a religious institution and exempted it from paying, or charging, sales tax on its courses or auditing processes. "After that, we knew we could buy whatever buildings we wanted using whatever corporate shell games we wanted as we were now out of the closet and legally safeguarded," Brennan said.

By 1980, the church owned four hotels and three office complexes, assessed at $8.9 million, brokering the deals in cash. About fifteen hundred Scientologists now lived in the area full-time, it was estimated, while another five hundred or so well-off Scientologists streamed into Flag annually from all over the world, spending weeks, and sometimes months, luxuriating at the Fort Harrison, with its newly renovated rooms, its lobby decked with crystal chandeliers, and its swimming pool. Church officials, hoping to combat the negative publicity caused by the Snow White revelations, reversed previous policy and threw open the doors of the Fort Harrison. With great fanfare, the church announced a downtown revitalization project and also began donating heavily to local charities. By the fall of 1980, the
Clearwater Sun
had to conclude that "Scientology is going to be part of Clearwater for a very long time."

Over the next decade, Scientologists continued to face significant opposition. In May 1982, the city's new mayor, Charles LeCher, held public hearings to probe Scientology's activities in Clearwater, which revealed shocking tales: break-ins and infiltration of government offices, local charities, and community organizations, as well as incidents of child neglect, maggot-infested food fed to staff, and an unreported hepatitis outbreak at the Fort Harrison. "I'm not here to complain about what the church has done to me," said a former church executive named Scott Mayer. "I'm here to really impress upon you what you're actually dealing with, the magnitude of what you're dealing with."

Scientology, nonetheless, continued its public relations campaign. The church hosted more open houses at the Fort Harrison, as well as free courses and Sunday worship services. Scientology officials took out newspaper ads and began to make regular appearances on local cable and radio talk shows, presenting the typical Scientologist as "the person you work with, your friend, or the person next door."
By the early 1990s, the Church of Scientology's promotional materials openly boasted of Clearwater as a spiritual mecca, inviting members to come to "the largest community of Scientologists and OTs in the world."
And thousands did. It was no surprise that Bennetta Slaughter would want to move her company there.

It was also not surprising that David Miscavige would have looked to Clearwater for inspiration when plotting the next phase of Scientology's advancement. Fresh from his victory over the IRS, Miscavige had taken on a new, and in some ways even more ambitious, scheme: modernizing L. Ron Hubbard's teachings, specifically those pertaining to auditor training, a project he called the Golden Age of Tech, or GAT.

This was a venture the Founder, having recognized that not all auditing was performed with the same level of care or efficiency, had initiated in the late 1970s, said the Scientologist Dan Koon, who helped design part of the Golden Age of Tech. But Miscavige, said Koon and others, seized upon the idea in the 1990s as, among other things, a money-making scheme: GAT would enforce new, rote methods that every auditor, no matter how experienced, would have to learn at his or her own expense, and then follow exactly. Ultimately, everyone in Scientology would be initiated into Miscavige's GAT approach, a massive retraining project that, over the coming years, would make millions of dollars for the church while overhauling Scientology's auditing procedures. Flag, already the church's cash cow, would be the testing ground for this new system.

Bennetta Slaughter wasted no time in Clearwater. Within a few months of her arrival, she'd ingratiated herself with the Clearwater Chamber of Commerce and begun to network with local politicians. "We called her the Queen of Clearwater," said Sandra Mercer, who'd moved to Florida from Los Angeles in 1990. "She put herself on all the political communication lines, on all the business communication lines ... on every communication line that she needed to get on. Had she not done that," Mercer added, "I don't know that the church would have done that well in Clearwater."

David Miscavige knew Bennetta Slaughter as a prominent donor who attended yearly Scientology events in England and on the church's exclusive cruise ship,
Freewinds.
Now the leader of Scientology began to hear that she was making inroads into Clearwater society. Miscavige became concerned. For all its efforts, the official Church of Scientology had very little relationship with the mayor's office or the city commission, and it had an openly antagonistic relationship with the police. Miscavige ordered Tom De Vocht, a senior official at Flag, to find out what Slaughter was doing. "Make sure that she's forwarding our purposes," he said.

"So I got her in to find out what she was doing, and to explain what we wanted her to be doing," said De Vocht, who now lives not far from Clearwater, in Tarpon Springs. "She was an important public figure and we wanted her to be an ambassador, to introduce us to people." Slaughter, said De Vocht, agreed to act as an emissary.

Largely spurred by Slaughter's efforts, Scientologists became increasingly civic-minded: stringing the downtown streets with Christmas lights, funding blood drives, painting murals, organizing local cleanup projects. A group Slaughter founded, the Tampa Bay Organization of Women, sponsored a carnival, dubbed Winter Wonderland, to benefit poor children, and for a few weeks each December transformed a local park into an Alpine village, complete with artificial snow, a fifty-foot Christmas tree, and Santa Claus.