TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/050691/0506992.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 32.1 KB | 673 lines

                                                                                SPECIAL REPORT, Page 50

COVER STORY

The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power


Ruined lives. Lost fortunes. Federal crimes. Scientology poses
as a religion but is really 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 world. On the day last June when his parents drove to
New York City to claim his body, they were nearly catatonic
with grief. The 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 yet 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 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 or 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 Kis ser, 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
Sci entology'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 attain credibility for Scien tology
in the 1990s. Among other tactics, the group:

    -- Retains public relations powerhouse Hill and Knowlton
to help shed the church's fringe-group image.

    -- Joined such household names as Sony and Pepsi as a main
sponsor of Ted Turner's Goodwill Games.

    -- Buys massive quantities of its own books from retail
stores to propel the titles onto best-seller lists.

    -- Runs full-page ads in such publications as Newsweek and
Business Week that call Scien tology a "philosophy," along with
a plethora of TV ads touting the group's books.

    -- Recruits wealthy and respectable professionals through
a web of consulting groups that typically hide their ties to
Scientology.

    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
Scientol ogy. Hubbard's "doctorate" from "Sequoia University"
was a fake mail-order degree. In a 1984 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 Scientology'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 $200 million from the church, the IRS was seeking an
indictment of Hubbard for tax fraud. Scien tology 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 members, 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 enlightenment? 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:



    CONSULTING. Sterling Management Systems, formed in 1983,
has been ranked in recent years by Inc. magazine as one of
America's fastest-growing private companies (estimated 1988
revenues: $20 million). Sterling regularly mails a free
newsletter to more than 300,000 health-care professionals,
mostly dentists, promising to increase their incomes
dramatically. The firm offers seminars and courses that
typically cost $10,000. But Sterling's true aim is to hook
customers for Scientology. "The church has a rotten product, so
they package it as something else," says Peter Georgiades, a
Pittsburgh attorney who represents Sterling victims. "It's a
kind of bait and switch." Sterling's founder, dentist Gregory
Hughes, is now under investigation by California's Board of
Dental Examiners for incompetence. Nine lawsuits are pending
against him for malpractice (seven others have been settled),
mostly for or thodontic work on children.

    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
ones at risk. Scientology also makes pitches to chiropractors,
podiatrists and veterinarians.



    PUBLIC INFLUENCE. One front, the Way to Happiness
Foundation, has distributed to children in thousands of the
nation's public schools more than 3.5 million copies of a
booklet Hubbard wrote on morality. The church calls the scheme
"the largest dissemination project in Scientology history."
Applied Scholastics is the name of still another front, which
is attempting to install a Hubbard tutorial program in public
schools, primarily those populated by minorities. The group also
plans a 1,000-acre campus, where it will train educators to
teach various Hubbard methods. The disingenuously named Citizens
Commission on Human Rights is a Scientology group at war with
psychiatry, its primary competitor. The commission typically
issues reports aimed at discrediting particular psychiatrists
and the field in general. The CCHR is also behind an all-out war
against Eli Lilly, the maker of Prozac, the nation's top-selling
anti depression drug. Despite scant evidence, the group's
members -- who call themselves "psychbusters" -- claim that
Prozac drives people to murder or suicide. Through mass
mailings, appearances on talk shows and heavy lobbying, CCHR has
hurt drug sales and helped spark dozens of lawsuits against
Lilly.

    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 learned who Hubbard
really was.



    HEALTH CARE. HealthMed, a chain of clinics run by
Scientologists, promotes a grueling and excessive system of
saunas, exercise and vitamins designed by Hubbard to purify the
body. Experts denounce the regime as quackery and potentially
harmful, yet HealthMed solicits unions and public agencies for
contracts. The chain is plugged heavily in a new book, Diet for
a Poisoned Planet, by journalist David Steinman, who concludes
that scores of common foods (among them: peanuts, bluefish,
peaches and cottage cheese) are dangerous.

    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."



    DRUG TREATMENT. Hubbard's purification treatments are the
mainstay of Narconon, a Scientology-run chain of 33 alcohol and
drug rehabilitation centers -- some in prisons under the name
"Criminon" -- in 12 countries. Narconon, a classic vehicle for
drawing addicts into the cult, now plans to open what it calls
the world's largest treatment center, a 1,400-bed facility on
an Indian reservation near Newkirk, Okla. (pop. 2,400). At a
1989 ceremony in Newkirk, the Association for Better Living and
Education presented Narconon a check for $200,000 and a study
praising its work. The association turned out to be part of
Scientology itself. Today the town is battling to keep out the
cult, which has fought back through such tactics as sending
private detectives to snoop on the mayor and the local newspaper
publisher.



    FINANCIAL SCAMS. Three Florida Scientologists, including
Ronald Bernstein, a big contributor to the church's
international "war chest," pleaded guilty in March to using
their rare-coin dealership as a money laundry. Other notorious
activities by Scientologists include making the shady Vancouver
stock exchange even shadier (see box) and plotting to plant
operatives in the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and
Export-Import Bank of the U.S. The alleged purpose of this
scheme: to gain inside information on which countries are going
to be denied credit so that Scientology-linked traders can make
illicit profits by taking "short" positions in those countries'
currencies.

    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 biotechnology 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.



    BOOK PUBLISHING. Scientology mischiefmaking has even moved
to the book industry. Since 1985 at least a dozen Hubbard
books, printed by a church company, have made best-seller lists.
They range from a 5,000-page sci-fi decology (Black Genesis,
The Enemy Within, An Alien Affair) to the 40-year-old
Dianetics. In 1988 the trade publication Publishers Weekly
awarded the dead author a plaque commemorating the appearance
of Dianetics on its best-seller list for 100 consecutive weeks.

    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 unparalleled 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 produce 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 Sci entology 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.