A Life on the Edge
When life kept kicking her in the teeth, Mary O’Connor finally bit back
By Carl Kozlowski 03/27/2008
The afternoon of Thursday, March 13, was one of the worst that Mary O’Connor had ever endured. Considering the 30-year-old Los Angeles resident had fallen into and recovered from a life in prostitution, survived multiple rapes and sexual assaults and suffered throughout her life from an array of physical and emotional disabilities, that’s saying a lot.
O’Connor had been locked in a battle with her landlord for the past three months, fighting to keep the first stable home she’d had in four years while her apartment building’s management company tried every trick in the book to avoid renewing her lease and toss her out. It’s not that they didn’t seem to have a case, either, for O’Connor is one of the most unusual human beings to ever come down the pike: a sometimes bemusing, more often bewildering and nearly always exasperating mass of contradictions that make the legendary firebrand Erin Brockovich seem as demure as Snow White.
On the surface, the battle between O’Connor and Mid-City Holdings, LLC, centered on the number of animals she kept in her one-room apartment in Koreatown, a few blocks east of Vermont Avenue on Beverly Boulevard. She had three dogs, two cats, two small birds and a turtle in a space that according to her lease, legally seemed to allow just one dog — yet due to the many traumatic events she had been subjected to in her relatively short lifetime, her physicians have vouched in writing that she needs every one of those animals as emotional support to help her function on a daily basis.
Mid-City and its representative, Bruno Sanchez, wanted her out due to the pungent scents brewing in her apartment, as well as their claims that the animals’ fur was clogging her bathroom drains and causing damaging floods to her fourth-floor apartment and the tenants below her. But thanks to knowing me as a member of the press and retaining Pasadena-based housing activist-turned-lawyer Philip Koebel as her attorney, O’Connor has been fighting back and apparently winning an unlikely string of concessions from Mid-City and its lawyer.
In fact, nothing dramatic was supposed to happen on March 13. LA Superior Court Judge Rex Heeseman told both sides on Feb. 29 to cool off, gather their evidence and arguments, and return on March 24 for a ruling on whether O’Connor could stay in her apartment, and with how many animals.
Yet now, due to a ruse in which a repairman said he needed to enter to fix the latest toilet overflow and proceeded to enable Animal Control and LAPD officers to enter her apartment as well, O’Connor was in handcuffs and hysterics in the hall outside her studio dwelling. As Animal Control officers removed the animals that she considered her family members, O’Connor said police officers on scene taunted her about her arrest as a prostitute and scoffed at her claims that the cuffs were notching up the severe pain she’s suffered for the past four years since a devastating car accident.
But in the days that followed, as she awaited her March 24 hearing, isolated in a neighborhood where few of her neighbors speak English, and in an apartment with nine documented repair needs, O’Connor still clung to the steely resolve that had kept her alive through situations that have overwhelmed countless others.
“This is not just about me and my animals. This is about everyone who has a need for support animals to survive, everyone who’s afraid or unable to speak up because of their mental or emotional illness,” said O’Connor, her hand stabbing the air dramatically. “I know how to speak up, and I won’t be ignored. Everyone has the right to live their life without total interference and keep a roof over their heads.” Odd, yet sweet
The story of how O’Connor wound up in such dire straits dates back to an unhappy childhood. Unlike the stereotypes that often surround prostitutes, however, her family was and remains intact — with both her parents and three brothers still living in the distant Chicago suburb of Woodridge.
Rather, O’Connor was the proverbial square peg in the round hole of society, a girl with unusual and eclectic tastes that ranged from a fascination with circuses to a Dr. Doolittle-like ability to relate to animals of all kinds. Even today, one can spend an afternoon watching her juggle, twirl batons and hula hoop all while riding a balance board before engaging in a discussion of Irish history while listening to her vast collection of obscure 1970s pop music.
“My whole family was intellectually driven, talking about ancient Roman history for casual dinner conversation, and I wrote five novels as a kid, so I was mocked horribly at school for being ‘different’ and never had many friends,” she recalls. “I can also unicycle, eat fire and can hula hoop atop a rolling globe, because my dream was always to be in the circus — so I could always travel and never get labeled again.”
While all this might make her sound like a character straight out of a John Irving novel, I can vouch for many of her stories and abilities. I met her 10 years ago in a community college’s Circus Arts class that I was taking as part of a story assignment for a Chicago weekly newspaper. While we never became close friends, our frequent acquaintance based on a love of comedy and entertainment stood out in my memories even after moving to Los Angeles in 2002.
To me and others on the Chicago standup comedy scene, O’Connor was an odd, yet incredibly sweet and innocently childlike woman with a boisterous laugh. There was no way to know she was harboring emotional wounds from a teacher’s unwelcome advance at age 11 and the seemingly non-stop verbal assault of fellow students her senior year that crushed her self-esteem.
And so it was disconcerting to find her calling out to me around midnight near the Hollywood-Vine Metro train stop on a cold night in March 2006, clutching a blue corduroy coat tight to hide the fact she was wearing only a bra and miniskirt underneath. I could immediately tell something was wrong with her, that a seismic shift had taken place in her life, but she wasn’t being forthcoming and it was not my place yet to pry.
All she would explain was that she had moved to the LA area a few months before, and that she was “getting by.” Only when a mutual friend put me in touch with her parents after O’Connor was arrested for prostitution later that month did I learn of her actual circumstances. Her mother asked me to head down to court in Long Beach and try to ensure that she didn’t leave her brother on the hook for the bail money he had fronted for her — a factor O’Connor had already handled.
That began what can only be described as an awkward phase in our acquaintance, as I found her problems were far deeper than I realized while Mary felt the understandable yet extreme anger of being outed by her mother to the only friendly person she knew in Los Angeles. But now I knew her reality: that she was going from one cheap hotel to another and selling herself to supplement the modest $940 she receives monthly as her SSI disability check.
“My whole life, I’ve had extreme difficulty with concentration, way beyond most people’s concept of [Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder],” says O’Connor. “That made most white-collar jobs off-limits for me, and then I also have severe endometriosis, which causes me so much pain so unexpectedly that I can be up and about one night and almost incapacitated by pain the very next morning.” The lowest point
One thing that O’Connor has learned amid all her problems is to keep thorough and well-detailed records of medical visits and police reports in a three-level file cabinet. And in searching through them as I got to know her anew, it was clear that she truly was buried under a mountain of bad luck and bureaucracy — most of which centered around her need for connection with animals, a connection she’d harbored since childhood but which now is a necessity in helping her deal with post-traumatic stress disorder from the challenge her life has become.
Mary had lived at home with her family until 2004, when many years of financial difficulties came to a head for them and they appeared in danger of losing their longtime home. Feeling guilty about being another mouth to feed while unable to maintain consistent employment, she hit the road, hop-scotching the country from Florida to Utah to Los Angeles with a few stops in Phoenix in between.
Possessed of an almost foolhardy bravery and financial desperation, she rented U-Hauls (a surprisingly affordable alternative to most car rentals) to get around before settling in the Los Angeles area due to its ample array of social services, including a program that would train her dogs as service animals. Since she brought her animals with her on this last trip west, she found it nearly impossible to afford an apartment that would also allow more than one animal.
Instead, she bounced between motels and the occasional couch or bed of a stranger — housing her animals — unpaid — in a kennel for months at one point. She’d find herself forced into trading sexual favors for the right to a roof over her head, sometimes even suffering outright rapes, all due to her abject terror that the city’s massive shelters and open streets were an even worse place to be.
She kept getting degraded by strangers and often ignored by police to whom she’d report an assault and eventually turned to hooking full-time for survival. Her lowest point perhaps came when she faced a judge over prostitution charges in May 2006, which Mary says prompted her brothers to turn on her with words like “whore” and her mother to say, “There are no good girls gone bad — just bad girls found out.”
Such comments have caused perhaps irreparable damage in her family relations. Yet, in her darkest moments Mary’s determination to regain her life held firm, leading to her ability to pull out of the sex industry in February 2007 and start pursuing justice for herself and others.
“When you’re told repeatedly that nothing that happens to you matters, it starts to alter your view of justice. I always thought you had an obligation to report when someone assaults you, even when you can’t bring yourself to do it,” explains O’Connor. “I don’t think people should judge women who can’t do it, because it’s the hardest thing in the world to talk about someone stroking your breasts and tonguing you against your will.
“Then, when every civil right was trampled on, I decided not to let them get away with it and it’s so hard to report it that I was praying, ‘Please God, let me be able to say this part’ about how my pants are around my ankles and a guy’s cleaning up with a towel, saying sorry. People say that if you’re hitchhiking around and get raped, why don’t you get up and leave in the middle of the night? Because the known devil you’re already with might be better than the unknown devil that might be outside.”True worth
As one might imagine, four years of not knowing whom to trust and whether you’ll have a roof over your head, and whether you’ll have your beloved pets and emotional support animals taken away, has hardened O’Connor. Possessed of a hair-trigger temper that she unleashes with tsunami-like strength and frequently employing a vocabulary that would make sailors cover their ears, she has developed a take-no-bullshit attitude that experts say is common to survivors of exploitation.
“All I know is that if you’ve been through the sex industry, whether as a prostitute or a stripper, you’ll get labeled as a ‘whore,’ usually by everyone you care most about, and sometimes for the rest of your life,” says Lora Allison, who runs Silver Braid, a sex workers survivors group in Ventura that Mary has attended numerous times. “That’s why we have to have an AA-like support group that can help them realize they’re not alone, they do have true worth as human beings and that they can break out of the cycle.”
Allison stated that 80 percent of women in prostitution were psychologically, physically or sexually abused as children. She also noted that the idea that a prostitute “wanted it and asked for it” when reporting a rape is yet another vicious myth that needs to be expunged from society.
“Mary’s definitely an extreme situation because often these people who suffer what she has are already much marginalized people, so they don’t tend to seek out services as much because they already know they’re fighting such an uphill battle,” says Allison. “A lot of people might fall by the wayside and suffer in silence, but Mary does not stay silent. She’s very vocal in getting what she needs.”
What Mary needs is to have a secure place to live with the de facto family of animals that make her feel safe in a world where so many people have done her wrong. But because the issue of support animals other than seeing-eye dogs — and especially animals whose support is deemed emotional — is often overlooked in general society, the battle to maintain them is uphill.Ongoing and growing
Spending an afternoon with O’Connor as she makes the rounds of the city revealed MTA buses that skipped right past her at bus stops and drivers that had to be begged to allow her service dog aboard the bus. The moment she brought in the dog to a Jack in the Box at Sunset and Cahuenga boulevards, the guard attempted to oust the pair — relenting only when I presented the dog’s paperwork along with my press card.
“ESA’s [Emotional Support Animals] are different because there’s no California or federal law directly addressing them, but rather they’re protected under the Fair Housing Act in which landlords are required to make reasonable accommodations,” says Kurt Baldwin, an assistant advocacy coordinator for the Independent Living Center of Southern California, who has advised O’Connor. “HUD is the enforcement agency and they’ve basically come out with guidance that if a landlord has a no-pets policy and then because of someone’s disability they have an animal that helps them function, a landlord has to make accommodation for that person. Companionship animals are a very big deal for seniors especially, so this is a very big and growing issue.”According to longtime activist Mitch Pomerantz, an American with Disabilities Act compliance officer for the city of Los Angeles whose wife Donna chairs Pasadena’s Accessibility and Disability Commission, state laws are weighted heavily to favor the disabled who seek ESAs.
“Landlords are not as familiar with the ESAs because it’s a newer type of classification in which doctors have found that people who’ve been attacked really do feel safer with their dogs around, or that bipolar people use the action of petting or holding a dog to get back to reality and an even keel,” says Pomerantz. “Under state law, someone who acquires an animal, whether trained or not, to help them emotionally has the protected right to keep it. And there are certainly laws protecting people who fight for these rights against retaliation for doing so.”
Yet the apparent retaliation that O’Connor has faced from Mid City Holdings and its representatives like Sanchez (who ignored repeated attempts for comment), is ongoing and growing. It’s just getting interesting
Faced with an eviction notice that could have tossed her back in the street, O’Connor finally found a sympathetic lawyer in Koebel, a longtime Pasadena housing activist who started his own law practice last year.
With an incredulous smirk and a sardonic world-weariness in his voice, Koebel, 42, is keen to express the frustration and inhumanity that can be heaped upon the weak by the strong in the housing arena. And yet he has plenty of fire left in his belly, even after 15 years of standing up to those same injustices — a period that even saw him run for Pasadena mayor against longstanding popular incumbent Bill Bogaard in 2003 on a platform focused on rent control.
His office is stuffed with files of cases from across the city and the San Gabriel Valley documenting the tragic tales of families on the brink of losing their homes. Remarkably, his own house is a testament to his concern for others, as he has shared it for the past decade with a single mother friend and her family of nine children who had lost their house next door.
Despite all his efforts, Koebel often finds himself on the receiving end of the same verbal attacks that his clients heap against those evicting them. Therefore, the colorfully abusive words that O’Connor throws his way when facing a downturn don’t seem to faze him much at all.
“Mary’s case is a very unusual case, but it’s fundamentally sound, and there’s very clear law that emotional support dogs are reasonable accommodations for people with disabilities and painful ailments. How that works is not clear to many landlords and many tenants,” says Koebel. “I’ve learned a lot from Mary O’Connor. I started the case much more skeptical but I’m learning all the time that there’s much more protection. The primary issue before the judge: Does that reasonable accommodation extend to three small dogs in a one-room apartment? What’s the balancing between a need for family of animals and flagrant abuse of the situation?”
What Koebel hopes Judge Heeseman will find when the next hearing comes around is that several of the arguments Mid-City Holdings is using against O’Connor are outright fabrications. Many of the deceptions have come to light, ironically, as a result of the animal seizures on March 13, when sympathetic neighbors stepped forward to take O’Connor’s side.
“Who would have known Koreatown is actually just like a 16th century New England village?” O’Connor said in one of her unique turns of phrase, describing the odd situation of being gossiped about in multiple languages by the strangers around her.
“Everyone knows everything.”
“We’re all talking about the potential damage on the quality of life of neighbors. Well, as the case goes on, we’re learning it’s certainly unclear how many neighbors have actually complained,” says Koebel. “The more the case goes along, this seems that the landlord just doesn’t like the tenant due to their issues and ‘difficulties’ brought about by emotional disabilities. It seems if there were no animals involved here, the landlord would have found another way to challenge this tenant.”
Among the juicy details that have come to light in the past two weeks are that O’Connor’s downstairs neighbors have stated her apartment’s bathroom has been flooding for years and cannot be blamed on her doing — yet Sanchez and Mid-City have repeatedly bemoaned that O’Connor is singlehandedly ruining their property. And the neighbor whom Mary supposedly drove away due to her apartment’s scent and the incessant yapping of her silky terrier? Turns out he joined the military in hopes of fighting in Iraq, and he even trusted her enough to watch his cat while he’s away.
Add in the extensive building code violations regarding safety and fire hazards that Koebel has uncovered while investigating O’Connor’s apartment and it could be one long and painful day for Mid-City when hearings reopen. And they haven’t even fully revealed the aces left up their sleeves: a planned dramatic presentation of the seven-pound, eight-inch-long silky terrier that Sanchez has blamed for biting a repairman and generally terrorizing the building, and the revelation that Animal Control not only utilized dirty and possibly illegal tricks but was so incompetent in their raid that they left O’Connor’s cat behind while claiming in their paperwork that they possessed the feline.
“You have a liability problem here and the [Mid-City staff] doesn’t wanna take a risk, so they’ve created a panic about this unreasonable accommodation that by all accounts is not bothering anybody. They’re gently lying in all cases,” says Koebel. “The interesting issue is you have someone with an emotional disability who is trying to cope. She’s upfront about it. She may have been deceptive about the number of animals when she moved in, but not of her emotional disability.
“What you have here is cut and dried. The person with a disability is making the landlord discomfited but the reason for that is that the landlord has some legitimate issues with the apartment building,” he said. “Stay tuned, folks. It’s gonna get interesting.”
In Part Two, the court showdown continues and O’Connor reveals the hardships of breaking free from the streets and the battle for justice with both police and her assailants.
I can't find Parts Two and Three right now but will add later when i do...Here's a 4th part with the latest twists in her life - nice ones, thank God...Not every hard-luck story gets a happy ending.
A new start for O'Connor
By Carl Kozlowski 05/29/2008
The hard-knocks life of Mary O’Connor — a woman whose struggles with mental illness and fight to avoid homelessness were highlighted by a three-part series in March and April editions of the Pasadena Weekly — took a turn for the better on Saturday when she moved into a spacious new apartment.
O’Connor came to the paper’s attention in February when Mid-City Holdings, LLC, refused to renew her lease on a Koreatown studio apartment, largely because of the number of animals she keeps in her home.
These animals — dogs, cats, birds and a turtle — have been deemed “emotional support animals” by her doctor and help her cope with such problems as post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and severe attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
With the help of Pasadena attorney Philip Koebel, O’Connor not only beat her pending eviction, she won an undisclosed court settlement that allowed her to move into her new home.
“The story has a happy ending. She’s lucked out. It just goes to show there are pet-friendly apartments and understanding apartment managers,” said Koebel. “The belief is that [people with special needs] have to conceal their disability and it’s not always the case. I think it comes down to people exercising good judgment. The fact that the new place is being favorable [to O’Connor] is a lesson that Mid-City should take to heart."
Saturday, May 31, 2008
Thursday, December 20, 2007
Blowing Its Top
Uncovering the true story behind Scientology
By Carl Kozlowski
For nearly twenty years, Tom Cruise has seemed like Hollywood’s Golden Boy, a movie star women loved and guys also thought was cool. He attributed his vast success to being a follower of Scientology, a self-help movement turned religion which claims the ability to “clear” its followers from all their problems. It seemed like the perfect match: the man with the perfect smile advocating for a group that offers perfection.
But in May, Cruise seemingly went apeshit. He suddenly announced his engagement to Katie Holmes, an actress whom no one had ever seen him with before late April. He leapt up and down on Oprah’s couch like a five-year-old on a sugar kick, generating derisive laughter across the planet. And just when you thought Tom could use a good dose of Ritalin, he was embarrassing himself on the “Today Show” by arguing that he knew more about psychiatry and its alleged evils than his interviewer, Matt Lauer.
Suddenly, people were wondering what was wrong with Mr. Perfect. And his attempts to pump up his church amidst all the publicity appear to have backfired, provoking widespread media coverage of Scientology that is reopening a 50-year history of overarching greed, fraud, judicial chicanery, near-terroristic threatening of the church’s critics, and the fact that the heart of the church’s beliefs center around the claim that every human’s stresses are in reality the souls of aliens attaching themselves to their bodies.
As if that’s not crazy enough, throw in tales of mysterious deaths, and an affidavit claiming that the church attempts to coerce abortions from its staff members, and suddenly, the perfect church doesn’t seem all that perfect – and a daring band of ex-members are making sure the full extent of its dark side is exposed.
The method they’re using to attack this multi-billion-dollar, multi-operational, worldwide dragon is surprisingly simple: they’re exposing Scientology’s darkest secrets, which for 50 years were only revealed to their top members, on the Internet. And like shedding light on cockroaches, the church’s leaders are desperately scurrying to stay alive by enshrouding as much information as possible in darkness.
Even better, it all started with a connection in Pasadena. For it was here, in the late 1940s, that eventual Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard – then a middling science-fiction author and accomplished ladies’ man – fell into the warped social circle of famed rocket engineer Jack Parsons, who proudly considered himself to be the Antichrist and frequently conducted orgies and other debauched events amid the wealthiest streets of Pasadena. According to a January 3, 2002 PW story on Parsons by Michael Collins, both Hubbard and Parsons shared a fascination with occultism and infamous black magic practitioner Aleister Crowley.
“There’s a lot of dispute about Hubbard’s connections with Parsons, because while there’s quite a bit of indications that he was involved in Parsons’ magic movement, Scientology claims that Hubbard was really an opposing undercover agent trying to expose them,” said Timothy Miller, a professor religious studies at the University of Kansas who specializes in “new religious movements,” the newfangled way of describing cults. “The term ‘cult’ has negative connotations and our work is supposed to be judgment-free and there is a consensus that we’ve already branded a group if you say it like that. On the other hand, we don’t whitewash anyone.”
Indeed, Miller points out that Scientology has been riddled with inconsistencies, mixing positive and negative qualities, since its very founding in 1950 by Hubbard, who created the church as a self-help movement after publishing a “modern guide to mental health” called “Dianetics.” For instance, they’ve proven to be one of the most litigious groups in America, barraging their critics and opponents with countless lawsuits and often outspending their way to victory, but speculation of whether some members have died as a result of the church’s “care” is much more questionable.
Miller, along with many other authorities on the church and ex-members, also takes issue with church leaders’ membership figures, in which they estimate eight million members in over 150 nations. Some peg the real total as low as 50,000 members whose excessive financial involvement propels the church’s unknown worth into estimated tens of billions of dollars.
He also takes issue with whether the church subjects its live-in members to slave labor, a frequent accusation in which critics claim that many Scientology staffers are subjected to working at least 60 hours a week for as little as $4 a week.
“People get very devoted to their religious, social and political causes, but to my mind, slave labor has to be something you don’t wanna do and you have to be locked up to do it,” said Miller. “But will they take your money? Yes, everything they can. Most religions want money, but they seem unusually good at it. The prices they charge are extraordinary, but people voluntarily pay.”
What constitutes “extraoardinary”, exactly? Scientology consists of an extensive series of highly invasive personal tests called “audits” and classes that a member must take to climb the church’s “Bridge”, a series of levels that gain them greater and greater insights into their allegedly “true” nature and a clearing of all the issues that vex their mental and emotional lives.
The problem is, that the big final lesson is basically a riddle: Now that you know what you are not, begin to find out what you are. Basically, the church offers a never-ending trip into the subconscious, only one that’s far less enjoyable than dropping out of college and following the Dead.
And most members never even get to that official final level – the biggest reward for those who don’t make it to the level of OT VIII (Operating Thetan at the eighth level), at which they’re also told they have the power to control time and space, can create universes and never get sick again, is to make it to OT III, where the first lessons about aliens and immortality come in.
“They have beliefs in reincarnation and past lives,” explained Miller. “And they believe that they are basically immortal, because the more dedicated members in an elite level called Sea Org sign billion-year contracts to work for the church. Imagine making it to the highest level and learning that it’s basically an endless loop of lessons and auditing that you’ll never really get out of.”
And along the way, members learn that their lifelong beef with their dad or their bad luck at finding well-paying employment doesn’t just stem from internal hurdles. Nope, those forces that are holding them back are really “thetans,” alien spirits that have been clinging to human bodies by the thousands ever since an evil intergalactic alien overlord named Xenu tried to imprison them on earth 75 million years ago.
By the time a member gets to hear these “truths” and feel stupid about them (many are rumored to endure psychic breakdowns upon realizing their years in the group have been all for naught), they’ve already typically been sucked in financially to the tune of $30,000 to $500,000, are considered by many critics to be brainwashed and likely have been “disconnected” from the lesser beings known as their families.
“What inspired me to join was I was looking for answers and solutions. I read ‘Dianetics’ and thought it was a solution for helping other people,” said Tory Christman, a former member now living in Burbank who spent 31 years in Scientology between 1969 and 2000 before quitting. “But if you think of Scientology like a pyramid, I got to the top and realized it was a scam. I was OT VII (the second-highest rank in the church) for seven years and they wound up saying we weren’t trained right and needed to retrain from scratch. A bunch of us finally went ‘forget it.’”
On the night she was interviewed, Christman was in a wryly witty mood. She had every reason to be happy, however, as she had just realized that that day was the five-year anniversary from the day she walked out on the group. As a result, she offered a sarcastic, no-nonsense assessment of Scientology and what she flat out terms its “evil” qualities.
Christman had worked her way up to the elite level of OT VII, a state in which she was nearly deemed clear of the thetans afflicting her body. Her duties within Scientology consisted of working for the Office of Special Affairs, a notorious “security”-oriented faction within Scientology that critics claim is responsible for the church’s frequent stream of lawsuits targeting their enemies, and even more unsavory tricks such as character defamation designed to scare opponents into submission under what is known as “Fair Game” tactics.
“I don’t think any of us say you should or should not have beliefs, but I speak out because of Fair Game where you can lie, cheat and attack those who differ with you,” explained Christman. “I was in charge of setting up phony accounts on the Internet that were designed to shut down free speech by blocking out opponents’ sites or trick-routing people to pro-Scientology sites when they were looking for opposing information.”
Along the way, Christman tried to join Sea Org, a branch of Scientology whose members are deemed more “elite” than others despite the fact they’re the only members required to sign the big billion-year commitment and they have to live in group settings while considerations of marriage and children are seriously frowned upon as distractions from working for the cause.
“The majority of members live out in the public, but the Sea Org gets young idealistic people to come in and save the planet and they give them a lot of power to control things and that’s how they keep them,” said Christman. “Who else would give people that young the power? I was auditing one of their kid authorities, and I was a member near the top of the Bridge whom they wouldn’t allow to walk down a hall alone, and I’m auditing a 17-year-old kid in a suit, having to say ‘Yes sir!’ to him.
“Kids get into that thing, and it’s a trap, a very bad trap. They really work on sucking kids in. I gave them my whole adult life. I don’t want to do the same unless they know both sides.”
For Christman, the will to leave came from her disgust with the most two-sided aspect of Scientology. There is perhaps nothing Hubbard claimed to hate more than psychiatry, which became an inexplicable obsession of his which many critics and historians believe stemmed from the fact he had a lifelong love of the sea that led him to join the Navy – only to be diagnosed as mentally unstable and discharged from the service.
Hubbard retaliated by inventing “Dianetics,” crafting a self-help philosophy that was supposedly gleaned from the best of the lessons he learned from diverse cultures while traveling the earth since childhood. (Numerous judges and historians have proclaimed Hubbard as everything from an outright liar to wildly exaggerating his life’s adventures, however.) And as Scientology flowed out from there, he made sure his followers believed that the answer to nearly every sort of affliction lay in “clearing” the body through auditing or taking a bizarre mix of vitamins and other allegedly natural materials rather than turning to traditional medical professionals.
The ironic, and even shocking, fact is that upon Hubbard’s death in 1986 at age 74 (so much for immortality), the coroner’s report revealed that he had “a bandaide affixed to the right gluteal area where 10 recent needle marks are recognized of 5-8 cm.” Meaning, the King of No Medicine had himself been shot in the ass with some goodies soon before his death.
And the fact that the “post mortem examination was refused because of religious reasons” also proved strange – as a member of the District Attorney’s office advised “immediate toxicology be performed on body fluids.” The fluids, which were not handed over easily by church officials, were also found to have traces of the anti-anxiety medication Vistaril.
“I speak out because I know tons of people who died in Scientology, and five kids who died after they tried to leave. Their fraud with guys like Tom Cruise telling people not to take meds, they can’t believe that in my world and have me shut up. Those are abuses that should not be allowed,” said Christman, who finally walked out after suffering grand mal seizures when the church refused to let her take epilepsy medications. “Hubbard was on meds all his life, and he had them the whole time.”
Christman certainly makes the Sea Org members sound devoted. In fact, drop by the old Hollywood Guaranty Building, which houses the L. Ron Hubbard Life Exhibition museum at 6331 Hollywood Blvd., and you can see for yourself just how dedicated the little worker bees in their faux-sailor uniforms are. In fact, there’s two benches out front that are perfect for relaxed observation.
You might think that people with a billion years to spend might take their time strolling on a break to grab a Coke, but one thing nearly every one of the dozens of Sea Org kids this reporter has observed runs to and from the building as if they’re going to detonate if they’re not back in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.
But drop by a little before midnight, as I did on a Wednesday, and you’ll find a massive uptick in the comings and goings of Sea Orgs. Not only do they pour out by the dozens from the Guaranty building, which Christman terms the absolute hub of the Church’s financial operations, but numerous other little sailors come running towards the building from seemingly all over Hollywood Boulevard – a handy reminder of the fact that the outrageously wealthy church is the biggest real-estate holder in Hollywood.
Where they’re all headed is an unmarked, full-size bus that, according to Christman, takes them to their group living quarters after a healthy 12-to-16 hour workday. And while that might be odd already, there’s nothing creepier than watching the Sea kids line up like Stepford children and board the bus silently, looking straight ahead without speaking to each other onboard.
Regardless of what Professor Miller said about ‘cult’ being a potentially unfair label, it seems fairly apt at a moment like that. In fact, before I could spend another moment watching on the corner, a security guard taps my shoulder and insists on knowing what I’m doing there. My body almost jumps out of my skin before I stammer I’m waiting on a bus myself. And thank God, I indeed found one a moment later and hopped on to get the hell out of there and avoid a potential disappearance – even if the bus that saved me was heading in completely the wrong direction.
Kind of a perfect metaphor for joining Scientology.
“Hubbard was seeking a land base for what had been a seagoing operation for a long time, and he in the early ‘70s he decided to build in Clearwater, Florida. Until then, for years they were more or less chased around the world by police and refused berthing rights,” said Rich Lieby, a Washington Post reporter who started writing about Scientologists up close while working for the local Clearwater newspaper. “Hubbard was in the Navy in WWII so he called himself the Commander and transformed Scientology into the Sea Org, giving a nautical flavor to all the uniforms. “
Lieby’s recollections of the way Scientology operated in Florida – creating an East Coast outpost nearly more impressive than their expansive California holdings – sheds light on several of the business practices of Scientology. First, they used a front organization to buy the property, calling themselves the United Churches of Florida without actually uniting with other churches.
At the same time the Scientologists were building their national headquarters, the FLAG Land Base, in a town that was leery of a church that fixated on aliens, Hubbard’s wife and eight of his minions went on trial in Washington because of the fact they had waged a massive infiltration of the federal government through the use of phony IRS and Justice Department badges. The illegal activities were in the midst of Scientology’s battle with the IRS over receiving tax-exempt status as a legally sanctioned church.
While European countries had gotten wise early, with Britain banning the entry of Scientologists from 1968 to 1980 and Germany having already established their permanent ban on the church because it felt it was a cult of personality in the Nazi vein, the US government found itself reeling from the fact it looked the other way just a little too long. The Scientologists’ dream of morphing from self-help group to official religion had begun back in 1969, when Hubbard suddenly ordered crosses with discreetly odd designs – which were in fact modeled on his warlock hero Aleister Crowley’s Satanic Cross – planted in the lobbies of all the Scientology offices nationwide.
The Scientologists finally won their battle for tax-exempt religious status in a secret agreement with the IRS in 1993, but Hubbard wasn’t only hoping to avoid taxation of his vast holdings. In fact, he was canny enough to know that due to church-state separation, police and other authorities would be highly unlikely to investigate the Church’s operations. A final bonus was his knowledge that church divisions like Christman’s Office of Special Affairs could get away with utterly outrageous intimidation tactics – ranging from incessant phone calls and wiretaps to spreading flyers accusing critics of being pedophiles and filing enough lawsuits to drive opponents bankrupt via legal costs alone - because no one would ever believe a church could be that crazy.
Their biggest battleground in recent years, however, seemed to be on the Internet. Not only did they encourage members to post generic happy websites about their membership, but they also engaged in devious tactics such as Christman alleged earlier.
Yet Scientology couldn’t clamp down on free speech and cyberspace forever, and their membership is believed to have decreased sharply in the past decade as anyone is free to now read about the church and many of its “truths” on the Web. The latest wave of publicity, caused by Cruise’s aggressive proselytizing and anti-psychiatric arguments, is perhaps a desperate and clueless attempt to win back young minds and reverse the exodus.
“They’ve regularly exaggerated the health and membership of the group. A lot of their facilities are being closed,” explained Jim Lippard, a computer network security expert in Pasadena who helped fight Scientology’s 1994 attempt to stop the critical alt.religion.scientology Usenet news group. “Even Cruise can’t help them now because he fired one of the best publicists in Hollywood and replaced her with his Scientologist sister, all because Scientology has a paranoid view of the world that worked in the Cold War era but hasn’t been updated.”
Lippard is only partially correct on that front, however. The Internet has leaked tales of numerous Scientologists who have died under allegedly mysterious circumstances after committing insubordination or merely being deprived of needed medications, or of the bizarre deaths of Hubbard’s denounced gay son Quentin or current church head David Miscavige’s mother-in-law within days of her threatening to speak publicly about what she felt were church abuses.
And as those tales spread, renowned ex-Scientologist Arnie Lerma noted, the church realized it had to soften its approach and reinvent some of its techniques Gone were most of the hard-sell membership-drive techniques of the past, when church members were as annoying as Jehovah’s Witnesses in their attempts to make passersby take “personality tests” that allegedly would reveal the stressful areas Scientology could help a person eliminate.
As the head of Lermanet.com, Lerma has drawn on his decade-long membership in Scientology to craft perhaps the most extensive and highly updated anti-Scientology website in the world. Lerma was actually working for Scientology in 1969, having joined at 17 after buying Hubbard’s tales of being a war hero and nuclear physicist. He was around for the early days of Clearwater and got to know Hubbard on a very close level.
Ultimately, that closeness to Hubbard would be key to Lerma’s breakup with Scientology, as he recalls falling in love with one of the founder’s daughters, Suzette. As marriage and family are frowned upon within Sea Org members as unnecessary distractions from church devotion, they were about to elope when she spilled the beans in one of her auditing sessions.
“I was given the option of leaving Florida with all my body parts intact if I told her the wedding was off, and that’s a quotable fact,” said Lerma. “So I told her and she cried. I was shocked like shock therapy and that woke me up. I was free.”
Indeed, Lerma has become one of Scientology’s most fervent critics, with his site tagging itself “Exposing the Con.” He says he was there the day Hubbard ordered the Satanic Crosses rolled into church offices, and watched in wonder as the church replaced its secular signs and symbols across the board with occult imagery designed to mislead the public and more importantly, the government into believing they were a fairly mainstream religion. By the time he was forced to leave, he had become the finance manger for the church’s publishing wing, Bridge Publications – a job that “required me to write checks to Hubbard all day.”
He has already experienced retaliation in the form of a raid on his house by Scientologists and US marshals who searched all his computer drives for the church’s copyrighted materials, such as information on thetans and climbing the Bridge. Yet he has soldiered on, as nothing was found worthy of shutting his efforts down.
In contrast, a decade ago Scientologist lawyers were able to launch 100 suits at a time against the former top anti-cult web group, the Cult Awareness Network, drive it into bankruptcy and then purchase the name to open yet another Scientologist front group that tries to assuage concerned family members with claims that membership in the church is harmless. The very fact that Lerma is up and thriving online is just one big sign that the church might be losing its grip.
“They love luring celebrities because they think it helps them win over countless more young people, and the celebrities stay with it both because every imaginable whim is catered to but because they’ve revealed every blackmailable secret in their auditing sessions over the years,” said Lerma. “Meanwhile, those stars’ needs are met by staffers who are either in it for life and vastly underpaid or by members who have run out of money for the church’s services and are basically slaving to pay it off.”
Just as the roots of Scientology began here in Pasadena with the bizarre friendship of Hubbard and Jack Parsons, its weaknesses with the Web also began here, in a Pasadena courtroom of the U.S. District Court. The case of the Church of Scientology International vs. Fishman and Geertz resulted in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco denying Scientology’s appeal to seal its “upper level materials” about the OT levels, Xenu and other high-level church secrets.
The case began with a 1991 lawsuit against former Scientologist Steven Fishman and his psychiatrist, Dr. Uwe Geertz, after they were quoted at length in a classic Time magazine expose on the church. Fishman had been convicted several years before of taking part in a Scientology securities class action fraud scheme in Florida, and in order to defend himself fully in this lawsuit without a lawyer, he had won the right to use the previously secret materials in his defense.
Dr. Geertz’s attorney, Graham Berry, heard about Fishman’s materials, and offered to help him as much as he could for free. When the men teamed up to accomplish a staggering success against Scientology that finally enabled the “upper materials” to stay open and be read anywhere, the truth was finally free and available to anyone exploring Scientology on the Web.
“Robert Vaughn Young was a high-level Scientology executive who escaped the church, and he said the Internet would prove to be the church’s Waterloo and lead to their demise,” said Berry, who has spent the past decade as a living victim of the church’s retaliatory techniques. “I believe that’s self-evident with the fact Fishman filed a worldwide affidavit where the information on Scientology is on the ‘Net for free while its members traditionally paid up to a half-million dollars to reach the same level of knowledge.”
After helping win the Fishman case, Berry found his homosexuality outed on the Web, along with further accusations that he was a pedophile. Those lurid and patently false allegations were only the tip of the iceberg in which he believes that Scientologists set out to slander him on nearly every level and did manage to break him financially by tying up all his time through a string of lawsuits against him. The final blow came when Scientologists convinced the state’s judicial system to label Fishman a “vexatious litigant,” a label that cost him his ability to practice law in California and, amazingly, can’t appeal his way out of.
Yet even now, living off government assistance and the kindness of friends and acquaintances, Berry remains unbowed and to this day travels to conferences around the world to speak out against the church’s ruthless tactics.
“Scientology will never understand how strongly friends can support you and it drives them nuts that I’m not in a gutter somewhere,” Berry noted. “But I will not remain silent, for they already have done all they can against me. I have nothing left to lose, and sometimes that’s the most powerful state to be in.”
By Carl Kozlowski
For nearly twenty years, Tom Cruise has seemed like Hollywood’s Golden Boy, a movie star women loved and guys also thought was cool. He attributed his vast success to being a follower of Scientology, a self-help movement turned religion which claims the ability to “clear” its followers from all their problems. It seemed like the perfect match: the man with the perfect smile advocating for a group that offers perfection.
But in May, Cruise seemingly went apeshit. He suddenly announced his engagement to Katie Holmes, an actress whom no one had ever seen him with before late April. He leapt up and down on Oprah’s couch like a five-year-old on a sugar kick, generating derisive laughter across the planet. And just when you thought Tom could use a good dose of Ritalin, he was embarrassing himself on the “Today Show” by arguing that he knew more about psychiatry and its alleged evils than his interviewer, Matt Lauer.
Suddenly, people were wondering what was wrong with Mr. Perfect. And his attempts to pump up his church amidst all the publicity appear to have backfired, provoking widespread media coverage of Scientology that is reopening a 50-year history of overarching greed, fraud, judicial chicanery, near-terroristic threatening of the church’s critics, and the fact that the heart of the church’s beliefs center around the claim that every human’s stresses are in reality the souls of aliens attaching themselves to their bodies.
As if that’s not crazy enough, throw in tales of mysterious deaths, and an affidavit claiming that the church attempts to coerce abortions from its staff members, and suddenly, the perfect church doesn’t seem all that perfect – and a daring band of ex-members are making sure the full extent of its dark side is exposed.
The method they’re using to attack this multi-billion-dollar, multi-operational, worldwide dragon is surprisingly simple: they’re exposing Scientology’s darkest secrets, which for 50 years were only revealed to their top members, on the Internet. And like shedding light on cockroaches, the church’s leaders are desperately scurrying to stay alive by enshrouding as much information as possible in darkness.
Even better, it all started with a connection in Pasadena. For it was here, in the late 1940s, that eventual Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard – then a middling science-fiction author and accomplished ladies’ man – fell into the warped social circle of famed rocket engineer Jack Parsons, who proudly considered himself to be the Antichrist and frequently conducted orgies and other debauched events amid the wealthiest streets of Pasadena. According to a January 3, 2002 PW story on Parsons by Michael Collins, both Hubbard and Parsons shared a fascination with occultism and infamous black magic practitioner Aleister Crowley.
“There’s a lot of dispute about Hubbard’s connections with Parsons, because while there’s quite a bit of indications that he was involved in Parsons’ magic movement, Scientology claims that Hubbard was really an opposing undercover agent trying to expose them,” said Timothy Miller, a professor religious studies at the University of Kansas who specializes in “new religious movements,” the newfangled way of describing cults. “The term ‘cult’ has negative connotations and our work is supposed to be judgment-free and there is a consensus that we’ve already branded a group if you say it like that. On the other hand, we don’t whitewash anyone.”
Indeed, Miller points out that Scientology has been riddled with inconsistencies, mixing positive and negative qualities, since its very founding in 1950 by Hubbard, who created the church as a self-help movement after publishing a “modern guide to mental health” called “Dianetics.” For instance, they’ve proven to be one of the most litigious groups in America, barraging their critics and opponents with countless lawsuits and often outspending their way to victory, but speculation of whether some members have died as a result of the church’s “care” is much more questionable.
Miller, along with many other authorities on the church and ex-members, also takes issue with church leaders’ membership figures, in which they estimate eight million members in over 150 nations. Some peg the real total as low as 50,000 members whose excessive financial involvement propels the church’s unknown worth into estimated tens of billions of dollars.
He also takes issue with whether the church subjects its live-in members to slave labor, a frequent accusation in which critics claim that many Scientology staffers are subjected to working at least 60 hours a week for as little as $4 a week.
“People get very devoted to their religious, social and political causes, but to my mind, slave labor has to be something you don’t wanna do and you have to be locked up to do it,” said Miller. “But will they take your money? Yes, everything they can. Most religions want money, but they seem unusually good at it. The prices they charge are extraordinary, but people voluntarily pay.”
What constitutes “extraoardinary”, exactly? Scientology consists of an extensive series of highly invasive personal tests called “audits” and classes that a member must take to climb the church’s “Bridge”, a series of levels that gain them greater and greater insights into their allegedly “true” nature and a clearing of all the issues that vex their mental and emotional lives.
The problem is, that the big final lesson is basically a riddle: Now that you know what you are not, begin to find out what you are. Basically, the church offers a never-ending trip into the subconscious, only one that’s far less enjoyable than dropping out of college and following the Dead.
And most members never even get to that official final level – the biggest reward for those who don’t make it to the level of OT VIII (Operating Thetan at the eighth level), at which they’re also told they have the power to control time and space, can create universes and never get sick again, is to make it to OT III, where the first lessons about aliens and immortality come in.
“They have beliefs in reincarnation and past lives,” explained Miller. “And they believe that they are basically immortal, because the more dedicated members in an elite level called Sea Org sign billion-year contracts to work for the church. Imagine making it to the highest level and learning that it’s basically an endless loop of lessons and auditing that you’ll never really get out of.”
And along the way, members learn that their lifelong beef with their dad or their bad luck at finding well-paying employment doesn’t just stem from internal hurdles. Nope, those forces that are holding them back are really “thetans,” alien spirits that have been clinging to human bodies by the thousands ever since an evil intergalactic alien overlord named Xenu tried to imprison them on earth 75 million years ago.
By the time a member gets to hear these “truths” and feel stupid about them (many are rumored to endure psychic breakdowns upon realizing their years in the group have been all for naught), they’ve already typically been sucked in financially to the tune of $30,000 to $500,000, are considered by many critics to be brainwashed and likely have been “disconnected” from the lesser beings known as their families.
“What inspired me to join was I was looking for answers and solutions. I read ‘Dianetics’ and thought it was a solution for helping other people,” said Tory Christman, a former member now living in Burbank who spent 31 years in Scientology between 1969 and 2000 before quitting. “But if you think of Scientology like a pyramid, I got to the top and realized it was a scam. I was OT VII (the second-highest rank in the church) for seven years and they wound up saying we weren’t trained right and needed to retrain from scratch. A bunch of us finally went ‘forget it.’”
On the night she was interviewed, Christman was in a wryly witty mood. She had every reason to be happy, however, as she had just realized that that day was the five-year anniversary from the day she walked out on the group. As a result, she offered a sarcastic, no-nonsense assessment of Scientology and what she flat out terms its “evil” qualities.
Christman had worked her way up to the elite level of OT VII, a state in which she was nearly deemed clear of the thetans afflicting her body. Her duties within Scientology consisted of working for the Office of Special Affairs, a notorious “security”-oriented faction within Scientology that critics claim is responsible for the church’s frequent stream of lawsuits targeting their enemies, and even more unsavory tricks such as character defamation designed to scare opponents into submission under what is known as “Fair Game” tactics.
“I don’t think any of us say you should or should not have beliefs, but I speak out because of Fair Game where you can lie, cheat and attack those who differ with you,” explained Christman. “I was in charge of setting up phony accounts on the Internet that were designed to shut down free speech by blocking out opponents’ sites or trick-routing people to pro-Scientology sites when they were looking for opposing information.”
Along the way, Christman tried to join Sea Org, a branch of Scientology whose members are deemed more “elite” than others despite the fact they’re the only members required to sign the big billion-year commitment and they have to live in group settings while considerations of marriage and children are seriously frowned upon as distractions from working for the cause.
“The majority of members live out in the public, but the Sea Org gets young idealistic people to come in and save the planet and they give them a lot of power to control things and that’s how they keep them,” said Christman. “Who else would give people that young the power? I was auditing one of their kid authorities, and I was a member near the top of the Bridge whom they wouldn’t allow to walk down a hall alone, and I’m auditing a 17-year-old kid in a suit, having to say ‘Yes sir!’ to him.
“Kids get into that thing, and it’s a trap, a very bad trap. They really work on sucking kids in. I gave them my whole adult life. I don’t want to do the same unless they know both sides.”
For Christman, the will to leave came from her disgust with the most two-sided aspect of Scientology. There is perhaps nothing Hubbard claimed to hate more than psychiatry, which became an inexplicable obsession of his which many critics and historians believe stemmed from the fact he had a lifelong love of the sea that led him to join the Navy – only to be diagnosed as mentally unstable and discharged from the service.
Hubbard retaliated by inventing “Dianetics,” crafting a self-help philosophy that was supposedly gleaned from the best of the lessons he learned from diverse cultures while traveling the earth since childhood. (Numerous judges and historians have proclaimed Hubbard as everything from an outright liar to wildly exaggerating his life’s adventures, however.) And as Scientology flowed out from there, he made sure his followers believed that the answer to nearly every sort of affliction lay in “clearing” the body through auditing or taking a bizarre mix of vitamins and other allegedly natural materials rather than turning to traditional medical professionals.
The ironic, and even shocking, fact is that upon Hubbard’s death in 1986 at age 74 (so much for immortality), the coroner’s report revealed that he had “a bandaide affixed to the right gluteal area where 10 recent needle marks are recognized of 5-8 cm.” Meaning, the King of No Medicine had himself been shot in the ass with some goodies soon before his death.
And the fact that the “post mortem examination was refused because of religious reasons” also proved strange – as a member of the District Attorney’s office advised “immediate toxicology be performed on body fluids.” The fluids, which were not handed over easily by church officials, were also found to have traces of the anti-anxiety medication Vistaril.
“I speak out because I know tons of people who died in Scientology, and five kids who died after they tried to leave. Their fraud with guys like Tom Cruise telling people not to take meds, they can’t believe that in my world and have me shut up. Those are abuses that should not be allowed,” said Christman, who finally walked out after suffering grand mal seizures when the church refused to let her take epilepsy medications. “Hubbard was on meds all his life, and he had them the whole time.”
Christman certainly makes the Sea Org members sound devoted. In fact, drop by the old Hollywood Guaranty Building, which houses the L. Ron Hubbard Life Exhibition museum at 6331 Hollywood Blvd., and you can see for yourself just how dedicated the little worker bees in their faux-sailor uniforms are. In fact, there’s two benches out front that are perfect for relaxed observation.
You might think that people with a billion years to spend might take their time strolling on a break to grab a Coke, but one thing nearly every one of the dozens of Sea Org kids this reporter has observed runs to and from the building as if they’re going to detonate if they’re not back in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.
But drop by a little before midnight, as I did on a Wednesday, and you’ll find a massive uptick in the comings and goings of Sea Orgs. Not only do they pour out by the dozens from the Guaranty building, which Christman terms the absolute hub of the Church’s financial operations, but numerous other little sailors come running towards the building from seemingly all over Hollywood Boulevard – a handy reminder of the fact that the outrageously wealthy church is the biggest real-estate holder in Hollywood.
Where they’re all headed is an unmarked, full-size bus that, according to Christman, takes them to their group living quarters after a healthy 12-to-16 hour workday. And while that might be odd already, there’s nothing creepier than watching the Sea kids line up like Stepford children and board the bus silently, looking straight ahead without speaking to each other onboard.
Regardless of what Professor Miller said about ‘cult’ being a potentially unfair label, it seems fairly apt at a moment like that. In fact, before I could spend another moment watching on the corner, a security guard taps my shoulder and insists on knowing what I’m doing there. My body almost jumps out of my skin before I stammer I’m waiting on a bus myself. And thank God, I indeed found one a moment later and hopped on to get the hell out of there and avoid a potential disappearance – even if the bus that saved me was heading in completely the wrong direction.
Kind of a perfect metaphor for joining Scientology.
“Hubbard was seeking a land base for what had been a seagoing operation for a long time, and he in the early ‘70s he decided to build in Clearwater, Florida. Until then, for years they were more or less chased around the world by police and refused berthing rights,” said Rich Lieby, a Washington Post reporter who started writing about Scientologists up close while working for the local Clearwater newspaper. “Hubbard was in the Navy in WWII so he called himself the Commander and transformed Scientology into the Sea Org, giving a nautical flavor to all the uniforms. “
Lieby’s recollections of the way Scientology operated in Florida – creating an East Coast outpost nearly more impressive than their expansive California holdings – sheds light on several of the business practices of Scientology. First, they used a front organization to buy the property, calling themselves the United Churches of Florida without actually uniting with other churches.
At the same time the Scientologists were building their national headquarters, the FLAG Land Base, in a town that was leery of a church that fixated on aliens, Hubbard’s wife and eight of his minions went on trial in Washington because of the fact they had waged a massive infiltration of the federal government through the use of phony IRS and Justice Department badges. The illegal activities were in the midst of Scientology’s battle with the IRS over receiving tax-exempt status as a legally sanctioned church.
While European countries had gotten wise early, with Britain banning the entry of Scientologists from 1968 to 1980 and Germany having already established their permanent ban on the church because it felt it was a cult of personality in the Nazi vein, the US government found itself reeling from the fact it looked the other way just a little too long. The Scientologists’ dream of morphing from self-help group to official religion had begun back in 1969, when Hubbard suddenly ordered crosses with discreetly odd designs – which were in fact modeled on his warlock hero Aleister Crowley’s Satanic Cross – planted in the lobbies of all the Scientology offices nationwide.
The Scientologists finally won their battle for tax-exempt religious status in a secret agreement with the IRS in 1993, but Hubbard wasn’t only hoping to avoid taxation of his vast holdings. In fact, he was canny enough to know that due to church-state separation, police and other authorities would be highly unlikely to investigate the Church’s operations. A final bonus was his knowledge that church divisions like Christman’s Office of Special Affairs could get away with utterly outrageous intimidation tactics – ranging from incessant phone calls and wiretaps to spreading flyers accusing critics of being pedophiles and filing enough lawsuits to drive opponents bankrupt via legal costs alone - because no one would ever believe a church could be that crazy.
Their biggest battleground in recent years, however, seemed to be on the Internet. Not only did they encourage members to post generic happy websites about their membership, but they also engaged in devious tactics such as Christman alleged earlier.
Yet Scientology couldn’t clamp down on free speech and cyberspace forever, and their membership is believed to have decreased sharply in the past decade as anyone is free to now read about the church and many of its “truths” on the Web. The latest wave of publicity, caused by Cruise’s aggressive proselytizing and anti-psychiatric arguments, is perhaps a desperate and clueless attempt to win back young minds and reverse the exodus.
“They’ve regularly exaggerated the health and membership of the group. A lot of their facilities are being closed,” explained Jim Lippard, a computer network security expert in Pasadena who helped fight Scientology’s 1994 attempt to stop the critical alt.religion.scientology Usenet news group. “Even Cruise can’t help them now because he fired one of the best publicists in Hollywood and replaced her with his Scientologist sister, all because Scientology has a paranoid view of the world that worked in the Cold War era but hasn’t been updated.”
Lippard is only partially correct on that front, however. The Internet has leaked tales of numerous Scientologists who have died under allegedly mysterious circumstances after committing insubordination or merely being deprived of needed medications, or of the bizarre deaths of Hubbard’s denounced gay son Quentin or current church head David Miscavige’s mother-in-law within days of her threatening to speak publicly about what she felt were church abuses.
And as those tales spread, renowned ex-Scientologist Arnie Lerma noted, the church realized it had to soften its approach and reinvent some of its techniques Gone were most of the hard-sell membership-drive techniques of the past, when church members were as annoying as Jehovah’s Witnesses in their attempts to make passersby take “personality tests” that allegedly would reveal the stressful areas Scientology could help a person eliminate.
As the head of Lermanet.com, Lerma has drawn on his decade-long membership in Scientology to craft perhaps the most extensive and highly updated anti-Scientology website in the world. Lerma was actually working for Scientology in 1969, having joined at 17 after buying Hubbard’s tales of being a war hero and nuclear physicist. He was around for the early days of Clearwater and got to know Hubbard on a very close level.
Ultimately, that closeness to Hubbard would be key to Lerma’s breakup with Scientology, as he recalls falling in love with one of the founder’s daughters, Suzette. As marriage and family are frowned upon within Sea Org members as unnecessary distractions from church devotion, they were about to elope when she spilled the beans in one of her auditing sessions.
“I was given the option of leaving Florida with all my body parts intact if I told her the wedding was off, and that’s a quotable fact,” said Lerma. “So I told her and she cried. I was shocked like shock therapy and that woke me up. I was free.”
Indeed, Lerma has become one of Scientology’s most fervent critics, with his site tagging itself “Exposing the Con.” He says he was there the day Hubbard ordered the Satanic Crosses rolled into church offices, and watched in wonder as the church replaced its secular signs and symbols across the board with occult imagery designed to mislead the public and more importantly, the government into believing they were a fairly mainstream religion. By the time he was forced to leave, he had become the finance manger for the church’s publishing wing, Bridge Publications – a job that “required me to write checks to Hubbard all day.”
He has already experienced retaliation in the form of a raid on his house by Scientologists and US marshals who searched all his computer drives for the church’s copyrighted materials, such as information on thetans and climbing the Bridge. Yet he has soldiered on, as nothing was found worthy of shutting his efforts down.
In contrast, a decade ago Scientologist lawyers were able to launch 100 suits at a time against the former top anti-cult web group, the Cult Awareness Network, drive it into bankruptcy and then purchase the name to open yet another Scientologist front group that tries to assuage concerned family members with claims that membership in the church is harmless. The very fact that Lerma is up and thriving online is just one big sign that the church might be losing its grip.
“They love luring celebrities because they think it helps them win over countless more young people, and the celebrities stay with it both because every imaginable whim is catered to but because they’ve revealed every blackmailable secret in their auditing sessions over the years,” said Lerma. “Meanwhile, those stars’ needs are met by staffers who are either in it for life and vastly underpaid or by members who have run out of money for the church’s services and are basically slaving to pay it off.”
Just as the roots of Scientology began here in Pasadena with the bizarre friendship of Hubbard and Jack Parsons, its weaknesses with the Web also began here, in a Pasadena courtroom of the U.S. District Court. The case of the Church of Scientology International vs. Fishman and Geertz resulted in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco denying Scientology’s appeal to seal its “upper level materials” about the OT levels, Xenu and other high-level church secrets.
The case began with a 1991 lawsuit against former Scientologist Steven Fishman and his psychiatrist, Dr. Uwe Geertz, after they were quoted at length in a classic Time magazine expose on the church. Fishman had been convicted several years before of taking part in a Scientology securities class action fraud scheme in Florida, and in order to defend himself fully in this lawsuit without a lawyer, he had won the right to use the previously secret materials in his defense.
Dr. Geertz’s attorney, Graham Berry, heard about Fishman’s materials, and offered to help him as much as he could for free. When the men teamed up to accomplish a staggering success against Scientology that finally enabled the “upper materials” to stay open and be read anywhere, the truth was finally free and available to anyone exploring Scientology on the Web.
“Robert Vaughn Young was a high-level Scientology executive who escaped the church, and he said the Internet would prove to be the church’s Waterloo and lead to their demise,” said Berry, who has spent the past decade as a living victim of the church’s retaliatory techniques. “I believe that’s self-evident with the fact Fishman filed a worldwide affidavit where the information on Scientology is on the ‘Net for free while its members traditionally paid up to a half-million dollars to reach the same level of knowledge.”
After helping win the Fishman case, Berry found his homosexuality outed on the Web, along with further accusations that he was a pedophile. Those lurid and patently false allegations were only the tip of the iceberg in which he believes that Scientologists set out to slander him on nearly every level and did manage to break him financially by tying up all his time through a string of lawsuits against him. The final blow came when Scientologists convinced the state’s judicial system to label Fishman a “vexatious litigant,” a label that cost him his ability to practice law in California and, amazingly, can’t appeal his way out of.
Yet even now, living off government assistance and the kindness of friends and acquaintances, Berry remains unbowed and to this day travels to conferences around the world to speak out against the church’s ruthless tactics.
“Scientology will never understand how strongly friends can support you and it drives them nuts that I’m not in a gutter somewhere,” Berry noted. “But I will not remain silent, for they already have done all they can against me. I have nothing left to lose, and sometimes that’s the most powerful state to be in.”
The Wizard of Odd
By Carl Kozlowski
You've probably seen his followers manning tables on college campuses, outside post offices and on street corners - handing out pamphlets urging voters to oppose the California recall (especially Schwarzenegger's ascendance to power), the electrical deregulation mess in California, or even calling Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney "children of Satan."
No, we're not talking about Howard Dean, John Kerry or even Dennis Kucinich. We're talking about Lyndon LaRouche, the man often derided as a political joke for his perennial presidential campaigns and status as a convicted felon for mail fraud and income tax evasion.
Dean laid claim to having passionate youth followers who signed up by the tens of thousands on the Internet, but they abandoned him when it came time to vote in Iowa and left him yapping like a prairie dog during his post-primary meltdown. But, LaRouche's kids - called the "Youth Movement" by the campaign and "LaRouchies" by detractors - are notorious for marching across campuses nationwide, disrupting classes with bullhorns, impeding the progress of students who try to sidestep their brochures, and working up to 15-hour days for what they consider a "revolution."
It seems odd, but odder still is the fact that the man in charge rarely even makes a campaign stop or public appearance in America, the country he supposedly seeks to lead - preferring to globetrot to conferences overseas or stay on his heavily guarded estate in rural Virginia. Granted, Lyndon LaRouche is 81 years old, but even so. his campaign seems to be classic example of the phrase "running to stand still.
So when there was a noticeable up-tick in activity by his local followers and word leaked out that LaRouche was actually coming to Los Angeles to deliver a body-slamming speech against Schwarzenegger last September 11, the mix of timing and events was worth investigating. At least the old guy was more interesting than the blow-dried personalities offered up by the parties' major candidates.
"We can't just be concerned that people have life and a home, but about their conditions on their way home. How many hours a day do people commute? How many jobs do they commute to? And what does this do to the quality of their family life and their neighborhoods and the fabric of our society?"
If I didn't tell you these words came from Lyndon LaRouche in that September 11 speech, you might think they came from the lips of President Bush in his State of the Union address. Yet while Bush conquers the Middle East in pursuit of oil, LaRouche speaks and writes about ideas like establishing high-speed railways within and between major population centers that can generate millions of jobs in New Deal fashion. Hear the words alone and you might think any other progressive, environmentalist politician - even Al Gore - is talking. In fact, from that end of the spectrum, he sounds downright normal.
The problem is, Lyndon LaRouche doesn't have a normal background at all.
"Lyndon LaRouche comes from a quasi-Quaker, fundamentalist family who were anti-Semitic, and he reacted against his parents by joining the Socialist Workers Party in the 1940s," said Dennis King, author of the 1989 Doubleday book Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism. "He was too smart for that group, so he started his own group in Manhattan around 1968.
"Eventually he turned from a guru into a cult leader, and when the antiwar movement wound down after Vietnam, he saw he could get bigger gate receipts on the right," King continued. "He returned to the views of his parents, though he uses coded anti-Semitism."
King believes that LaRouche's views are fascist, because fascism centers on a cult of personality and can shift politically between aspects of the left and the right. Yet LaRouche's press spokesman and right-hand man for the western United States, Harley Schlanger, is Jewish, -- rendering King's claims of LaRouche's anti-Semitism curious.
"Instead of addressing the ideas that he raises, what people do is attack him. You hear he's an anti-Semite, but we have members of all religions here, and I'm Jewish myself," said Schlanger. "If you oppose the practices of Ariel Sharon, does that make you anti-Semitic? People can't find where they say he attacks the Jews, and they used to say we skinned cats and left them with our enemies, but no one ever showed evidence of a cat or DNA. If people just listened to LaRouche and there was no war, what would that mean? A lot of people who get money out of this war would be out."
So how has the LaRouche organization managed to maintain strength for so long?
"The answer is simple. There's 280 million people in the United States, and every year in every state, fringe candidates get on the ballot, and raise enough signatures to get on the ballot," said Bob Secter, the Illinois Political Editor for the Chicago Tribune. "People don't even realize what they're doing when they sign the ballot petitions."
But King's explanation for why the LaRouche campaign is growing on college campuses is interesting, nonetheless. Believing that the current antiwar movement is rooted in more anti-Semitism than past antiwar movements, because of anger over Israel's treatment of Palestinians, King said LaRouche can appear to "tilt leftward" while actually drawing college kids into his movement for anti-Semitic viewpoints and activities.
"I was told by the editor of 'Chronicle of Higher Education' that LaRouche has 1,000 new college-age recruits nationwide, and 1,000 fully committed young people can cause problems," said King. "He has strong intelligence ties all over the world and visited Iraq back in the 1970s, so it's natural that he would be antiwar now."
LaRouche's notoriously aggressive fundraising has enabled his team to raise more than $5 million nationally and as a result earn more than $800,000 in federal matching funds in 2003. That's a figure bigger than that raised by fellow present and former Democratic presidential candidates Al Sharpton, Carole Moseley Braun, and even Dennis Kucinich. Yet despite these fundraising successes - and landing spots on primary ballots in 13 states and the District of Columbia - so far, he's been kept out of every debate in every election cycle he's ever run in.
"We can't control who wants to call themselves a Democrat or qualify themselves for the ballot," said Tony Welch, spokesman for the Democratic National Committee. "But we're not obligated to turn the stage over to everyone who comes along."
The official reason the Democratic National Committee is eager to keep him out of debates is that LaRouche was sentenced in 1989 to 15 years in prison for mail fraud conspiracy. He and his organization were convicted on illegal and manipulative fund-raising practices, and he was released in 1994.
But it's his outrageous comments that draw the hearts and minds of young people like the two guys who drove me to LaRouche's speech, whose identities I will protect for fear that their comments might earn them retribution from within the organization.
"Nobody else [other campaigns] ever asked us to join them. Have they tried?" asked Tony. "Nobody says 'Bush is a bipolar idiot controlled like a puppet, help me stop him.'"
"The so-called leading nine candidates don't know how to fight his fascist nature," added Marco. "They're not qualified to take risks."
Those kinds of impassioned sentiments worry people like Oscar-winning author/filmmaker Michael Moore, who noticed the LaRouche movement's presence during the tour for his book "Dude, Where's My Country?" in October.
"It does seem that there's something going on here in California with LaRouche more than anywhere else I've traveled," said Moore, when asked about the campaign. "I think it shows that there's young people really hungry for leadership alternatives, and the traditional Democratic candidates are leaving them with a vacuum of passionate leadership to get behind."
My entrée into the world of the LaRouche campaign was a college student named Wesley, who had come down from Seattle to help in the anti-recall drive. He was manning a table outside the Borders bookstore in Glendale on September 4th.
Wesley was young, clean-cut, and seemed sane, so I stopped. .And when I told him I was a reporter and curious enough to give the LaRouchies a chance to tell their side of the story, he told me that LaRouche was having a top-secret campaign rally for his L.A. supporters on September 11, and I could be in on the otherwise-private affair.
Seven nights later, I was off to a ballroom at the Burbank Hilton. My escorts seemed like fairly normal guys, college-age chaps who dressed in normal college-age clothes and had boisterous college-style laughs and senses of humor.
Arriving at the hotel, the idea that this would be a lily-white gathering of racists was rendered absurd by the crowd of 500 who were easily the most diverse group of people I'd ever seen at a political gathering. And anyone who needed Spanish translation of the night's proceedings was provided with headphones that gave an instant live feed from an interpreter.
Suddenly a door at the front of the hall opened and an old guy came barreling in faster than a speeding bullet to the stage. There was no announced intro, but the entire crowd was on their feet as one, in a standing ovation. Lyndon LaRouche was in the building. But instead of talking right away, he took a seat as a young Latino student introduced a student chorus from a LaRouche-funded school called the Schiller Institute. They took the stage and sang "O Freedom," a Negro spiritual that was described as "the theme song of the LaRouche Movement on the West Coast." The tune was an old slave song about deliverance to the Lord after death - not the most optimistic view I've ever heard from a campaign. Or the most pertinent. Or frankly, youthful. Then again, LaRouche is 81.
Finally, it was time for the main man to speak, and he was certainly colorful.
Wonder what he thinks of this Bush? "The dumbest man in America was seated as President." How about Cheney? "Cheney and his ilk are man-beasts and Satans. Cheney is an intrinsically evil person. If he were more intelligent, he would be Satanic. But he is only a thug for Satan."
In more practical, current terms, LaRouche and his people had proven their stripes to the Democratic cause by printing up and distributing 500,000 copies of a magazine entitled "Who Robbed California?" which purported to tell the story of the energy deregulation disaster in California and their claim that Schwarzenegger's rise was part of a conspiracy tied into that. . Things were fairly routine until Hollywood liberal legend Ed Asner walked into the room and sat down in front of me. It was my turn to pounce, and Ed's turn to look stunned.
"I just [came] because I had heard contradicting rumors of him and had dismissed him because of it, but I found him very enjoyable," said Asner. "Everything I've heard from him is in the progressive agenda that I entertain.
"All too often Democrats play go-along to get-along, and LaRouche shows that it's more than the head of the pimple that's gotta be squeezed," Asner continued. "I support Kucinich really, and I can't make a judgment on the time LaRouche spent [in jail] because he will not be the first person to be placed there and silenced that way in America. I am certainly aware that he is controversial, but in this case, that attracts me because I tend to be seen as controversial in the same way."
LaRouche ran out the door of the Burbank Hilton as quickly as he had come in, after leaving his followers with this directive: "Have fun!" True to his command, the fun was just beginning.
It was 11:30 p.m. and I was starving, but more than that, I was eager to get my young LaRouchie hosts to hang out in a normal, outside-the-campaign setting. They already said they were tired, so my goal was to keep them up 'til 2 or 3 a.m. and see if I could get them to dish out some answers to tough questions.
But I should have known we were headed for trouble when they said they needed to find a gas station "right away." Pasadena was only 15 or 20 minutes away, I figured, how bad could it be? The only time I'd ever seen someone run out of gas was in a movie.
But two blocks later, it happened to us. Boom, out. All she wrote. No gas station in sight. And I was the only one with a AAA card. I wound up having to pay for the $5 in gas the tow-truck guy provided. So not only did these "campaign workers" not have enough cash to keep their gas tank above "E" while escorting a reporter at midnight, they didn't have the money to pay the guy who was saving their ass. The AAA man looked at our "LaRouche in '04" badges, tried not to snicker, and headed into the night.
I was determined to get my secrets. However, more importantly, I wanted to get breakfast. Denny's awaited.
Hours later, we finally pulled into Denny's, and as the LaRouchies devoured their meals, the conversation turned a little more casual and a lot more revealing. They were stressing out about getting home and asleep because they had to be up for work the next morning, but I asked if driving a reporter around counted as racking up some hours on the job. Marco, said they might get to sleep in for an hour, meaning they could get started at 8:30 instead of the usual 7:30 a.m.
"7:30?!" I spat out. "So what time do you finish? 3:30 or 4 p.m.?"
"No!" they laughed, like the 8-hour workday was the silliest concept in the world.
"We work until 10 usually," said Tony.
But if you thought they'd be done after a grueling 15 hour work day, you'd be wrong.
"We teach each other classes in history or science or other topics 'til midnight most nights," said Marco. "Then we go to bed and start over the next day."
I asked them how they have time to have normal lives, how their schedules possibly jive with Lyndon's own speech about the social fabric and being able to have a balanced life with family. That they seemed like hip, young, good-looking guys who could do well with the ladies and aren't they missing out? I had heard that one big motive of the current recruiting wave was because the members weren't allowed to date and marry, and the original members had grown old or drifted off and the movement needed to recruit fresh blood just to keep going.
Tony's voice started to tremble with feeling.
"If you knew you had the chance to change the world, really make a difference, would any of the rest of that, anything else, matter to you, or wouldn't it seem silly and trivial?" he asked.
"Sure," I said. "But come on, I like some of what he has to say, but Lyndon is 81 and has been running for president for 27 years. I don't mean to be mean, but you have to know that he can't win."
He was silent for a moment. Then he leaned forward and pounded his arm on the table.
"OK, it's not about winning the presidency!" he nearly shouted. "It's about a revolution!" Thankfully, it was now approaching 3 a.m. and people expected odd behavior in Denny's.
"Like violent?!" I was freaking now.
"No, it's about turning society back to true culture - Renaissance culture. That's why we learn to sing chorale music when we join, and have reading days on the classics, and teach each other classes," said Marco.
"Popular culture is disposable, and wasteful and will die out. The classics will not. If it takes us 500 years, it doesn't matter. We will win!" said Tony, his fury back and his forearm pounding the table again. "We're revolutionaries!"
They may have been revolutionaries, but they weren't particularly well-funded ones. Even Marco revealed that he was broke and had to stiff me on the Last Meal Surprise at Denny's. Denny's is dirt-cheap, but I walked out the door footing a $45 bill.
So how does the campaign convince such bright young minds to get involved so thoroughly? First off, they play to the vanity of passersby.
"They convince you of your intellectual superiority," recalled one former follower from LaRouche's early-70s Manhattan era. "They tell you you know more than Einstein."
But if you ignore LaRouche recruiters, say officials at both UCLA and Pasadena City College, their efforts can get progressively more forceful. According to Burky Nelson, Director of Student Programming at UCLA, "The LaRouche people tend to be anti-authoritarian and use amplified bullhorns any time of day, disrupting classes and only backing down when we call in actual police."
Nelson has worked at UCLA since 1981, and said that "they've become much more vociferous the past few years." He gave several examples of how students are "aggressively followed and called names" to the point that they sometimes even call upon the campus police for help. Nelson singled out a particularly egregious disruption by a "LaRouchie" at an appearance last March by conservative heavy-hitters William Bennett, former CIA head James Woolsey, and Iraq reconstruction head James Bremer.
"There was an opportunity for the audience to talk, and the person for LaRouche asked a question but refused to get off the microphone and went into a diatribe that went against the principles that the question and answer session was about," said Nelson.
That's putting it mildly, according to UCLA student Robert Burgess, a fifth-year major in classics and history who was the recipient of some first-hand harassment by a "LaRouchie" on the day after the recall. After stopping by the LaRouche table and unwittingly commenting favorably about its nuclear energy pamphlets, the "LaRouchie" recruiter - a male whom I'll call Trucker Shades because of his enormous '70s-style trucker sunglasses - said "thanks" but was unable to contain himself from delivering an anti-Arnold diatribe.
"Did you know that if you'd donated to LaRouche we could have stopped the Nazi man-beast?" asked Trucker Shades, whose table signs also referred to the new governor by the same unflattering term. He apparently was unaware of the previous night's election results having reflected the state electorate's overwhelming desire to turn Gov. Davis out of office and willingness to put Ahnold in.
"He then said 'You know Arnold is a Nazi pig,'" said Burgess moments after he and Trucker Shades' heated verbal exchange nearly erupted into on-campus fisticuffs. "I said I didn't think that was fair because he's never had time to do anything in office, and he just kept repeating himself. He got so into my face I finally recognized him from the Woolsey event, and I remembered he was so full of shit then that people were ready to kick his ass."
When Burgess finally managed to break Trucker Shades' mind-melding force field, the unbowed recruiter immediately set his darkened sights on a group of Latino students, whom he proceeded to debate across several blocks of campus for the next hour before they finally begged him to let them study.
"It's kind of odd, really, because they try to make a lot of noise and draw attention to themselves but then they never seem to even take it far enough to collect information from people to get them to sign up for the group," said Burky Nelson. "I've never seen what happens when you say, 'I believe what you're saying and I want to get involved.'"
Meanwhile, over at Pasadena City College, the PCC Courier newspaper staff learned the hard way 18 months ago about what happens when a college paper dares to question the LaRouche campaign's on-campus recruiting. (The campaign, while cooperative in providing interviews with Schlanger, did not allow us to photograph their recruitment efforts anywhere). A former Courier editor wrote an unfavorable story about the organization, setting off a string of bizarre retributions that - according to current Courier Sports Editor Jaynita Carney - included LaRouche followers bringing a video camera to the Courier office many times and attempting to force staffers to comment on tape about their editor and their opinions about the LaRouche campaign.
"Once a week one of them would come up to visit us, and they would say if we were truly intelligent we would understand what LaRouche was about," said Carney. "[One] day they were talking about building a land bridge - from Russia to Alaska. After we changed editors it kind of died off, other than trying to film us for no apparent reason until we'd call in the campus police."
The now-retired chief of the PCC police, Phil Mullendorf, had plenty of run-ins with the LaRouchies during his 22 years on campus, with an increase in problems "for at least the last 10 years." Like Nelson at UCLA, he notes that as a public campus the school has to allow the LaRouche recruiters on their "haven for free expression of ideas," officials had to be wary for when their "annoying" conduct crossed over the line - and when he did take action, Mullendorf found that the LaRouchies retaliated in their own disturbing way.
"They retaliate in their own newspapers, and bring them on campus. They'll preach to kids not to go to school but to sign up for LaRouche and say that he'll take care of all your needs and in effect brainwash these kids," said Mullendorf. "So when we chased them off, they came out with a headline nationally saying 'Campus Nazis Are Smoked Out at Pasadena City College,' quoting our exchange, which led me to believe they had a little tape recorder going. Then they went online and found stuff like 'Mullendorf is part of the Campus Security Insitute, trying to intimidate me. The LaRouche people published defamatory information and some personal information in their paper," Mullendorf continued. "We got lots of complaints about harassment and intimidation, and [we] arrested one of them - for refusing to leave and trespassing - and when we arrested him we found he was carrying a knife on him."
In the end, the question of how to keep politically curious and committed students within the productive political mainstream rests upon giving them more than, as Michael Moore puts it, "passionate leadership to get behind." It lies in the Democrats or even Republicans or Greens reaching out to provide the same answers that Schlanger claims the LaRouchies find. "Five years ago, young people thought if I get a computer degree I can be a millionaire in 15 years. Now many young people see they have no future. Many in our group see that they're the 'no -future' generation," said Schlanger. "LaRouche says don't be an existentialist, fight for a future not just of money and comfort but [one that] addresses real problems that threaten mankind. That's what's different about this."
Until the other candidates can hit campuses with the same message as convincingly, more bright young minds will find themselves working 15 hour days for not enough money to eat at Denny's.
You've probably seen his followers manning tables on college campuses, outside post offices and on street corners - handing out pamphlets urging voters to oppose the California recall (especially Schwarzenegger's ascendance to power), the electrical deregulation mess in California, or even calling Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney "children of Satan."
No, we're not talking about Howard Dean, John Kerry or even Dennis Kucinich. We're talking about Lyndon LaRouche, the man often derided as a political joke for his perennial presidential campaigns and status as a convicted felon for mail fraud and income tax evasion.
Dean laid claim to having passionate youth followers who signed up by the tens of thousands on the Internet, but they abandoned him when it came time to vote in Iowa and left him yapping like a prairie dog during his post-primary meltdown. But, LaRouche's kids - called the "Youth Movement" by the campaign and "LaRouchies" by detractors - are notorious for marching across campuses nationwide, disrupting classes with bullhorns, impeding the progress of students who try to sidestep their brochures, and working up to 15-hour days for what they consider a "revolution."
It seems odd, but odder still is the fact that the man in charge rarely even makes a campaign stop or public appearance in America, the country he supposedly seeks to lead - preferring to globetrot to conferences overseas or stay on his heavily guarded estate in rural Virginia. Granted, Lyndon LaRouche is 81 years old, but even so. his campaign seems to be classic example of the phrase "running to stand still.
So when there was a noticeable up-tick in activity by his local followers and word leaked out that LaRouche was actually coming to Los Angeles to deliver a body-slamming speech against Schwarzenegger last September 11, the mix of timing and events was worth investigating. At least the old guy was more interesting than the blow-dried personalities offered up by the parties' major candidates.
"We can't just be concerned that people have life and a home, but about their conditions on their way home. How many hours a day do people commute? How many jobs do they commute to? And what does this do to the quality of their family life and their neighborhoods and the fabric of our society?"
If I didn't tell you these words came from Lyndon LaRouche in that September 11 speech, you might think they came from the lips of President Bush in his State of the Union address. Yet while Bush conquers the Middle East in pursuit of oil, LaRouche speaks and writes about ideas like establishing high-speed railways within and between major population centers that can generate millions of jobs in New Deal fashion. Hear the words alone and you might think any other progressive, environmentalist politician - even Al Gore - is talking. In fact, from that end of the spectrum, he sounds downright normal.
The problem is, Lyndon LaRouche doesn't have a normal background at all.
"Lyndon LaRouche comes from a quasi-Quaker, fundamentalist family who were anti-Semitic, and he reacted against his parents by joining the Socialist Workers Party in the 1940s," said Dennis King, author of the 1989 Doubleday book Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism. "He was too smart for that group, so he started his own group in Manhattan around 1968.
"Eventually he turned from a guru into a cult leader, and when the antiwar movement wound down after Vietnam, he saw he could get bigger gate receipts on the right," King continued. "He returned to the views of his parents, though he uses coded anti-Semitism."
King believes that LaRouche's views are fascist, because fascism centers on a cult of personality and can shift politically between aspects of the left and the right. Yet LaRouche's press spokesman and right-hand man for the western United States, Harley Schlanger, is Jewish, -- rendering King's claims of LaRouche's anti-Semitism curious.
"Instead of addressing the ideas that he raises, what people do is attack him. You hear he's an anti-Semite, but we have members of all religions here, and I'm Jewish myself," said Schlanger. "If you oppose the practices of Ariel Sharon, does that make you anti-Semitic? People can't find where they say he attacks the Jews, and they used to say we skinned cats and left them with our enemies, but no one ever showed evidence of a cat or DNA. If people just listened to LaRouche and there was no war, what would that mean? A lot of people who get money out of this war would be out."
So how has the LaRouche organization managed to maintain strength for so long?
"The answer is simple. There's 280 million people in the United States, and every year in every state, fringe candidates get on the ballot, and raise enough signatures to get on the ballot," said Bob Secter, the Illinois Political Editor for the Chicago Tribune. "People don't even realize what they're doing when they sign the ballot petitions."
But King's explanation for why the LaRouche campaign is growing on college campuses is interesting, nonetheless. Believing that the current antiwar movement is rooted in more anti-Semitism than past antiwar movements, because of anger over Israel's treatment of Palestinians, King said LaRouche can appear to "tilt leftward" while actually drawing college kids into his movement for anti-Semitic viewpoints and activities.
"I was told by the editor of 'Chronicle of Higher Education' that LaRouche has 1,000 new college-age recruits nationwide, and 1,000 fully committed young people can cause problems," said King. "He has strong intelligence ties all over the world and visited Iraq back in the 1970s, so it's natural that he would be antiwar now."
LaRouche's notoriously aggressive fundraising has enabled his team to raise more than $5 million nationally and as a result earn more than $800,000 in federal matching funds in 2003. That's a figure bigger than that raised by fellow present and former Democratic presidential candidates Al Sharpton, Carole Moseley Braun, and even Dennis Kucinich. Yet despite these fundraising successes - and landing spots on primary ballots in 13 states and the District of Columbia - so far, he's been kept out of every debate in every election cycle he's ever run in.
"We can't control who wants to call themselves a Democrat or qualify themselves for the ballot," said Tony Welch, spokesman for the Democratic National Committee. "But we're not obligated to turn the stage over to everyone who comes along."
The official reason the Democratic National Committee is eager to keep him out of debates is that LaRouche was sentenced in 1989 to 15 years in prison for mail fraud conspiracy. He and his organization were convicted on illegal and manipulative fund-raising practices, and he was released in 1994.
But it's his outrageous comments that draw the hearts and minds of young people like the two guys who drove me to LaRouche's speech, whose identities I will protect for fear that their comments might earn them retribution from within the organization.
"Nobody else [other campaigns] ever asked us to join them. Have they tried?" asked Tony. "Nobody says 'Bush is a bipolar idiot controlled like a puppet, help me stop him.'"
"The so-called leading nine candidates don't know how to fight his fascist nature," added Marco. "They're not qualified to take risks."
Those kinds of impassioned sentiments worry people like Oscar-winning author/filmmaker Michael Moore, who noticed the LaRouche movement's presence during the tour for his book "Dude, Where's My Country?" in October.
"It does seem that there's something going on here in California with LaRouche more than anywhere else I've traveled," said Moore, when asked about the campaign. "I think it shows that there's young people really hungry for leadership alternatives, and the traditional Democratic candidates are leaving them with a vacuum of passionate leadership to get behind."
My entrée into the world of the LaRouche campaign was a college student named Wesley, who had come down from Seattle to help in the anti-recall drive. He was manning a table outside the Borders bookstore in Glendale on September 4th.
Wesley was young, clean-cut, and seemed sane, so I stopped. .And when I told him I was a reporter and curious enough to give the LaRouchies a chance to tell their side of the story, he told me that LaRouche was having a top-secret campaign rally for his L.A. supporters on September 11, and I could be in on the otherwise-private affair.
Seven nights later, I was off to a ballroom at the Burbank Hilton. My escorts seemed like fairly normal guys, college-age chaps who dressed in normal college-age clothes and had boisterous college-style laughs and senses of humor.
Arriving at the hotel, the idea that this would be a lily-white gathering of racists was rendered absurd by the crowd of 500 who were easily the most diverse group of people I'd ever seen at a political gathering. And anyone who needed Spanish translation of the night's proceedings was provided with headphones that gave an instant live feed from an interpreter.
Suddenly a door at the front of the hall opened and an old guy came barreling in faster than a speeding bullet to the stage. There was no announced intro, but the entire crowd was on their feet as one, in a standing ovation. Lyndon LaRouche was in the building. But instead of talking right away, he took a seat as a young Latino student introduced a student chorus from a LaRouche-funded school called the Schiller Institute. They took the stage and sang "O Freedom," a Negro spiritual that was described as "the theme song of the LaRouche Movement on the West Coast." The tune was an old slave song about deliverance to the Lord after death - not the most optimistic view I've ever heard from a campaign. Or the most pertinent. Or frankly, youthful. Then again, LaRouche is 81.
Finally, it was time for the main man to speak, and he was certainly colorful.
Wonder what he thinks of this Bush? "The dumbest man in America was seated as President." How about Cheney? "Cheney and his ilk are man-beasts and Satans. Cheney is an intrinsically evil person. If he were more intelligent, he would be Satanic. But he is only a thug for Satan."
In more practical, current terms, LaRouche and his people had proven their stripes to the Democratic cause by printing up and distributing 500,000 copies of a magazine entitled "Who Robbed California?" which purported to tell the story of the energy deregulation disaster in California and their claim that Schwarzenegger's rise was part of a conspiracy tied into that. . Things were fairly routine until Hollywood liberal legend Ed Asner walked into the room and sat down in front of me. It was my turn to pounce, and Ed's turn to look stunned.
"I just [came] because I had heard contradicting rumors of him and had dismissed him because of it, but I found him very enjoyable," said Asner. "Everything I've heard from him is in the progressive agenda that I entertain.
"All too often Democrats play go-along to get-along, and LaRouche shows that it's more than the head of the pimple that's gotta be squeezed," Asner continued. "I support Kucinich really, and I can't make a judgment on the time LaRouche spent [in jail] because he will not be the first person to be placed there and silenced that way in America. I am certainly aware that he is controversial, but in this case, that attracts me because I tend to be seen as controversial in the same way."
LaRouche ran out the door of the Burbank Hilton as quickly as he had come in, after leaving his followers with this directive: "Have fun!" True to his command, the fun was just beginning.
It was 11:30 p.m. and I was starving, but more than that, I was eager to get my young LaRouchie hosts to hang out in a normal, outside-the-campaign setting. They already said they were tired, so my goal was to keep them up 'til 2 or 3 a.m. and see if I could get them to dish out some answers to tough questions.
But I should have known we were headed for trouble when they said they needed to find a gas station "right away." Pasadena was only 15 or 20 minutes away, I figured, how bad could it be? The only time I'd ever seen someone run out of gas was in a movie.
But two blocks later, it happened to us. Boom, out. All she wrote. No gas station in sight. And I was the only one with a AAA card. I wound up having to pay for the $5 in gas the tow-truck guy provided. So not only did these "campaign workers" not have enough cash to keep their gas tank above "E" while escorting a reporter at midnight, they didn't have the money to pay the guy who was saving their ass. The AAA man looked at our "LaRouche in '04" badges, tried not to snicker, and headed into the night.
I was determined to get my secrets. However, more importantly, I wanted to get breakfast. Denny's awaited.
Hours later, we finally pulled into Denny's, and as the LaRouchies devoured their meals, the conversation turned a little more casual and a lot more revealing. They were stressing out about getting home and asleep because they had to be up for work the next morning, but I asked if driving a reporter around counted as racking up some hours on the job. Marco, said they might get to sleep in for an hour, meaning they could get started at 8:30 instead of the usual 7:30 a.m.
"7:30?!" I spat out. "So what time do you finish? 3:30 or 4 p.m.?"
"No!" they laughed, like the 8-hour workday was the silliest concept in the world.
"We work until 10 usually," said Tony.
But if you thought they'd be done after a grueling 15 hour work day, you'd be wrong.
"We teach each other classes in history or science or other topics 'til midnight most nights," said Marco. "Then we go to bed and start over the next day."
I asked them how they have time to have normal lives, how their schedules possibly jive with Lyndon's own speech about the social fabric and being able to have a balanced life with family. That they seemed like hip, young, good-looking guys who could do well with the ladies and aren't they missing out? I had heard that one big motive of the current recruiting wave was because the members weren't allowed to date and marry, and the original members had grown old or drifted off and the movement needed to recruit fresh blood just to keep going.
Tony's voice started to tremble with feeling.
"If you knew you had the chance to change the world, really make a difference, would any of the rest of that, anything else, matter to you, or wouldn't it seem silly and trivial?" he asked.
"Sure," I said. "But come on, I like some of what he has to say, but Lyndon is 81 and has been running for president for 27 years. I don't mean to be mean, but you have to know that he can't win."
He was silent for a moment. Then he leaned forward and pounded his arm on the table.
"OK, it's not about winning the presidency!" he nearly shouted. "It's about a revolution!" Thankfully, it was now approaching 3 a.m. and people expected odd behavior in Denny's.
"Like violent?!" I was freaking now.
"No, it's about turning society back to true culture - Renaissance culture. That's why we learn to sing chorale music when we join, and have reading days on the classics, and teach each other classes," said Marco.
"Popular culture is disposable, and wasteful and will die out. The classics will not. If it takes us 500 years, it doesn't matter. We will win!" said Tony, his fury back and his forearm pounding the table again. "We're revolutionaries!"
They may have been revolutionaries, but they weren't particularly well-funded ones. Even Marco revealed that he was broke and had to stiff me on the Last Meal Surprise at Denny's. Denny's is dirt-cheap, but I walked out the door footing a $45 bill.
So how does the campaign convince such bright young minds to get involved so thoroughly? First off, they play to the vanity of passersby.
"They convince you of your intellectual superiority," recalled one former follower from LaRouche's early-70s Manhattan era. "They tell you you know more than Einstein."
But if you ignore LaRouche recruiters, say officials at both UCLA and Pasadena City College, their efforts can get progressively more forceful. According to Burky Nelson, Director of Student Programming at UCLA, "The LaRouche people tend to be anti-authoritarian and use amplified bullhorns any time of day, disrupting classes and only backing down when we call in actual police."
Nelson has worked at UCLA since 1981, and said that "they've become much more vociferous the past few years." He gave several examples of how students are "aggressively followed and called names" to the point that they sometimes even call upon the campus police for help. Nelson singled out a particularly egregious disruption by a "LaRouchie" at an appearance last March by conservative heavy-hitters William Bennett, former CIA head James Woolsey, and Iraq reconstruction head James Bremer.
"There was an opportunity for the audience to talk, and the person for LaRouche asked a question but refused to get off the microphone and went into a diatribe that went against the principles that the question and answer session was about," said Nelson.
That's putting it mildly, according to UCLA student Robert Burgess, a fifth-year major in classics and history who was the recipient of some first-hand harassment by a "LaRouchie" on the day after the recall. After stopping by the LaRouche table and unwittingly commenting favorably about its nuclear energy pamphlets, the "LaRouchie" recruiter - a male whom I'll call Trucker Shades because of his enormous '70s-style trucker sunglasses - said "thanks" but was unable to contain himself from delivering an anti-Arnold diatribe.
"Did you know that if you'd donated to LaRouche we could have stopped the Nazi man-beast?" asked Trucker Shades, whose table signs also referred to the new governor by the same unflattering term. He apparently was unaware of the previous night's election results having reflected the state electorate's overwhelming desire to turn Gov. Davis out of office and willingness to put Ahnold in.
"He then said 'You know Arnold is a Nazi pig,'" said Burgess moments after he and Trucker Shades' heated verbal exchange nearly erupted into on-campus fisticuffs. "I said I didn't think that was fair because he's never had time to do anything in office, and he just kept repeating himself. He got so into my face I finally recognized him from the Woolsey event, and I remembered he was so full of shit then that people were ready to kick his ass."
When Burgess finally managed to break Trucker Shades' mind-melding force field, the unbowed recruiter immediately set his darkened sights on a group of Latino students, whom he proceeded to debate across several blocks of campus for the next hour before they finally begged him to let them study.
"It's kind of odd, really, because they try to make a lot of noise and draw attention to themselves but then they never seem to even take it far enough to collect information from people to get them to sign up for the group," said Burky Nelson. "I've never seen what happens when you say, 'I believe what you're saying and I want to get involved.'"
Meanwhile, over at Pasadena City College, the PCC Courier newspaper staff learned the hard way 18 months ago about what happens when a college paper dares to question the LaRouche campaign's on-campus recruiting. (The campaign, while cooperative in providing interviews with Schlanger, did not allow us to photograph their recruitment efforts anywhere). A former Courier editor wrote an unfavorable story about the organization, setting off a string of bizarre retributions that - according to current Courier Sports Editor Jaynita Carney - included LaRouche followers bringing a video camera to the Courier office many times and attempting to force staffers to comment on tape about their editor and their opinions about the LaRouche campaign.
"Once a week one of them would come up to visit us, and they would say if we were truly intelligent we would understand what LaRouche was about," said Carney. "[One] day they were talking about building a land bridge - from Russia to Alaska. After we changed editors it kind of died off, other than trying to film us for no apparent reason until we'd call in the campus police."
The now-retired chief of the PCC police, Phil Mullendorf, had plenty of run-ins with the LaRouchies during his 22 years on campus, with an increase in problems "for at least the last 10 years." Like Nelson at UCLA, he notes that as a public campus the school has to allow the LaRouche recruiters on their "haven for free expression of ideas," officials had to be wary for when their "annoying" conduct crossed over the line - and when he did take action, Mullendorf found that the LaRouchies retaliated in their own disturbing way.
"They retaliate in their own newspapers, and bring them on campus. They'll preach to kids not to go to school but to sign up for LaRouche and say that he'll take care of all your needs and in effect brainwash these kids," said Mullendorf. "So when we chased them off, they came out with a headline nationally saying 'Campus Nazis Are Smoked Out at Pasadena City College,' quoting our exchange, which led me to believe they had a little tape recorder going. Then they went online and found stuff like 'Mullendorf is part of the Campus Security Insitute, trying to intimidate me. The LaRouche people published defamatory information and some personal information in their paper," Mullendorf continued. "We got lots of complaints about harassment and intimidation, and [we] arrested one of them - for refusing to leave and trespassing - and when we arrested him we found he was carrying a knife on him."
In the end, the question of how to keep politically curious and committed students within the productive political mainstream rests upon giving them more than, as Michael Moore puts it, "passionate leadership to get behind." It lies in the Democrats or even Republicans or Greens reaching out to provide the same answers that Schlanger claims the LaRouchies find. "Five years ago, young people thought if I get a computer degree I can be a millionaire in 15 years. Now many young people see they have no future. Many in our group see that they're the 'no -future' generation," said Schlanger. "LaRouche says don't be an existentialist, fight for a future not just of money and comfort but [one that] addresses real problems that threaten mankind. That's what's different about this."
Until the other candidates can hit campuses with the same message as convincingly, more bright young minds will find themselves working 15 hour days for not enough money to eat at Denny's.
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