Inside Scientology (52 page)

Overjoyed, Stefan urged Tanja to communicate with him by voice mail and text message, methods he knew would be hard to trace. Through these furtive exchanges, Tanja learned about her husband's new life. He was making over $100,000 per year as a production designer. He had a house in the San Fernando Valley and a car. Were she to join him, they could have children, he promised her. Finally, after several weeks, Stefan convinced his wife to risk escape.

On August 5, 2006, Tanja took a ladder and walked toward the wall near the Castle, the only spot on the base not surrounded by an electric fence. It was just after midnight. Outside the wall, Stefan sat in his dark blue Mustang, waiting. His friend John, in a separate vehicle, drove down the road to an area where it was possible to pull onto the base. This, they knew, would alert the security guard, who would immediately go to investigate, at which point Tanja would jump over the wall. Even if she happened to trip the wire at the top, setting off an alarm, she would still have at least two minutes to run.

Stefan had painstakingly organized the plan. He and John stayed on the phone as John parked on the base. A few minutes later, a roving security guard walked toward his car. John hung up—the agreed-upon signal. Then Stefan called Tanja. "Go baby, go!" he said. "Now!"

"I'm going!" Tanja said, and taking a deep breath, jumped over the wall into the darkness. She saw her husband's waiting car and ran toward it. Then, with no one behind them, they sped off down Highway 79, out of the dust-choked San Jacinto Valley, and toward Los Angeles, and freedom, unleashed from the bonds of Int, David Miscavige, the Sea Organization, and the Church of Scientology.

The Scientologists who have left the church since the mid-2000s, a group from all strata of the organization, form part of what some have called the Second Great Exodus. There is a significant difference between this generation and those who were part of the exodus of the 1980s, largely thanks to the Internet, which has enabled former members, both Sea Org and public, to find one another and unite over their shared experience. "You don't tend to blame yourself when you see that others went through the same thing," commented Jeff Hawkins, who has become an outspoken critic of Scientology's current management. "It's made for a strong, well-informed, and coordinated group of ex-members, which the church has never had to face before."

Hawkins has helped this group develop, writing about his personal experiences in a memoir and blog, called Counterfeit Dreams, and creating a second website, Leaving Scientology, intended to help current, as well as former, Scientologists see beyond the church's hyperbolic speeches and marketing strategies. He advised his readers to look at their local org. "How many people are in the org? Are there more people in the org than there were ten years ago? Twenty years ago? Or are there less? What about events? Are there many more people now at events than there were ten years ago? You would think that if Scientology had been experiencing 'unprecedented expansion' for the last 10 years"—as the church often claims—"they would need bigger and bigger event venues. But the LA Events are still at the Shrine, as they were 20 years ago. And they have trouble filling that. So
where
is this expansion?"

One answer is Scientology's real estate portfolio. Since the early 2000s, Scientology has been running what former church executives say is a very profitable building and renovation scheme called the Ideal Org program. Indeed, according to numerous reports from within and outside of the church, real estate may now be Scientology's principle cash cow.

A comparable model for the Ideal Org program would be one used by another franchise-based operation, McDonald's, which is also one of the most successful real estate corporations in the country. McDonald's earns most of its income not from the sale of Big Macs, but from the money its franchise owners pay in rent on their properties. Scientology too has used this formula, assigning a special division of church management, the International Landlord Office, to purchase choice buildings around the world, often through third-party corporations, and paying for them in cash, with IAS money raised from Scientology's parishioners.

In some cases, these buildings have reportedly been leased to the local orgs, which are expected to raise the money for rent, and for renovations, from their congregation. This buys the Church of Scientology, as a business enterprise, significant autonomy. No longer is the church dependent on services—sales of auditing and course packages—for income; the onus is now on the local organizations to succeed, and if they don't, the Church of Scientology, whose investment in the Ideal Org was minimal, is none the poorer.

The New York Org, which I visited in 2005, was one of the original Ideal Orgs. As the Church of Scientology already owned the West 46th Street property, it did not need to purchase a new building, but the church nonetheless spent $18 million on renovating the structure, installing skylights, building a full-service spa for its Purification Rundown program, redoing the ornate lobby, and adding other plush features. Tom De Vocht, who'd run similar building projects in Florida, was tasked with overseeing the renovations, which, he said, were far from complete as the grand opening ceremony, slated for September 25, 2004, approached. To address the problem, some four hundred Sea Org members descended upon midtown Manhattan the day before the ribbon cutting, to finish the cosmetic renovations.

After the ceremony, said De Vocht, many of the refurbishings had to be redone, having failed to meet certain building codes, which drove the local organization only further into debt. "It was a disaster. The org already owed $1.8 million to contractors who were banging on the door every day, saying, 'Where the hell's my money?' They had not paid the building off as yet, and so they were regging the public like crazy. But hey, on the face of things, it looked like a beautiful new organization." (In Scientology parlance,
regging
means "soliciting money from members.")

The theory behind the Ideal Org program is "If you build it, they will come." By most accounts, however, it hasn't worked out that way. Montreal, for example, has always had a small congregation and roughly fifteen people on staff. Yet the Church of Scientology recently decided to open an Ideal Org there. Members were convinced to donate $4 million to purchase the building and then another $4 million to renovate it. While the membership was pressured for the money, sometimes holding all-night fundraising sessions, the new building sat empty, and the original organization struggled with debt, because the parishioners had spent all their money on the building and thus could no longer afford to pay for services.

But it is likely that this problem did not affect the Church of Scientology as a corporate entity. "As a money-making scheme, the Ideal Org plan is pretty good," said Mat Pesch, a former Sea Org official who was an executive in the International Landlord Office. Though he lacks current financial data, which remain confidential (Pesch left Scientology in 2005), he said, "What I would expect to find based on the indicators and data that I have is that cash and real estate are growing by leaps and bounds. On the other hand, the staff and public and structure of the church, other than real estate, are breaking down ... even the best PR will not be able to cover it up or slow it down."

In the summer of 2010, Mike Rinder conducted an online survey of former Scientologists to find out what had motivated them to leave the church. Of the hundreds of respondents, most cited the unremitting pressure, sometimes called "crush regging," to donate to various Scientology causes, like the Ideal Org program. Rinder dubbed it the "vulture culture."

Mike and Donna Henderson, onetime Scientologists from Clearwater, were victims of this culture. OT 7 and OT 8 respectively, they were nearly bankrupted by their involvement with the church. Today they are two of a growing number of ex-Scientologists who predict that in these dark economic times, Scientology's "unvarnished demand for money," as Mike puts it, may lead to its demise.

Mike joined the Church of Scientology in 1971, as a nineteen-year-old in Los Angeles. By 1973, he'd signed a billion-year contract with the Sea Organization and was sailing with L. Ron Hubbard aboard the
Apollo.
When Hubbard moved onshore, Mike, eager to strike out on his own, went through the appropriate steps to leave the Sea Org. He moved back to L.A. and became a public Scientologist, ultimate reaching the very top of the Bridge to Total Freedom, as did Donna, his second wife, whom he married in 2003.

Along the way, Mike contributed to a wide range of causes and programs, ranging from the Golden Age of Tech to the release of a sophisticated new E-meter. To further Scientology's "planetary dissemination," he and Donna bought extra copies of
Dianetics
and other books by Hubbard to send to libraries all over the world. They helped fund a project to translate the Founder's writing and lectures into languages spoken by relatively few people, such as Lithuanian. To preserve Hubbard's technology for eternity, the couple gave money to the Church of Spiritual Technology, a special entity that has spent the past twenty years preparing and storing all of the Founder's handwritten notes, policy letters, and science fiction in secret, underground vaults spread across three remote locations in California, as well as one near Trementina, New Mexico. The Hendersons also regularly took cruises, costing $10,000 to $20,000, aboard
Freedwinds,
and they gave generously to groups such as Narconon, Applied Scholastics, and the Citizens Commission on Human Rights; they were listed in church publications as patrons of the International Association of Scientologists, signifying they had contributed at least $50,000 to the church's legal war chest.

Joining the IAS was not optional. Every Scientologist must be a member, though when people first become interested in Scientology they are offered a free six-month membership. After that, members are prohibited from taking further Scientology services until they buy either a yearly or a lifetime membership. A yearly membership costs $300 and a lifetime membership costs $3,000. "The thing is, you are pretty much expected to become a lifetime member, and they hit you up for money all the time," Mike said during an interview in Clearwater in 2010. "Every few months, or weeks, there's some kind of event that they get you to go to, and then ask you for this and that. And eventually, you wind up being an IAS sponsor, which is $5,000, and then you get up to where you've paid $40,000 or $50,000, and now you're a patron."

During his thirty-four years as a member of the Church of Scientology, Mike, who once ran a profitable contracting business, estimated he "donated" roughly $600,000. Donna, a veterinarian, was a member for just ten years but spent well over $1 million in that time. The Hendersons also claimed over $100,000 in tax deductions in the decade or so after donations to the Church of Scientology became tax-exempt, though as with most parishioners, the money they saved was plowed back into the church.

"The money that keeps this church going comes from professionals like my wife," Mike explained. "People think it's the celebrities"—the actress Nancy Cartwright, the voice of
The Simpsons
' Bart Simpson, for example, donated $10 million to the IAS in 2007
—"but a big, big part of Scientology has nothing to do with celebrities; it has to do with dentists, vets, chiropractors, podiatrists, accountants, professional people who have six-figure incomes and who can afford to drop everything, come to Flag twice a year, and spend some serious money because it won't make a dent in their life."

Ultimately, however, even Scientology's wealthiest benefactors have found themselves running out of money, as the Hendersons did in 2005. By then Mike, whose business had suffered a downturn, had committed so much money to the Church of Scientology that he was reduced to borrowing from his elderly divorced mother to recompense Flag for past debts. Donna was in such bad financial straits that she sold her thriving veterinary practice to help pay off some of what she owed. Left with no work and little choice, but still loyal to Scientology, the couple made what to them seemed the logical decision at the time: they joined the Sea Organization to defray costs.

But rather than indoctrinate them more deeply, Donna Henderson, a plainspoken woman, said the Sea Org experience served to "wake us up." Public members, and notably those who've paid enough to become Operating Thetans, are assiduously kept in the dark about how the Sea Org, and the overall church hierarchy, actually functions. "You truly have no idea that things are as bad as they are within the organization," said Donna. "But once you're in, it's like the curtain just drops, and all of a sudden there's absolutely no pretense. You're not there to save the planet, you're not there to help anybody—you're there to get money from people. And you don't have money anymore, so you're a slave."

Four months after joining the Sea Org, in July 2005, the Hendersons packed their belongings in a Ryder truck and drove away. They refused to submit to the coercive exit interview process, known as "routing out," by which disgruntled staffers are often (albeit after days or weeks of pressure) convinced to stay. They thus became SPs. Shortly afterward, Mike's sisters, brother, nieces, nephews, his children, and his ex-wife—roughly thirty-five people in all
^*
—disconnected from him. So did many of his business associates, and almost all of the couple's friends.

Today the Hendersons live alongside the water in a quiet middle-class neighborhood of St. Petersburg, just south of Clearwater. Slowly, they have rebuilt their lives: Mike has worked odd jobs and currently sells furniture; Donna opened a new veterinary practice. They have become vocal critics of the church and its administration, and their fear of harassment is palpable. Their ranch-style home is a fortress not unlike a Scientology org, Mike said with a laugh. "We have a twenty-four-hour alarm system, plus fire protection, glass-break protection, forced-entry and burglar protection, and security lights around the house, with motion detectors."