Ruthless (19 page)

Greg saw that I still needed convincing. “Look,” he argued, “if you come back, you can go to Flag. You can have your own apartment. There's cooking facilities. You can work whatever hours you want. And maybe, if you want, you can teach these young kids to sell. And you can play with the musicians if you want. And then, if you don't like that, you can do what you just did and leave again.”

“Greg, I am not going back.” I don't doubt for a second that the message he delivered came from Dave because of the words, “You don't have any idea what you're doing to me.” What
I
was doing to
him?
Only one person in the world would have the balls to say that: my son David.

“Let us take you out to dinner. There's a real nice place we found and after we can go to a movie.”

These schmucks actually had the nerve to think they were going to schmooze me into going back with dinner and a movie. They must have thought we were dating.

What the hell was this? These people were from outer space. They think that they can come to somebody who had to escape to get away from that life and that the person is now going to say, “Gee, guys, I'm sorry. Of course I'll come back.” How much more wrong could they have been about a person like me? They seriously miscalculated if they thought they could flatter me into going back or that I would act contrite and say, “Aw, shucks, I'm sorry, guys. All right, we'll come back. We'll face the music.”

That was the end of it. They were staying in a motel on the other side of town and getting around in a rented Jeep. They called every day. I never answered their calls. They must have called for a month.

Meanwhile, Denise and Lori and I had been talking frequently. It was like old times with them. They were glad to be back in touch and so was I. Denise even offered us the use of her husband's boat, a yacht that was moored at a marina in Clearwater. She said we'd be safe there. Denise had also been talking to Ronnie and had given him my phone number. I had no idea where Ronnie was living and no way of contacting him because he had left Scientology years before, in 2000. One day he called me out of the blue. It was a pleasant surprise.

“Ronnie! How are you doing? How did you get my number?”

“You buy vitamins from VitaCost, right? Well, they sent me one of your invoices thinking I was you, and it had your number on it.”

I did not know at the time that Denise had given him my number. Both of us are named Ronald Miscavige. Ronnie buys supplements from VitaCost as well. Of course, it is completely illogical that they would send the invoice of someone living in California (where I had been ordering before we escaped) to someone living in Virginia, even with the same name, but I was so happy to speak to Ronnie that the point slipped past me. The VitaCost tale was what we called a shore story in the Sea Org, in other words, a lie. When I was talking to Denise later, I said, “Guess what? Ronnie called me!”

“Oh, really,” she said, pretending she didn't know anything about it. “Wow, that's great, Dad. Now Ronnie's is a place where you should go. I'm sure he'll take care of you. He built a house. It has a guest room in case you ever came by.” She talked me into going to Ronnie's house in Virginia.

The next time Ronnie called, he invited us to come down for a visit. A little while later, Becky and I flew down, and we stayed with Ronnie and his wife, Bitty, for a week and had a great time.

When we got back to Whitewater, I called the motel where Greg and Marion were staying. I asked to speak with Greg Wilhere and was told that they had checked out the day after Becky and I flew down to Virginia. The church has ways of tracking people when they fly, and that is how they knew we had gone to Virginia. They had stayed in Wisconsin for a month after I had told them we would never go back and even though I never took a single one of their calls. Why did they stay? Simple: they did not want to return and tell COB, “We couldn't get them back.” You can be sure they were both in a world of hurt after they limped back onto the base.

That August, Becky and I drove down to Virginia, stopping in Indiana to visit Becky's dad and my old hometown of Mount Carmel on the way. We stayed with Ronnie for nearly a year. Becky got a job, and I sold
Exer-Genies
and began looking around for gigs as a musician. I also started reading the Internet and began finding out stuff about L. Ron Hubbard that I had never known, such as his war record, his previous marriages and so on. I got in touch with other people I knew from the base who also had left. One was Hubbard's granddaughter Roanne Horwich, who left after I did. When we spoke, she said she had been planning to blow that same Sunday as well but couldn't because we got out first. She felt she had to make sure there was not some general concern with people escaping, so she waited a month before driving out the gate.

I began contacting other people from the base who had left: Marc Headley, Steve Hall, Joe Caneen and a really good friend, Fernando Gamboa, the longtime drummer for the Gold musicians. As I talked to them and read more on the Internet, I began to see how I had been duped. L. Ron Hubbard was not the heavenly soul the church made him out to be. Not even close. Despite his many obvious warts, however, he did codify a lot of things that he learned from other people and advanced their theories with discoveries of his own. That may be hard to fathom for anyone who has read news stories about Scientology and Hubbard. I don't doubt that Hubbard read and learned from Aleister Crowley, the British occultist and writer, or that he and Jack Parsons were dabbling in black magic and planning to create a moonchild (a perfect soul, captured through black magic rituals). I don't doubt that Hubbard was a con man. But I believe that each of us is capable of engaging in negative or positive behavior. Whichever you choose is your decision as an individual. Your experiential track will lead you to adopt certain moral codes or develop a conscience, or whatever you want to call it, and that will deter you from acting out certain behaviors. A person can choose to live a fruitful, productive life helping people, and I firmly believe that you get the most benefit out of life that way. If you begin doing evil stuff, it is going to come back to you somehow.

If there is one point where I think Scientology falls down it is this: Hubbard stated time and time again that Scientology was a scientific approach to the mind and life. He wrote that Scientology was the meeting ground between science and religion. The very large problem with that is that science progresses in a precise way. Someone advances a theory and tests it out. Other scientists replicate the experiments that validate or invalidate the original theory. Others weigh in on the subject. Other ideas are tossed around, some good, some not so good. Advances come from that process. That's science. When someone asserts, “This is the way it is, period,” that is not science. That is authoritarianism and it quickly becomes a cult, which is what Scientology is today.

Ever since Hubbard's death in 1986, Scientology has stopped progressing and even fossilized. That isn't science, if indeed it ever was.

At any rate, down in Virginia, Becky and I got along great with Ronnie and Bitty, and life was good. But Ronnie's daughter, Jenna, and grandkids were out in San Diego. Bitty had been spending a lot of time there, and, I wondered, what if he decides to move out there with them? He was going out to visit all the time, so I finally told Ronnie that we were going to move back to Wisconsin. We had been in Virginia for nearly a year, but it was time to settle down near Becky's mother and her relatives, a situation that would be more supportive than our going it alone in Virginia. I like the weather in Wisconsin
better—I
like the seasons and the cold up there. Having grown up in Pennsylvania, I came to enjoy it.

Becky got a job with the same chain as an assistant store manager in Wisconsin. In June 2013, we moved back in with her mother and began looking for a house. And that deserves a chapter of its own.

Nineteen

A Final Gesture

Being the father of the leader of Scientology is a sword that cuts both ways. I've already written about some of the advantages that came with that relationship. On my birthday, Dave would send me a really nice meal from a good LA restaurant, a full meal like an Italian dinner, with a basket of salamis to accompany the spread, and Becky and I could enjoy the dinner as long as we wanted that evening. We were excused from the evening muster. He never called, but he always sent a nice meal. Some of the crew were jealous of the gesture, and I could sense it as they scurried out of the dining room to roll call.

Also, that personal communication channel was open most of the time if I needed or wanted it. Sometimes we would run into each other when he was on the base and just chat for 15 minutes or so.

For my seventieth birthday, Tom Cruise sent me an enormous
blown-glass
vase, literally the size of an aquarium (in fact, it was later used as such), and it was full of flowers. Along with that he sent me a very nice Harman/Kardon sound system that I still use. One Christmas, John Travolta sent me DVDs of all his movies. Another time, Tom gave me a coffee table book on jazz that must have weighed 20 pounds.

Whatever perks I gained from my relationship with David came at a price, however. The security guards, for example, went out of their way to prove that I was not going to receive any special treatment. On Sunday mornings, we had cleaning time, and that afternoon security guards inspected everybody's rooms. They complained that Becky and I had the
worst-looking
room they had ever inspected. Why? Because we had a bunch of family photos on the shelves. I had been in other people's rooms and the guards' assertion was simply not true. One security guard actually said that he was repulsed when he went into our room. We were made to go look at his room, and there was not a single personal item anywhere. Not one photo, not a single book, nothing. Just bare furniture. That was supposed to be a model room, neat as a pin. All it proved to me is that he did not own anything.

If I parked my car next to the motor pool in a space where the mechanics wanted to put a car, the reaction I got was, “What the #!@& are you doing? Get your car the %!#!* out of here!” If someone else did the same thing it was, “Tsk, tsk, that's a
no-no
.”

I think that people sometimes went out of their way to show me that they were not intimidated because I was COB's
father—they
were going to let me have it. The truth probably is that they were taking out on me what they wished they could do to COB.

I left all that behind when we escaped in March 2012. Some time later, during the time we were in Virginia, I decided to write Dave a letter. I wanted to let him know why we escaped. “If you are wondering why I left,” I began and proceeded to explain the different issues that had led up to my decision: working every day week after week, month after month, without getting anything approved; literally begging him to get me another job so I could produce something of value; not being able to make phone calls without someone listening in; having my mail opened; not being able to go to a store; not having a day off; and so on. That letter was sent back by Marion Pouw, and I was told that David had not seen it because it was “antagonistic.”

Later, I wrote another letter saying that because of my years in the Sea Org, I had not been paying much into Social Security and that I would like some financial help. This time he answered and sent me $100,000 so I could buy a house.

Loretta had died in 2005 from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. She had been on life support for some time, and my daughters finally made the decision to take her off. From a Scientologist's perspective,
Loretta—the
being, the individual, the
spirit—was
either ready to leave her body or had already left, and only a physical shell was being kept alive. For what? It was time to allow her to move on. Her estate was divided among our children, and Dave gave me his share of the inheritance.

It is fair to ask how I reconcile this act of generosity with behaviors that most definitely qualify as selfish and corrupt to the
core—the
harm that Sea Org members, public Scientologists, the international Scientology network, the subjects of Dianetics and Scientology, as well as the legacy of L. Ron Hubbard himself have suffered under David's abusive
leadership—these
things are all well documented in a growing public record of news reports, documentaries and the accounts of former Scientologists. I wonder what in my letter reached him as he sat alone in his office, perhaps reading it in a quiet moment. I can't say for certain that it was the
father-son
bond we formed as he was growing
up—the
comical things we did together, the bench presses I made him do in the garage on winter evenings to stave off another asthma attack, our shared suffering as fans of the Eagles and Phillies. Maybe there still existed in him a tiny flame of humanity, of compassion. Or, to take a harder look, maybe the check was a public relations move, an investment to shut me up and make me go away, to hedge his bets against the possibility of a tabloid headline. I'd like to believe it was a spark of humanity, but after living under his leadership for almost 27 years in the Sea Org, I have doubts.

Regardless, we used that money to buy a house. Becky had gotten a good job in Milwaukee, but living in Whitewater meant nearly an hour's commute each way. We wanted to be closer to her work, so we looked for houses in West Allis, a Milwaukee suburb. We found a place that was perfect for us, cozy with a nice yard and a basement that I could use for my music. We bought the place in August 2013, and that was when the fun began and why I am telling my story.

Twenty

“If He Dies, He Dies. Don't Intervene.”

We made plans to move into our new house. Becky would have nearly two more hours in her day. I would continue selling
Exer-Genies
, but initially I would spend much of my time scouring secondhand shops and garage sales for everything we needed. After more than a year of living with Becky's mom and Ronnie, we were looking forward to settling down in a place of our own.

There were some other houses for sale in the neighborhood; one was in sight of ours, in fact. One day a neighbor spotted a man walking back and forth in the area while talking on his cell phone. She watched him for a while as he paced up and down the street. One thing I like about Wisconsin is that people here look out for each other. She grew suspicious, then picked up her phone and reported a prowler. Soon afterward, an officer in a patrol car saw a man peering through the glass in the door of a house for sale.

The officer approached the man and asked him what he was doing; he replied that he was just looking at houses. He refused to identify himself, which didn't sit too well with the officer. One thing led to another, and the officer, now joined by a detective who had also responded to the neighbor's call, arrested the man. They searched his car, which had been left with its motor running around the corner and alongside our new house. Now I ask you: Who leaves his motor running and walks around the corner to go snooping? Inside his car the officers found, among other things, a fake driver's license, seven license plates from five different states, a GPS tracking device, portable cell phone blockers, laptops, cameras, a stun gun, several handguns and rifles, ammunition, and, oh yes, a
30-inch
-long
homemade silencer.

Down at the station house, the man identified himself as Dwayne Powell, a private investigator from Florida. He said he had been following me for a year and a half and that his son Daniel had been working with him for the past year. David's gift of $100,000 so I could buy a house looks kind of cheap in light of the fact the church paid these two clowns way more than $500,000 to spy on me for more than a year and on an ongoing basis report back anything and everything I did between 8:00 a.m. and 8:00 p.m. To me, it is impossible to conclude that anyone besides David was behind the entire affair.

Dwayne was snooping around the house that day because of its
location—our
house was within sight. If Dwayne bought it, apparently being able to spy on me from an upstairs window would make his job a lot easier. He told the police that his job and his son's was to dig up dirt on me.

Meanwhile, Daniel Powell was unaware of his father's encounter with the police, but he finally learned that Dwayne had been arrested and went to the station, where Daniel, too, spoke to the police. Father and son independently said that they had been hired by the Church of Scientology through another private investigation firm and that their main client was David Miscavige. Dwayne said that an intermediary was paying them $10,000 a week on behalf of the church.

Asked what he considered his and Dwayne's job to be, Daniel said, “We dig up dirt on this guy to make sure he can't do anything to hurt the church.” As Daniel told it, the Powells wrote reports every day about what they had done; they sent these reports to “the client,” who documented the reports. The PIs did not know what happened to the information after that.

They were especially on the lookout for anything I might say that denigrated David. David evidently did not want “the target,” as they referred to me, talking to other people who had left the church and who might be saying bad things about him or the church. Furthermore, Daniel told the police that the church has a network of people out in the field (imagine a spider web with David at the center)—
former
Scientologists who are used to defuse any plan I or someone else might have. He explained that if, for example, he and his father learned that I was talking to someone else who had escaped from the church and might pose a threat, they would report it to the client, who would then relay the information to the PIs keeping an eye on the person I was talking to. Then, as Daniel understood it, an undercover agent for the church would go to work to defuse the situation. In other words, if I was planning to write a book and they found out about it, a supposed friend would call me and say, “Oh, Ron, you don't want to get into that. You want to retire,” in an attempt to influence me to drop the idea. As it so happened, a
so-called
friend once used almost exactly those words when I was considering writing a book some years ago. According to the police report, Dwayne corroborated this, saying, “If Ron was doing anything that was deemed to be not in the best interests of the church, I would report to my contact, and the church would send people from LA to intervene and speak with Ron to correct his behaviors.”

Daniel said that someone had relayed to them a message from David: that he just wanted his father to live his life and go off and retire in some
out-of
-
the
-way
place. He and Dwayne were told that David was the leader of the Church of Scientology. That's true. I am his father. Also true. But the message also included this: I was the musical director of the church, and my music had become outdated, so David said to me one day, “Don't worry about it. Just go off and live your life,” which, according to the Powells, I supposedly took to mean, “You're fired. Get the hell out of here. We don't want anything to do with you anymore. Leave.” They also were told that I was writing books, one of which was entitled
My Son David.
Daniel also was told that Dave had paid me to not finish that book, which was how I got the money to buy our house. He also was told that David bought me a $5,000 trumpet to guarantee my silence. All complete nonsense, except, ironically, the part about writing a
book—this
book!

During the year and a half they followed me, Dwayne and Daniel told police, they sat behind me in restaurants to overhear my conversations. They snuck past me when I was using computers at the Whitewater library and peeked over my shoulder to take screenshots that showed whom I was emailing. They followed me wherever I drove. They put a GPS on my car. They pulled up next to me in parking lots and listened to my telephone conversations. They photographed me wherever I went. They went into stores and asked clerks what I had talked about. They followed Becky and me from Whitewater to Virginia, when we went to stay with Ronnie, and watched me there.

They even rifled through my trash. Each morning I make a “
to-do
” list for the day. The next day I tear it up and throw it in the garbage. The Powells had taped at least one of these lists back together and taken a photo of it. Detective Nick Pye of the West Allis Police Department saw the photo. The Powells also had photos of my computer screen from when I sat at the library emailing people. These are
big-time
invasions of privacy, arranged by the church for the express purpose of snooping into my life as deeply as they could. What other church does stuff like this?

Dwayne and Daniel Powell watched me come and go for more than a year. And they saw me reach for my cell phone that day in the parking lot at Aldi's.

Daniel saw me hunched over and grabbing my cell phone, and he told his father, “He looks like he's having heart problems.” Dwayne relayed that information to his contact at the firm that hired him. Within minutes, David called Dwayne. This had never happened before. David's instructions still impact me: that if it was my time to die, Dwayne should let me die and not to intervene in any way.

Dwayne then said to Daniel, “I don't care what David says, if you see the old man on the ground, and he starts grabbing his chest, you call 911. But don't go help because if they get pictures of us helping, we can get sued because our client told us not to do anything.”

That was the only time either of them talked to David and very likely the last. Dwayne told the police that he thought it was weird because, to his knowledge, none of the PIs had ever talked to David. Still, both Powells were concerned that if they lost this job, they would lose their cars, their homes and everything they had bought since they had been following me. If they'd had any common sense, they would have figured out that when you are riding the gravy train, as they had been for more than a year, the smart thing to do is pay all your bills and don't tie yourself down with a bunch of financial commitments because you never know how long the ride will last. Daniel told the police he had a monster truck, several Camaros, a Corvette and two motorcycles, as well as a bunch of guns, and that he and his dad each had a house. They were worried that if they lost the gig, they would lose it all. I don't know for sure, but I imagine they did and they have.

The butterfly effect is an interesting theory. If Dwayne had not let more than a year's worth of weekly $10,000 paychecks go to his head, maybe he would have been more cooperative when the officer asked him why he was prowling around the house that day. Who knows? They might still be cashing those fat checks even now. For certain, though, you would not be reading this book because I might never have found out what they were doing.

Church lawyers claim that the Powells' story is, in their words, “provable bullshit.” In fact, David and the church deny any connection to the Powells. When the
Los Angeles Times
broke the story about Dwayne's following me, David's attorney said in an email to the
Times:
“Please be advised that Mr. Miscavige does not know Mr. Powell, has never heard of Mr. Powell, has never met Mr. Powell, has never spoken to Mr. Powell, never hired Mr. Powell and never directed any investigations by Mr. Powell.”

Possibly one could see the point of the church's claim. After all, private investigators do not always have the best reputation. It would not have been beyond the realm of possibility that they had agreed on a story before speaking to the police in order to deflect attention from themselves and channel it onto David or the church.

If that is the angle the church is pursuing, it is not going to get it very far. The police are smart, and when there is a chance of collusion in cases such as this, they interview the parties separately without letting them confer beforehand. What's more, in this case the Powells could not have colluded because Dwayne was interrogated after being hauled down to the station, and he'd had no chance to speak to Daniel. After both had been questioned separately, the police compared the Powells' stories and they matched: They had tracked me to Aldi's market; they saw me reach for my chest, David got on the phone shortly after Dwayne made the call and, most damning, David said, “If he dies, he dies. Don't intervene.” All this was recorded by Nick Pye and the agent from the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives who participated in the questioning. I have listened to recordings of the interrogations several times. If the church wishes to back up its claim of “provable bullshit,” all I can say is “good luck.”

In 2014, Dwayne was indicted by a federal grand jury in Milwaukee on a firearms charge in relation to the illegal silencer. The charge against him later was dismissed after prosecutors agreed to allow him to enter a pretrial diversion program. Daniel Powell was not arrested or charged with any crime.