Blown for Good - Marc Morgan Headley [119]
Dave Miscavige was also the only one who already knew about all of these things as in most cases, he was the one that approved or directed they be re-released or produced in their current or previous forms.
Yeah, and Dave Miscavige was the only one that already knew all this and was NOT sitting in the SP hole at the Int Base.
Chapter Twenty-Four – Enjoy the Silence
he Int Base is a 500-acre property divided in half by Gilman Springs Road, or Highway 79 as we called it. Back in the old days if you wanted to go from one side of the property to the other, there were pedestrian gates that you would walk through, cross the highway and then go through the gate on the other side. This was fine for the occasional person going across. But when a meal was about to happen or just ending, you would have 600 people crossing the highway in one long stream. It was a bit dangerous, just like crossing the street with no traffic light.
In the early 1990s, the Soboba Indian tribe, whose reservation was several miles east of the base, decided they were going to make some money off of their little casino. Up until this time, they had a small building with a few gaming tables, slot machines and a steak restaurant. First, they worked on putting in a huge parking lot that could hold thousands of cars, and then they brought in the tents, three of them. Each of these huge white tents would hold an entire casino each.
There are two ways to get to the Soboba Indian Casino, You can drive from LA and come down Highway 60 East and then down Gilman Springs Road which takes you past the base, or you can come from the Palm Springs direction and go west on the Interstate 10 and take Lamb’s Canyon to Gilman Springs Road, which again takes you past the base.
There was one other way you could go instead of using Gilman Springs Road, and that was to take Sanderson Street to the Ramona Expressway. This way might have been a little faster even, but was little known.
The traffic going by the base was getting heavier and heavier. It was actually becoming VERY busy.
The road was pretty crappy and not well taken care of, and for the most part, was unlit at night.
And there was also a matter of the security problems that the road presented. Staff could (and had) easily slip out any one of six pedestrian gates and be gone forever. There was no way to control people coming in or going out these gates and even though there were security cameras at every gate, at night it was hard to see and many people had blown by simply walking out the gates and into cars that had pulled up to rescue them.
Dave Miscavige directed and approved a new plan for the highway that would not only make it harder to get out, but harder for cars to drive by. They would build two tunnels under the road and connect the North and South sides of the property together to get rid of the pedestrian gates.
Then the road would be made smaller by putting in a median and curbs on both sides of the property lines. While construction was occurring, the alternate route was to be made popular and promoted as faster and easier. The idea was that this road construction would handle all of the problems the old road presented.
In fact, if Dave had actually had it his way, the road would be rezoned and made a private road and gates would have been put up on the highway at both ends, preventing ANY through traffic. But he would have to settle for his acceptable plan.
This plan was easily approved through the city planners. Most of the time, anything built or constructed at Gold would be scrutinized by the city planners to no end. They did not seem to like us and whenever we were briefed on any of the city related stuff by the External PR staff, it was always how “despite all odds and the SPs in the City Planning Office,” they had managed to get a permit to build something.
For the road, though, the city whizzed everything through. Even though it was Dave’s plan to reduce the traffic, which would not appeal to the city, construction work was to move forward.