Blown for Good - Marc Morgan Headley [124]
There was also the matter of preparing the Freewinds to be able to hold these events. The Freewinds normally operated at a financial loss year round, except for the one week at the June 6th event. The idea was that the money they made during that week put them back in the black for the year. This was their “Black Friday,” so to speak, and it was for this reason that the Freewinds crew LOVED the Gold event crew. Also, when the Gold event crew were aboard, we made any work they normally did look like a walk in the park. Most Gold event crew were up day and night for the entire week and then after the week of events, we would spend two full days packing up our stuff and clearing out.
The Freewinds is a tiny cruise ship. It has very small crew quarters and we brought 50 crew members from Gold to put on the events. The ship holds a little over 350 passengers total. So, between the Gold and Freewinds crew that was about 100 people right there. That left only about 250 paying passengers that could fit. This meant that all the Freewinds crew would have to free up their beds so that the Gold event crew would have a place to sleep. Usually the Freewinds crew slept on the floor in the course rooms, restaurants or wherever they could find some open floor space during that week.
Then there was the matter of technical gear. For any given Freewinds event, we had at least seven high-end broadcast cameras that fed into the “production truck”. At any other event during the year, an actual TV production truck would pull up to the Shrine Auditorium in LA or Ruth Eckerd Hall in Clearwater. The cameras would be set up and cables run into the truck. Well, there is no place on the Freewinds to put a huge semi truck trailer. So, a crew of people went to the Freewinds three weeks ahead of everyone else to load the gear onto the ship and build a TV production truck aboard.
About four weeks before the event, the TV production gear was rented in Burbank, CA. The sound and lighting equipment was rented from a place in Camarillo, CA. The sets and props made at Gold were loaded into shipping containers that met up with the other equipment at Long Beach harbor and all of this stuff was loaded onto container ships that headed over to Miami.
When the stuff reached Miami, it went through customs and was loaded into planes that flew to Curacao where the ship docked. When the gear arrived, it was loaded onto the ship in individual cases and then all the empty equipment cases were stored on the island. You can imagine that this was an expensive operation. A normal event that was produced in the United States cost around $400,000. That included a few days or maybe one full week of rentals. For the June 6th event, this stuff was being rented for a month at least! Granted, not as much money was spent on a hall or stage items, but $300,000 in rentals was a large expense for one week of events at the Freewinds.
So it was now two days after the Freewinds events had concluded for the year. Most of us at Gold were relieved that the week of events had gone well. All the gear had been removed from the Freewinds and was on its way back to Miami. Most of the crew were already on their way back or would be heading back now that the Freewinds and its facilities had been converted back to their normal operating routines.
We were eating lunch in the MCI dining room. Suddenly, several people throughout the room got up and rushed out. Great! Something is up! Anyone on COB’s lines had a Nextel radio / phone. Most could only dial other Nextels on the Scientology network. No outside lines could be dialed, and if they could, they were monitored closely for “out-security calls.” These Nextels issued group text messages whenever a flap occurred. Whenever people suddenly got up from a meal it was one of three things:
1. COB was pissed off and had called a meeting.
2. Someone had blown the Int Base.
3. Electrical