Blown for Good - Marc Morgan Headley [144]
Then it bounced around between the CO Gold and CO CMO INT several times and parked with CO CMO INT while event stuff was being worked on.
Being the end of the year, Christmas was coming up. At Christmas time, when you were at Gold, you could usually count on getting some sort of year-end bonus. Every year, it would get smaller, but still, each year, you would look forward to the small chance that this year’s bonus would be awesome. Well that year, I think it was $35. That was less than one dollar a week as an end of the year bonus. Awesome.
In addition to that, because the crew had to buy a group gift for COB and COB Asst, $10 was taken out of each person’s pay for the two weeks before Christmas for the gifts. Dave would usually get a $10,000 handmade suit from High Society Custom Tailor in Beverly Hills and Shelly, his wife and personal assistant, would get some sort of clothing item worth more than I made all year long. This did not only happen at Christmas. This same sort of thing happened on Dave and Shelly’s birthdays as well. I was there for 15 years and each birthday and Christmas they got a gift that was easily worth more than a few thousand dollars. Also this was not something that only Gold did; Gold was actually considered the cheapskate of all orgs! Because we had so many people, we could get away with just giving a few bucks. And if you did not give, you were “disaffected or had Black PR on Dave”. RTC staff would sometimes pony up $100 each for their org’s present. RTC, IAS, CST, ASI, CMO INT, CMO GOLD CMO PAC, CMO CW, CMO EU, CMO EUS, CMO SHIP, CMO ANZO, FLAG, and other orgs all did this. In 2004, ASI gave Dave a brand new BMW 645Ci for Christmas! If Dave Miscavige did not get over $50,000 dollars worth of gifts each birthday and Christmas, I would be surprised.
Well, I decided that this was crap and that I would get something for Dave and Shelly from my wife and I, and that the $40 auto deduction would not apply to me. When I picked up my pay those weeks, I told the payroll officer that I was getting them my own gift and was not to have my pay deducted.
The week before Christmas Day, we got two hours to do our Christmas shopping at Wal-Mart. The buses were filled with people in shifts and everybody went to Wal-Mart, bought what they needed, climbed back on the buses and came back.
Each year the Christmas shopping time had gotten shorter and shorter, but this was insane. I considered a gift from Wal-Mart an insult and I certainly was not going to purchase gifts for Dave and Shelly from Wal-Mart.
Since I had an Ebay account, I decided to get something that was unique and would be cool. I bought Dave a Depeche Mode album, which is what I usually gave him each birthday and Christmas anyway. I found an original printing of a book that L Ron Hubbard’s uncle, Elbert Hubbard, wrote called A Message to Garcia. The book is referenced in a few policies. There were a few different ones on Ebay that I could get, all fairly cheap, so I bought all of them. When I got them in, the best one was printed in the early 1900’s and was the original leatherbound booklet in mint condition. I had a little wood box and wrapped some velvet around some foam and put the booklet inside.
When Christmas eventually came, we did not get the day off. Since the New Year’s event speeches and videos were so behind, everybody had to work all day on Christmas, even if they had nothing to do with the event production. Because it would be unfair to have only the event crew miss Christmas, the theory was that the fair thing to do was to have everyone miss Christmas! Sure, that’s totally fair!
So we worked all day, during which most people ended up sitting in their offices complaining about how much it sucked that we were working on Christmas Day. But at least we got to have a 45-minute Christmas dinner instead of the normal 15-30 minute dinner break!
The only good thing about that Christmas for my wife and I was our gifts to Dave and Shelly – they were a huge hit. About a