Blown for Good - Marc Morgan Headley [146]
When we arrived at their house in La Crescenta, we exchanged gifts and played around with the kids. Now, Claire’s step-dad, Hugh, is not the most talkative person in the world. In the 12 years that Claire and I had been married, I estimate that her stepdad and I had spoken to each other for a total of 60 minutes. That night, Hugh talked to me for probably two hours straight. Apparently, he was in major trouble over something that had happened a few months earlier.
Hugh was the Executive Director of the Beverly Hills Scientology Mission. He had been doing that for over a decade. He had been a Scientology auditor for his entire career. As the head of the mission, he would routinely fly off to places all over the US and audit high paying clients for the mission. The Beverly Hills Mission had a unique ability to draw in very wealthy people to deliver to. Some of these people, however, were only in Beverly Hills doing business and lived out of state. In most cases, the orgs or missions in the person’s own area were low quality dumps and these people wanted nothing to do with them. This is how Hugh ended up flying out to where they lived and auditing them there. This had been the way the Beverly Hills Mission had ALWAYS functioned and there were never any questions about this. Until now.
Well, with the advent of Dave Miscavige’s Ideal Org Program, no org or mission was allowed to deliver services to any person that was not in their immediate “sphere of influence.” If you drew a circle around the Beverly Hills Mission and their nearest competing org or mission, and then made those circles larger until they touched each other, you would have established the sphere of influence of each of those organizations.
So this meant that any person who did not live within the sphere of the Beverly Hills Mission could not receive any services from them.
To add insult to injury, the way all orgs or missions were to get new people into the org and onto services was now only through E-Meter stress test tables! That was it. Dave Miscavige had piloted this technique at New York Org and had established this as the best way to get new people into the org. Based on his isolated test, he cancelled all other forms of getting new people in and made this the ONLY way that any org or mission could get new people in.
Well, in Beverly Hills you didn’t find many high-class operations busting out the crappy folding table and chairs and setting up shop on Rodeo Drive next to Gucci, handing out flyers and asking the filthy rich to get a stress test! But Dave Miscavige had spoken. This was now the ONLY way orgs or missions could operate. According to Hugh, the mission had tried this and failed miserably. They had, over a period of years, perfected an exact way to generate business and keep the mission producing. The new method with the stress test tables simply did not work for them. Based on this, they carried on doing business as usual and ignored the new rules.
Months earlier Dave Miscavige told a story about something that had happened in New York. At the time it meant nothing to me and I thought it was just another story that Dave liked to tell to show that he was the boss. He had been in New York right after the new Ideal Org opened and the place was a ghost town. He demanded that the org be filled with people and could not believe that it was not packed already. Whilst he was going around the org and trying to find where all the people had gone, he happened to run into a guy from a WISE group. David Singer was a chiropractor that had a consulting business. He would consult chiropractors on how to expand their practices and then when they did better and wanted more information, they would end up getting into Scientology.
Well David Singer was walking through New York Org and ran