Blown for Good - Marc Morgan Headley [50]
“Yeah, she was the one who gave me the tour of the place,” I answered, thinking about all of this.
“Yeah, well she used to be a Lieutenant junior grade. She was the only one that did not get RPFed or declared. She was lowered in rank to a Chief Petty Officer and has hundreds of hours of amends to do or she will get sent to the Rehabilitation Project Force anyway,” Tom explained.
“Why didn’t she go to the RPF or get declared like everybody else?” I asked.
“Well, she is David Miscavige’s sister in-law,” Tom finished.
After muster I went back to tapes.
“So, what should I do?” I asked CB as I walked in.
“Well, we need to set up for all hands tonight,” CB said as we walked into the finishing area. “All of these bins of tapes have to have the labels removed.” She waved her hands at all the red bins I had seen earlier during my tour.
“All of them?”
“Yeah, all of them,” she said. “We’ve been doing this with the entire crew for a few months already. Each night for at least an hour, all of Gold comes down here and peels these paper labels off the tapes by hand. Then any sticky residue gets wiped off and the tapes get brought up to the 3rd floor warehouse.”
“Why not just throw them out?” I asked, dreading spending the rest of my adult life peeling labels off cassettes.
“Because each tape is worth about $1.50. We can’t throw that away. That is about a half a million dollars in materials,” CB said, almost so softly that I could barely hear her.
I totally understood CB now. She was the only one in this whole place that did not get busted and she knew it was only because she was related to the boss’s wife. She would have been mincemeat any other day of the week if it were not for that fact.
It also explained the constant long face she wore. She was miserable. She had been in the Sea Org her entire life and was actually working for L. Ron Hubbard when he died in 1986. She had risen up the ranks and was an officer and here she was after 20 years, just a staffer back at the bottom again.
I asked CB if there were any write-ups or directions on how to get the labels off.
“No, everything was burned,” CB replied.
“Huh?”
“Anything that was here from the previous crew was burned, any items that could be burned were burned, log books, daily Battle Plans, directions and procedures, training materials, any correspondence, anything. All of the desks were emptied out into a fire and burnt. There is not one scrap of anything left from the previous people. It is as if they never existed,” CB said.
“Okay,” I replied, not knowing what I could possibly say in response to that. That was plain nuts. They burnt everything, as if the evilness was somehow going to be transferred onto the next batch of people through the paper.
Weeks went by and we de-labeled cassette tapes each night with the entire crew. It seemed like it would take forever. We’d maybe get a few thousand done each night with a few hundred people helping us. Then one day it happened. A guy named Luigi came into the packaging area and told me to come into the room where all the duplication equipment was.
“Hold this for me,” Luigi said as he soldered some part to a circuit board he handed me.
You would think that with a name like Luigi, he would have been a big Italian guy. Luigi was as far from that as you could imagine. He was a small thin Asian with jet-black hair and a Fu Manchu moustache. He spoke perfect English and had just a tinge of “Los Angeles attitude” in his accent.
Bruce, the technician I had met earlier in Ray Reiser’s office, was in the room as well. Bruce looked as though he could fall asleep any second. Both he and Luigi had been in and out of the duplication room for weeks. They were trying to fix the machines that made the cassette tapes. This is the exact part of the line that made all of the bad cassettes.
“This is the Gauss line,” said Luigi while continuing to solder. “All these machines are made by a company called Gauss.”
“What’s wrong with them?” I asked.
“Well, they are not making the tapes sound as good as we would like,” Luigi answered.
“Why