Blown for Good - Marc Morgan Headley [86]
COB turned to Marc Yager. “You get Wendell and Ken down here right now! They are both toast!”
“You,” he said looking at me, “are the only one around here that is doing what I want. You find out where any of these other videos are and get them all rounded up and sent to you. Do not stop until you get every last one that exists.”
“Yes, Sir,” I said, thinking I must have dodged another bullet meant for me.
Just as I was making my way out, I could hear Dave Miscavige laying into Wendell and Ken. If there was one thing that Dave Miscavige seemed to love to do it was yell at people. He had obviously been doing it for years as he did it effortlessly and could be heard from over a hundred feet away. Oh well, better them than me, I thought with the typical dog-eat-dog base mentality.
In the end, it would cost about $90,000 to have a high-end visual effects company in Los Angeles fix the 12 seconds of footage of Dave saying, “The war is over.” It would take months to get an edit of the event approved by Dave.
At least ten people from throughout Gold were given a Committee of Evidence and two were sent to the Rehabilitation Project Force. Most of the staff involved in the event lost the remainder of any rank they had achieved in their decades of service to the Sea Organization, and they were assigned hundreds of hours of amends to do (in their sleep time) to make up the damage they had caused. It was a blood bath. It was the worst situation since the 1990 flood.
1993 would spark the beginning of a new era of cruel and unusual punishment.
And it took me more than a year to gather up every one of the 1235 copies of that video that were passed around. It turned out that a “pirate copy” operation had been in place for years. I say “pirate” as everybody knew about it besides COB. The night the events were held, one SVHS copy of the event from the video production truck would go to COB and one other SVHS copy would go to a guy who would make a bunch of video copies locally in LA. Those copies would then get sent out, copied again and distributed to the smaller organizations. Turns out that because Gold took so long getting the final event videos approved by COB, this shadow operation had been put in place. Since I was the new guy and hadn’t been grooved into the whole system, I ruined it for everyone. Up until that point, COB thought the events being watched were high quality edits that he was approving weeks after the event. Instead, most Scientology public were seeing all the errors, bad audio mixes and crappy speech flubs made in the live event that Dave would spend weeks having staff at Gold cut out so that the public wouldn’t see them!
Chapter Sixteen – Behind the Wheel
After the 1993 International Association of Scientologists event and the deal with the IRS, it seemed like Dave Miscavige had nothing to do anymore. He was getting more and more involved with everything happening at the base. From technical revisions of courses to the color and type of the carpet in the dining hall, Dave had to approve it or dictate what it would be.
If Scientology as an organization were being driven like a car, who would the driver be? Who was behind the wheel of Scientology, so to speak? The answer is simple, Dave Miscavige. He controlled every single aspect of all operations and any major decisions were made by him.
In 1995, I was sent to Florida to install several new systems at the Fort Harrison hotel and surrounding buildings. I had to install several new equipment items in the Flag Auditorium, Sandcastle, and Coachman training building.
Dave Miscavige was at Flag the entire time I was there. He was running everything at Flag. Because he was there, and he wanted to use the Fort Harrison auditorium to brief the Flag staff on a regular basis, I had to make sure that if I ever unhooked anything or rewired the mix board or other equipment in the auditorium, the system had to be able to work in minutes if Dave Miscavige needed to use it.
I had set up a sound system for an