Inside Scientology - Janet Reitman [129]
Agent Lee Strope, who'd waited close to a year for the state to reach a decision, felt "blindsided" by the charges. What had happened to charging the Flag officials with manslaughter?
The state attorney, McCabe, was blunt. "The evidence isn't there," he said.
What the state had, McCabe believed, was simply not enough to prove that any single individual was responsible for Lisa's death. Instead, they found a pattern of neglect and concluded it was more appropriate to charge the Clearwater church, as an organization. "I truly think Bernie didn't want to be the first prosecutor to charge the Church of Scientology with manslaughter," admitted a Clearwater law enforcement official. "So he went with what he felt was a safe charge—negligence."
Publicly, the church met these charges with "surprising calm," as one newspaper report noted. A week after the indictments were filed, the Church of Scientology broke ground on its Mecca Building. The "Hollywood-style ceremony," as the St. Petersburg Times described the event, "featured green lasers, colored spotlights, fireworks, and shooting flames, all choreographed with pulsating song." City Manager Roberto and other officials were in attendance, as were some six thousand Scientologists, seated in a grandstand erected for the occasion. Miscavige, tanned and smiling, served as the master of ceremonies and described Scientology's commitment to Clearwater as "now, tomorrow, and forever." The Scientologists in the crowd roared their approval.
This was the public face Miscavige showed to Clearwater. Privately, Miscavige approached the prosecutor McCabe and offered him a deal: dismiss the charges, and the Church of Scientology would do everything it could to ensure that what had happened to Lisa would never happen again. It would hire a full-time, non-Scientologist medical doctor to serve at church facilities and would refer any serious injuries or illness to a local hospital. The church would donate half a million dollars to the county's emergency medical services "as a sign of its commitment to using available services whenever necessary." It would also pay the full cost of the state's criminal investigation, an estimated $180,000.
But if the state refused, Miscavige added, a "holy war" of litigation would rain down on the state attorney's office, tying up precious resources for years. Those who understood the tactics of the Church of Scientology, including many people in the prosecutor's office, did not see this as an empty threat. "We knew what to expect," said Assistant State Attorney Doug Crow, whom McCabe assigned to handle the case. Crow, regarded in legal circles as McCabe's best prosecutor, had worked in the state attorney's office since the late 1970s, back when Scientologists infiltrated the office as part of Operation Goldmine. "I knew they'd hire experts and pursue this defense with everything they had," he said.
Indeed, harassment by lawsuit was not simply a matter of practice; it was a matter of doctrine. The purpose of a lawsuit, L. Ron Hubbard wrote in 1955, was "to harass and discourage rather than to win," and defending oneself against legal charges was "untenable," he added. "The only way to defend anything is to ATTACK, and if you ever forget that, then you will lose every battle you are ever engaged in, whether it is in terms of personal conversation, public debate, or a court of law."
McCabe had settled for lesser charges; he was not going to be bullied into dropping them entirely. The state attorney rejected Miscavige's proposal. On December 1, 1998, the Church of Scientology's Flag Service Organization pleaded innocent to the felony charges. In a letter to the court, the church's lawyer, Lee Fugate, promised a long legal battle. Fugate even went so far as to suggest the case be assigned a special docket to handle the "complex" and "voluminous" motions Scientology attorneys planned to file, which, he vowed, would require "a significant number of hearings and significant