Inside Scientology - Janet Reitman [91]
The church also spent roughly $6 million on a series of full-page advertisements that ran in USA Today and the Wall Street Journal. One advertisement, with the heading "Don't You Kill My Daddy!" addressed an incident in which "a band of armed IRS agents" supposedly tried to choke an Idaho man who hadn't paid his taxes. Several of the ads also featured photographs of individual agents, including the IRS chief, Fred Goldberg Jr.
Scientology did not confine its war to the IRS as an organization. Following the well-worn path that L. Ron Hubbard had laid out, the church hired private investigators to dig into the lives of IRS employees. One of these investigators, Michael L. Shomers, later told the New York Times that in 1990 and 1991, he was retained by the Church of Scientology to perform a variety of services, including "looking for [the] vulnerabilities" of various IRS agents. Posing as an IRS employee, Shomers said he attended IRS conferences, where he took notes on those agents who seemed to have a drinking problem or were being unfaithful to a spouse. He then provided the church with the names, and in some cases the phone numbers, of agents he thought it might be easy to blackmail.*
In August 1991, the church filed a $120 million federal lawsuit against seventeen individual IRS officials, accusing them of various illegal acts, including infiltrating the church using paid informants, conspiring to plant phony documents in Scientology's files, and in one case, attempting to rewrite the IRS definition of church to enable the agency to deny the Church of Scientology its exemption.
The agency, overwhelmed, began to feel the cumulative effect of the church's pressure campaign. "It was blatant harassment," opined one formerly high-ranking IRS official. He'd been harassed by Scientologists, he noted, since the 1970s. "They have a nasty habit of finding your unlisted telephone number and calling you at two A.M., just to let you know they're there." One assistant commissioner repeatedly found his garden hose mysteriously turned on in the middle of the night. Other agents reported that their dogs and cats had disappeared.
In the fall of 1991, Miscavige proposed meeting with the IRS commissioner Fred Goldberg, personally, to work out a deal. He floated the idea, said Rathbun, during a meeting with the church's lawyers based in Washington, D.C. The attorneys balked. But Miscavige insisted, and Goldberg agreed to see them later that week.
As Rathbun later recalled, Miscavige opened the meeting with a twenty-minute speech that included a passionate defense of Scientology as a legitimate religion. He acknowledged the Church of Scientology's history of harassment and lawsuits, but claimed that the church had never had much choice. "We're just trying to defend ourselves," he said.
Then he made a peace offering. "Look, we can just turn this off," he told Goldberg, in reference to the lawsuits—provided that the Church of Scientology could get "what we feel we are actually entitled to," which was full exemption. Goldberg had been with the IRS since 1982, and was, by all accounts, eager to make the messy Scientology battles go away. During a break Goldberg came up to Rathbun and asked if Miscavige was serious. "We can really turn it off?"
Rathbun looked at the commissioner. "Like a faucet."
For the next two years, Rathbun and Miscavige made weekly trips to Washington, D.C., to meet with a five-man working group of IRS officials that had been put together by Commissioner Goldberg, outside normal channels. The group was highly irregular; it bypassed the IRS's Exempt Organizations Division, which would have normally handled