Blown for Good Behind the Iron Curtain of Scientology (43 page)

When I showed up to post on New Year’s day, I was lucky enough to have a dispatch from COB’s Office on my desk. It was from COB’s Communicator.

It was actually not written to me, but was written to HCO Gold. I was simply cc’d on it since it had to do with me. It said that “COB had not gotten my systems submission and if I was not working on that, what was I working on?”

Essentially, the dispatch implied that I must be up to “no good” and HCO Gold was to find out what this was. By the time I finished reading it, Gerald Duncan had already showed up at my office. Gerald had been in HCO his entire time at Gold. Before that he was the Security Chief at the HGB. That’s where I first met him. His radio handle was “Panther.” I think that was because he was a tall black guy.

I sat down in his tiny office. He told me that he was going to give me an ethics interview on the E-Meter. He asked me a bunch of questions about what out-ethics I was involved in. Nothing came up. My needle was floating and Gerald was stumped. This went on until lunchtime. We took a break so I could get something to eat.

I knew how this was going to go down. When you get a dispatch from COB’s office asking for some guy’s crimes, you HAVE to write back with the crimes. It does not matter if there aren’t any there to report on. That would be the equivalent of saying, “Sorry, Sir, you are wrong!” Noncompliance with the order could get someone in even hotter water. This was not going to end until they found the “Sherman Tank” — Scientologese for massive sabotage or crime — I was hiding.

After lunch, I was told to go back to post and Gerald would let me know when I was needed next.

That evening after dinner, Gerald came back and grabbed me. We went to his office and he took another stab at getting me to cough up the crimes, but this time, he offered suggestions:

“Sex crimes?

“Out-ethics?

“Out-admin?

“Out-tech?

“Off policy?

“Misunderstood words?

“Stealing?

“Doing other things than post?

“Visiting porn sites?”

The list went on forever. He got nothing out of me. My needle was floating and I was content to sit there forever on this one.

I explained to him again that I had already done the submission, that it was submitted days ago and was sitting on Marc Yager’s desk. Gerald was not interested in this. He had to come up with a crime and there would be major consequences when this finally came out. Not only was I on the spot, but so was Gerald. This was Sec Checking 101. If he could not get me to cough up my crimes, than as far as anyone above him was concerned, he was no use to them in HCO.

At the end of the night, I went back to my area. My senior, the Manufacturing Sec, asked me what came up.

“Nothing,” I told her. “The submission is with CO CMO Int. I don’t understand why he is not being investigated. He has been sitting on the thing for over a week. “

“Well, he rejected it back to you today,” she told me.

“Of course he did!” I said. “He ain’t going to be the one holding the hot potato now, is he?”

Brilliant.

As I walked back into my office, I saw the submission sitting on my desk. He had some teeny tiny “wording” reject that could not have taken a week to send back to me.

Right as I sat down to handle the reject point, Gerald walked in and told me that I “needed to get some sleep so I could be sessionable for tomorrow.”

“Really?” I said. “Are you kidding me, Gerald? The submission is right here. Why can’t you guys just say that the submission was completed a week ago, sat with CO CMO INT and is now back up on its way to him? What is so complicated about this? Is it possible for you guys not to be robots and just write what the actual facts are? ”

“I will see you in the morning,” Gerald said as he walked out.

The next morning when I showed up in HCO, Chris Guider was there waiting for me. Chris Guider was the Rehabilitation Project Force In-Charge at the Ranch for years. He was the guy someone would be sent to if Gerald or the Master at Arms, Jenny, could not handle it. They did not even bother trying to have Jenny take a crack at me. Time was running out and they had to get an answer up to COB’s Communicator.

I spent the entire day on the E-Meter with Chris. Nothing came up.

While I was on the meter with Chris, HCO people had been going through all of my office files and out at my berthing looking for anything that would give them a clue as to what my out-ethics situation was.

The next morning I had been on the meter for a few minutes with Chris when Gerald knocked on the door. Gerald and Chris talked for a few minutes outside the interview office and Chris came back in, obviously with some sort of new info that was going to break this thing wide open.

Chris sat back down and placed a piece of paper on the table next to the E-Meter. It was an invoice for a projector lens that I had sold on eBay for $300.

“Yeah?” I said.

“What is this?” Chris asked. “It was found in your office.”

“It’s an invoice for a projector lens that I sold,” I told him. “So what?”

“Well, why are you selling $300 of org equipment on Ebay?” Chris asked as though he had found the goods and this whole charade could now end.

“I have a CSW approved by all Gold executives to get rid of all of the systems dead stock so I can fund the new systems R&D being done,” I said, all the while maintaining my cool.

“Well, apparently this did not get invoiced by Treasury, so where is the money?” he said.

“It’s in my Paypal account. That is what Treasury and I had worked out as they don’t have any credit cards that they wanted to link to a Paypal account. So I used my own, and after I sell stuff, I transfer the money to them so they can transfer it into the Systems account.”

“So you have $300 in your personal account?” Chris asked.

Oh, I get it now. This was the Sherman Tank. “Marc Headley had $300 of org money in his own personal account and had not given it to Treasury!” This was going to be rich. They were surely going to freak out when I dropped the bomb on them.

“No,” I said, knowing the effect that would be created as the words hit Chris’s ears, “I don’t have $300 in my personal account, I have several thousand dollars in my personal account!”

“I see,” Chris said. He got up and walked out of the office.

A few minutes later he showed up with Gerald and they wanted to come up with me to my office. Gerald wanted the logins and passwords to my Paypal account, my bank accounts, he wanted all my bank cards and any other cards I had to anything, They wanted my social security number, and security info answers, they wanted everything I had on anything.

People started showing up in my office as we were going through the online info. Treasury personnel, HCO people, the MFG Sec.

The Manufacturing Sec began attacking me verbally. “You never told me that the money was going into your personal account! You said that you were selling this stuff on Ebay!”

“Yeah, in my CSW it specifically stated that the money would go into an Ebay account and that the money would come in to Paypal!” knowing that I might as well be speaking Greek. About ten people at the Int Base had any clue how the internet worked, and she was not one of them.

“Well, no one who approved your CSW knew that was the case! The CSW approval is rescinded,” she yelled back at me.

Wow, it did not take long for her to throw me under the bus.

“We are going to do an audit of all of these accounts. We are going to find out how much money you have embezzled here!” Gerald said. “Go back down to HCO and stay there until we let you know to do otherwise.”

I sat in the small yellow office for hours. Every so often some person would come in and ask what some charges were on some account and then leave.

Around 8:00
p.m.
that night, Gerald came in and saw me. He had stacks and stacks of papers and figures highlighted.

“So here it is, Marc. All the evidence of the money you have embezzled from the org,” he said as he placed the papers on the desk.

I looked through the figures. All the account charges for what I sold on Ebay were on there. The Paypal fees were on there. They added up to around a few hundred bucks. I was unimpressed.

“I don’t think so. I would have to go through these and double-check these figures. I seriously doubt that any money has been ’embezzled’ from the org,” I told him.

“Go ahead. Look through them and mark anything that you don’t think is a personal expense,” Gerald answered back.

I could tell by the way he answered, that this was not going to go away. He would be the hero and would be the one that busted Marc Headley.

After a few minutes, I had gotten rid of a ton of expenses that were related to the equipment and had narrowed down any personal purchases from the Paypal account down to a list of about $100. Funny enough, the $100 worth of charges were for the gifts Claire and I had gotten for Dave, Shelly and a few other people we worked with!

I went to Gerald’s office and showed him the list.

“So here it is,” I said.

He looked it over and said, “So?”

“So, I will give you the difference and we can all go back to work,” I told him, reaching for my wallet.

“No, I don’t think so, Marc. This is serious business. LRH says that those involved in financial irregularities can join the walking dead. You are in serious trouble here,” Gerald said solemnly.

So that was how it was going to be. They did not seem to mind me spending hundreds of dollars over the years on uniforms or things that they were supposed to be providing. They did not mind all the money I spent on gas for the entire shoot crew when we were out on location with no gas money from the org. They did not mind billing me for damaged materials or expendables used while on post. It was okay to mix my money with their money and for me to pay for their stuff. But they seem to get all fussy when their money was mixed with mine. Even after I offered to pay back any monies “allegedly” improperly spent and this was denied? I knew it. This was not about me; this was about politics and HCO answering their stupid dispatch.

“You can go back up to your area and pack up your things,” Gerald said.

I went back up to my office. The Manufacturing Sec met me there and told me that I was being taken off post. But first I needed to fix a few points on the systems submission to COB! Unbelievable. Really? I thought to myself. Half of me wanted to tell her to go fly a kite, but the other half of me had a plan.

I fixed all the points on the submission. It was going up to COB’s Office and now everybody was totally cool with it getting passed on and getting to COB by the end of the night. Of course, now that someone can go to the RPF everyone was happy.

The Manufacturing Sec and HCO were actually rewriting the submission so that it was coming from the Manufacturing Sec and at the beginning of the submission there would just be a little note about how I was off post and the submission was going to come from the Manufacturing Sec while I was being dealt with in ethics.

While we were waiting to see if there were any points from COB’s office on the submission, I was to pack up all of my stuff in the office. Perfect. I can get all my stuff together and it won’t even look like I am planning to get the hell out of here!

For several months I had been listening to a little AM radio that I had whilst I built computer systems and cloned hard drives. The only station that I could get was an AM station in LA called KFI AM 640. I would listen to these two DJs called John & Ken. John & Ken challenged the status quo and had something to say on many different subjects. I did not pay too much attention to what they were talking about, most of it seemed completely foreign to me, but I was thoroughly entertained with their bad attitudes and not accepting what they were told as fact. I likened myself to them and realized that I had been told many things as fact and I was slowly realizing that they were ALL LIES. Add to this the fact that I had seen a few episodes of Late Night with Conan O’Brien and he constantly dissed Scientology. Between Conan O’Brien, the KFI DJs, and 15 years of a miserable existence, I had decided that it was all crap and that getting out of here was my best bet at having a happy existence.

Can I even get out of here? If I do leave, I will certainly be declared. My wife, Claire, will divorce me for sure. I will never see my family ever again. How will I get a job? What job can I even do? Will I end up being a bum on the street begging for money? How can I even get off the property without security seeing me? I will most likely be restricted to the base anyway and won’t be able to leave.

Screw it. I am blowing. I will have to figure out a way. Once I am gone, I will worry about where I go and what I end up doing. Until I break out of here, there is no use in trying to figure all that out. The chances of me making it out of here are slim anyway.

I spent a few hours gathering up any valuable personal documents I had.

I had my driver’s license still and HCO had not taken that. I had no bank cards. I downloaded a few items I needed from the Int Base computer network and got all my stuff into a few boxes.

Around 3:00
 a.m.
the Mfg Sec comes in and says, “The systems submission was passed on to COB. You can go home. Be sessionable because you need to get more sec checking. But you are going to the Rehabilitation Project Force tomorrow if Gerald has his way.”

“Yes, Sir,” I say as I walk out with my boxes of stuff, never intending to see her again.

I stop by Treasury and see if anyone is around. The Director of Income, Scheri, is there. She opens the door and asks me what I want.

“I need to see if I have any back weeks of pay here so that I can come up with enough money to straighten out this silly mess,” I tell her, knowing full well that the money will be counted on her income stat and that it is Wednesday.

“Let me check,” she says.

With New Year’s and Christmas I had not made it by to Treasury to pick up a few weeks here and there and hoped at least one or two weeks’ pay were there.