<p>Ruined lives. Lost fortunes. Federal crimes. Scientology poses
as a religion but is really a ruthless global scam--and aiming
for the mainstream.
</p>
<p>By Richard Behar
</p>
<p> By all appearances, Noah Lottick of Kingston, Pa., had
been a normal, happy 24-year-old who was looking for his place
in the world. On the day last June when his parents drove to
New York City to claim his body, they were nearly catatonic
with grief. The young Russian-studies scholar had jumped from
a 10th-floor window of the Milford Plaza Hotel and bounced off
the hood of a stretch limousine. When the police arrived, his
fingers were still clutching $171 in cash, virtually the only
money he hadn't yet turned over to the Church of Scientology,
the self-help "philosophy" group he had discovered just seven
months earlier.
</p>
<p> His death inspired his father Edward, a physician, to
start his own investigation of the church. "We thought
Scientology was something like Dale Carnegie," Lottick says. "I
now believe it's a school for psychopaths. Their so-called
therapies are manipulations. They take the best and brightest
people and destroy them." The Lotticks want to sue the church
for contributing to their son's death, but the prospect has them
frightened. For nearly 40 years, the big business of Scientology
has shielded itself exquisitely behind the First Amendment as
well as a battery of high-priced criminal lawyers and shady
private detectives.
</p>
<p> The Church of Scientology, started by science-fiction
writer L. Ron Hubbard to "clear" people of unhappiness, portrays
itself as a religion. In reality the church is a hugely
profitable global racket that survives by intimidating members
and critics in a Mafia-like manner. At times during the past
decade, prosecutions against Scientology seemed to be curbing
its menace. Eleven top Scientologists, including Hubbard's wife,
were sent to prison in the early 1980s for infiltrating,
burglarizing and wiretapping more than 100 private and
government agencies in attempts to block their investigations.
In recent years hundreds of longtime Scientology adherents--many charging that they were mentally or physically abused--have quit the church and criticized it at their own risk. Some
have sued the church and won; others have settled for amounts
in excess of $500,000. In various cases judges have labeled the
church "schizophrenic and paranoid" and "corrupt, sinister and
dangerous."
</p>
<p> Yet the outrage and litigation have failed to squelch
Scientology. The group, which boasts 700 centers in 65
countries, threatens to become more insidious and pervasive than
ever. Scientology is trying to go mainstream, a strategy that
has sparked a renewed law-enforcement campaign against the
church. Many of the group's followers have been accused of
committing financial scams, while the church is busy attracting
the unwary through a wide array of front groups in such
businesses as publishing, consulting, health care and even
remedial education.
</p>
<p> In Hollywood, Scientology has assembled a star-studded
roster of followers by aggressively recruiting and regally
pampering them at the church's "Celebrity Centers," a chain of
clubhouses that offer expensive counseling and career guidance.
Adherents include screen idols Tom Cruise and John Travolta,
actresses Kirstie Alley, Mimi Rogers and Anne Archer, Palm
Springs mayor and performer Sonny Bono, jazzman Chick Corea and
even Nancy Cartwright, the voice of cartoon star Bart Simpson.
Rank-and-file members, however, are dealt a less glamorous
Scientology.
</p>
<p> According to the Cult Awareness Network, whose 23 chapters
monitor more than 200 "mind control" cults, no group prompts
more telephone pleas for help than does Scientology. Says
Cynthia Kisser, the network's Chicago-based executive director:
"Scientology is quite likely the most ruthless, the most
classically terroristic, the most litigious and the most
lucrative cult the country has ever seen. No cult extracts more
money from its members." Agrees Vicki Aznaran, who was one of
Scientology's six key leaders until she bolted from the church
in 1987: "This is a criminal organization, day in and day out.
It makes Jim and Tammy [Bakker] look like kindergarten."
</p>
<p> To explore Scientology's reach, TIME conducted more than
150 interviews and reviewed hundreds of court records and
internal Scientology documents. Church officials refused to be
interviewed. The investigation paints a picture of a depraved
yet thriving enterprise. Most cults fail to outlast their
founder, but Scientology has prospered since Hubbard's death in
1986. In a court filing, one of the cult's many entities--the
Church of Spiritual Technology--listed $503 million in income
just for 1987. High-level defectors say the parent organization
has squirreled away an estimated $400 million in bank accounts
in Liechtenstein, Switzerland and Cyprus. Scientology probably
has about 50,000 active members, far fewer than the 8 million
the group claims. But in one sense, that inflated figure rings
true: millions of people have been affected in one way or
another by Hubbard's bizarre creation.
</p>
<p> Scientology is now run by David Miscavige, 31, a high
school dropout and second-generation church member. Defectors
describe him as cunning, ruthless and so paranoid about
perceived enemies that he kept plastic wrap over his glass of
water. His obsession is to attain credibility for Scientology
in the 1990s. Among other tactics, the group:
</p>
<p>-- Retains public relations powerhouse Hill and Knowlton
to help shed the church's fringe-group image.
</p>
<p>-- Joined such household names as Sony and Pepsi as a main
sponsor of Ted Turner's Goodwill Games.
</p>
<p>-- Buys massive quantities of its own books from retail
stores to propel the titles onto best-seller lists.
</p>
<p>-- Runs full-page ads in such publications as Newsweek and
Business Week that call Scientology a "philosophy," along with
a plethora of TV ads touting the group's books.
</p>
<p>-- Recruits wealthy and respectable professionals through
a web of consulting groups that typically hide their ties to
Scientology.
</p>
<p> The founder of this enterprise was part storyteller, part
flimflam man. Born in Nebraska in 1911, Hubbard served in the
Navy during World War II and soon afterward complained to the
Veterans Administration about his "suicidal inclinations" and
his "seriously affected" mind. Nevertheless, Hubbard was a
moderately successful writer of pulp science fiction. Years
later, church brochures described him falsely as an "extensively
decorated" World War II hero who was crippled and blinded in
action, twice pronounced dead and miraculously cured through
Scientology. Hubbard's "doctorate" from "Sequoia University"
was a fake mail-order degree. In a 1984 case in which the church
sued a Hubbard biographical researcher, a California judge
concluded that its founder was "a pathological liar."
</p>
<p> Hubbard wrote one of Scientology's sacred texts,
Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, in 1950. In it
he introduced a crude psychotherapeutic technique he called
"auditing." He also created a simplified lie detector (called
an "E-meter") that was designed to measure electrical changes
in the skin while subjects discussed intimate details of their
past. Hubbard argued that unhappiness sprang from mental
aberrations (or "engrams") caused by early traumas. Counseling
sessions with the E-meter, he claimed, could knock out the
engrams, cure blindness and even improve a person's intelligence
and appearance.
</p>
<p> Hubbard kept adding steps, each more costly, for his
followers to climb. In the 1960s the guru decreed that humans
are made of clusters of spirits (or "thetans") who were banished
to earth some 75 million years ago by a cruel galactic ruler
named Xenu. Naturally, those thetans had to be audited.
</p>
<p> An Internal Revenue Service ruling in 1967 stripped
Scientology's mother church of its tax-exempt status. A federal
court ruled in 1971 that Hubbard's medical claims were bogus and
that E-meter auditing could no longer be called a scientific
treatment. Hubbard responded by going fully religious, seeking
First Amendment protection for Scientology's strange rites. His
counselors started sporting clerical collars. Chapels were
built, franchises became "missions," fees became "fixed
donations," and Hubbard's comic-book cosmology became "sacred
scriptures."
</p>
<p> During the early 1970s, the IRS conducted its own auditing
sessions and proved that Hubbard was skimming millions of
dollars from the church, laundering the money through dummy
corporations in Panama and stashing it in Swiss bank accounts.
Moreover, church members stole IRS documents, filed false tax
returns and harassed the agency's employees. By late 1985, with
high-level defectors accusing Hubbard of having stolen as much
as $200 million from the church, the IRS was seeking an
indictment of Hubbard for tax fraud. Scientology members
"worked day and night" shredding documents the IRS sought,
according to defector Aznaran, who took part in the scheme.
Hubbard, who had been in hiding for five years, died before the
criminal case could be prosecuted.
</p>
<p> Today the church invents costly new services with all the
zeal of its founder. Scientology doctrine warns that even
adherents who are "cleared" of engrams face grave spiritual
dangers unless they are pushed to higher and more expensive
levels. According to the church's latest price list, recruits--"raw meat," as Hubbard called them--take auditing sessions
that cost as much as $1,000 an hour, or $12,500 for a 12
1/2-hour "intensive."
</p>
<p> Psychiatrists say these sessions can produce a
drugged-like, mind-controlled euphoria that keeps customers
coming back for more. To pay their fees, newcomers can earn
commissions by recruiting new members, become auditors
themselves (Miscavige did so at age 12), or join the church
staff and receive free counseling in exchange for what their
written contracts describe as a "billion years" of labor. "Make
sure that lots of bodies move through the shop," implored
Hubbard in one of his bulletins to officials. "Make money. Make
more money. Make others produce so as to make money...However you get them in or why, just do it."
</p>
<p> Harriet Baker learned the hard way about Scientology's
business of selling religion. When Baker, 73, lost her husband
to cancer, a Scientologist turned up at her Los Angeles home
peddling a $1,300 auditing package to cure her grief. Some
$15,000 later, the Scientologists discovered that her house was
debt free. They arranged a $45,000 mortgage, which they
pressured her to tap for more auditing until Baker's children
helped their mother snap out of her daze. Last June, Baker
demanded a $27,000 refund for unused services, prompting two
cult members to show up at her door unannounced with an E-meter
to interrogate her. Baker never got the money and, financially
strapped, was forced to sell her house in September.
</p>
<p> Before Noah Lottick killed himself, he had paid more than
$5,000 for church counseling. His behavior had also become
strange. He once remarked to his parents that his Scientology
mentors could actually read minds. When his father suffered a
major heart attack, Noah insisted that it was purely
psychosomatic. Five days before he jumped, Noah burst into his
parents' home and demanded to know why they were spreading
"false rumors" about him--a delusion that finally prompted his
father to call a psychiatrist.
</p>
<p> It was too late. "From Noah's friends at Dianetics" read
the card that accompanied a bouquet of flowers at Lottick's
funeral. Yet no Scientology staff members bothered to show up.
A week earlier, local church officials had given Lottick's
parents a red-carpet tour of their center. A cult leader told
Noah's parents that their son had been at the church just hours
before he disappeared--but the church denied this story as
soon as the body was identified. True to form, the cult even
haggled with the Lotticks over $3,000 their son had paid for
services he never used, insisting that Noah had intended it as
a "donation."
</p>
<p> The church has invented hundreds of goods and services for
which members are urged to give "donations." Are you having
trouble "moving swiftly up the Bridge"--that is, advancing up
the stepladder of enlightenment? Then you can have your case
reviewed for a mere $1,250 "donation." Want to know "why a
thetan hangs on to the physical universe?" Try 52 of Hubbard's
tape-recorded speeches from 1952, titled "Ron's Philadelphia
Doctorate Course Lectures," for $2,525. Next: nine other series
of the same sort. For the collector, gold-and-leather-bound
editions of 22 of Hubbard's books (and bookends) on subjects
ranging from Scientology ethics to radiation can be had for just
$1,900.
</p>
<p> To gain influence and lure richer, more sophisticated
followers, Scientology has lately resorted to a wide array of
front groups and financial scams. Among them:
</p>
<p> CONSULTING. Sterling Management Systems, formed in 1983,
has been ranked in recent years by Inc. magazine as one of
